Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION

CURMUDGUCATION:

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION

Checker Still Doesn't Understand Tenure

1by Peter Greene / 1h

Chester "Checker" Finn, Grand Poobah Emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is the reformster most likely to unleash his higher dudgeon over Kids These Days and Those Darn Teachers, and he has done so again on the Fordham 

Charters and Commitment

13by Peter Greene / 15h

It happened again. This time in Milwaukee. Students at the Universal Academy for the College Bound Webster Campus returned to find themselves in a completely different school , because a charter management company had decided they'd rather move on than finish out their contract for the year. Universal Companies took with them their books and their technology. Milwaukee Public Schools filled in the

Leaders, Character, and Policy

14by Peter Greene / 19h

Many of us spend huge amounts of time discussing and debating education policy. But where the synthetic rubber meets the recycled asphalt, policy is not the most important thing. In every school, in every district, what really matters is the character of the leadership. In the same way that workers do not quit workplaces so much as they quit a boss, teachers are influenced by the administrators in

The Attack on Charter Schools

26by Peter Greene / 1d

Nashville Charter School parents complain that they are under attack and disrespected . Charter advocates have long panel discussions about how to fight back against the attacks on charters and choice. Every 9-12 months, a new website is launched because reformy fans of charter and choice believe that they are under attack and need to get their story Out There. Even the newly-minted teacher of the

APR 20

Are Charters a Rural Solution

2by Peter Greene / 2d

In a piece that has circulated a bit, Karen Eppley, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at Pennsylvania State University suggests that charter schools might be the solution to many rural education problems. While the article is not as gung-ho about charters as the title suggests (I know-- writers rarely get to pick their own headline), it still misses some critical points. Accord

APR 19

Personalization and the Outliers

35by Peter Greene / 2d

Henry Ford was an early proponent of personalization. "Any customer can have a car pained any color that he wants," said Ford in 1909 , "so long as it is black." There have always been limits to personalization. I like to wear hats, but my head is some sort of extra-large melon, so while hat manufacturers may offer choices to fit the personal size preferences of many customers, I'm an outlier. Man

APR 18

PA: Let's Arm Teachers?

51by Peter Greene / 3d

Apparently it's education crazy season in Harrisburg, with one ill-advised ed bill after another. But fear not-- at least one PA legislator wants some of us to start packing heat in school. Senate Bill 383 intends to amend the school code, with the intent of "providing for protection and defense of pupils. Sponsor Donald C White , who was an insurance salesman back before his 2001 election, explai

APR 17

EdTech To Teachers: Who Needs You?

18by Peter Greene / 4d

If you want to see a fully-refined expression of edtech disdain for actual teachers, check out this article by Dr. Karen Beerer, "Greatest Lesson: Teacher Buy-in Is Overrated ." Beerer is VP of Professional Development for Discovery Education. She's held that job since 2012-- before that she was Asst. Super at Boyertown School District for seven years, and before that an "educator" at Quakertown C

Why the Attack on Sarah Chambers Matters

300+by Peter Greene / 4d

Every day, from all over the country, we hear stories of teachers whose jobs are, for one reason or another, are on the line. Sometimes we hang back, correctly assuming that we don't have the whole story, that there are local issues that we don't know about. But sometimes these local stories deserve all the attention we can give them because they are an early warning of kinds of problems we could

APR 16

ICYMI: Easter Edition

3by Peter Greene / 6d

It's easter Sunday and I'm a huge fan. But just in case you have some time to pass today, here's an assortment of worthwhile reads from the week. A Tale of Two Schools Mitchell Robinson takes us to two schools, only twenty miles apart, that illustrate some of the inequity in education today. Apparently Diversity Is Still Nor Innovative for Edtech... At Educolor's blog, a look at the problem with d

APR 15

PA: Are We Future Ready?

8by Peter Greene / 6d

Pennsylvania is using its newfound ESSA-empowered freedom to create a new dashboard for measuring school awesomeness-- Future Ready PA . Many folks in Harrisburg are very excited about it and are touting it as a relief from the standardized tests that are "failing" PA students. Let's grab our flux capacitor and our supply of illegal plutonium! Is Future Ready PA all that and a bag of Snyder's chip

Who's The Boss?

20by Peter Greene / 7d

When someone tells you who they are, listen to them. Representative Markwayne Mullin (Rep-OK) told his constituents a great deal this week, when in a town hall meeting he said this: You say you pay for me to do this. Bullcrap. I pay for myself. I paid enough taxes before I got there and continue to through my company to pay my own salary. This is a service. No one here pays me to go. And as a foll

APR 14

IN: Welcome UPSTART Pre-K Cyberschool

200+by Peter Greene / 7d

You probably thought this was going to be one of those posts where I made fun of some trend in education by extending it to its logical yet absurd extreme. Sadly-- I mean, really sadly-- that is not the case. "Seriously, dude. What the hell." Meet UPSTART , a company that... well, let me just quote from their home page: UPSTART is an in-home, technology-delivered kindergarten readiness program tha

CURMUDGUCATION:

How the Coming Church-State Showdown Could be Avoided - The Atlantic

How the Coming Church-State Showdown Could be Avoided - The Atlantic:

How the Coming Church-State Showdown Could be Avoided
The Supreme Court has ample reason to avoid deciding a case that could erode the Establishment Clause.

During argument in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer last week before the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan mused that the case poses “a hard issue. It's an issue in which states have their own very longstanding law. It's an issue on which I guess I'm going to say nobody is completely sure that they have it right.”

The court did not pay much attention to a question that logically flows from Kagan’s concern: Is this trip really necessary?

Does the court really need to jump into this dispute between a church and a state government—or is it a case where the two parties basically have already kissed and made up?

Missouri’s Constitution, as written in 1875 and readopted in 1945, contains a provision that “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.” The Missouri courts over the years have interpreted this provision quite literally. As a result, a church named Trinity Lutheran in Columbia, Missouri, was denied a state grant to resurface their daycare playground with recycled rubber tires. (The daycare would have been eligible if it had been run by a separate church-affiliated non-profit; but because in this case the money would have gone directly to the church, the provision applied.) The church sued, and the case has wended its way to the Supreme Court.

Apparently fearing a 4-4 split, the court delayed hearing the case for more than a year. Last week, Trinity Lutheran got its chance to explain to a full set of nine justices that the state’s constitution forces the church “to choose between exercising their religious faith and receiving a public benefit.”

The church was represented by David A. Cortman, senior counsel of the religious-right powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom. I don’t question that ADF is deeply concerned about playground injury, but its agenda is broader. Much of its advocacy is concerned with creating religious-based exemptions to regimes of protection for LGBTQ people, with broadening the ability of Christian majorities to bring religion into public life and policy, and with empowering Christian parents in their dealings with public education.

Some 40 U.S. states maintain constitutional provisions like the one at issue in How the Coming Church-State Showdown Could be Avoided - The Atlantic:

Keeping retirement weird. Who is leaving? | Fred Klonsky

Keeping retirement weird. Who is leaving? | Fred Klonsky:

Keeping retirement weird. Who is leaving?

On this beautiful Earth Day I am going to be a judge evaluating high school students who are aspiring political cartoonists.

I will receive a small stipend, but I’m not doing it for the money. The stipend is not much. Like so many other retired teachers, we volunteer in schools, we coach, we are political activists and so much else.

We are a free asset to our communities.

I read the other day that every ten years or so the pension actuarial tables and mortality rates have to be recalculated. Some of us are living longer.

For others, life expectancy is actually decreasing. We can blame the widening gap between rich and poor for those whose lives are at greater risk.

For teachers in the retirement pension system, living longer is a problem for the state. The pension actuaries have to account for our increasing life expectancy. It is one factor in the state’s $130 billion pension liability. Some of our state’s politicians complain that retired teachers are living too long.

When I write, as I did yesterday, about health care, pensions and taxes, I Keeping retirement weird. Who is leaving? | Fred Klonsky:

More Cartoons on Using Technology | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

More Cartoons on Using Technology | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

More Cartoons on Using Technology

Yeah, I know I have been showing lots of cartoons about using technology. But I cannot help myself since I do laugh at how technologies have penetrated our (I include myself) lives. Taking a step back to laugh at ourselves as immoderate users of new technologies is, I believe, healthy. So enjoy this batch of cartoons.

 More Cartoons onMore Cartoons on Using Technology | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

The enemies of public education | Editorials | paysonroundup.com

The enemies of public education | Editorials | paysonroundup.com:

The enemies of public education

Senator Sylvia Allen

Representative Bob Thorpe

Representative Brenda Barton

They represent Rim Country.

And they’ve apparently decided we don’t need free, universal public schools.

So they all three voted for vouchers — which will probably do even more damage to public schools in Arizona than our indifferent Legislature has done to this point by ensuring we have among worst-funded schools in the nation.

If they were parents of struggling children — that vote would take them from neglecting their children to outright abuse. Hard to know whether neglect or abuse does more harm to a child — but the combination is terrible.

They’ll argue that they voted for the $4,500-per-student vouchers as a way to empower parents and give lagging public schools a bracing dose of competition. They’ll argue that they want parents to have a choice, so low-income and special education students have an alternative to attending a failing public school.

Of course, that’s all nonsense — transparent, hypocritical, outrageous nonsense.

Certainly, those arguments served to insert the camel’s nose under the tent flap when the Legislature first foisted the misnamed “Empowerment Scholarships” on this state. When the Legislature first voted this terrible idea into law several years ago, lawmakers limited the vouchers to special education students who couldn’t get what they needed in public schools. That almost made sense. Then they expanded it to students in public school rated D or F, on the theory those kids should have an out. All right, that’s a superficially plausible argument. But after a couple additional senseless expansions, lawmakers have now dropped all pretenses. Granted, they left in place a cap on the total number of scholarships and the total amount per student — but they’ll likely be back next year to raise or eliminate those limits.

So, what will happen?

Our already shamefully underfunded public schools will grow more segregated as they bleed money and students. The richest, most pro-active families will move their children to private schools and our educational system will increasingly serve to harden class boundaries, rather than providing equal opportunity to all our children.

An investigation by The Arizona Republic revealed that already most of the voucher money’s going to pay private school tuition in rich neighborhoods. Lawmakers said they wanted to provide options for kids in failing schools — but actually, the rich parents are moving their children out of “A” and “B” ranked schools in wealthier neighborhoods.

That’s hardly surprising. The roughly $5,000 voucher will pay less than half of the tuition at your average private school. So only parents who can fork out another $6,000 per child to cover the balance of the tuition can afford to take the voucher.

Mind you, this abusive decision to divert millions of dollars from public schools follows years of shameful neglect. Arizona year after year has starved our schools for resources — cutting per-student funding to 40 percent below the national average. We rank somewhere between 48th and 50th nationally.

In the meantime, lawmakers have heaped one mandate after another on public schools, most of them more of a burden than a help.

You’d have thought legislative educational abusers like Thorpe, Barton and Allen would have been happy just to starve public schools and nurture charter schools. After all, publicly funded charter schools already give parents a choice. Granted, they don’t have to follow a lot of the burdensome rules that shackle public schools and aren’t nearly as accountable financially. And it’s also true that they add lots of fees, skip things like buses and have had the effect of increasing racial segregation almost everywhere they operate, according to an investigation by the Centers for Investigative Journalism. But at least charter schools remain public schools.

Not so voucher schools — or whatever else the parents do with the taxpayer money they take. So now a Legislature that has insisted on school ratings, legislated the number of periods in the day and heaped on layers of expensive oversight wants to give away a virtually unlimited amount of taxpayer money with no strings attached.

And so neglect degenerates into abuse.

But we’ll say one thing for the vote to cannibalize our public schools.

This vote strips away all pretense.

So just make a note.

Senator Sylvia Allen.

Rep. Bob Thorpe.

Rep. Brenda Barton.

They still represent Rim Country.

But make no mistake: They’re now the declared enemies of free, universal, public education.

• The enemies of public education | Editorials | paysonroundup.com:

Russ on Reading: School Choice: The Faustian Bargain

Russ on Reading: School Choice: The Faustian Bargain:

School Choice: The Faustian Bargain

Yesterday, Secretary of Education and school choice champion, Betsy DeVos and school choice opponent and President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten toured a public school in Ohio. The New York Times reported that the two were there seeking some common ground in the school choice debate. While the school that DeVos and Weingarten visited is in a heavily Republican district in Ohio, the voters there are no fans of school choice. As one voter put it, vouchers are "like theft." "It's saying we passed a levy to go to our school district, and it's going somewhere else." Exactly. School choice is theft of our tax dollars and theft of our democracy.


Choice sounds so democratic, so quintessentially American that voucher and charter school champions keep using the term to hoodwink people into thinking that choice in schooling is a good thing. I suggest that those of us who oppose vouchers and charter schools call school choice what it is in the eyes of that Ohio voter, tax theft. The government collects our taxes in order to provide essential services to all of us. There is no choice involved, we all must pay taxes (unless, apparently, we are hugely wealthy). Those essential services include providing for a military, promoting research on health and welfare, providing for police and fire protection, and funding public schools. When money is diverted from the support of the public schools, it amounts to, as the Ohio voter said, theft. Or maybe another way to say it is "taxation without representation", since voters have no voice and no oversight of how Russ on Reading: School Choice: The Faustian Bargain:

Will Fordham Institute Tenure Die? | deutsch29

Will Fordham Institute Tenure Die? | deutsch29:

Will Fordham Institute Tenure Die?

On April 19, 2017, former president and board member emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham (TBF) Institute, Chester Finn, published a piece entitled, “Will Teacher Tenure Die?”

Below is an excerpt:

Tenure arrived in K–12 education as a trickle-down from higher ed. Will the demise of tenure follow a similar sequence? Let us earnestly pray for it—for tenure’s negatives today outweigh its positives—but let us not count on it. …

It’s no secret that the HR practices of private and charter schools—neither of which typically practices tenure—work far better than those of district schools from the standpoint of both school leaders and their students. That’s because the leadership team can generally employ (and deploy) the instructors they deem best suited to their pupils and they’re not obligated to retain any who don’t do a satisfactory job. They can be nimble in regrouping, restaffing, and redirecting their schools—and everyone who works there knows that’s how it goes. Nobody has a right to continued employment untethered to their own performance and the school’s needs. The employer has the right to change the shape, nature, and size of the organization, to redeploy human resources, to substitute capital for labor, to replace elbow grease and sitzfleisch with technology, and to hire and fire according to shifting pupil needs and organizational priorities. …

Though often framed in term of “making it easier to fire bad teachers,” that’s not the main point of such reforms, nor should it be. The main point is to make it possible to run the kinds of schools that kids deserve to attend at a cost the taxpayer can afford to pay—and to bring the profession of school-teaching into the twenty-first century.

Finn’s piece is much longer. In it, he confuses K12 teacher due process rights with Will Fordham Institute Tenure Die? | deutsch29:

Mother Crusader: We Made a Difference! Grassroots Organizing in New Jersey Inspires Senators to Take Action on PARCC

Mother Crusader: We Made a Difference! Grassroots Organizing in New Jersey Inspires Senators to Take Action on PARCC:

We Made a Difference! Grassroots Organizing in New Jersey Inspires Senators to Take Action on PARCC

The crew!

Yesterday I went on a road trip with my twin 10 year old girls to Senate President Steve Sweeney's office where we spent time with some of the most fantastic, courageous folks you'd ever want to meet. 

Why were we there? 

To ask Senator Sweeney to post SCR 132, a concurrent resolution that would send NJ's new PARCC graduation requirement regulations back to the State Board of Education for a much needed re-write. You see, the regulations that the State Board passed don't match up with state statute.

The statute calls for a test of basic skills administered in 11th grade with re-testing options in grade 12. So what does the NJDOE and the State Board do? Propose and pass regulations that make PARCC Algebra 1 (taken as early as 7th grade) and PARCC ELA 10 the new exit exams.

See the disconnect? 

And the best part about the concurrent resolution? It completely side-steps Christie. It's veto proof. 

The Assembly already passed their version of the resolution. If it passes the Senate the Mother Crusader: We Made a Difference! Grassroots Organizing in New Jersey Inspires Senators to Take Action on PARCC:

That's (one of) my girl(s).

Powerpoint: Short comprehensive overview of history and outcomes of charter school movement | educationalchemy

Powerpoint: Short comprehensive overview of history and outcomes of charter school movement | educationalchemy:

Powerpoint: Short comprehensive overview of history and outcomes of charter school movement

Power Point link here. Click to download and save:

Charter Schools forEdualch

 

Powerpoint: Short comprehensive overview of history and outcomes of charter school movement | educationalchemy:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Randi's school visit gambit with Betsy DeVos

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Randi's school visit gambit with Betsy DeVos:

Randi's school visit gambit with Betsy DeVos

AFT Pres. Randi Weingarten seems convinced that she can show Trump's Ed. Sec. Betsy DeVos the error of her ways. By touring a few public schools together with DeVos, Randi hopes to show her that public schools are not the devil's workshop after all and should be supported by the D.O.E., rather than demolished as is essentially the stated ambition of the Trump administration.

DeVos and Weingarten at Van Wert H.S. 

Even after DeVos' first visit to Jefferson Academy in D.C. began with her having to sneak in the back door to avoid protesting parents and community members and ending with her debasing the teachers there, Weingarten's response has been to plead with DeVos to do another school visit, but this time with her.

I don't know what there is about photo-op school visits she thinks are so powerful as to turn this evangelical hater of anything public into an advocate for public ed. But Randi is a committed corporate liberal who has faith in the good intentions of corporate power brokers and profiteers and her ability to get them to do the right thing if only they give her a seat at the Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Randi's school visit gambit with Betsy DeVos:

CURMUDGUCATION: Charters and Commitment

CURMUDGUCATION: Charters and Commitment:

Charters and Commitment

It happened again. This time in Milwaukee. Students at the  Universal Academy for the College Bound Webster Campus returned to find themselves in a completely different school, because a charter management company had decided they'd rather move on than finish out their contract for the year.

Universal Companies took with them their books and their technology. Milwaukee Public Schools filled in the gaps and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association-- you know, that damn union that only worries about adult interests-- stepped in to help the staff.

It could have been worse. In other places it has been worse. The company gave MPS a warning ahead of time-- almost a full month's notice. And they handed the school back to MPS rather than simply locking the door.

And if you're thinking, "Well, of course they did that-- what sort of monster would close a building with no notice," then you haven't been following charter schools much. Charters don't have to explain themselves when they close, like these two closures in Indiana-- parents demanded an explanation and were ignored. Or this similar story from Philly. And these schools at least finished the year-- here's a charter that closed up shop in September. Here's a story about a charter in North Carolina that had to close mid-year mostly because they got caught lying about enrollment in order CURMUDGUCATION: Charters and Commitment: