CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Jazz In Church Edition (1/13)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Jazz In Church Edition (1/13)

ICYMI: Jazz In Church Edition

Today was m day to visit my brother's church to play some jazz versions of old hymns. Fun times, but it ace for a full family day. Nevertheless, I have some reading for you from the week. Remember-- if you think it's a good one, share it and amplify the voice.

Charter Lobby Still Spending Money in Connecticut

Wendy Lecker lays out the ways in which the usual charter lobbyists are still plying their trade in Connecticut to garner as much influence as they can.

Challenging the Myths About Teachers

Love Long and Prosper is a new blog to us here at the Curmudgucation Institute, and this is a worthwhile post to serve as an introduction.

100 Arizona Charter Schools In. Danger Of Closing


No, that's not one of my usual typos-- about 100 charter schools in Arizona re in danger of going out of business because they've botched their financial management. Just mazing.

Whatever Happened to the Waiting for Superman Kids

Gary Rubinstein always asks the good questions. Like, whatever happened to the students who were used as the focus of Waiting for Superman, the classic public-school-trashing film.

Fables of School Reform

Audrey Watters is one of the great chroniclers of ed tech. Here is another great look at the long history of reformy baloney.

How To Teach Virtue? Start with a Charter School

Nancy Flanagan has been watching reformster Checker Finn clutch his very expensive pearls for years, and she has a few thoughts about his latest outburst.

When You Give a Teacher A Gun

Mitchell Robinson takes a look at a piece about arming teachers, and he has a few thoughts.

Public School Students Are Being Erased From TV,  Movies, and Other Media

Steven Singer has noticed something odd happening with school aged characters in pop culture. They've stopped going to public school.

South Carolina Hasn't Enforced Class Size Limits Since 2010. It's Starting To Show.   

South Carolina continues to cut educational corners while hoping that its underpaid teachers can somehow pick up the slack.


CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Jazz In Church Edition (1/13)

Four Reasons Charters Are A Bad Fit For Rural Communities

43by Peter Greene / 1d

For just a moment, I'm going to set aside the larger problems of charters and privatization nationally. Charter advocates and education reformers have recently turned their attention to rural communities. Last summer, Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) unleashed one of his wide-release op-eds to point out the "problem" of "charter deserts" --those markets where charter schools have made few inroad

JAN 11

Why The Reading Wars Will Never End

86by Peter Greene / 2d

I made the mistake of tossing a comment into the middle of a twitter thread on Monday. Not a nice quiet subject like vaccinations or abortion or Trump's wall, but reading. As soon as it became apparent that thread would blow up and swallow my feed, I could have asked to be cut loose or just muted the participants, but I was curious. How much longer would this go on? The answer is that after five d

JAN 10

GA: Cyber Schools Failing Here, Too

37by Peter Greene / 3d

In what could be news only to someone who has not been paying any attention to cyberschooling in the US, a report from Georgia's Department of Audits and Accounts found that the state's cyber schools "underperformed ." Mind you, I'll argue that the state's College and Career Ready Performance Index is a lousy way to measure the performance of schools. But those are the rules that reformsters want

JAN 09

Bill Gates Is Still Pushing Common Core

500+by Peter Greene / 4d

Sigh. You've undoubtedly heard the news over the past couple of days-- the Gates Foundation is going to throw $10 million at teachers to help promote "high-quality" curriculum. There are several problems with this, and none of them are new. First, despite the headlines, this money is not actually being thrown directly at teachers. “We want to identify the content-specific professional development

Id: Ibe Hp Vp Bs

23by Peter Greene / 4d

Idaho Business for Education (IBE) is "a group of nearly 200 business leaders from across the state who are committed to transforming Idaho’s education system." IBE works with the legislature and key Idaho stakeholders to help set our students up for success in school, work and life, and build the workforce that will lead to a vibrant economy for years to come. Our 2019 initiatives include the Sc

JAN 08

PA: How Charters Damage a Public School System

100+by Peter Greene / 5d

Erie has come a long way since the days that visitors would travel to the beaches just to be appalled by the dead fish on shore, the days when Western Pennsylvanians called it "The Mistake on the Lake." The waterfront is now pristine and beautiful, the city now boasting great theaters, hotels and recreation. But public education is still struggling. Just two and a half years ago, the previous sup

JAN 07

Why You Can't Fire Your Way To Excellence

100+by Peter Greene / 6d

For some reformsters and accountability hawks, the dream remains the same-- find those Bad Teachers, fire them, and replace them with Awesome Teachers. Crack the accountability whip and fire our way to excellence. We have discussed some of the obvious flaws with this approach. How do you even define a Bad Teacher, and is it a permanent condition or a day-to-day variable? How do you find your Bad T

JAN 06

ICYMI: Still Waiting for Winter Edition (1/6)

by Peter Greene / 7d

Still no snow in my neck of the woods, but still plenty of writing about education to be read. Remember, sharing is caring. Keep That Same Energy Jose Luis Vilson has my favorite kick off the new year piece. Check it out. Excuse Me While I Teach Your Child A greatest hits fun and games from McSweeney's Appellate Division Kills Zombie PARCC A great breakdown of New Jersey's rejection of the little-

JAN 05

Terror, Hubris and AI (or Can Artificial Intelligence Fake Being A Self-important Pompous Tool?)

by Peter Greene / 8d

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, if not a hot new product itself, the additive that helps sell a million other products ("New! Improved!! Now with AI!!!"). And the proponents of AI are loaded with big brass cyberballs when it comes to making claims about their product. And all the most terrible and frightening things are happening in China . Come down this terrifying baloney-stuffed rabbit hole wi

JAN 04

After the Education Wars: The Best and Worst of Reform

20by Peter Greene / 9d

Andrea Gabor is a business journalist by trade, and it's our great good fortune that she followed the thread of business-style reform into the world of education. Her recent book, After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, is an invaluable addition to the literature of ed reform -- not the faux reform that has been foisted on us for the past decades, but actual impro

JAN 03

It's Not the Implementation

by Peter Greene / 10d

"You just didn't implement it properly." This is the all-too-frequent cry of program creators and policy writers after their pet project goes belly up in the great goldfish bowl of education. It was a popular explanation for the crash of Common Core. More than a few district superintendents have used it to explain why their pet project failed. And publishers like to use it as an explanation for w

Not Quite Seven Reasons To Ditch Teachers Unions

200+by Peter Greene / 10d

The Foundation for Economic Education may be the oldest libertarian thinky tank in the US, and they are a missionary group , set "to make the ideas of liberty familiar, credible, and compelling to the rising generation." So it comes as no surprise to find them running an article entitled " 7 Reasons To Say Goodbye to the Teachers Union." Author Daniel Buck is a bit of a mystery on line, but he lay

JAN 02

How Much Money In That Edusector?!!

70by Peter Greene / 11d

When you're starting to wonder why so many people are interested in education, even though they have no training, experience, or apparent deep interest in education, it's helpful to see some numbers. Like 2,600,000,000. Reportsnreports is an international outfit that provides "market research reports to industries, individuals, and organizations to accelerate decision making process." They offer a

JAN 01

School Choice Is School's Choice

58by Peter Greene / 11d

The core idea of every version of a school choice program is that students and their families will choose wha schools to attend. The anecdotal evidence has called that into question time after time, suggesting that it is schools that get to choose what students they will or will not accept. This happens not necessarily through direct rejection, but by a hundred little obstacles. An application sys

China: You Will Wear Big Brother

59by Peter Greene / 12d

If nothing else, China is constantly providing new responses to the comment, "Well, there's no way anybody could actually do that." What happens when the business mindset comes up against a powerful profit motive? China has 

Enrique Baloyra: UTLA teachers striking for smaller class size - YouTube #UTLA #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed

UTLA teachers striking for smaller class size - YouTube

UTLA teachers striking for smaller class size

enrique baloyra

It looks like tomorrow teachers in the nation’s second largest school district will be going on strike. Over 600,000 students could be affected. On Friday the Los Angeles Unified School District and United Teachers of LA failed to reach a last minute agreement. Thirty-some thousand teachers are expected to forgo their paychecks after the superintendent refused to meet their union’s demands of smaller class sizes, more school counselors, nurses, and librarians, and accountability for charter schools. The district claims it’s broke, but records show reserves in excess of $1.8 billion. Schools will remain open, and LAUSD has contracted over 400 subs to cross the picket line. Last spring’s teacher rebellions were attributed to red state politics, where Republican-controlled state legislatures have slashed taxes for the wealthy, resulting in deep cuts to education funding. But the corporate takeover of public education has its origins in urban school districts, where poor and minority parents are less equipped to fight back against hedge fund managers and the politicians they buy. “Networks of wealthy billionaires and the foundations they create have advocated and imposed reforms nationally, even globally, we see today in LA schools: using standardized tests to control what and how children learn; creating charter schools to weaken neighborhood schools and undermine parent loyalty to public education; creating new revenue sources for corporations to profit from education; and weakening teachers unions.” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/ut... Outside special interests spent $15 million during the 2017 school board election. The resulting pro-charter majority then went on to select an investment banker with no experience in education as the current superintendent. The new reforms LAUSD has since announced include giving away half of all the district’s schools to education profiteers. Critics of the strike say that teachers are greedy and lazy. And how we get the summers off. But none of these walkouts — including the ones in the most poorly funded states, where teachers spend our own money to buy students books, supplies, and even food — have been about teacher pay. They’ve been about kids and the communities we serve. To show your support for public schools and the work teachers do, take a selfie wearing red and post it on your social media feed with the hashtag RedforEd.

UTLA teachers striking for smaller class size - YouTube

The Collective Of Strike Perspectives – redqueeninla #UTLA #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

The Collective Of Strike Perspectives – redqueeninla

The Collective Of Strike Perspectives

Hollywood paints a rather simple picture of strikes.  There are good guys and bad guys. Workers and non-workers.

But the imminent teacher’s strike here in LA is complicated. For one thing, it’s a public service union.  So the owners are a complicated notion. The boss of public school teachers are we the people, tax payers:  Us.  And yet across the table from the bargaining teachers is “Los Angeles Unified School District”.  LAUSD is a public agency bargaining on behalf of:  Us.  Or at least it’s supposed to be. The current Superintendent is not an educator, he’s a professional money manager, expert in finessing trickeries of the stock market. His business is to leverage money to make more of it.

So there’s a lot that is confusing about the layout of this strike.  For one thing, public employees are set against public servants.  That leaves the public stuck in the middle:  Us.

As if it were proper to envision this as a black-white setup, what we have here is (group M (“management”)) folks negotiating with tax payer’s money against (group W (“workers”)) those hired by we the tax-payers. Taking orders from Group M is an intervening, quasi-management group: school administrators – Principals, District Brass, Administrative support-staff. Their hands are not directly on the purse-strings – that would be the bailiwick of elected school board members who vote on a potential contract, and their appointed Superintendent (hedge fund one-time whiz kid Beutner) who negotiates it. But administrators are not UTLA members (they have their own union: AALA). Many, though not all, administrators come up from teacher-land – or at least once did. As of late, many have been trained through a different trajectory, the Eli Broad Institute.  Gates has put his thumb on the scale too. There is an ideological management-factory CONTINUE READING: The Collective Of Strike Perspectives – redqueeninla

A Charter School Pawn #UTLA #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed

A Charter School Pawn

A Charter School Pawn

If I asked my teachers in my old school for help, they wouldn’t worry about it. They worried more about their pay.”

– 4th Grade Charter School Student

Jose, a fourth-grade student at a charter school, was so nervous as he spoke before the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) School Board that he was fighting back tears. The tension in the gallery was thick as the audience held its breath for the young boy. Board President Monica Garcia intervened and suggested that he take a deep breath. The founder of his charter school gave him a reassuring hand on his shoulder. She also had an ear to ear smile on her face.

As Jose continued through his speech, the tension increased as it became apparent that his young mind had been subjected to some very serious indoctrination. By getting him “into their ship” they saved him from teachers “worried more about their pay” than helping him to read at grade level. The Board had to renew his school because only they had “real teachers.” The charter’s founder beamed with joy.

While the LAUSD will rarely reject requests to renew charters, these CONTINUE READING:  A Charter School Pawn

How to Teach Virtue? Start with a Charter School. | Teacher in a strange land

How to Teach Virtue? Start with a Charter School. | Teacher in a strange land

How to Teach Virtue? Start with a Charter School.

Yes. The title is sarcasm.

But the idea must be acknowledged. It sprang from the mind of one of most venerable Famous Educators, a hoary pillar of the never-ending education reform movement, Chester E. Finn, known to his fellow reformistas as ‘Checker.’ Checker is currently paterfamilias of the Thomas Fordham Institute group, one of whom, Michael Petrilli, recently suggested that the education reform movement has been so successful in accomplishing its goals that it was currently fading into media obscurity. As if.

I have never been a fan of Finn’s approach to school reform. (Click here, for example.) Finn, whose teaching career spanned one full year, is one of those private-school, private-colleges, wordsmithy edu-pundits who look down—way down—on fully public education, seeing it as a hopeless tax-funded entitlement program for subpar youth.

My favorite example of this comes from his book, Troublemaker, a very readable sort-of autobiography where he positions himself as an education policy rebel—a ‘gadfly’– poking at sacred public education cows. He talks about the difficulties he had teaching high school as a newbie, and blames them on the lack of a good syllabus. Because in working with ‘tough’ kids, with ‘few prospects,’ a rigidly defined curriculum rich with the classical canon is your ace in the hole as a novice teacher.  (Sarcasm again. Sorry. There’s something about Finn’s George Willesque writing that brings out the snark.)

Finn now writes the occasional op-ed at Flypaper (get it?), tutting about mistakes made by those who persist in defending public education and don’t see issues his way. His most recent one is ‘Rekindling moral education: A worthy challenge for schools of choice.’  If you’d like a get a flavor of Finn’s erudition and moral rectitude, you can read it, but I’ll summarize for you:

The nation is going to heck in a handbasket, and it’s time for schools to get on the stick and start teaching some values moral certainties, because ‘we’ are observing ‘an excess of selfishness, cheating, laziness, and willingness to be a burden on others.’

He (Finn) has read two excellent essays, comparing the views of Aristotle, Kant and Rousseau (a long-time favorite target for Finn), and thinks we could benefit from high- CONTINUE READING: How to Teach Virtue? Start with a Charter School. | Teacher in a strange land

Marie Corfield: How NJ Politicians—D & R—Stuck It To Consumers

Marie Corfield: How NJ Politicians—D & R—Stuck It To Consumers

How NJ Politicians—D & R—Stuck It To Consumers

"Are you ready for some football good ole' fashioned consumer screwing?"

This blog has been quiet for some time. The "shock and awe" of Trumplandia has left me mouth-agape, clinging to the lifesavers tossed by our better angels in the not-"fake news" who remind me that while the rudder is shaking, the seas are rough, and we've taken on water, the good ship USS Democracy is holding steady—so far.

With PARCC testing, the minimum wage, legal pot, lax oversight of corporate tax breaks, and the usual political sliminess that defines the Garden State all making headlines recently, there's no shortage of subject matter. But with the NFL playoffs starting, synchronicity was at work. As I was reading the Star Ledger this story about the 2014 Super Bowl caught my eye:

So? That was five years ago. What does all this have to do with the 'All Dem, All the Time' New Jersey State Legislature and Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy? Well, this entire story is a shining example of elected officials feeding their egos at the expense of citizens, elected officials allowing big corporations to stuff their wallets at the expense of  CONTINUE READING: Marie Corfield: How NJ Politicians—D & R—Stuck It To Consumers

The Grand Scam: The Economy’s Turned Around But Where Is the Praise for Schools?* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Grand Scam: The Economy’s Turned Around But Where Is the Praise for Schools?* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Grand Scam: The Economy’s Turned Around But Where Is the Praise for Schools?*

Why is it that now with a bustling economy, rising productivity, and shrinking unemployment American public schools are not receiving credit for the turnaround? In light of scathing criticism of poorly performing public schools, the question sounds foolish. It isn’t if you consider the Great School Scam of the 1980’s.

For the last decade, U.S. Presidents, corporate leaders, and critics blasted public schools for a globally less competitive economy, sinking productivity, and jobs lost to other nations. The United States, as one highly popular report put it in 1983, had educationally disarmed itself in a hostile economic war. “If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets,” the report said, “we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system.”

And school reforms have spilled over the country since the early 1980’s. States legislated higher graduation requirements, a longer school year, new curricula, and more tests for students. This year, national school reformers using this belief in better schools as an engine for a better economy crowned their efforts with strong bipartisan support for President Clinton’s education bill setting eight national goals while establishing standards and tests to prod 15,000 school districts to reach those goals.

Reforms have occurred. More students take academic subjects than in the 1970’s. Scores on tests of basic skills are higher now than in previous decades. More CONTINUE READING: The Grand Scam: The Economy’s Turned Around But Where Is the Praise for Schools?* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teach for America: Their Harmful Effect on Special Education

Teach for America: Their Harmful Effect on Special Education

Teach for America: Their Harmful Effect on Special Education

Since 1990, America has put many school children, usually poor, in classrooms with Teach for America Corps Members (CMs) who get five weeks of training. They’ve also placed novices in special education classrooms. Many corporations and individuals donate to this group, undermining professional teachers who commit to teaching as their choice of a career.

There’s no evidence that TFA CMs teach better than professional teachers, but today I focus on how TFA has failed k-12 students in special education.

The ultimate goal for TFA is not to create a teaching service to fill the need for a teaching shortage, as advertised. Their objective is to privatize public education and end the teaching profession.

TFA CMs also, despite their insufficient pedagogical and experiential background, rise to powerful administrative positions in local, state, and federal general and special CONTINUE READING: Teach for America: Their Harmful Effect on Special Education

Upcoming Legislative Session: Will the Legislature/Governor Agree to a Moratorium on the Creation of New Charter Schools? | Ed In The Apple

Upcoming Legislative Session: Will the Legislature/Governor Agree to a Moratorium on the Creation of New Charter Schools? | Ed In The Apple

Upcoming Legislative Session: Will the Legislature/Governor Agree to a Moratorium on the Creation of New Charter Schools?

n December, 1998 Governor Pataki called the legislature back into session, sessions after Election Day are called “lame duck” sessions, legislators who were defeated or chose not to run participate in the sessions. After lots of behind the scenes wrangling the legislature passed two items: a raise for themselves and Governor Pataki’s charter school bill.

In the intervening twenty years the charter school law has been amended a number of times, raising the cap on the number of schools and a few other changes enhancing the rights of charters.

Read the charter school law here (click on “laws,” scroll down to EDU and click, scroll down to CHARTER SCHOOLS)

Charter schools in New York State are “authorized” by two organizations, the Charter School Institute, part of the State University of New York (SUNY) and the New York State Education Department Charter School Office.

The authorizers have different standards for approving charters; the Charter School Institute is the easier route; a recent applicant was turned down a number of times by the Charter School Office, applied to the Charter School Institute and was approved. A decade ago Merryl Tisch was the chancellor of the Board of Regents, she advocated, without success, for legislation that would place all charters under the Board of Regents; will the idea be back on the table?

The law sets caps on the number of charters, one for New York City and one for CONTINUE READING:Upcoming Legislative Session: Will the Legislature/Governor Agree to a Moratorium on the Creation of New Charter Schools? | Ed In The Apple