How big a mess is Pennsylvania’s charter school sector? This big. - Network For Public Education

How big a mess is Pennsylvania’s charter school sector? This big. - Network For Public Education

How big a mess is Pennsylvania’s charter school sector? This big.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf horrified the charter school lobby with eight words — “the privatization of education in our public schools.” He used that phrase during a July news conference in which he was bemoaning the state of cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania.

Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, quickly expressed outrage and dismay. “I am shocked that you and your staff are unaware that none of Pennsylvania’s charter schools [bricks-and-mortar or cyber] are private or for-profit institutions,” stated Meyers in a letter to the governor.

As shocked as she may claim to be, Meyer’s response was entirely predictable. Denying that the state’s charters are connected from profiteering is part of the narrative that the charter lobby spins, confusing the public.

You can read Carol’s entire piece on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog here.

How big a mess is Pennsylvania’s charter school sector? This big. - Network For Public Education

Parents Sue Minnesota School District Saying It Did Nothing to Protect Their Kids From Rampant Racism

Parents Sue Minnesota School District Saying It Did Nothing to Protect Their Kids From Rampant Racism

Parents Sue Minnesota School District Saying It Did Nothing to Protect Their Kids From Rampant Racism

A group of parents have hit their almost lily-white school district with a civil rights lawsuit, charging it turned a blind eye to rampant instances of egregious racist abuse and bullying of their children.

According to the Daily Beast, the abusive behavior alleged includes:

• a 6-year-old black child being punched in the face by a classmate twice and told he “didn’t belong”
• white students posting on Snapchat that students who attended a forum on race relations would be shot, and, in a separate incident, posting the faces of black students on Snapchat and locating them at “Negro Hill.”
• a middle-school student whose T-shirt was vandalized with the words “nigger” and “leave now” after it was stolen from his locker
• white students tormenting the same middle-schooler by destroying his computer and calling his dad a “drug dealer or rapper” like “all black dads are.”

Jquan Fuller-Rueschman, a black former high school student in the district who is another one of the plaintiffs, also charged, per the Daily Beast:

that he was punched in the face by a white student, repeatedly called the n-word, accused of being stupid and dumb, had food thrown at him, and had his car egged. He was labeled “aggressive” and suspended after confronting a student who repeatedly called him the n-word, the complaint states.

But, according to the suit, no matter how many times parents and the students CONTINUE READING: Parents Sue Minnesota School District Saying It Did Nothing to Protect Their Kids From Rampant Racism

A Very Busy Day Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

A Very Busy Day Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... 

The latest news and resources in education since 2007

“Q&A Collections: The Inclusive Classroom”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 6h

Q&A Collections: The Inclusive Classroom is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. All Classroom Q&A posts offering advice on The Inclusive Classroom (from the past eight years!) are described and linked to in this compilation post. Here’s an excerpt from one of them:

Video: “The Life Of An Unaccompanied Minor In L.A.”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 6h

OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay Lauren Skeen shared this three-year-old L.A. Times video on Leading ELLs Facebook Group:

YESTERDAY

Do’s & Don’ts Of Working With An Aide In An ELL Classroom – Please Add Your Own Suggestions

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

geralt / Pixabay We’re getting a new bilingual aide at our school sometime in the next week or two, and I thought I write up some “dos and don’ts” for my colleagues who are newer at teaching ELLs and at working with aides. I also thought it would be a good opportunity for me to reflect on my own experience, especially considering that I consider the biggest mistake I have made (so far) in my teac

World War II Began Eighty Years Ago This Week – Here Are Related Teaching & Learning Resources

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

skeeze / Pixabay Germany invaded Poland eighty years ago. You might be interested in: The Best Online Resources For Teaching & Learning About World War II (Part One) The Best Online Resources For Teaching & Learning About World War II (Part Two) The Best Resources On Japanese-American Internment In World War II The Best Sites For Learning About The Holocaust The Best Sites For Learning About The

Pins Of The Week

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

I’m fairly active on Pinterest and, in fact, have curated 19,000 resources there that I haven’t shared on this blog. I thought readers might find it useful if I began sharing a handful of my most recent “pins” each week (I’m not sure if you can see them through an RSS Reader – you might have to click through to the original post). You might also be interested in My Seven Most Popular Pins In 2018

New Study Shows Active Learning More Effective Than Lectures – DUH!

by Larry Ferlazzo / 15h

There is no shortage of research finding that active learning is more effective than lectures (see The Best Research Demonstrating That Lectures Are Not The Best Instructional Strategy ). However, I was surprised to read in a report on a new study that many students, however, think they learn more from lectures. That same report, fortunately, debunks that belief. Perhaps it can soon go the way of

“How Do You Respond to a Teacher Who Says, ‘I Don’t See Color’?”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 16h

How Do You Respond to a Teacher Who Says, ‘I Don’t See Color’? is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. The new question-of-the-week is: What are the best ways to respond to educators who say they “don’t see color” when they teach? Guest-host Shannon R. Waite introduces the upcoming series. Feel free to leave responses in the comments there or here….

This Week’s “Round-Up” Of Useful Posts & Articles On Ed Policy Issues

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1d

Here are some recent useful posts and articles on educational policy issues (You might also be interested in THE BEST ARTICLES, VIDEOS & POSTS ON EDUCATION POLICY IN 2019 – PART ONE ): Big news about charters here in California: Charter school compromise could intensify L.A.’s school board 

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

New Orleans Will Close Failing Charter Schools In The District : NPR

New Orleans Will Close Failing Charter Schools In The District : NPR

Closing A Failing School Is Normal, But Not Easy, In Charters-Only New Orleans

On a clear morning in late August, 9-year-old Alongkorn Lafargue hops in the back seat of his father's car. He's wearing his school uniform: neatly ironed khakis and a bright blue polo shirt embroidered with the logo of his new charter school, IDEA Oscar Dunn. Alongkorn has been going there only a few weeks, and his dad, Alex Lafargue, says he has struggled to get his son to talk about what it's like.

A Look At New Orleans

NPR ED

Is Bigger Always Better? The Case For Starting Small With New Learning Ideas

"He was anxious," Lafargue says. "And [its] his third week there now. He's starting to open up."

Alongkorn is going to a new school because New Orleans' school district shut down his old one, Medard H. Nelson Charter School, for its students' poor performance on standardized tests.

Alongkorn went to Nelson for five years. Lafargue acknowledged that the school had problems — most notably, a revolving door of leadership. The school had three different principals in its last four years of operation. But the Lafargues built a community at Nelson. And the school was just down the street — a six-minute walk door to door.

"This was a great school," Lafargue said. "Orleans Parish School Board [NOLA Public Schools] surely has not allowed me the choice to let him stay with family, to let him stay in the neighborhood, to let him stay within a rich environment that he has pulled from since pre-K."

Lafargue said many students, including his son, were confused and upset when they CONTINUE READING: New Orleans Will Close Failing Charter Schools In The District : NPR

NYC Public School Parents: Make your voices heard! Urge NYSED not to weaken the state privacy law by allowing companies to sell or market personal student data

NYC Public School Parents: Make your voices heard! Urge NYSED not to weaken the state privacy law by allowing companies to sell or market personal student data

Make your voices heard! Urge NYSED not to weaken the state privacy law by allowing companies to sell or market personal student data

The New York Board of Regents is currently considering whether to approve a radical weakening of the state student privacy law, which would allow the College Board, the ACT and other companies that contract with schools or districts to use the personal student information they collect for marketing purposes – even though the original New York law that was passed in 2014 explicitly barred the sale or commercial use of this data.

Parents and all others who care about protecting children’s privacy should send in their comments to the state now, by clicking here or sending their view to REGCOMMENTS@nysed.gov. Deadline for public comment is Sept. 16. More on this below.

Starting in 2014, many states, including New York, approved legislation to strengthen the protection of student privacy, due to a growing realization on the part of parents that their children’s personal data was being shared by schools and districts with a wide variety of private companies and organizations without their knowledge or consent. The US Department of Education had weakened the federal student privacy law known as FERPA twice over the past decade, rewriting the regulations during the Bush and Obama administrations to allow for non-consensual disclosures for different purposes.

At that time, few parents were aware how federal law had been altered to allow their children’s information from being passed into private hands. Then controversy erupted over the plans of nine states and districts to share personal student data with a comprehensive databank called inBloom, developed with more than $100 million of funding from the Gates Foundation.

InBloom Inc. was designed to collect a wide variety of personal student data and share it with for-profit vendors to accelerate the development and marketing of the ed tech industry, to facilitate the adoption of online instruction and assessment. As a result of widespread parental activism and concerns, all nine states and districts that had originally intended to participate in the inBloom data-sharing plan pulled out, and 99 new state student privacy laws were passed across the country between 2014 and 2018.

New York was one of the first to pass a new student privacy law. In March of 2014, our State Legislature approved Education Laws § 2-c and §2-d , which among other things, prohibited the state from sharing student data with inBloom or another comprehensive databank, and also regulated the way schools and vendors must secure student data, including imposing a complete ban on the sale of personal student information or its use for marketing purposes .

As a result of these provisions, New York received a grade of A- in the category of “Limitations on the Commercial Use of Data” in our State Student Privacy Report Card, released last January by the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy (PCSP), which I co-chair, and the Network for Public Education. In turn, this high mark raised New York’s overall grade for protecting student privacy in our rating system to B-, the second highest grade of any state after Colorado. (You can check out the interactive map that grades every one of the fifty states on its student privacy laws, overall and in seven different categories).

Yet to the frustration of many parents and privacy advocates, it would be nearly five years before New York State Education Department drafted any regulations to implement its CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Make your voices heard! Urge NYSED not to weaken the state privacy law by allowing companies to sell or market personal student data

Trump is Diverting Funds from U.S. School Systems to Build His Wall + Edgar Villanueva | Schott Foundation

Trump is Diverting Funds from One of the Best U.S. School Systems to Build His Wall | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Trump is Diverting Funds from One of the Best U.S. School Systems to Build His Wall

Yesterday the Pentagon announced that it would cut funding to its schools and daycare centers as part of a $3.6 billion diversion of funds toward construction of President Trump’s proposed wall on the southern border:

Schools for the children of U.S. military members from Kentucky to Germany to Japan will be affected. A daycare center at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland - the home of Air Force One - will also have its funds diverted, the Pentagon said.

This diversion, a result of President Trump using “national emergency” powers, means that the Federal government is cutting funding to a school system that educates the children of men and women serving in the military and is one of the highest-performing, most equitable school systems in the United States. 

Under the auspices of the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), the Pentagon operates 163 schools in seven states, Puerto Rico, Guam, and eleven other countries. Students at DoDEA schools consistently rank among the highest-performing in the nation: 2017’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) saw DoDEA 8th graders take top marks in Reading and tie with Massachusetts students in Mathematics.

But what makes DoDEA schools so unique is more than just test scores. As Michael Winerip wrote in the New York Times several years ago,

In the last decade, the gap in reading between black and white fourth graders at base schools has decreased to 11 points this year (233 compared with 222), down from a 16-point difference in 2003 (230 compared with 214), a 31 CONTINUE READING: Trump is Diverting Funds from One of the Best U.S. School Systems to Build His Wall | Schott Foundation for Public Education

A Long Stare in the Mirror

Edgar Villanueva, author of Decolonizing Wealth, says philanthropy needs to take a long stare in the mirror. He’s a leading voice in the push for real equity and inclusion in the sector. “We need to look back at our history,” he said. “We exist with all these contradictions and we have to understand that the work of equity is messy. This is intentional work that we have to do every single day. How far are we willing to go to change things so that it’s not in service of our own comfort?”

Video produced by the Skoll Foundation.

A Long Stare in the Mirror

Pay Teachers More, Because Women Have Other Options - The Atlantic

Pay Teachers More, Because Women Have Other Options - The Atlantic

For Teachers, the Money Keeps Getting Worse
When classroom jobs were female college graduates’ best option, U.S. schools could skimp on wages. To fill vacancies now, districts and state legislatures need to offer competitive pay.

As kids and parents settle into another school year, principals and superintendents in districts across the country are still scrambling to fill vacant teaching positions. The severity of the shortages varies from state to state; across urban, suburban, and rural districts; and from one subject area to another. The number of unfilled positions is greatest in high-needs schools, such as those with high poverty rates or a disproportionate number of students with learning disabilities or English-language deficiencies.

If past experience holds true, many vacancies in September will morph into permanent shortages that continue throughout the year. In Arizona, for example, a survey conducted in December 2017—months after class started—by an association of public-school personnel administrators in the state reported nearly 2,000 vacancies. When kids are expecting routine, consistency, and continuity, many face the opposite. On a day-to-day basis, schools make do by casting around for substitute teachers, asking other teachers to work more, deploying nonteaching staff, or even taking a “warm body” approach that allows just about anyone to fill in. The absence of permanent qualified teachers harms student achievement and depletes school budgets. It also adds to the frustrations that led to a remarkable series of local and statewide teacher strikes last year.

To address teacher shortages, policy makers at the national and local levels have proposed more extensive recruitment efforts and looser certification rules. But a deep look at the numbers suggests that such tinkering will only achieve so much. Teachers, on average, are paid significantly less than similar college graduates. According to research that my colleague Lawrence Mishel and I published this year, the pay disparity has reached a record high.

Read: The larger concerns behind the teachers’ strikes

For decades, school districts essentially had a captive labor pool. But even as discrimination against women has decreased in law, medicine, finance, and other professional fields, the United States has continued to pay public-school CONTINUE READING: Pay Teachers More, Because Women Have Other Options - The Atlantic