Within integrated schools, de facto segregation persists - Baltimore Sun

Within integrated schools, de facto segregation persists - Baltimore Sun:

Within integrated schools, de facto segregation persists

They were classmates and best friends, and they both wanted to get into the 11th-grade Advanced Placement English class at Columbia's Hammond High School.

Since meeting in summer school just before ninth grade, Mikey Peterson and Eli Sauerwalt had been through a lot together. They'd each battled depression, they'd failed classes, they'd encouraged each other to do better.

As 10th-graders in English, the teens were each hoping for a prized recommendation to the AP English class for their junior year.

Eli had doubts about whether AP English was for him. His attendance had been poor, and he had barely passed some assignments. But for the teacher, he said, it was never even a question.

You can do this, he recalled her saying. This is what you should do.

Racial disparities within Howard County classes

Mikey also asked his teacher about AP English. Despite failing several assignments, he believed he could thrive in a more competitive environment.

Her response, as he remembered it: Do you really want to do that to yourself?

The following fall, Eli, who is white, enrolled in AP English. "I was always kind of told I belonged," he said.

Mikey, who is black, enrolled in regular English. "That's where the black kids are," he said.

Howard County is the most integrated school district in the region, according to the Maryland Equity Project of the University of Maryland. Children of different races — especially those who are black and white — are more likely to sit next to each other in Howard than almost anywhere else in the state.

But within that diversity, school leaders have uncovered a de facto system of segregation.

Enrollment data obtained by The Baltimore Sun through a public records request shows that the district's advanced classes — honors, gifted and talented, and AP — are disproportionately white, while the regular and remedial classes are disproportionately black.

There are twice as many white students as black students in Howard schools. But demographics alone doesn't explain the disparities.

In elementary school, nearly five times as many white students as black students are enrolled in gifted and talented courses. In middle school, it's nearly four times as many.

By high school, where the menu of advanced classes expands to include honors, the gaps persist, with twice as many white students in honors classes and three times as many in Within integrated schools, de facto segregation persists - Baltimore Sun:

Malloy: State's Desegregation Efforts Depriving Children Of Quality Education - Hartford Courant

Malloy: State's Desegregation Efforts Depriving Children Of Quality Education - Hartford Courant:

Malloy: State's Desegregation Efforts Depriving Children Of Quality Education

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said he has lost faith in Connecticut's nationally touted school-desegregation efforts and argued that Hartford students would be better served if the landmark Sheff v. O'Neill case returned to court for a fresh round of judicial review.

Although Malloy commended integration as a "laudable goal" and an "OK aspiration," he said that the state's negotiations with the Sheff plaintiffs have dragged to an impasse, and that in the meantime too many Hartford children have been left behind in sub-par neighborhood schools — including some black and Latino students excluded from high-performing magnet programs in the quest to meet racial integration quotas.

Those state-sponsored policies, revealed in a Courant special report this month, include tilting the odds in the regional school choice lottery to favor white suburban students who apply to magnet schools. And in a practice that the governor said was discriminatory and likely unconstitutional, some Hartford magnets leave seats empty rather than accept minority children off the waitlist — denying them admission in an effort to achieve an integrated student body.

"It's as if we're going out of our way to deprive kids from Hartford of a good education," Malloy said in an interview with The Courant this week. "I'm going to assume that this goes back to court because this solution is no longer working for the Hartford kids who it's supposed to benefit, and is Malloy: State's Desegregation Efforts Depriving Children Of Quality Education - Hartford Courant:

Liberals, Conservatives Agree: Big Mistake for White House to Push Private School Choice | US News

Liberals, Conservatives Agree: Big Mistake for White House to Push Private School Choice | Education News | US News:

Liberals, Conservatives Agree: Big Mistake for White House to Push Private School Choice

Having just sent a memo to the Democratic caucus Wednesday morning outlining a strategy to oppose the Trump administration’s plans to push private school choice, Sen. Patty Murray headed to the left-leaning Center for American Progress to further condemn the idea.

“Unfortunately, our system breaks down completely when it comes to public money going to private schools,” the Washington Democrat and ranking member of the Senate education committee said to a room of mostly like-minded liberals. “Without accountability and without transparency, too many students fall through the cracks and we fly blind without the information we need to make sure all students are succeeding.”

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RELATED CONTENT

Patty Murray Outlines Case Against Trump's School Choice Agenda

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At the same moment, across town at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, a panel of conservative and libertarian education policy experts waxed on the very same private school choice proposal. And, like Murray, they also concluded – though for very different reasons – that the Trump administration should not be pushing such an agenda.

“This is something that would be a huge issue if the federal government gets involved,” said Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at Heritage.

Neal McCluskey, the director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, agreed: “I don’t think it’s something that we want.”

“The only thing that worries me about school choice is government intervention,” added Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice.

So if Democrats don't support private school choice on the basis that the underlying education policy flies in the face of the principles of a public education system, and Republicans are hesitant to support private school choice because they don't believe it's an appropriate role for the federal government, then who does want the Trump administration to pursue that agenda?

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, for one. The billionaire and her family have spent millions of dollars lobbying for private school choice policies in her home state of Michigan, and have been major players in the proliferation of charter schools and voucher programs that allow students to enroll in religious private schools in and around Detroit.

That DeVos would want to expand policies she’s familiar with and has experience with is not unusual. In fact, it’s exactly what former Education Secretary Arne Duncan did under the Obama administration by pushing an aggressive reform agenda that included expanding charter schools, evaluating and paying teachers based in part on test scores and fixing failing schools by shuttering them – all policies he experimented with as CEO of schools in Chicago and that were at the heart of the administration hallmark education Liberals, Conservatives Agree: Big Mistake for White House to Push Private School Choice | Education News | US News:

California school districts increased spending on administrator pay faster than teacher pay | The Sacramento Bee

California school districts increased spending on administrator pay faster than teacher pay | The Sacramento Bee:

California school districts increased spending on administrator pay faster than teacher pay

Every so often, “clackers,” as teachers at Hiram Johnson High call them, will visit Mary Rodríguez’s class to watch her teach and make recommendations. These administrators, she said, wear shoes that aren’t ideal for Hiram Johnson’s floors, making it easy to hear them coming.

A lot of them roam the halls these days: Sacramento City Unified has increased spending on administrators during the last several years while cutting spending on teachers.

“We are just putting our noses to the grindstone and trying to teach the kids, and it becomes exhausting,” Rodríguez said.

The imbalance at Sac City has become the norm in California. As funding grew following years of budget cuts, California school districts increased spending for administrator pay faster than they raised spending for teacher pay, a Bee review of state financial data found.

General fund spending by school districts on teacher salaries rose by 15 percent, or $3 billion, from the 2010-11 school year to 2015-16. During the same period, administrator pay grew by 27 percent, or $700 million.

Adjusted for inflation, California’s school districts spent less money on teacher salaries in 2015-16 than they did in 2006-2007, the last year before the recession. The opposite was true for administrators: Districts spent slightly more on administrators in 2015-16 than they did during the year before the recession.

Teachers and the unions that represent them say the trend has hurt students by increasing class sizes, and that it has prompted some teachers to leave the profession.

“Even though they are paying more to administrators, we have this incredible turnover,” said Rodríguez, a special education teacher, referring to other teachers leaving her school due to low pay and other factors. “ It's beyond embarrassing.”

School district officials say they spend far more money on teachers than on administrators. “Almost two thirds of our budget goes toward salary and benefits for teachers,” said Maria L. Lopez, a spokeswoman for Sacramento City Unified.

Lopez and others also said administrators do important work. At the school level, administrators play a vital role in keeping schools running. At the district level, administrators help ensure that instructional materials and practices are uniformly effective. They maintain payrolls, deal with a mountain of paperwork and they obtain money for schools through grants.

Naj Alikhan, a spokesman for the Association of California School Administrators, said administrators often negotiate for pay individually while teachers negotiate for pay collectively, which can produce divergent results. “I don’t think you can compare and contrast,” he said.

Administrators come in different flavors, ranging from a middle school vice principal to the superintendent of a large district. The state further breaks down spending on administrativeCalifornia school districts increased spending on administrator pay faster than teacher pay | The Sacramento Bee:

Remember 'Open Schools'? Probably Not, And Here's Why : NPR Ed : NPR

Remember 'Open Schools'? Probably Not, And Here's Why : NPR Ed : NPR:

'Open Schools' Made Noise In The '70s; Now They're Just Noisy

It's a perennial debate in American education: Do kids learn best when they're sitting in rows at their desks? Or moving around, exploring on their own?

Back in the 1960s and '70s, that debate led to a brand new school design: Small classrooms were out. Wide-open spaces were in. The Open Education movement was born.

Across the U.S., schools were designed and built along these new ideas, with a new approach to the learning that would take place inside them.

It was a response, historians say, to fears that the U.S. was falling behind in key subjects like science and math. The approach "resonated with those who believed that America's formal, teacher-led classrooms were crushing students' creativity," Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, wrote in 2004.

"No whole-class lessons, no standardized tests, and no detailed curriculum," he wrote. "The best of the open classrooms had planned settings where children came in contact with things, books, and one another at 'interest centers' and learned at their own pace with the help of the teacher."

Sounds great, right? But within just a few years — by the late 1970s — the open schools movement had faded. A backlash set in. "Traditional schools sprang up in suburbs and cities," Cuban wrote. "This time the call was not for open education but for a return to the basics."

Of course many open schools remained in operation long after that. I remember visiting one in Detroit in the 1990s, when I was a student teacher. By then, open schools were already an endangered species: education's equivalent of a red-cockaded woodpecker. Or a Ford Pinto.

So, what happened?

Recently, I ran across another survivor just a few miles from NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. What better place to explore this mystery than a visit to Benjamin Orr Elementary School?

I asked the principal, Carolyn Jackson-King, what she thought the philosophy behind this model was back in 1974 when the school was built. "I think it was mainly for collaboration for teachers," she explained. "A lot of times, teachers are in their silos, by ourselves, doing our own thing."

The openness allowed them to work together and students too: "If I'm a first-grader doing second-grade work," Jackson-King says, "I could easily go over to that second-Remember 'Open Schools'? Probably Not, And Here's Why : NPR Ed : NPR:

How to Expose Racists: Simply Mention Racism | radical eyes for equity

How to Expose Racists: Simply Mention Racism | radical eyes for equity:

How to Expose Racists: Simply Mention Racism

I was pleasantly surprised when Education Week published Why Are We Criminalizing Black Students? by Tyrone C. Howard.

Regretfully, this blog is gorged with posts about EdWeek routinely failing the education discussion, but Howard’s commentary confronts well a hard topic in education.

And then came the comments—tone deaf at best, defensive and racist themselves as worst (first three opening rebuttals):

mcruiz

I’m amazed. I truly didn’t know we teachers had that much power, and the propensity to use it for evil deeds. Wow! Imagine that, we have the power to criminalize Black students. Wow, again!

LynnG

This is a ridiculous article and the author’s bias is so heavy handed that he’s made his argument a joke. Talk about confirmation bias.

Paul D. White

One more racist rant from a Black college professor who doesn’t have the courage to tell the truth, and one more worthless posting by Ed Week for what? A desire to show how “tolerant” they are to biased, ignorant positions regarding race and performance in the schools?

The great failure of the U.S. which has brought us to Trumplandia is, as I have pointed out often, James Baldwin’s “this rigid refusal to look at ourselves” that must be aimed with laser focus on white America.

In schools, black and brown children are disproportionately targeted and punished for the same behaviors as white children, and then in society, black and brown people suffer more inequitable treatment by police and How to Expose Racists: Simply Mention Racism | radical eyes for equity:

Paul Vallas again? Really? | Fred Klonsky

Paul Vallas again? Really? | Fred Klonsky:

Paul Vallas again? Really?

I have always believed there are two main reasons we in Illinois suffer from having Bruce Rauner as governor.

Pat Quinn decided he was placed on this earth to cut public employee pensions.

He picked Paul Vallas as his running mate.

Quinn lost by a mere 70,000 votes statewide. I pin that tiny margin on pensions and Vallas.

Vallas screws up anything he does. He is like Midas in reverse. Everything he touches turns to shit.

But, jeez, don’t the school privatizers just love him.

His actual job resume is shaky:  Fired as CPS CEO. Fired as NOLA recovery school’s chief after Katrina. Fired as Bridgeport, Connecticut schools superintendent for lacking basic educational credentials. Shown the door in Philadelphia.

He might as well have been a coach in professional sports where white guys also seem to get another coaching job no matter how bad they are.

The news that he is being promoted by Bruce Rauner to run the underfunded Chicago Paul Vallas again? Really? | Fred Klonsky:

How the Nation’s Two Oldest School Voucher Programs Are Working: Part I—Wisconsin | janresseger

How the Nation’s Two Oldest School Voucher Programs Are Working: Part I—Wisconsin | janresseger:

How the Nation’s Two Oldest School Voucher Programs Are Working: Part I—Wisconsin

School voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland are now over twenty-five years old.  Now both states have expanded statewide what began as stand-alone, big-city programs, and last week, local newspapers in Milwaukee and Cleveland examined these programs.  Today’s post will look at last week’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel‘s report on Wisconsin vouchers; tomorrow’s will look at Patrick O’Donnell’s recent Plain Dealer report on vouchers in Cleveland and Ohio.

Underneath both of these reports are some realities. Wisconsin and Ohio are among the 25 states today where conservative Republicans control the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature. In both states, school vouchers have created a set of private schools that receive public tax dollars. Both voucher programs are relatively small compared to the public schools that serve the mass of each state’s children.

In the new exploration of Wisconsin vouchers, Erin Richards explains: While President Donald Trump is pitching to boost federal spending on school choice programs by $1.4 billion—a down payment on his promise of $20 billion—Wisconsin is already demonstrating the complexities of expanding private-school choice to exurban America. Now that private schools outside of densely populated Milwaukee and Racine can tap into voucher funding, new tensions are bubbling up between religious conservatives eager to offer more students a religious-based education and district advocates who fear losing resources to private schools now competing for the same pot of public dollars… To qualify for a voucher in the statewide program, students have to come from families earning no more than 185% of the federal poverty level, or about $45,000 for a family of four or about $52,000 if the parents are married. The income limit for Racine and Milwaukee programs is 300% of the federal poverty level.”

Milwaukee’s voucher program dates back to 1990: “Milwaukee hosts the country’s longest-running urban school voucher program.  For decades, Wisconsin’s outstate city and school leaders watched from a distance the constant opening and shuttering of private schools in the 27-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program—and the battles over funding and accountability… Then in 2011, the GOP-led Legislature approved replicating the Milwaukee voucher program in Racine… Two years later, Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a statewide expansion and a separate special-needs voucher program.”  “State law caps voucher-student enrollment at 2% of a district’s population this year, a figure that is rising 1% each subsequent year of the program—unless lawmakers act to lift the cap more quickly.”

Wisconsin’s statewide program also involves a required local school district tax assessment as a local contribution to each voucher. In an FAQ published before the current statewide program was passed in 2013, the Wisconsin School Boards Association explained how the breakdown of state-local contributions would be likely to work: “Under current law, the state pays 61.6 percent of the total cost of the voucher (or about $3,969 per voucher student) directly. The remaining 38.4 percent of the voucher (or about $2,474 per voucher student) is How the Nation’s Two Oldest School Voucher Programs Are Working: Part I—Wisconsin | janresseger:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES 'Move fast and break things...'

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES 'Move fast and break things...':

WEEKEND QUOTABLES 'Move fast and break things...'

Bannon: "Move fast and break things" 

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

“We have got to have the guts to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies and move forward toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program, And I’ll be introducing legislation shortly to do that.” -- All In with Chris Hayes

Chicago Ald. Roderick Sawyer

"I just don't know what value he [Paul Vallas] adds to this university, that's my concern. I don't even know what a crisis intervention specialist means." -- Chicago Tribune

 Allyson Moloney, a K-4 special education teacher

“All of our paraprofessionals are tied up with testing. Even our ‘specials’ teachers — gym and tech — are tied up with PARCC testing. We don’t have a lot of extra bodies that can help us out.” -- Sun-Times

Reince Priebus

"I'm not in any trouble." -- Politico

Nicole Jorwic, dir. of rights policy for the Arc, an advocacy organization for people with intellectual disabilities 

We would hope that in his future rulings, Judge Gorsuch would see that the purpose of IDEA is to help students with disabilities achieve more meaningful progress that can ultimately lead to their success and full life in their communities." -- New York Times

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE)

“By appointing Mr. Severino to enforce the life-saving protections that he has made his personal mission to dismantle, the Trump administration has once again put the fox in charge of the hen house." -- LGBTQ Nation

Gwenda Blair, Trump biographer 

...said of Trump’s supporters: “They voted for a guy who could fix it, the CEO, on The Apprentice for 10 years, who could make a deal with anybody.”  -- GuardianMike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES 'Move fast and break things...':

Technology “Disrupting” Journalism and Teaching (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Technology “Disrupting” Journalism and Teaching (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Technology “Disrupting” Journalism and Teaching (Part 1)

Recently a few friends and I saw “All The President’s Men.” The 1976 film about the Watergate burglary in 1972, the subsequent cover up by the White House and eventual resignation of President Nixon in 1974 featured Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford playing Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward.

As I watched the two-hour film unfold, these young investigative reporters ran down leads, established facts, verified sources, and pecked out their stories on typewriters– desktop computers didn’t enter newsrooms until the early 1980s. Constantly on landline phones in the newsroom checking out facts and sources, using street-corner telephone booths when they were checking out leads in the field, and jotting notes hurriedly as they interviewed and re-interviewed sources, the technology was clearly state-of-the-art for the early 1970s. The film (drawn from the book of the same name) is a textbook description of how investigative reporters go about their work on a daily basis.

If “Law and Order,” “NYPD Blue” and “Blue Bloods” are police procedurals detailing the steps that patrolmen and detectives investigate a case, develop theories, establish facts, and make arrests, then “All the President’s Men” is a journalism procedural much like the recent Oscar nominated film “Spotlight” that followed a Boston Globe team investigating Catholic priests accused of abusing children and youth. A generation later than the Watergate burglary and Nixon’s resignation, a “Spotlight” reporter commenting on the film, said:  “We talk on the phone, we do data entry, we look at court records. Good luck making that interesting!” Their newspaper stories published in 2002 became an Oscar-winning film in 2016.

Fast forward 40 years from the Washington Post reporters and nearly two decades since  the Boston Globe pieces on the Catholic Church’s cover-up of abusive priests, and journalists today use an array of technologies that were unavailable then to journalists. Today reporters for print and digital media carry cell phones that double as recorders and memo takers, laptops and tablets; they Technology “Disrupting” Journalism and Teaching (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

One to One Initiative Threatens Public Education | tultican

One to One Initiative Threatens Public Education | tultican:

One to One Initiative Threatens Public Education

One to one classroom agendas have a dark side that includes the destruction of public schools as we know them; where teachers and students interact. It’s a dystopian ideology that posits students earning education badges while working in isolation at a digital screen.

This month, the entire staff at my high school received an email from a colleague who recently volunteered to be on our district’s technology committee. The message said in Part:

“In doing research for next year’s Technology Plan I came across some interesting data collected by the Speak Up 2015 Research Project.

“Although this particular data is from 2015 it still makes a lot of great points! Click on the links below, I promise it is a quick read.  Enjoy!”

The email message included three links to infographics provided by tomorrow.org.

What do Parents Really Think about Digital Learning

Looking Inside Today’s Digital Classroom

10 Things Everyone Should Know About K12 Students’ Digital Learning

These infographics claim that to be the result of authentic unfiltered data from respectively; 38,613 K-12 parents nationwide, 38,157 K-12 educators nationwide and 505,676 K-12 students, parents and educators nationwide. Ever since my Viet Nam war experience, I have been less trusting. I seek verification for all claims. I want to know the research methodology and who is paying.

The project tomorrow’s research is based on volunteers who engage with their web site answering survey questions. The web site is mostly an advertisement for implementing digital learning and a guide for how to lobby local schools to implement it. It has an agenda and a profound bias.

There are more than 90 corporations and non-profits listed as supporters of One to One Initiative Threatens Public Education | tultican:

Chester Finn Laments Maryland’s Corporate Reform Resistance; Fails to Connect Common Core to Falling NAEP Scores | deutsch29

Chester Finn Laments Maryland’s Corporate Reform Resistance; Fails to Connect Common Core to Falling NAEP Scores | deutsch29:

Chester Finn Laments Maryland’s Corporate Reform Resistance; Fails to Connect Common Core to Falling NAEP Scores

On March 22, 2017, former Fordham Institute President and current Maryland State Board of Education Vice President Chester Finn published an opinion piece for the ed reform think tank, Fordham Institute, entitled, “A Painful ESSA Setback in Maryland.”

Finn is upset that signature ed reform policies, such as the expansion of charters and vouchers and test-score-centric policies for “grading” schools are taking a hit in the Maryland legislature.

Finn tries to leverage his argument by centering on Maryland’s 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores:

Maryland prides itself on having high-performing public schools, but the truth is that its primary-secondary education system is failing to prepare far too many children for what follows. On the most recent (2015) National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, barely one third of the state’s eighth graders were “proficient” or “advanced” in either math or reading. Among African-American youngsters, that key benchmark was reached by fewer than one in five.

Yet lawmakers are on the verge of undermining the best chance the state has had in ages to do something forceful about the schools that have allowed this sad situation to endure. They’re about to prevent the State Board of Education from installing a new school-accountability system that prioritizes pupil achievement and student success, as well as true transparency by which parents can easily tell whether their child’s school is succeeding or failing. Instead, House Bill 978 and Senate Bill 871, now speeding toward enactment, sharply limit the extent to which learning counts, restrict the use of achievement data, forbid the state from “grading” its schools (or intervening in dreadful ones), and give top billing to measures of teacher satisfaction, class size, adult credentials, and other inputs that are dear to the hearts of teacher unions but have woefully little to do with classroom effectiveness. The General Assembly has already killed Governor Hogan’s proposed expansion of the state’s cramped charter school program and is threatening to shrink its tiny voucher program, thereby ensuring that kids stuck in district-run dropout factories won’t have any alternatives. Maryland districts are also famously allergic to public-school choice, save for the occasional magnet.

Maryland’s House Bill 978 and Senate Bill 871 are essentially the same bill. Both call for school quality indicators to be included in school performance grades; both specifically forbid school quality from being measures using test scores. Furthermore, regarding schools identified for intervention, both bills specifically forbid 1) the Chester Finn Laments Maryland’s Corporate Reform Resistance; Fails to Connect Common Core to Falling NAEP Scores | deutsch29:

NYC Public School Parents: It's not too late to opt out & more reasons to do so-- including to protect your child's privacy and deny them the data!

NYC Public School Parents: It's not too late to opt out & more reasons to do so-- including to protect your child's privacy and deny them the data!:

 It's not too late to opt out & more reasons to do so-- including to protect your child's privacy and deny them the data!

On Tuesday begin three days of state ELA exams for grades 3-8.  Last year, about 265,000 NY students in these grades opted out --22% of students statewide.  It's not too late to opt your child out now!

See the video below with ten good reasons to opt out, from NYC Opt Out.  Check out their website for sample opt out letters you can email to hand to your child's principal and teacher.

Top Ten Reasons To Opt Out from Shoot4Education on Vimeo.

If you're not convinced yet, here are eight more reasons, from teacher/blogger extraordinaire, Peter Greene.  Here are even more reasons from NYC teacher and parent Katie Lapham.

Still not convinced? NYSAPE has some excellent fact sheets and refutations of NYSED's talking points, showing how the tests are still overly long, developmentally inappropriate, and essentially flawed, designed to show the majority of the state's students as failing.

As mentioned by several of the links above, denying the data-miners and privacy violators is a top reason to opt out.  After nearly three years, New York State Education Department has still not enforced the student data privacy law passed in 2014 after the collapse of inBloom.  The outsourcing of students' personal data continues essentially unregulated, with few if any security protections.  The Parent Bill of Student Privacy NYC Public School Parents: It's not too late to opt out & more reasons to do so-- including to protect your child's privacy and deny them the data!:

Badass Teachers Association: The Case Against Crayons by Catherine Malley

Badass Teachers Association: The Case Against Crayons by Catherine Malley:

The Case Against Crayons 

by Catherine Malley

Crayons are illegal today; Classroom contraband, reeking of play.

My box of new September crayons: Flawless, sharp tipped, begging to escape their yellow and green striped Crayola box. Each color was perfectly placed in the spectrum: red, maroon, scarlet, brick red and my favorite, magenta. Magenta fell somewhere in the purples, but it was rarely returned to its identified space. At seven, I revered the fuchsia hue, utilizing it at every opportunity to color lips, tulips, and princess gowns.

Now my second grade students’ crayons maintain their sleek points most of the year. They are rarely used for any length of time. Crayons are illegal, especially when they are gloriously scattered under a desk just as the principal walks in to observe my classroom at reading time. I watch two pony tailed girls, one mahogany, one peach, scramble to take exquisite measures to lovingly return errant colors to the box. They roll the crayons in their palms, check for broken tips, set them in rainbow hues. ROYGBIV, a mantra for the order of color. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet – the progression as sacrosanct as the words of a prayer.

The careful placement of each color in the Crayola box takes too much time, is too engaging, enables the students to avoid decoding and reading comprehension. As the principal typed comments on his IPad, I knew the act of crayon spilling would have consequences.

Coloring rainbows makes little sense; When standards based tests demand recompense.

Daisies, sunflowers and a soft gray cat with a celestial blue collar. Panda bears and butterflies. My students can barely contain their excitement when given rare opportunities for free time – crayons, scissors and folded paper are exponentially exciting. Soon enough, we will be back to searching for the main idea in a story, identifying the problem and solution Badass Teachers Association: The Case Against Crayons by Catherine Malley: