Special Nite Cap: Catch Up on Today's Post 9/27/15

CORPORATE ED REFORM

50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic

50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic: The Black Family in the Age of Mass IncarcerationAmerican politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they've failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’

by mike simpson / 21min 

Private Equity Asset-Stripping Strategy Meets Charter Schools to Produce Even Better Looting

Private Equity Asset-Stripping Strategy Meets Charter Schools to Produce Even Better Looting: Private Equity Asset-Stripping Strategy Meets Charter Schools to Produce Even Better LootingEileen Appelbaum, co-author of the important book Private Equity at Work, flagged an important article in Philly.com on how a secretive consulting firm that was previously investigated for corruption and a local la

by mike simpson / 58min 

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » NEA Early Endorsement: No

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » NEA Early Endorsement: No: NEA Early Endorsement: NoFor reasons that are not making sense to me, and a lot of other union members, NEA President Lilly Ekelsen Garcia has decided that NOW is the time and we must endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. This has led to a lot of head scratching, and “what the hecks?” from members

by mike simpson / 1h 

So Maybe Those Tin-Foil ‘Black Helicopter Mind Reading’ Hat Wearers Were Right » Missouri Education Watchdog

So Maybe Those Tin-Foil ‘Black Helicopter Mind Reading’ Hat Wearers Were Right All Along? How Will Representative Mike Lair Respond? » Missouri Education Watchdog: So Maybe Those Tin-Foil ‘Black Helicopter Mind Reading’ Hat Wearers Were Right All Along? How Will Representative Mike Lair Respond?Folks in Missouri remember how Representative Mike Lair made fun of those taxpayers concerned about not

by mike simpson / 1h 

The Teach For America Bait and Switch: From 'You’ll Be Making a Difference' to 'You’re Making Excuses' | Alternet

The Teach For America Bait and Switch: From 'You’ll Be Making a Difference' to 'You’re Making Excuses' | Alternet: The Teach For America Bait and Switch: From 'You’ll Be Making a Difference' to 'You’re Making Excuses'Idealistic young people are lured by TFA's promises. But what happens once they're placed in classrooms has left some alums questioning the organization's approach.Editor's note: In t

by mike simpson / 2h 

Peg with Pen: Some Thoughts about the History of Opt Out

Peg with Pen: Some Thoughts about the History of Opt Out: Some Thoughts about the History of Opt OutRight now there is a lot of discussion around the history of Opt Out. Ultimately Opt Out has been around for years. Here in Colorado, Don Perl refused to administer the test to his students in 2001- for starters!And while I appreciate the work and historical sharing of Opt Out via NPE it's important

by mike simpson / 4h 

Education is a fundamental human right – which is why private schools must be resisted | Kishore Singh | Global development | The Guardian

Education is a fundamental human right – which is why private schools must be resisted | Kishore Singh | Global development | The Guardian: Education is a basic human right – which is why private schools must be resistedPrivatisation of education has a devastating impact, aggravating inequality, so why does the development community fund profit-seeking providers?At the beginning of the new millenn

by mike simpson / 4h 

MINORITY ADMINISTRATORS FACILITATE CONTINUED LAUSD AND CHARTERS' FAILURE - Perdaily.com

MINORITY ADMINISTRATORS FACILITATE CONTINUED LAUSD AND CHARTERS' FAILURE - Perdaily.com: MINORITY ADMINISTRATORS FACILITATE CONTINUED LAUSD AND CHARTERS' FAILURE(Mensaje se repite en Español)There is an exquisitely sick irony to the fact that segregated and purposefully maintained inferior inner city public education could not be maintained at the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and el

by mike simpson / 5h 

NYC Public School Parents: Notes from Grover Cleveland HS receivership hearing and the Chancellor's "Framework for Great Schools"

NYC Public School Parents: Notes from Grover Cleveland HS receivership hearing and the Chancellor's "Framework for Great Schools": Notes from Grover Cleveland HS receivership hearing and the Chancellor's "Framework for Great Schools"There were about fifty people in the audience for the Grover Cleveland High School receivership hearings yesterday -- not great for a school that e

by mike simpson / 5h 

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Ed Reform Both on the Move/Slowly Imploding

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Ed Reform Both on the Move/Slowly Imploding: Ed Reform Both on the Move/Slowly ImplodingThere have been a number of hugely important ed reform stories from around the country in the last couple of weeks.  But naturally, my focus was on the strike and the charter law ruling. Here's what has been happening in Florida and California.Two big stories out of Florida; one

by mike simpson / 6h 

Jersey Jazzman: The Reformy Arguments Are Getting Worse

Jersey Jazzman: The Reformy Arguments Are Getting Worse: The Reformy Arguments Are Getting WorsePeter Cunningham started Education Post because he wanted a "better conversation" about education. That sounds great to me -- so I wish he would follow through and stop publishing illogical, incoherent claptrap like this piece from Michael Vaughn:But it’s getting harder and harder to see the t

by mike simpson / 6h 

The Power of Opt Out to Preserve Public Education – The Network For Public Education

The Power of Opt Out to Preserve Public Education – The Network For Public Education: The Power of Opt Out to Preserve Public EducationJeanette Deutermann did not intend to become the leader of the most effective opt out organization in the United States. She was a suburban mom trying to figure out why her son no longer wanted to go to school.The year that Long Island Opt Out began, Tyler Deuterma

by mike simpson / 6h 

Allentown Student Activists Prepare to Walkout of Classes on September 28 | Raging Chicken Press

Allentown Student Activists Prepare to Walkout of Classes on September 28 | Raging Chicken Press: Allentown Student Activists Prepare to Walkout of Classes on September 28Instead of watching their schools die a slow death by defunding and neglect, a group of Allentown students is taking their education to the streets during the week of September 28 – October 2. In press release issued earlier toda

by mike simpson / 7h 

Florida’s Superintendents Have Officially “Lost Confidence” in the State’s Teacher and School Evaluation System | VAMboozled!

Florida’s Superintendents Have Officially “Lost Confidence” in the State’s Teacher and School Evaluation System | VAMboozled!: Florida’s Superintendents Have Officially “Lost Confidence” in the State’s Teacher and School Evaluation SystemIn an article written by Valerie Strauss and featured yesterday in The Washington Post, school superintendents throughout the state of Florida have officially dec

by mike simpson / 8h 

Award-Winning Filmmakers Reveal How Big Business is Dismantling our Public School System - CNN iReport

Award-Winning Filmmakers Reveal How Big Business is Dismantling our Public School System - CNN iReport: Award-Winning Filmmakers Reveal How Big Business is Dismantling our Public School SystemFilmmakers Jack Paar and Ron Halpern are creating a film that will blow the lid off of the corruption that is behind the corporate takeover of public education. "Corporatized" has been called the an

by mike simpson / 8h 

Kindergarten teacher’s fear: Testing my students into failure - The Washington Post

Kindergarten teacher’s fear: Testing my students into failure - The Washington Post: Kindergarten teacher’s fear: Testing my students into failureRobyn Noble is a public school kindergarten teacher in Providence, R.I., who has become alarmed at the excessive standardized testing of young children, as well as the design of the exams and what is — and is not — done with the results. Noble sent me an

by mike simpson / 8h 

Dear Liv: Yes, A Loss for ALEC and the Privatizers Makes Me Happy | Seattle Education

Dear Liv: Yes, A Loss for ALEC and the Privatizers Makes Me Happy | Seattle Education: Dear Liv: Yes, A Loss for ALEC and the Privatizers Makes Me HappyThe following is a response to Liv Finne who is a Director at the Washington Policy Center in our state and a member of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, published a piece after the Washington State Supreme Court brought down their d

by mike simpson / 9h 

Schools Matter: Eli Broad's California Strategy, Part 2: Shrinking Organized Labor and Increasing Control of Parents

Schools Matter: Eli Broad's California Strategy, Part 2: Shrinking Organized Labor and Increasing Control of Parents: Eli Broad's California Strategy, Part 2: Shrinking Organized Labor and Increasing Control of ParentsBroad's plan to claim half of Los Angeles schools over the next 8 years for corporate welfare charter companies is specific in its grandiosity.  See Part 1 here.The first chart below

by mike simpson / 9h 

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Edureading for the Week

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Edureading for the Week: ICYMI: Edureading for the WeekShortly I have to run up to school and start undecorating from last night's Homecoming Dance (woo-hoo), but I still have time to give you some reading suggestions for your Sunday.The Cost of Ignoring Developmentally Appropriate PracticeWe still love the idea that the faster we move a child through childhood, the more adv

by mike simpson / 9h 

#DCPS as an all-charter district? | @ THE CHALKFACE

#DCPS as an all-charter district? | @ THE CHALKFACE: #DCPS as an all-charter district?This, according to the Washington Post. I say no, absolutely no.In many cases, charter schools are operated by for-profit entities with boards and shareholders. By law, the rights of shareholders are protected. But in the process of ensuring adequate profits on investments, they are forgetting that they are provi

by mike simpson / 9h 

In Mississippi, best teachers don’t go where they are needed most - The Hechinger Report

In Mississippi, best teachers don’t go where they are needed most - The Hechinger Report: In Mississippi, best teachers don’t go where they are needed mostLow-income, minority schools get by with subs, rookies, and incorrectly licensed staffHazlehurst Elementary is one of three schools that make up the Hazlehurst School District, which has previously relied on teachers from Teach For America to fi

by mike simpson / 9h 

As Commissioner Stewart hypes FSA cyber-attacks, FDLE dismisses case | The Edvocate Blog

As Commissioner Stewart hypes FSA cyber-attacks, FDLE dismisses case | The Edvocate Blog: As Commissioner Stewart hypes FSA cyber-attacks, FDLE dismisses caseThe Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FLDE) quietly closed its Florida Standards Assessment “cyber-attack” investigation this month citing an inability to identify suspects.  Not surprisingly, Education Commissioner Pam Stewart ignored t

by mike simpson / 9h 

YESTERDAY

Perdido Street School: Will The Families For Excellent Schools Race Baiting Ad Hurt The Charter Movement?

Perdido Street School: Will The Families For Excellent Schools Race Baiting Ad Hurt The Charter Movement?: Will The Families For Excellent Schools Race Baiting Ad Hurt The Charter Movement?Michael Fiorillo on the Families for Excellent Schools race-baiting ad:Regarding FES's charges of racism against De Blasio, see Projection, Psychological, defined as the psychological phenomenon where humans (or

by mike simpson / 22h 

Boehner’s Exit and the ESEA Reauthorization: What Next? | deutsch29

Boehner’s Exit and the ESEA Reauthorization: What Next? | deutsch29: Boehner’s Exit and the ESEA Reauthorization: What Next?On Friday morning, September 25, 2015, Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH) announced that he would be retiring at the end of October.My first thought was about the fate of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the latest versi

by mike simpson / 23h 

Special Nite Cap: Catch Up on Today's Post 9/26/15

CORPORATE ED REFORMMind Reading Data Sets Coming Soon to Classrooms? The Onion Glimpses the Future & it Might Not be Parody. » Missouri Education WatchdogMind Reading Data Sets Coming Soon to Classrooms? The Onion Glimpses the Future & it Might Not be Parody. » Missouri Education Watchdog: Mind Reading Data Sets Coming Soon to Classrooms? The Onion Glimpses the Future & it Might Not be

by mike simpson / 1d 

50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic

50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic:

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they've failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family” tragically helped create this system, it's time to reclaim his original intent.

“lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”

By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol. “My relations are obviously those of divided allegiance,” Moynihan wrote in a diary he kept during the 1950s. “Apparently I loved the old man very much yet had to take sides … choosing mom in spite of loving pop.” In the same journal, Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and father—They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes—of whom the least rejection was cause for untold agonies—the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”

As a teenager, Moynihan divided his time between his studies and working at the docks in Manhattan to help out his family. In 1943, he tested into the City College of New York, walking into the examination room with a longshoreman’s loading hook in his back pocket so that he would not “be mistaken for any sissy kid.” After a year at CCNY, he enlisted in the Navy, which paid for him to go to Tufts University for a bachelor’s degree. He stayed for a master’s degree and then started a doctorate program, which took him to the London School of Economics, where he did research. In 1959, Moynihan began writing for Irving Kristol’s magazine The Reporter, covering everything from organized crime to auto safety. The election of John F. Kennedy as president, in 1960, gave Moynihan a chance to put his broad curiosity to practical use; he was hired as an aide in the Department of Labor. Moynihan was, by then, an anticommunist liberal with a strong belief in the power of government to both study and solve social problems. He was also something of a scenester. His fear of being taken for a “sissy kid” had diminished. In London, he’d cultivated a love of wine, fine cheeses, tailored suits, and the mannerisms of an English aristocrat. He stood six feet five inches tall. A cultured civil servant not to the manor born, Moynihan—witty, colorful, loquacious—charmed the Washington elite, moving easily among congressional aides, politicians, and journalists. As the historian James Patterson writes in Freedom Is Not Enough, his book about Moynihan, he was possessed by 50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic:

Private Equity Asset-Stripping Strategy Meets Charter Schools to Produce Even Better Looting

Private Equity Asset-Stripping Strategy Meets Charter Schools to Produce Even Better Looting:

Private Equity Asset-Stripping Strategy Meets Charter Schools to Produce Even Better Looting

Eileen Appelbaum, co-author of the important book Private Equity at Work, flagged an important article in Philly.com on how a secretive consulting firm that was previously investigated for corruption and a local law firm are engaged in complex, high cost bond deals to implement an asset stripping strategy that Appelbaum and her co-author Rosemary Batt have called out as a private equity enrichment scheme that impairs operating businesses. It's bad enough to see this sort of thing take place in the dog-eat-dog world of Corporate America. It's even worse to see it take place in charter schools, where the losers are students, by virtue of unjustifiably large portions of charter fees go to unproductive rental payments and financing fees, as opposed to education, and to taxpayers, who over time face inflated costs to fund profiteering masquerading as education.

If you live in the Philadelphia area, I hope you'll read articles Charter schools building boom: Charters borrow nearly $500 million on taxpayers' dime and raise holy hell about the String Theory charter schools, whose expansion plans need to be stopped in their tracks, as well as the roles of its highly paid fixers, the consulting firm Santilli & Thomson and the law firm Sand & Saidel.

The nub of the looting strategy is the acquisition and leaseback of lavish buildings to house charter schools. Because charters are correctly perceived to be risky tenants, bond financings for these purchases are at junk bond rates, meaning high financing costs are heaped on top of what would already be unjustifiably high rental charges, by virtue of putting schools in educationally unproductive glamorous digs. And of course, in an environment where it's business as usual to lard up bond deals that could be done on a plain-vanilla basis with far more complicated deals that lower Private Equity Asset-Stripping Strategy Meets Charter Schools to Produce Even Better Looting:

NEA Early Endorsement: No - Reflections on Teaching

Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » NEA Early Endorsement: No:

NEA Early Endorsement: No

For reasons that are not making sense to me, and a lot of other union members, NEA President Lilly Ekelsen Garcia has decided that NOW is the time and we must endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. This has led to a lot of head scratching, and “what the hecks?” from members who are up on the doings at NEA because at the last Representative Assembly (NEA RA) a measure was passed saying that there would be no early endorsement from the RA. I won’t go into the justification that NEA leadership is offering to defend this move. It does not matter if they can do it under the by-laws. This is a member organization, they need to have the members along with this. Here (hopefully briefly) is why I think this is a bad idea:

1. It’s too soon. This is over one year out from the presidential vote. If Hillary’s campaign is about to implode from lack of funding, she needs to learn how to run a campaign more frugally, since she got herself in the pickle last time too. She’s got the money, she’s got name recognition and standing, and primary season, although getting pushed back, isn’t until next year.
2. In addition, there may be another viable candidate entering the race, Vice President Joe Biden. SEIU is holding off endorsements for just this reason. We should too.
3. Speaking of viable, given the rapidly changing dynamics of national presidential races, and this one in particular, it’s too soon to call Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » NEA Early Endorsement: No: