R U READING THESE PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION FELLOWS — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good - Progressive.org

The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good - Progressive.org

R U READING THESE PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION FELLOWS 

Public School Shakedown—A project of The Progressive - Progressive.org - https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown

THE PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION FELLOWS

• 

  Jeff Bryant

  Director of the Education Opportunity Network and associate fellow at Campaign for America’s Future. more
• 

  Xian Franzinger Barrett, Chicago

  Award-winning teacher in Chicago Public Schools and founding member of EduColor. more
• 

  Jennifer C. Berkshire, Boston

  Journalist, blogger and cohost of the podcast 'Have You Heard,' about education in the time of Trump. more
• 

  Ashana Bigard, New Orleans

  Social justice organizer, and advocate for children and families in Louisiana. more
• 

  Peter Greene, Pennsylvania Region

  English teacher for a few years. Blogger at Curmudgucation. more
• 

  Jesse Hagopian, Seattle

  History teacher at Garfield High in Seattle, and author of “More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing.” more
• 

  Jake Jacobs, New York City

  New York City school teacher and education blogger. more
• 

  Rann Miller, New Jersey

  After-school program director, teacher, and blogger at Urban Education Mixtape. more
• 

  Julian Vasquez Heilig, Sacramento

  Professor at California State University Sacramento and blogger at Cloaking Inequity. more
• 

  Sarah Lahm, Minneapolis

  Sarah Lahm is a writer based in Minneapolis. Her writing has appeared in local and national publications, including The Progressive and In These Times. more
• 

  Cynthia Liu, Los Angeles

  Founder of K-12 News Network, watchdog, community organizer. more
• 

  Carole Trone, Wisconsin

  Wisconsin-based writer and advocate for education access and success. more
• 

  Sabrina Joy Stevens, Washington, D.C.

  Mother, writer, education advocate, and former teacher based in Washington, D.C. more
• 

  Dora Taylor, Seattle

  Public ed advocate, founding member of Parents Across America, and author. more
• 

  John Thompson

  Award-winning historian and retired Oklahoma City teacher. more
• 

  Jose Luis Vilson, New York City

  Math educator, blogger, speaker, and activist in New York City. more

Public School Shakedown—A project of The Progressive - Progressive.org - https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown

The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good - Progressive.org

Education May Spell Doom for Oklahoma’s Republican ‘Subprime’ Gubernatorial Candidate - Progressive.org

Education May Spell Doom for Oklahoma’s Republican ‘Subprime’ Gubernatorial Candidate - Progressive.org

Education May Spell Doom for Oklahoma’s Republican ‘Subprime’ Gubernatorial Candidate
Oklahoma educators have had enough of outsiders imposing their untested opinions on classrooms.

Much has been made in this election season of the success educators have had in winning down-ballot primaries and competing strongly in the November midterms. There’s also evidence of a “trickle up” effect, even in the reddest states where you’d expect to see Republican candidates skating to easy victories.

In Oklahoma, the governor’s race would ordinarily result in a solid victory for an enthusiastic Trump supporter like Republican Kevin Stitt, who brandishes a “100 percent Pro-Life score” and an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association.

But this year’s focus on education could turn the election for Stitt’s competitor, veteran Democrat Drew Edmondson, who trails by only four points, according to a recent poll.

At a recent forum, Stitt has evaded the question of how he would fund a teacher pay raise without raising taxes. Edmondson, in contrast, committed to a $300 to $350 million annual increase for education, funded by taxes on oil and gas production, removing a capital gains exemption for high-income taxpayers, and a 50-cent tax hike on cigarettes.

Asked about this difference in strategy, Edmondson’s campaign manager Michael Clingman said in an email, “the lack of specificity in Kevin Stitt's messages is troubling. Teachers marched on the Oklahoma Capitol last April demanding real solutions, not vague promises.”

The Stitt campaign did not respond to a request for an interview.

---

Stitt is basing much of his campaign on running government like a publicly-traded company—setting performance metrics for state governance and holding subordinates accountable for measurable outputs. Drawing from his Continue Reading: Education May Spell Doom for Oklahoma’s Republican ‘Subprime’ Gubernatorial Candidate - Progressive.org

CURMUDGUCATION: How Teachers Avoid the Common Core

CURMUDGUCATION: How Teachers Avoid the Common Core

How Teachers Avoid the Common Core

Here's an important thing to understand about the Common Core Standards--nobody is in charge of them.

Many standards have official gatekeepers. For instance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado is the official civilian source for the answer to "What time is it?" through the national atomic clock.

There is no such body for the CCS. When the standards were first unleashed, the official word was that a state could not change a single word of them, and the states could add no more than 15%. The unanswered question was, "Or what...?" There has never been an official body to monitor state use of the standards. The folks who wrote the standards might have fulfilled such a function, but they dispersed almost immediately to new jobs (David Coleman took over the College Board, Jason Zimba booked some consultant gigs, etc). Sure, there's a site where you can look at the standards and read some PR, but it's the equivalent of a business site that won't let you contact the company or order product.

There has never been an official Common Core office to say, "This is correct, but that is not."

The implications for the use of the standards are huge. There is not, for instance, a body that approves whether or not a textbook can call itself "Common Core ready." Some organizations have tried to fill that gap by doing reviews based on textbook alignment to the Core, but those groups are themselves taking an unauthorized stab at what the Core says.

When the Core started finding its way to individual districts and schools, an army of consultants was unleashed to lead sessions on "unpacking" the standards. At these sessions, teachers would be put Continue reading: CURMUDGUCATION: How Teachers Avoid the Common Core

Quit Saying Special Ed. Costs Too Much! 8 Cost-Cutting Signs to Watch Out For

Quit Saying Special Ed. Costs Too Much! 8 Cost-Cutting Signs to Watch Out For

Quit Saying Special Ed. Costs Too Much! 8 Cost-Cutting Signs to Watch Out For

In 1975, President Gerald Ford signed Public Law 94-142. The law guaranteed every child a free appropriate public education. This positively impacted millions of children across the country. The law was later reauthorized and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Many politicians never wanted to fund special education. From the start, there was no Rose Garden ceremony for signing the bill. Why? Shouldn’t such compassionate commitment to America’s kids be cause for a celebration? We should have been proud of a country that valued its children.

Since the signing of that law, we still have local, state, and federal policymakers who don’t want to pay for special education. IDEA gets in their way.

Now, corporate school reformers seek to privatize public schools and create charter schools for students with disabilities. When parents leave public schools they lose the protections afforded their child through IDEA.

This is not a poor nation. Legislators think nothing of giving the wealthiest Americans huge tax breaks. They find money to pay for what they prioritize.

Here are cost-cutting messages meant to Continue reading: Quit Saying Special Ed. Costs Too Much! 8 Cost-Cutting Signs to Watch Out For

Latinx LGBTQ Youth Report | Human Rights Campaign

Latinx LGBTQ Youth Report | Human Rights Campaign

Latinx LGBTQ Youth Report

In 2017, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation partnered with researchers at the University of Connecticut to conduct a groundbreaking survey of over 12,000 LGBTQ youth and capture their experiences in their families, schools, social circles and communities. More than 2,900 LGBTQ Latinx youth responded to the survey. This resource presents data collected from these Latinx youth, shedding light on their challenges and triumphs encountered while navigating multiple, intersecting identities. 

Additionally, you can learn more about the intersectional challenges that LGBTQ Latinx Americans can face when coming out in HRC's Living Authentically as LGBTQ Latinx Americans.  

Download the 2018 LGBTQ Latinx Youth Report or flip through the digital version below. 

Latinx LGBTQ Youth Report | Human Rights Campaign

NAACP Legal Defense Fund Asks Florida DoE to End Biased Hair Policies

NAACP Legal Defense Fund Asks Florida DoE to End Biased Hair Policies

Education, Not Discrimination: NAACP Legal Defense Fund Asks Florida Schools to End Biased Hair Policies

As children returned to school this fall, new teachers and classmates weren’t the only things that greeted some students. More than one story surfaced of children being turned away, or sent home from school, because of culturally-specific hairstyles like braids or dreadlocks. One such child was six-year-old Clinton Stanley, Jr., whose story went viral when he was denied his first day at A Book Christian Academy in Apopka, Fla., because his dreadlocks were deemed non-compliant with the school’s dress code.

The Dress Code Is Discrimination? First Grader Denied His First Day of School for Dreadlocks

Imagine this: You escort your son to his first day of first grade, all buttoned up in his brand new …

Read more

A Book Christian Academy is only one of many private evangelical schools in Florida enacting this type of policy. Many of the schools participate in the Hope Scholarship program, Florida’s new school voucher program. (A Book Academy is not part of the voucher program but does benefit from government funding.) While the publicly-funded scholarship program was, ironically, implemented to help students escape bullying in public schools, an investigation by the Huffington Post revealed that as many as Continue reading: NAACP Legal Defense Fund Asks Florida DoE to End Biased Hair Policies

Support Andrew Gillum for Florida Governor -https://andrewgillum.com/

Support Andrew Gillum for Florida Governor - https://andrewgillum.com/

We’ve known since the 1940s that kids don’t do well in school when they’re hungry

We’ve known since the 1940s that kids don’t do well in school when they’re hungry

We’ve known since the 1940s that kids don’t do well in school when they’re hungry

National School Lunch week is here (October 15-19), a time for shining the spotlight on this essential program that feeds hungry children.

For just a moment, let’s take a step back in time to see what President Harry Truman and the United States Army were doing about school lunches in the fall of 1946.

Truman had recently signed the National School Lunch Act, which provided meals for needy children.  This meant free or reduced price school lunches for children of families living in poverty. The school lunches meant better health and education.

“The well-nourished school child is a better student. He is healthier and more alert. He is developing good food habits which will benefit him for the rest of his life” explained the President.

Truman sought to spread the initiative as far as possible. This was vital for the health of children, and of the nation.

President Truman proclaimed “The school lunch program provides a cooperative means of assuring adequate nutrition for millions of our children who otherwise might be denied this basic need.”

But Truman also cautioned that more needed to be done. Hunger is relentless.  We must keep advancing school feeding. Truman said “This is a splendid start, but we must look forward to the day when the lunches are available in every community in every State and territory.”

Our National School Lunch Program has been expanded in the decades since Truman. Thirty million children depend on these meals during the school year today. But the Continue reading: We’ve known since the 1940s that kids don’t do well in school when they’re hungry

CURMUDGUCATION: John White Remains Confused

CURMUDGUCATION: John White Remains Confused

John White Remains Confused

Last week the Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) network held its annual meeting, this time in New Orleans. It's a jolly gathering of all our reform friends, and this year it featured a speech from Louisiana school chief John White, the test of which was run by Fordham's Flypaper blog. I'll warn you-- this starts out just sort of ill-formed, and ends up pretty awful. But it is a window, once again, on how fully lost some reformsters are.

White has a hefty reform pedigree-- Teach for America, TFA director, Joel Klein's team in NYC, Broad Academy of Faux Superintendency). The headline that gave this piece some legs and attention was White's observation that education is no longer a political winner, which is only slightly more insightful than suggesting that Barack Obama will probably win the Democratic nomination over Hilary Clinton. Or as I've commented elsewhere, 2018-- the year I run out of new ways to say "And you just figured this out now..."

White does note that the 2016 election put paid to the notion that education would be an important political issue. Jeb! Bush tried to make education a chunk of his campaign foundation, and Campbell Brown tried to set up a website that would position her as arbiter of the education discussion (remember when she staged education summits and nobody came). In 2016, people who banked on education as an issue were like folks who speculated in real estate, but the railroad went through some other town.

But White believes this lack of political interest in education is a serious problem. I don't disagree with that basic point-- it sucks that politicians, leaders, media outlets, and strangers on the street aren't more interested in what goes on in the world of education. But beyond that-- well, I find White's analysis suspect at best.

Education reform has made positive gains in this country for the people whom it’s set out to serve without question.

Yes, "without question" probably belongs somewhere else in that sentence, but it's a sentence that Continue reading: CURMUDGUCATION: John White Remains Confused

Save The Date: BLM At School National Week of Action, 2019, Feb 4th-8th – Black Lives Matter At School

Save The Date: BLM At School National Week of Action, 2019, Feb 4th-8th – Black Lives Matter At School

Save The Date: BLM At School National Week of Action, 2019, Feb 4th-8th

Mark your calendar! The Black Lives Matter at School action this school-year will be held from February 4-8th, 2019.

Black Lives Matter At School is a national committee educators organizing for racial justice in education.  We encourage all educators, parents, students, unions, and community organizations to join our annual week of action during the first week of February each year.

If you or your organization would like to support or endorse the week of action, please email us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail.com.   

During the 2017-2018 school year, from February 5 to 9, thousands of educators around the U.S. wore Black Lives Matter shirts to school and taught lessons about structural racism, intersectional black identities, black history, and anti-racist movements for the nationally organized Black Lives Matter at School week of action. Educators in over 20 cities participated in this national uprising to affirm the lives of Black students, teachers, and families including, Seattle, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and beyond.

BLM at School started nationally with these three demands:

1) End “zero tolerance” discipline, and implement restorative justice

2) Hire more black teachers

3) Mandate black history and ethnic studies in K-12 curriculum

The lessons that educators teach during the week of action corresponded to the thirteen guiding principles of Black Lives Matter:

Monday: Restorative Justice, Empathy and Loving Engagement

Tuesday: Diversity and Globalism

Wednesday: Trans-Affirming, Queer Affirming and Collective Value

Thursday: Intergenerational, Black Families and Black Villages

Friday: Black Women and Unapologetically Black

With your help, this year’s BLM at School week of action can be even bigger and have more of an impact.  Let us know what you are planning for BLM at School week this school year or ask us how to get involved with the action by emailing us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail.com.

Save The Date: BLM At School National Week of Action, 2019, Feb 4th-8th – Black Lives Matter At School

Charter Schools: When 'School Choice' Means the Opposite - Bloomberg

Charter Schools: When 'School Choice' Means the Opposite - Bloomberg

When ‘School Choice’ Means the Opposite
The U.S. charter-school movement was meant to stimulate innovation. Instead, it’s enforcing uniformity.

When Albert Shanker, the legendary teachers’ union leader, promoted the idea of charter schools 30 years ago, he was hoping to create flexibility from the constraints of education bureaucracies and union contracts so teachers and communities could experiment and innovate.

In the years since the first charter-school law was passed in Minnesota, in 1991, the charter movement has strayed far from Shanker’s original vision. Instead of community-based, educator-driven innovation, charters have grown into an industry dominated by like-minded management organizations that sometimes control hundreds of schools — some nationwide.

These charter organizations have proliferated with the help of deep-pocketed philanthropists and businesspeople who have sought to transform the public-education system so that both charters and traditional public schools operate like companies competing in an economic market. Schools survive by producing the greatest gains, usually measured by test scores. The rest lose students as families choose the highest-performing schools or have their charters revoked by state-designated organizations that authorize charters.  

Now the charter industry is reaching an inflection point. Business backers are pushing to expand charter schools at an unprecedented rate, doubling down on the idea that free markets are the best approach to improving K-12 education. At the same time, critics — some from within the charter movement — are shining a Continue reading: Charter Schools: When 'School Choice' Means the Opposite - Bloomberg