Tuesday Tutor Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

Tuesday Tutor Diane Ravitch's blog 

 A site to discuss better education for all

FBI Investigating Russian Cyber Attacks Coordinated to Support Trump Campaign

3by dianeravitch / 3h

McClatchy News reports that the FBI is investigating the timing of Russian cyber attacks timed to support Trump campaign when it was on the defensive. “Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any 

Why Are Public School Parents and Teachers Excluded from Policy Discussions?

3by dianeravitch / 19min

Reader Chiara. Has written innumerable comments pointing out that the parents and teachers of public schools have been shut out of policy circles. Why? Nearly 90% of the children in the United States attend public schools, not 

Mercedes Schneider: Betsy DeVos Cherrypicks One Student Success in a Failing Virtual Charter School

6by dianeravitch / 41min

You will note that all of Betsy DeVos’s stories are about struggling students who were rescued from failing public schools by choosing to go to a charter school, a religious school, a home school, or a virtual charter school. Apparently she has 

Sarah Blaine Calls on New Jersey Legislators to Block Use of PARCC as a Graduation Requirement

by dianeravitch / 35min

Sarah Blaine, a lawyer and parent in New Jersey, calls on the legislature to block the use of PARCC as a graduation requirement for students in the state. As she notes in this article, the New Jersey Assembly voted overwhelmingly to block the State Board of Education from imposing this nutty requirement. The bill now moves to the State Senate, and she urges senators to vote for the bill. She writ

Check Out This Debate About Charters Tonight

2by dianeravitch / 50min

Julian Vasquez Heilig will debate Christopher Stewart tonight. It will be live-streamed. The proposition is: “Charters and Vouchers are the Answer.” I will be rooting for Julian, who knows the research and knows that privatization has never produced better education for the neediest kids. Julian is a member of the board of the Network for Public Education.

Sara Stevenson Tells the Texas Legislature What’s Wrong with Vouchers

5by dianeravitch / 1h

Tuesday, March 21, 2017 Senate Bill 3 Testimony Good afternoon, Senators. My name is Sara Stevenson, and I’ve been a librarian at O. Henry Middle School in Austin for 14 years. Previously, I taught English at St. Michael’s Catholic Academy for ten years, so I have a great respect for Catholic education. I also write opinion pieces for The Austin American-Statesman, The Houston Chronicle, and The

Arkansas: Voucher Bill Fails in Legislature

6by dianeravitch / 2h

Vouchers, also known as education savings accounts and tax credits, failed in the lower house of the state legislature in Arkansas. The legislator who sponsored the bill hails from Bentonville, the home of the Walton Family (Walmart) corporation. Given the accumulation of research showing the failure of vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, D.C., Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, you have to wonder why T

Jennifer Rubin, the Conservative Columnist for the Washington Post Says: Comey Humiliated Trump

by dianeravitch / 3h

Jennifer Rubin was hired by the Washington Post to represent a conservative viewpoint in its editorial column. However, she is appalled by Trump’s tweets and lies. She describes here how Comey humiliated Trump at the House hearing yesterday. He can’t lie his way out of the mess he has created, she says, nor create a big enough distraction to change the subject.

YESTERDAY

I Am Speaking in Austin Next Week

11by dianeravitch / 17h

If you are anywhere near Austin, join me for a discussion about schools, school reform, and children on March 29 at 6:30 pm at the Austin Marriott. The event is sponsored by Friends of Texas Public Schools. http://fotps.org/events/dinner-diane-ravitch/

New York Times: Internal Debate About Louise Mensch’s Opinion Article

4by dianeravitch / 20h

Buzzfeed reports that an internal quarrel has broken out between the news room and the opinion pages of the New York Times about an article featured on the editorial opinion page by journalist Louise Mensch. (I posted Mensch’s article). A civil war between news and opinion has broken out at the New York Times. In a Times op-ed posted online Friday, Louise Mensch, a writer and former member of the

A Summary of Today’s Hearings about Russian Role in Our Elections

16by dianeravitch / 20h

This is a useful and informative summary of the highlights of today’s hearings, where intelligence officials confirmed that they are investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. They also said they knew of no evidence that Trump Tower was wiretapped. The most amusing part of the summary is the compilation of tweets by Trump. He thinks the day’s exchanges

Sarah Jaffe: Organizing to Hit Trump’s Corporate Cabinet Where It Hurts

13by dianeravitch / 22h

Sarah Jaffe interviews labor organizers in a group called the HedgeClippers who are mobilizing against the corporations backing the Trump regime. One of their campaigns is to organize bank workers. Bank workers in other countries are unionized. Why not in the U.S. as well? The Hedge Clippers campaign looks at hedge funds and private equity, thus hedge clippers clipping their power. It basically s

Betsy DeVos Loves For-Profit Schools: They Are a Disgrace

23by dianeravitch / 23h

ProPublica writes about the abuses that occur in certain for-profit schools designed especially for difficult children. The very concept of a public school that operates for profit is absurd, because every dollar from taxpayers is meant for the children, the teachers, and the schools, not investors. But this article is specifically about a for-profit chain for difficult students. An alternative s

Mary Gonzalez: Texas Needs to Supports Its Public Schools, Not Charters and Vouchers

25by dianeravitch / 23h

Mary Gonzalez is a member of the Texas House of Representatives. She is now serving her third term in the House, and she is deeply concerned that the state and the federal government want to destroy public education. The goal of school choice, she says, is to create a separate and unequal system of schools for the state’s 6 million students. She writes: In 2011, the Legislature cut $5.4 billion i

New York: Parents and Educators Call for a New Round of Opt Out to Protest Flawed Tests

17by dianeravitch / 1d

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 20, 2017 More information contact: Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) http://www.nysape.org Link to Press Release New York’s Largest Grassroots Education Advocacy Organizations Join Forces to Urge Parents to Opt Out of NYS Common Core State Tests Across the state, grassroots education advocacy organizations includ

The Most Important Post You Will Read This Week: The Reclusive Tycoon Who Financed the Alt-Right and Trump

100+by dianeravitch / 1d

I will not post anything again for a while today, unless there is breaking news. You need time to read this article in full. It is a long article by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker , who has written major books about the dark money fueling 

CURMUDGUCATION: Netflix and the Myth of Personalization

CURMUDGUCATION: Netflix and the Myth of Personalization:

Netflix and the Myth of Personalization

Today Slate has an analysis of how Netflix began the process of personalizing marketing, of using "algorithms to micromanage distribution, not production" in particular in the multi-pronged marketing of House of Cards.

In the middle of the article, we find this paragraph:

House of Cards thus embodies one of the most seductive myths of the algorithmic age: the ideal of personalization, of bespoke content assembled especially for each one of us. In fact, the content, or at least the costly, aesthetically rich content we care about, like Fincher’s show, is still fairly limited. There is only one House of Cards, but there are as many ways to market the show as there are to target Netflix viewers. This is what information theorist Christian Sandvig calls “corrupt personalization”: the ways that algorithmic culture blurs the lines between our genuine interests and a set of commodities that may or may not be genuinely relevant, such as products “liked” by our friends on Facebook even if they did not knowingly endorse them.

The piece on corrupt personalization is worth the side trip, but it's a bit much to squeeze in here. But let me toss out three context-free quotes that may ring bells.

It’s as if on Facebook, people were using the yellow pages but they thought they were using the white pages. 

In sum this is again a scheme that does not serve your goals, it serves Facebook’s goals at your expense.

Money is used as a proxy for “best” and it does not work. That is, those with the most money to spend can prevail over those with the most useful information. The creation of a salable audience takes priority over your authentic interests. 


And I will bring back Greene's Law-- the free market does not foster superior quality; the free CURMUDGUCATION: Netflix and the Myth of Personalization:

Trump's Signature Education Goal Has A Long History With White Flight | The Huffington Post

Trump's Signature Education Goal Has A Long History With White Flight | The Huffington Post:

Trump’s Signature Education Goal Has A Long History With White Flight
Decades ago, voucher programs were used to sidestep desegregation by helping white students go to all-white academies.

Debates about the viability of school voucher programs have focused in recent months on programs with lackluster or spotty academic records. But there’s another issue raised by the potential expansion of public financing for private schools: an exacerbation of segregation.

A brief released Tuesday by the left-leaning Century Foundation takes a look at the limited research on race and school voucher programs to glean what expansion of these programs at the federal level would mean for student diversity. The brief’s results are mixed, but it posits that these programs slightly increase segregation in private and public schools.

The report comes after President Donald Trump’s proposed budget set aside $250 million for a still-opaque “private school choice program” and after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos claimed at her confirmation hearing that school choice programs lead to more integrated schools. 

The history of school voucher programs is tied up with ideas of white supremacy. To avoid school desegregation as a result of 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, some Southern states created tuition grants to allow white students to attend all-white private schools in the 1960s. Some of these private schools still exist, though they are no longer specifically for white students. 

White students continue to dominate private school demographics, in part because of this racist history, says Halley Potter, the Century Foundation fellow who wrote the brief. It’s a history that must be considered when looking at the future of these programs.

“It’s important to realize that a lot of people think about private school vouchers as providing more opportunities for students of color, but there’s also a trend borne out in the data that white families tend to use private school vouchers to leave diverse public schools to attend more white schools and religious families move to parochial schools. There’s a real sense of sorting there that promotes segregation,” Potter said.  

There is a dearth of research that directly tracks school segregation as it relates to voucher programs. Potter’s study looks at available data from programs around the country and overseas and finds that these programs tend to slightly exacerbate issues of segregation, although the record is certainly uneven. This can happen when white students use these programs to leave schools where they are in the minority and go to schools where they Trump's Signature Education Goal Has A Long History With White Flight | The Huffington Post:

IBO REPORT: NYC Charter School Costs To Grow More Than Budgeted! Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública:

Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública: IBO REPORT: NYC Charter School Costs To Grow More Than Budgeted!:

IBO REPORT: NYC Charter School Costs To Grow More Than Budgeted!

New York City Charter School Costs To Grow More Than Budgeted!

 Although the preliminary budget forecast of charter school enrollment is lower than projected by IBO, the Department of Education's (DOE) budget for charter school tuition in 2018 represents a $138 million increase over the current year's figure.

This increase reflects not only enrollment growth, but an anticipated increase in the state-approved per-pupil tuition rate for charter schools. It is likely that the per-pupil tuition rate for charter school students will continue to rise in coming years as the formula driven amount catches up to recent increases in per-pupil spending at the DOE. IBO estimates that once the state updates the formula for determining charter school funding for next school year, the additional cost to the city may range from $159 million to $220 million.



The city may also lose an expected state reimbursement of $52 million for 2016-2017 costs.

John Thompson: Indivisible Oklahoma forum responds to 'Trumpism' - NonDoc

Indivisible Oklahoma forum responds to 'Trumpism' - NonDoc:

Indivisible Oklahoma forum responds to ‘Trumpism’

Following the election of President Donald Trump, Oklahoma’s U.S. Senators James Lankford and Jim Inhofe earlier this year refused to hold traditional town hall meetings with their constituents.

It’s just as well: Had they been present to face the 1,500 people who attended the Indivisible Oklahoma public meeting on Saturday at Rose State Community College, the senators might not have appreciated the panelists’ explanation of how today’s right-wing agenda is born of fear and xenophobia.

Even if they couldn’t say so aloud, however, surely Lankford and Inhofe understand that Trumpism is also founded on decades of conservative and neoliberal, national and international efforts to privatize our democracy.

As the officeholders and political activists on the Indivisible Oklahoma panel knew from personal experience, Trumpism was first nurtured by quiet and well-funded groundwork in states like Oklahoma. The hard lessons we’ve learned will be brought into the battle against President Donald Trump.

Inman warns against limiting opportunities

Oklahoma House Minority Leader Scott Inman (D-Del City) recalled the lesson of the rope and why we should never cut it. Like the generations of Americans who preceded us, Indivisible Oklahoma forum responds to 'Trumpism' - NonDoc:

“We Teach English” Revisited | radical eyes for equity

“We Teach English” Revisited | radical eyes for equity:

“We Teach English” Revisited

At times quaint and oddly misguided but unflinchingly confrontational and assertive—the signature tone of her work—Lou LaBrant’s We Teach English (1951) was a rare book-length text over her 65 years as an educator.

While this text for teachers of ELA/English never garnered the status of Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration (LaBrant and Rosenblatt were colleagues at NYU), both works represent a long history of trying to coral the field of ELA/English teaching.

A recent conversation and debate on NCTE’s Connected Community about teaching whole-class, assigned novels has reminded me of the enduring tensions of what it means to teach ELA/English—tensions that span K-12 grade levels as well as being grounded in responsibilities to student needs and interests, the field or discipline of English, and literacy broadly.

Historically and then magnified during the past thirty years of high-stakes accountability, ELA/English has shared with math demands and expectations that are not as pronounced in other disciplines; despite the limitations and problems with the terms, I characterize those demands as addressing disciplinary knowledge (or content) and literacy skills.

Our disciplinary knowledge obligations rest with the compulsion to cover established content, such as identifying the parts of speech, analyzing the main characters in The Scarlet Letter, or explaining the key ideas expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as American Transcendentalism.

Literacy skills comprise reading, writing, speaking, and listening—how we “We Teach English” Revisited | radical eyes for equity:

A fair, comprehensive Education Adequacy Cost Study is the key to reforming Connecticut’s school funding system - Wait What?

A fair, comprehensive Education Adequacy Cost Study is the key to reforming Connecticut’s school funding system - Wait What?:

A fair, comprehensive Education Adequacy Cost Study is the key to reforming Connecticut’s school funding system

In testimony before the Connecticut General Assembly’s Education Committee yesterday, the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding [CCJEF] explained why a cost study is so critically important to the development of a fair and comprehensive school funding formula.  CCJEF explained:

Why an Education Adequacy Cost Study for Connecticut?

For too long Connecticut has developed education funding policy backwards and without hard data.  For too long our State has let budget politics, special interests and perceived fiscal “realities” determine how much to spend on K-12 public education.  State government time and time again has backed into an education funding amount and then corrupted the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula and other funding programs to deliver a target spending amount.  This has been the harsh reality since the inception of the ECS grant. Since 2013 we have not even maintained the fiction of using the ECS formula.

An education adequacy cost study is the necessary prerequisite to developing a new, rational and constitutional education finance system in Connecticut.  Unlike the arbitrary, budget-driven efforts of the past and present, an education adequacy cost study would provide hard, real-world data on student needs and what resources are necessary to meet our state constitutional responsibility to deliver an adequate and equitable educational opportunity for every K-12 public school student in our state.

Connecticut’s shame is to tolerate some of the most economically and racially segregated school districts in the nation.

An education adequacy cost study would ensure that the resource needs of all school districts – successful, struggling, and those in between – as well as the resources needed by regular and special needs students are identified and quantified.  It would then be up to policymakers and stakeholders to put these resource needs in fiscal context, determine a state and local share, and rationally develop an A fair, comprehensive Education Adequacy Cost Study is the key to reforming Connecticut’s school funding system - Wait What?:

Apples, Oranges, & The Myth Of Grading Schools: The True Goals Behind Bad Education Policy – Exceptional Delaware 2017

Apples, Oranges, & The Myth Of Grading Schools: The True Goals Behind Bad Education Policy – Exceptional Delaware 2017:

Apples, Oranges, & The Myth Of Grading Schools: The True Goals Behind Bad Education Policy

Atnre Alleyne came out with a blog post this morning supporting a Governor Carney idea where Delaware rates schools with stars.  Of course he did!  I don’t care what you label them with: stars, letter grades, numbers, or rocket ships.  It all translates to a comparison between apples and oranges.  What I find most ironic about Alleyne’s post is how self-serving this is for him.  As the guy behind Delaware Can, any school labeling further perpetuates the myth that companies like that thrive on: label, shame, and punish.  Alleyne’s personal war against the Delaware State Education Association is filled with holes and misdemeanors!  I thought I would pick apart a few of his “facts” and “myths”.

The Fallacy of Surveys

Thousands of Delawareans responded to the Delaware Department of Education’s 2014 survey indicating they want school performance ratings.

When you come out with a survey that doesn’t even ask the question “Do you think Delaware should have school performance ratings?” and you continue that survey with questions about those ratings, I don’t think it is fair to say that means “thousands of Delawareans” wanted this.  The survey predetermined the school report cards was going to happen (as required by federal law) but that in no way to translates to the citizens of Delaware demanding this system.

Self-Serving Agendas

Recently a coalition of 24 community and business groups also sent the Department a letter with recommendations for the state’s ESSA plan that called for a “single summary rating for schools and districts…in order to ensure clarity for parents and community members.”

And who led that band of public education marauders, disguised as organizations wanting to help public education?  Who corralled and convinced these 24 mostly non-profits who would benefit from what Alleyne wants?  Who was also on the Governor’s Advisory Committee for the state ESSA plan and in a Apples, Oranges, & The Myth Of Grading Schools: The True Goals Behind Bad Education Policy – Exceptional Delaware 2017:

Former Lobbyist With For-Profit Colleges Quits Education Department - ProPublica

Former Lobbyist With For-Profit Colleges Quits Education Department - ProPublica:

Former Lobbyist With For-Profit Colleges Quits Education Department

Under fire from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Taylor Hansen quit the department three days after ProPublica revealed his hiring.

 A former lobbyist for an association of for-profit colleges resigned last Friday from the Department of Education, where he had worked for about a month.

As ProPublica reported last week, the Trump administration had hired Taylor Hansen to join the department’s “beachhead” team, a group of temporary hires who do not require approval from the U.S. Senate for their appointments.

On the day Hansen resigned, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sent a letter to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, citing ProPublica’s reporting and requesting more information on Hansen’s role.

“Mr. Hansen’s recent employment history clearly calls into question his impartiality in dealing with higher education issues at the Department of Education, and raises alarming conflicts of interest concerns,” she wrote.

Jim Bradshaw, an education department spokesman, told ProPublica in an email that the department was “grateful for [Hansen’s] contributions.”

“He served ably and without conflict and decided his service had run its course,” said Bradshaw. Hansen did not immediately respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. Bloomberg first reported Hansen’s departure.

Hansen isn’t the only hire from the for-profit college industry to join the Education Department via the beachhead team. The New York Times reported that Robert S. Eitel, a former compliance officer at for-profit college operator Bridgepoint Education Inc., is working at the department. Eitel, a former deputy general counsel at the Education Department from 2006 to 2009, has been a critic of federal regulations on for-profit colleges.

Warren also criticized Eitel’s hiring in her letter to DeVos. She noted that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last September ordered Bridgepoint, Eitel’s former employer, to refund $23.5 million to students whom it had deceived into taking out loans that cost more than advertised. Bridgepoint is currently under investigation by the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the attorneys general of New York, North Carolina, California and Massachusetts, Warren wrote.

Until July 2016, Hansen worked as a registered lobbyist for the nation’s largest trade Former Lobbyist With For-Profit Colleges Quits Education Department - ProPublica:

CURMUDGUCATION: IN: Vouchers and Changing the System

CURMUDGUCATION: IN: Vouchers and Changing the System:

IN: Vouchers and Changing the System

Indy Ed is a website devoted to exploring one idea-- "There are so many changes swirling around our schools that it’s hard to get straight answers." Their focus is Indianapolis, one more urban center suffering from a plethora of education problems, not the lest of which is a government that doesn't want to spend too many tax dollars on Those People. But Indy Ed seems to prefer focusing on that most magical of solutions-- vouchers and choice.

There's no big scam or fraud or misbehavior here. But in one simple piece, Indy Ed gives us a picture of many of the ways that vouchers open up the market and let profiteers and religious ed folks get past the system that has stood in their way for so long.

"Vouchers May Not Be a Panacea But They Are Really Working for Some Families" is the headline for this piece highlighting Oaks Academy, an example of vouchers working for some people.

So before we read the piece, what do we know about Oaks Academy? Well, here's the pitch at the top of their website:

The Oaks Academy is a Christ-centered school that exists to provide a rich, classical education to children of diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, preparing them to succeed in a rigorous secondary educational program and to demonstrate spiritual, social and emotional maturity.

Indy Ed tells us that the student population of Indianapolis is three-quarters black and brown, but the header photo for OA (which Indy Ed also uses for its piece)shows a group of students who are two-thirds white.

OA has a whole page devoted to Teacher Support which highlights such great features as their outstanding professional development (so much better than public schools). One might think they CURMUDGUCATION: IN: Vouchers and Changing the System:

Hoosier School Heist TV is Doug Martin's channel featuring videos of his book tour across Indiana speaking on the corporate takeover of public education. Order Hoosier School Heist at http://hoosierschoolheist.com/.

Follow Hoosier School Heist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HoosierSchoolHeist

Tweet with Doug Martin at: https://twitter.com/DougMartinED

Mr Rad's Neighborhood - Linkis.com

Mr Rad's Neighborhood - Linkis.com:

Hey Principals, You Are Screwing Up.

Principals: If you lose good teachers from your building at the end of this year, then you are screwing up. Principals, If people are leaving a profession that no one enters without passion, that no one enters expecting to be easy, you are not doing your job. Principals, every teacher that walks away from the kids in your your building and is thinking of your face is your fault.

It’s budget time for schools, which means the beginning of perennially awful time of year that teachers lose jobs and schools lose teachers. For whatever reason, budget time this year feels like a particularly brutal bloodbath, and it sucks.

It sucks. At a time a year when almost nothing feels like enough, we get told we’re somehow going to start getting by with less. At a time of year full of sacrifice, just rounding into the time where we start to see some our work pay off, we start to learn how different next year will be, we start to learn we won’t get to come back, or that too many other people won’t be there. It sucks.

So budgets and cuts are a thing, but not the thing I’m most worried about.  What I’m really and truly disturbed by is the wave of teachers who have had enough, with their building or their boss or with the hours or with the kids. What I’m worried about is all the teachers who leave. Except for all those who really are sick of kids (bye Felicia), we are, as schools and as a system, losing teachers we need, losing teachers that could or would be better with more or different something, and you know what?  It’s not their fault, and it matters, it matters, it really really matters when good teachers leave.

Principals (and just like I use “teachers” to mean everyone who works with kids, I’ll use “principals” Mr Rad's Neighborhood - Linkis.com:

Children should not be a number.: 14 Reasons to Opt Out in 2017

Children should not be a number.: 14 Reasons to Opt Out in 2017:

2016-17 Refusal Letter & Info.

Why Opt Out?

What Opt Out is NOT.

Opt Out Myths & Talking Points

14 Reasons to Opt Out in 2017

Via my friends at NYSAPE.org

 

Children should not be a number.: 14 Reasons to Opt Out in 2017:

Donald Trump, If the US is Attacked, We Will Blame YOU | gadflyonthewallblog

Donald Trump, If the US is Attacked, We Will Blame YOU | gadflyonthewallblog:

Donald Trump, If the US is Attacked, We Will Blame YOU

Donald Trump,

Our nation is on the brink of massive violence.

Many people in the Middle East think the United States wants a war with Islam. Our relations with North Korea are more strained than they’ve been in decades. Russia has infiltrated the deepest levels of our government. Our international standing has been called into question. Our closest allies have been insulted and threatened. Our economy continues to stagnate. Our citizens live in fear. Hate groups are ramping up bomb threats, spray painting their rhetoric in public spaces and celebrating it being echoed back to them on the lips and Twitter accounts of our very own lawmakers. For the first time in decades, our sick, our elderly, our children are left to wonder – not if they will have enough – but if they will have anything at all.

All while our military grows fat and anxious and waiting.

It’s a power keg looking for a match.

And it’s mostly your fault.

Don’t think we’re unaware. We see what you and your cabinet of fools and hate-mongers are doing.

We see how they are “dismantling the administrative state.” We see how they are tearing away protections for your own citizens. We see how they are spreading fear and instability. We see how you are preparing the way for the next unnecessary war.

Most of these fires were not started by you, but your policies have poured gasoline on them.

There is only one thing you need to know: we will hold you accountable.

That’s right. We will hold YOU, personally, responsible.

If a terrorist attacks the United States, we will hold YOU accountable.

If a foreign power attacks us, we will hold YOU responsible.

If desperate and frightened Americans lash out at law enforcement or our military, we will hold YOU accountable.

We will not all rally together behind you. We will not close ranks. We will notDonald Trump, If the US is Attacked, We Will Blame YOU | gadflyonthewallblog:

TALKING COMMUNITY SCHOOLS WITH ALISON McARTHUR « Dad Gone Wild

TALKING COMMUNITY SCHOOLS WITH ALISON McARTHUR « Dad Gone Wild:

TALKING COMMUNITY SCHOOLS WITH ALISON MCARTHUR

Over the last several years in public education, we’ve seen the pendulum start to swing away from an over reliance on assessment data as we enter the beginning stages of recognizing the depth of challenges faced by children in poverty. This recognition has fueled a push back to the over reliance on standardized testing and assessment data being used an indicator of school success and a community school movement has begun to take root. Community schools do more than just provide wraparound services for children. They reclaim the role public schools previously played as centers of the community. Each one of these community schools differs in that each one is responsive to the community they serve. It is early in the process of data collection, but so far the results look promising. Metro Nashville Public Schools has been growing its number of community schools for a while now.

I sat down at Istanbul Café and over a couple of gyros, Community Achieves  program coordinator Alison McArthur and I discussed community schools and their potential.

Dad Gone Wild: Alison, thanks for joining me today and filling me in on community schools.

Alison McArthur: You are welcome. We always welcome the chance to talk about our schools.

DGW: Before we get rolling on community schools, I’ve always been interested in how people came to where they are in life. You were a high school teacher, right?

AM: I was a high school teacher at Glencliff. Right around the corner from here.

DGW: Very cool. For how many years?

AM: I taught for 13 years, and I was TALKING COMMUNITY SCHOOLS WITH ALISON McARTHUR « Dad Gone Wild:

Audio: LA Unified has gotten billions to serve high-needs kids. Here's how they've spend it. | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: LA Unified has gotten billions to serve high-needs kids. Here's how they've spend it. | 89.3 KPCC:

LA Unified has gotten billions to serve high-needs kids. Here's how they've spend it.

When California inaugurated a new school funding formula in 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown wanted to do more than restore money the state's public schools had lost to deep recession-era budget cuts.



 The governor hoped to level the playing field for three high-need groups in the state's schools — low-income students, English Learners, and foster youth. The new "Local Control Funding Formula" called for billions of new dollars for school districts who serve these children.

But in the Los Angeles Unified School District, a coalition of "equity advocates" led by the United Way of Greater L.A. have questioned for years whether this new state funding — a total of $3.8 billion over the last four years — is reaching campuses serving the largest numbers of kids in these high-need groups.

On Monday, members of the coalition released a new, school-by-school analysis that they say provides fresh evidence to back up their concerns.

"This is a good news-bad news story," explained UC Berkeley education professor Bruce Fuller, whom the United Way and coalition members contracted to crunch L.A. Unified's budget data.

The elementary and middle schools are the "bad news," Fuller said.

In 2015-16, high-need students comprised more than 90 percent of the student bodies at 269 of L.A. Unified's 400-plus elementary schools. But per-student spending on these highest-need campuses still lags behind spending on 139 campuses where between 60 and 90 percent of the student body fits the state's definition of high-need, according to the coalition's report.

In fact, since the 2012-13 school year, 31 elementary campuses with the smallestconcentrations of high-need students saw larger increases in their per-pupil spending than the neediest campuses.

And in middle schools, the coalition notes after an initial uptick in spending in the highest-need campuses, spending has since flattened out.

"By regressively allocating funds to elementary and middle schools," Fuller said, "by the tea leaves, we don’t see any likelihood the achievement gaps will narrow for young children."

Fuller said the advocates would prefer to see L.A. Unified officials "progressively" allocate this influx of state funding by sending more money to schools serving the largest numbers of high-need students.

Advocates say they've observed this progressive allocation at the district's high school campuses — that's the "good news," Fuller said. Since California inaugurated its new school funding formula in 2013, the 35 high schools with the largest high-need student populations have seen their per-pupil spending increase by nearly 50 percent.Audio: LA Unified has gotten billions to serve high-needs kids. Here's how they've spend it. | 89.3 KPCC:

Court Upholds Prayer at School Board Meetings, Overlooking Their Judicial and Executive Functions That Suggest a Different Result - Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog:
Court Upholds Prayer at School Board Meetings, Overlooking Their Judicial and Executive Functions That Suggest a Different Result

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in American Humanist Association v. Birdville Independent School District has upheld a First Amendment challenge to student prayer at school board meetings.  The court offered this summary of the facts:

BISD’s board holds monthly meetings in the District Administration Building, which is not located within a school. The meetings include sessions open to the public. Attendees are free to enter and leave at any time. Most attendees are adults, though students frequently attend school-board meetings to receive awards or for other reasons, such as brief performances by school bands and choirs. Since 1997, two students have opened each session—with one leading the Pledge of Allegiance and the Texas pledge and the other delivering some sort of statement, which can include an invocation. Those student presenters, typically either elementary- or middle-school students,2 are given one minute. BISD officials do not direct them on what to say but tell them to make sure their statements are relevant to school-board meetings and not obscene or otherwise inappropriate. At a number of meetings, the student speakers have presented poems or read secular statements. But according to AHA and Smith, they are usually an invocation in the form of a prayer, with speakers frequently referencing “Jesus” or “Christ.” AHA and Smith claim that sometimes the prayers are directed at the audience through the use of phrases such as “let us pray,” “stand for the prayer,” or “bow your heads.”

From 1997 through February 2015, the student-led presentations were called “invocations” and were delivered by students selected on merit. In March 2015, in an apparent response to AHA’s concerns about the invocations, BISD began referring to them as “student expressions” and providing disclaimers that the students’ statements do not reflect BISD’s views. BISD began randomly selecting, from a list of volunteers, the students who would deliver the expressions.

The court recognized that two different lines of precedent potentially controlled the case--one dealing with legislative prayer and the other with school prayer.  

Like [the legislative precedent], this dispute is about the constitutionality of permitting religious invocations at the opening, ceremonial phase of a local deliberative body’s public meetings. But like [the school prayer Education Law Prof Blog:

School Funding: A Moral, Not a Fiscal Problem | janresseger

School Funding: A Moral, Not a Fiscal Problem | janresseger:

School Funding: A Moral, Not a Fiscal Problem

Taxes are merely a tool by which governments can fund the services needed in a good society.  Today instead, as the Freedom Caucus dominates the House of Representatives and Donald Trump sets sets the agenda, taxes and government are seen as the enemy—something to eliminate.  Grover Norquist, who leads Americans for Tax Reform and who has convinced a mass of state legislators to sign his pledge never to raise taxes, is famous for his declaration: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” In the eyes of many of today’s politicians, tax policy has become not a tool of government but a goal in itself along with the goal of reducing the programs and services the government provides.

Some of the services tax cutters want to eliminate are provided by public schools.  Even before President Donald Trump announced his budget outline last week, federal funding for schools had declined because many in Congress have prioritized tax cutting. In October 2016, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that the two largest funding streams for K-12 public schools have been growing smaller. Funding for Title I, the program for schools serving concentrations of children in poverty dropped 8.3 percent (adjusted for inflation) between 2010 and 2016 and funding to support federally mandated programs for special education dropped 6.4 percent (again adjusted for inflation).

If tax reduction were merely a federal malaise, it would not be so serious for schools, for federal funds pay for merely 10 percent of school funding, with the bulk of the money roughly split between states and local school districts. But because schools make up one of the the biggest budget lines in every state, tax slashing by the state legislative endorsers of Norquist’s School Funding: A Moral, Not a Fiscal Problem | janresseger:

Betsy DeVos Pitches Virtual School with 4-Yr Cohort Grad Rate Below 32 Percent | deutsch29

Betsy DeVos Pitches Virtual School with 4-Yr Cohort Grad Rate Below 32 Percent | deutsch29:

Betsy DeVos Pitches Virtual School with 4-Yr Cohort Grad Rate Below 32 Percent

On March 20, 2017, US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos addressed the National Association of State Boards of Education in Washington, DC.

Her speech includes the repeated, slanted story of Denisha Merriweather, whose story of private school success coincided with the stabilization of her home life— and whose private school has an established record of low math test scores.

Of course, DeVos does not mention such pesky details. Instead, she simplifies Merriweather’s story to suit her narrative of private school choice saving a student from those deficient public schools.

In short, when it comes to her shaped Merriweather narrative, DeVos continues to lie.

In this speech, DeVos follows her Merriweather tale with one about a student whose academic life was rescued by his attending a Washington State virtual school:

Another student I met, Sandeep Thomas, grew up impoverished in Bangalore, India with absent and neglectful parents. Sandeep was adopted by a loving couple from New Jersey but continued to suffer from the experiences of his early years. He was not able to focus in school, and it took him hours to complete even the simplest assignment.

This changed when his family moved to Washington state, where Sandeep was able to join a virtual public school. This option gave him the flexibility to learn in the comfort of his own home and develop at a pace that was right for him. He ended up graduating high school with a 3.7 GPA, and also having earned 39 hours of college credit. Today, he’s working in the finance industry and is a public advocate for increased school options that allow students like him a chance to succeed. …

Only moments later, DeVos urges members of state boards of education to focus on trees, not the forest:

All of these students’ experiences suggest that we should value and appreciate the individual trees rather than see a monolithic forest. Let’s stop prioritizing process over people.  If our actions don’t benefit students at the 

Betsy DeVos Pitches Virtual School with 4-Yr Cohort Grad Rate Below 32 Percent | deutsch29: