Sunday, July 5, 2015

UOO Conference, February 26 - 28, 2016: Transcending Resistance, Igniting Revolution - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform

UOO Conference, February 26 - 28, 2016: Transcending Resistance, Igniting Revolution - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:

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.

It is time for non-negotiable demands.

It is time to reclaim our public schools and demand all for all children.

Join us in Philly as we dialogue with an incredible group of revolutionary
leaders who will help the Opt Out movement, the people’s movement, to craft
a revolution that will tear down the test and punish system and help reshape
our country, our communities, and our public schools so that equity and true
democratic thinking becomes our reality. Help fund the conference here.

UOO Conference, February 26 - 28, 2016: Transcending Resistance, Igniting Revolution - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:

Friday Evening Keynote

Stephen Krashen

Stephen Krashen is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. He is best known for developing the first comprehensive theory of second language acquisition, introducing the concept of sheltered subject matter teaching, and as the co-inventor of the Natural Approach to foreign language teaching. He has also contributed to theory and application in the area of bilingual education, and has done important work in the area of reading. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from UCLA, was the 1977 Incline Bench Press champion of Venice Beach and holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He is the author of The Power of Reading (Heinemann, 2004, second edition). His recent papers can be found at his website.

Saturday Morning Keynote

Chris Hedges

(The following portions of Chris’s biography were originally posted atTruthdig.)

Chris Hedges, whose column is published weekly on Truthdig, has written twelve books, including his latest book, Wages of Rebellion, published in May, 2015. Hedges previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and The University of Toronto. He currently teaches prisoners at a maximum-security prison in New Jersey. Hedges began his career reporting on the Falkland War from Argentina for National Public Radio. He went on to cover the war in El Salvador and Nicaragua for five years, first for The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio and later The Dallas Morning News.

Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief there for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he joined the Times’ investigative team and was based in Paris to cover al-Qaida. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

In 2012, Hedges notably sued President Barack Obama after the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration appealed, and the decision was overturned. In 2014 the the Supreme Court denied to review Hedges v. Obama. The act still allows for presidential authority for indefinite detention without habeas corpus.

Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and studied classics, including ancient Greek and Latin, at Harvard. In 2014, Chris Hedges was ordained as a minister at the Second Presbyterian Church. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey and is married to the Canadian actress Eunice Wong with whom he has two children. He also has two children from a previous marriage. Please read Chris’s complete biography atTruthdig.

Saturday Afternoon Keynote

Antonia Darder

Dr. Antonia Darder is a distinguished international Freirian scholar. She holds the Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles and is Professor Emerita of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Her scholarship
focuses on issues of racism, political economy, social justice, and education. Her work critically engages the contributions of Paulo Freire to our understanding of inequalities in schools and society. Darder’s critical theory of biculturalism links questions of culture, power, and pedagogy to social justice concerns in education. In her scholarship on ethics and moral issues, she articulates a critical theory of leadership for social justice and community empowerment. Her work also engages issues of culture and its relationship to recent developments in neuroscience.

She is the author of numerous books and articles in the field, including Culture and Power in the Classroom (20th Anniversary edition), Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, A Dissident Voice: Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power and Freire and Education. She is also co-author of After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism; and coeditor of The Critical Pedagogy Reader, Latinos and Education: A Critical Reader, and the forthcoming International Critical Pedagogy Reader.

Sunday Morning Keynote

Mercedes Martinez

Mercedes Martínez is an ESL teacher from Puerto Rico. She has been in the Teachers Federation as an active member since 2007. In 2008 she participated with thousands of teachers in a 10 day strike, requesting a fair contract for teachers. As a direct result, wages were raised through Law 109.

She became the Toa Baja Teachers Federation Union President from 2009-2012, where she led many protests against unfair treatment to teachers, requesting better working conditions, claiming for a diverse curriculum, a smaller class size, and providing legal support to teachers in need.

In 2012 she became a Teachers Federation Area Representative, and provided services to teachers from Bayamón, Toa Baja, Cataño and Guaynabo. She participated in the Pension System protests that won over the cuts that were proposed by the government. She participated in a civil disobedience activity, defending teachers’ rights to a fair pension, and participated nationwide in strikes and protests with other union members.

In 2014 a great Opt Out movement came to life in Puerto Rico, led by the Teachers Federation, where the 1st testing day, 20% of the expected students were absent. The movement was preceded by hundreds of talks and meetings with parents islandwide, defending public education against corporate testing and privatization.

As of July 1st, 2015, she is now the President of the Teachers Federation Union, leading a struggle against the announced school closures in Puerto Rico. One hundred schools are proposed to be shut down. Thirty schools have struggled and maintained open. Many people are currently in permanent vigils in front of their schools, fighting against this crime on education, along with community members and union members of the Teachers Federation. Mercedes is one of the founders of Opt Out En Español National.

Sunday Afternoon Keynote

Bill Ayers

William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), member of the executive committee of the Faculty Senate and founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, taught courses in interpretive and qualitative research, oral history, creative non-fiction, urban school change, and teaching and the modern predicament. A graduate of the University of Michigan, the Bank Street College of Education, Bennington College, and Teachers College, Columbia University, Ayers has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is a past vice-president of the curriculum studies division of the American Educational Research Association.

Ayers’ articles have appeared in many journals including the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Rethinking Schools, The Nation, Educational Leadership, the New York Times and the Cambridge Journal of Education. His books include Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident, with Ryan Alexander-Tanner To Teach: The Journey in Comics , with Bernardine Dohrn Race Course: Against White Supremacy, with Rick Ayers Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom, Teaching toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom, with Kevin Kumashiro, Erica Meiners, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall Teaching toward Democracy: Educators as Agents of Change, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court,Fugitive Days: A Memoir, On the Side of the Child: Summerhill Revisited, Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice, The Good Preschool Teacher: Six Teachers Reflect on Their Lives, andTo Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, (Teachers College Press, 1993) which was named Book of the Year in 1993 by Kappa Delta Pi, and won the Witten Award for Distinguished Work in Biography and Autobiography in 1995.

He lives in Hyde Park, Chicago with Bernardine Dohrn, partner, comrade, friend, co-parent and
grand-parent, inspiration, co-author, lover, and soul-mate for close to half a century. Read more on Bill Ayers at his website.

Location: International House Philadelphia

Tentative Schedule

Friday
5:00-8:00 p.m. Welcome Reception Stephen Krashen

Saturday
8:00 – 9:00 a.m. Registration
9:00 – 10 a.m. Meet and Greet with UOO Leaders
10:00 – 11:00 a.m. Keynote with Chris Hedges
11:00 – 12:00 p.m. Breakout Sessions
12:00 – 12:45 p.m. Lunch
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. Panel #1 Global Privatization and “the Advancing Endgame Result!”
2:00 – 3:00 p.m. Breakout Sessions
3:00 – 3:45 p.m. Panel #2 Civil rights: Reclaiming the Narrative
3:45 – 4:00 p.m. Break
4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Keynote with Antonia Darder

Sunday
9:00 -10:00 a.m. Keynote with Mercedes Martinez
10:00 to 10:15 break
10:15 – 11:15 p.m. Breakout Sessions
11:15 – 11:30 break
11:30-12:30 Keynote with Bill Ayers
12:45 – 1:15 p.m. Closing Remarks from UOO leaders

BREAKOUT SESSION TOPICS

Book Talk with Ricardo Rosa and Joao J. Rosa: Capitalism’s Educational Catastrophe: And the Advancing Endgame Revolt!
Community Empowerment
Student Activism
Opt Out 101
Black Lives Matter
Teachers of Professional Conscience
Media and Messaging
Our Demands: What’s Next?
Union Caucus Building
More TBD soon!

Hotels: We will have a block of rooms available at Homewood Suites University City, 4109 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 very soon – check back here on July 6th! Hotel has shuttle and is only five blocks away from conference location!

Meet the UOO TEAM (click pic to enlarge):

Top row left to right: Morna McDermott McNulty, Michael Pena, Denisha Jones, and Peggy Robertson.

Bottom row left to right: Ceresta Smith, Tim Slekar, Ruth Rodriguez and Rosemarie Jensen

UOO Conference, February 26 - 28, 2016: Transcending Resistance, Igniting Revolution - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:

CURMUDGUCATION: Detroit News Is Clueless

CURMUDGUCATION: Detroit News Is Clueless:

Detroit News Is Clueless

Detroit News writer Ingrid Jacques reports breathlessly about the arrival of education experts into the motor city. Actually, the headline writer says the experts "descend" on Detroit, which tells you plenty about how the editor views the relative position of these experts and the city, even if the editor stopped short of writing "Experts descend from on high to enlighten lowly locals."

Jacques and her editors have an odd view of what constitutes an educational expert, because the experts in question are Mike Petrilli (Fordham Foundation) and Eric Chan (Charter School Growth Fund). So, not so much "educational experts" as "charter school marketing experts." They were invited by Excellent Schools Detroit. ESD deserves its own piece, but the short form is that ESD was formed in 2010 as one of those "community philanthropic boards" that allows all sorts of privatizersto get a seat at the school management table without having to be, you know, elected or anything. These boards are carefully crafted to make sure that The Right People are in charge of making all the decisions about how to manage schools (and those sweet, sweet piles of public tax money).

Chan and Petrilli were working the next phase charter talking points, which is generally to call for tighter quality controls on charter schools, because while the theory is that charters need to be opened because the charters do a better job than public schools, it turns out that many don't do a better job than public schools and so the charter system has to be fixed. This is the newest odd paradox in the privatizing narrative-- when public school systems fail, they must be replaced, but when charter school systems fail, they must be nurtured, supported, managed and improved. Go figure.

Jacques says that Detroit should look at "models that are working," citing New Orleans and Memphis, so I guess by "working" she doesn't so much mean "providing quality community school systems" as she means "creating good revenue streams for privatizers." She does note that Detroit is "complicated" and poses some "unique challenges." Which leads us to this improbable sentence:

That's partly why the education debate in Detroit is attracting such high-profile expertise.

Will this be the place where she introduce people who are actually experts in education? (Spoiler alert: no). Her next example is Paul Pastorek, the former NOLA superintendent who turned post-Katrina public school crisis in to charter school gold (well, gold for charter operators-- for students CURMUDGUCATION: Detroit News Is Clueless:

Why Does Special Education Have to be Special? - Work in Progress - Education Week Teacher

Why Does Special Education Have to be Special? - Work in Progress - Education Week Teacher:

Why Does Special Education Have to be Special?

Guest post by Dr. Douglas Green

Thanks to the federal Individuals with Disabilities Act passed in 1975, students who have some kind of identifiable disability that gets in the way of keeping up with their able peers, get service from special education teachers in schools throughout the United States.

While practices vary from state to state, there is some similarity as to how these services are provided. The law is well intentioned, and there is no doubt that much of what special education teachers do is helpful. However, we spend too much money and time on bureaucratic procedures that wastes funds that could be used to pay more teachers to give more help. The process that a child has to go through to become classified and therefore eligible for service creates a barrier that favors students with strong parent advocates, at the same time it leaves some poor kids who aren't quite disabled enough out of luck.

Unlike Finland where services are provided to about half of the students at some point before they fall too far behind, we limit these kind of services to roughly 12% of the student population, and often wait until students are far behind their peers before we provide it. As an elementary school principal where 90% of the students were poor, 25% were refugees, and 20% qualified for special education services, I've seen this process close up. I have great respect for the teachers involved, but found that we spent way too much time in meetings trying to determine if a given student was classifiable rather than just helping kids who seemed to need help.

Tag 'em and Bag 'em

In order to qualify for special education services, a student needs to go through the dreaded classification process. Students who seem to need help are first dealt with by a committee of teachers who try to figure out how to help the student to avoid a special ed classification. If this doesn't work, the student gets individual testing from a special education teacher and a school psychologist. When the testing is finished, the committee on special education meet to review the results and decide if a special ed classification is in order.

These meetings include the child's regular classroom teacher, a special education teacher, the school psychologist, the child's parent (if they show up), a parent of a student already in the special ed system, and a committee chair provided by the district. As principal, I usually attended and parents where allowed to bring in advocates and lawyers if the wished.

After about half an hour of sorting through data that almost no parent and many regular ed teachers don't understand, it's up to the school psychologist to see if the child is eligible for one of the allowed classifications. About half of the students who make it are considered learning Why Does Special Education Have to be Special? - Work in Progress - Education Week Teacher:

Can 5-year-olds in Mississippi conquer the Common Core? - The Hechinger Report

Can 5-year-olds in Mississippi conquer the Common Core? - The Hechinger Report:

Can 5-year-olds in Mississippi conquer the Common Core?

Standards are becoming harder and Mississippi kindergartens start school behind their peers in other states

A worksheet that Kathy Glover’s kindergartener brought home from school to introduce the new Common Core standards. Courtesy of Kathy Glover

BROOKHAVEN, Miss.— It was only 10:30 a.m. on a late spring day at Enterprise Attendance Center, and Landon Delcambre had already learned how to make estimates while watching six students guess the number of buttons in a jar. He had listened to a weather report from two students. And in what was perhaps the highlight of lesson-filled day, he’d counted to 100 with the help of a YouTube video featuring a “counting superhero.”

Landon, six, is among the Mississippi kindergarten students who are learning new, more challenging academic standards such as counting to 100 by ones and tens. For many years, they only needed to count to 20 before moving on to first grade.

He doesn’t find the new standard too hard. “I already knowed how to count to 100,” Landon said calmly, sitting back at his desk after the video. “I didn’t learn it. I just knew for years.”

Yet Landon’s confidence isn’t shared by some educators and experts who argue the new standards are too hard for students just starting school, even though it appears they are here to stay. Against a swirl of protest, Gov. Phil Bryant in April vetoed a bill that would have forced the state to re-examine Common Core Standards adopted five years ago for all grades.

Now called the Mississippi College-and-Career Readiness Standards, the standards are particularly challenging in the early grades like kindergarten, where students are expected to learn skills previously expected from 7- or 8-year-olds.

Nationally, more than 40 states have adopted or adapted Common Core, with ensuing questions about how well they were suited for each K-12 grade. However, the changes to kindergarten have garnered special outrage. While some supporters say young learners are fully capable of mastering these new standards, early childhood experts insist some standards are too tough and will further pull kindergarteners away from traditional, play-based learning.

Often it’s parents who are flummoxed by the changes to what used to be a softer, more relaxed introduction to school.

“I was just blown away that they wanted a kindergartener to know that much,” said Mississippi parent, Kathy Glover, referring to noticeable instructional changes for her second child.

“I was thinking, ‘Does second grade now start in kindergarten?’” she said.

Message to parents: ‘Days of naps and unstructured play are long gone!’

In Mississippi, where a 2013 survey of teachers found that 40 percent of students in the state arrive unprepared for kindergarten, the new standards are truly daunting. Teachers surveyed said that some students were unable to hold crayons or identify colors. A 2014 state reading exam found that about 65 percent of Mississippi’s kindergarten students did not meet the benchmark score for early literacy skills, which includes being able to distinguish between lower and upper case letters.

Related: Why is ‘high quality’ so elusive in Mississippi’s child care centers?

When the state adopted the Common Core standards, it was in the hopes that they would “put students on a level playing field regardless of their ZIP code,” according to the state education website. But like the majority of states, kindergarten attendance is optional in Mississippi, and the state’s fledging pre-K program and piecemeal private options means more than half of 3- and 4- year-olds did not attend preschool programs between 2011 and 2013.

That has fueled concerns that with new, more challenging goals, students who did not attend preschool or kindergarten could enter school even further behind than they would have in previous years.

Glover’s children attend school in Lowndes County, and she remembers a strong emphasis on phonics and handwriting when her Can 5-year-olds in Mississippi conquer the Common Core? - The Hechinger Report:

Wholesale makeover of New Orleans schools after Katrina sows impressive PROFITS, bitter recriminations | New Orleans | The Advocate — Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Wholesale makeover of New Orleans schools after Katrina sows impressive progress, bitter recriminations | New Orleans | The Advocate — Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

Wholesale makeover of New Orleans schools after Katrina sows impressive progress, bitter recriminations

Karran Harper Royal

Georgia lawmakers must have whiplash. Back in February, Gov. Nathan Deal flew a whole delegation of them down to New Orleans with him so they could see up close how charter schools have transformed public education here, an approach the governor hopes to copy in his own state.

They toured some of the best-performing charter schools in the city and heard from state officials involved in remaking the district. Leslie Jacobs, a former state school board member, told them Georgia should act slowly and be careful about deciding who gets to run schools. “You can have quick failure or slow success,” she said.

Then, just a few days later, local education activist Karran Harper Royal got on a plane to Atlanta and told another group of legislators something completely different. New Orleans is not a success story at all, she said.

“It is an experiment in taking power and control over people because different people think they know better how poor minority children should be taught,” Royal said.

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina cleared the way for a new kind of public school system in New Orleans, the argument over its merits remains as contentious as ever.

Data show the percentage of high school dropouts has shrunk, while the number of city students passing state exams continues to climb steadily. Yet, if anything, those figures have only intensified the debate, raising the stakes considerably as lawmakers around the country implement similar strategies or consider whether to do so.

Detractors still insist that academic gains in New Orleans are illusory, or unimpressive, or bought at too high a price.

And the price, by any measure, has been high.

Teachers returning to a wrecked city after the storm found their jobs and their retirement benefits had been washed away, just like their homes. Families discovered that under a new paradigm, their children’s school might be abruptly shut down for failing to improve test scores.

Administrators for years struggled to devise a fair system for enrolling students in a district without traditional neighborhood school boundaries. And in the meantime, students with disabilities sometimes found themselves unwanted, bounced from one campus to the next.

Not even the charter school movement’s biggest fans argue that better schools came without pitfalls or pain.

“When people are looking to do this in other places, they’re coming to New Orleans 10 years later,” Jacobs said. “They’re not understanding the journey to get to where we are today.”

After Katrina, state officials were eager to blow up the traditional, centralized school system that used to run public education in New Orleans. The idea was to shift decision-making from politicians and bureaucrats to the people who actually run schools: the principals and teachers.

Before, an elected board would hire a superintendent to run the district. A central office would select principals and hire teachers, establish curriculum and buy textbooks.

Under the new regime, almost every school would operate independently as its own nonprofit. The head of each school or a small group of schools would do the hiring and policymaking. If they couldn’t get results, the state would shut down the school or find another operator.

Unforeseen challenges

Inevitably, there were challenges that officials didn’t anticipate.

Consider Derrick Batiste. In 2011, when he arrived at KIPP McDonogh 15 in the French Quarter for kindergarten, the school wasn’t sure what to do with him. He has autism. He cannot speak or use the restroom without help.

Jessica Taylor, who runs Mac 15’s special-needs program, had never had to accommodate a student without any ability to follow the regular curriculum. Ordinarily, she would work with students one on one for 30 minutes to an hour per day. Derrick needed more than that, and he was only the first.

“We got some kids who were several years behind, didn’t recognize any letters, nonverbal,” Taylor said. “I spent the first year figuring out what that meant. Our need has just gone through the roof.”

Legally speaking, charter schools like KIPP are school districts unto themselves, and as such, they cannot turn away a Wholesale makeover of New Orleans schools after Katrina sows impressive progress, bitter recriminations | New Orleans | The Advocate — Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

Postponing charter-school reform again | The Columbus Dispatch

Postponing reform again | The Columbus Dispatch:

Postponing reform again

Despite support for charter-school fix, legislative leaders take a pass

Charter-school reform once again has stalled in Ohio, and the blame lies with legislative leaders who failed to advance a bill that Ohio’s taxpayers and students need .

House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger’s decision not to allow a vote on House Bill 2 before the summer recess means that another school year will begin without the reforms desperately needed to hold charter schools accountable for their academic performance and their use of taxpayer dollars.

It is a disappointment to all those who want to see Ohio shed a national reputation for having one of the worst-managed charter-school programs in the country.

H.B. 2 is the strongest reform measure ever put forward, thanks in large part to changes made by the Senate, which passed it Thursday night and sent it back to the House, where a vote to accept the changes was expected to follow. Supporters say it had enough support in the House to pass unchanged.

So why isn’t it waiting for Gov. John Kasich’s signature today?

Rosenberger, a Clarksville Republican, and Senate President Keith Faber, R-Celina, said they want the bill to go to conference committee, which is what happens when the two chambers support different versions of a bill and those differences have to be worked out. But there is no good reason to hold the bill up when the Senate’s changes strengthened it greatly and a majority of House members favor those changes.

There’s no mystery, however, about who does benefit from derailing or at least delaying charter-school reform: the same for-profit charter-school operators that have resisted reform all along.

Some charter-school operators wield enormous influence. White Hat Management owner David Brennan and Altair Learning owner William Lager, have given lawmakers a combined $1.4 million in campaign contributions since 2009. White Hat operates Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy, an online charter, as well as the Life Skills drop-out-recovery schools; Altair operates the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), the state’s largest online charter school. All have performed abysmally.

Re-opening the bill for further debate now gives these interests another opportunity to weaken it.

One possibility for mischief is a behind-the-scenes push to have the state Department of Education change the way it evaluates the academic performance of charter schools. Currently, Ohio uses data on individual student performance, from one year to the next, to measure progress.

But operators of some schools — which, not coincidentally, score low by that measure — want the department to consider a more-simplistic method, used in California. Instead of using individual progress, California evaluators look at the performance of a school Postponing reform again | The Columbus Dispatch:

Rocketship charter schools criticized as overly rigid

Rocketship charter schools criticized as overly rigid:

Rocketship charter schools criticized as overly rigid

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Looking for first-graders at Fuerza Community Prep?

One sunny morning last spring, they could be spotted inside the school's spacious computer lab, headphones strapped on their ears, eyes scrutinizing mini-laptop screens, plowing through online books about Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed and practicing online math exercises. This is where they spend up to 90 minutes a day.

For Preston Smith, a co-founder of Rocketship Education, the San Jose-based charter network that runs the school, that computer lab exemplifies what the chain is good at: harnessing technology to teach at-risk students.

THE TENNESSEAN

Rocketship Nashville avoids criticism of peers after first year

"We feel a great responsibility to get our kids, who are often behind, up to grade level," said Smith, who oversees 11 tech-heavy elementary schools, including one in Nashville and one in Milwaukee. "I'm proud of that."

But for some former teachers and parents, the Rocketship computer lab tells a different story — of a charter network too reliant on "screen time," too light on free play and too obsessed with test scores.

Kate Mehr, a former Rocketship executive who now runs the Baltimore outpost of another charter network, says Rocketship's "stripped-down efficiency model" has much going for it. But, she says, "The question is, how efficient should you be when you're dealing with little human beings?"

Rocketship is perhaps the nation's most celebrated pioneer of online learning, having received millions of dollars from outside funders, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Obama administration, as well as financing from former tennis star Andre Agassi's real estate fund. The attraction is its innovative approach, which promises that intensive online work and a rigorous curriculum will help disadvantaged children make up ground quickly and gain parity with their better-off peers. (Close to 88 percent of the schools' students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and 60.5 percent are English-language learners.)

But as the network has grown, it has encountered challenges, losing key staff members and struggling with its reading program. In math, a relatively high percentage of its students routinely score well on state exams. But in 2013 — the last year thatCalifornia published reading and math scores — four of Rocketship's elementary schools showed significant dips in state reading scores.

"They are really phenomenal at marketing their schools," said Roxana Marachi, an associate professor in the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San Jose State Rocketship charter schools criticized as overly rigid:

New state education commissioner MaryEllen Elia starts job - Times Union

New state education commissioner MaryEllen Elia starts job - Times Union:

New state education commissioner MaryEllen Elia starts job

New York's top education official Mary Ellen Elia faces political minefield

Schoolchildren across the state are enjoying summer vacation and the July weather is turning placid, but New York's newly hired education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, will be entering a stormy, highly charged environment when she takes office on Monday.

Elia, a western New York native who comes back after running the 200,000-student Hillsborough County, Tampa, Fla., school system, has a number of priorities laid out by the Board of Regents.

Elia will be overseeing implementation of a controversial new teacher evaluation program and she will have to continue to straighten out the years-long and troubled rollout of a Common Core learning standards.

But just as important, she'll have to mediate relations between the Board of Regents, which hired her and oversees the state Education Department, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has been battling the Regents and Education Department with no signs of a letup.

Top officials downplay the potential conflict.

"Let's welcome her and see what she can add (to the process)," Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said. Her advice: "Be yourself, do the right thing, listen carefully and communicate actively.''

But outside observers see the storm clouds only growing given the rift between Cuomo, as well as reformers such as charter school proponents and much of the education establishment.

"Elia is walking into a minefield. Her political skills will be tested," education analyst and researcher Diane Ravitch said in an email.

"She was chosen unanimously, but the board is deeply divided," Ravitch added, referring to the 17-member Board of Regents.

Much of the division played out in June when board members, in an unusually fractious meeting, made sweeping amendments to the system by which local schools are supposed to evaluate teachers. That system includes the use of standardized test results by students.

Cuomo had pushed this program through by inserting it in his budget proposal.

As a result, lawmakers, including Assembly Democrats who are close to the teachers unions, felt they had to approve the plan or risk not getting a timely budget.

When the time came for the Regents to administratively approve the program, seven members New state education commissioner MaryEllen Elia starts job - Times Union:

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