Pandemic, Public Health, Policing, And Pay For Success “Solutions” – Wrench in the Gears

Pandemic, Public Health, Policing, And Pay For Success “Solutions” – Wrench in the Gears

Pandemic, Public Health, Policing, And Pay For Success “Solutions”

My research into “pay for success” over the past three years made it clear that health and behavioral health data would be used to fuel the growth of “social impact” finance around the world. Over the past three weeks, however, it has dawned on me that it will also likely be used as a tool of social control. As populations become more volatile with the roll out of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, digital quarantine will be a powerful method of regulating economic systems and human bodies.

Framing future pandemics as an issue of national security allows public health to be subsumed within an increasingly sophisticated global apparatus of of digital surveillance, predictive analytics, and enclosure. The nature of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has been characterized by asymptomatic carriers and inadequate testing protocols, has led populations around the world to embrace diminished civil liberties and even welcome the opportunity to be deputized as community enforcers.

In our present state of emergency mismanagement, the vast majority of people do not have a solid understanding of the territory into which we are rushing. But the World Economic Forum with its Covid Action Platform does. Theirs is a future of robots and algorithms, where the masses are valued only so far as they demonstrate compliance to a new global order dictated by behavioral economics. CONTINUE READING: Pandemic, Public Health, Policing, And Pay For Success “Solutions” – Wrench in the Gears

Sacramento City Unified schools lay off classified employees | The Sacramento Bee

Sacramento City Unified schools lay off classified employees | The Sacramento Bee

As economic crisis worsens, Sacramento school district approves dozens of layoffs

Sacramento City Unified school board members approved to a motion to lay off classified employees Thursday night during a board meeting over Zoom.

The 46.5 full-time equivalent positions, which include bus drivers, clerks, campus monitors, yard duty employees and instructional aides will be eliminated effective July 1. A number of those positions were vacant, and several were tied to one-time funds and 17 grants that were expiring. It would cost nearly $1 million for the district to cover the positions that were initially paid for by grants, officials said.

It’s unclear how many people will lose their jobs in total, but officials said about ten positions were not part of a limited assignment or vacant.

“The district is not filling 50 more positions, a move that will further impact employees’ workloads, and it is laying off some classified employees in the middle of a pandemic,” said Karla Faucett, the chapter president of SEIU Local 1021, the unions that represents 1,950 classified employees in the district. “It feels like retaliation. This is the time we need to come together. SCUSD is behaving as the worst corporate employer.”

Several of the board members called the decision “heartbreaking” and difficult as concerns continue to rise over an economic crisis as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

All but one board member approved the motion. Mai Vang opposed it, and suggested an alternative motion to only approve layoffs for vacant positions and positions paid for by grants.

Classified employees will begin receiving pink slip notices on April 13 and layoffs will occur by June.

Several community members and teachers were critical of the decision, making comments through messages that were read aloud by the district clerk. People were upset that the district was planning to move forward with the layoffs during an economic crisis as people stay home to help slow the coronavirus outbreak.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced all school districts will receive their full funding for the remainder of the school year. But the state didn’t provide waivers to districts, relieving them from already approved motions to vote on layoffs.

C.K. McClatchy High teacher Lori Jablonski called it a moral imperative to not lay off the employees.

Board President Jessie Ryan emphasized that anyone laid off will receive pay through the end of the school year.

“I could not do my job without the classified staff around me,” said district teacher Erin Duarte. “Historically, they have been ignored and perceived as expendable.”

Several people criticized the decision to lay off staff just weeks after district Superintendent Jorge Aguilar received a raise of $34,000 to his total compensation, increasing his overall salary and benefits to $414,000.

“The timing of the layoffs is an atrocity,” said SEIU Local 1021 union member Robyn Mutchler. CONTINUE READING: Sacramento City Unified schools lay off classified employees | The Sacramento Bee

Labor unions and school officials agree on terms | The Sacramento Bee

Labor unions and school officials agree on terms | The Sacramento Bee

Newsom announces agreement between teachers and school officials amid closures

This article has Unlimited Access. For more coverage, sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter. To support our commitment to public service journalism: Subscribe Now.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a major agreement Wednesday between teachers and school management that provides guidance on pay, benefits and distance learning.

The framework, which is not a directive, was agreed upon by teachers, classified employees, school boards, superintendents and principals. It will allow more students to receive school resources as schools remain closed to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

“While schools might be physically closed, class is still in session,” said Governor Newsom in a news release. “This agreement is good news for students and parents, and the announcement means that more California kids will have tools to learn at home during this crisis.”

Those who endorsed the agreement include the California Department of Education, California Teachers Association, California School Employees Association, and the California School Boards Association.

The principles include:

▪ All pay and benefits for K-14 school employees should continue throughout the remainder of the school year.

▪ Employees do not need to use accrued leave to comply with a medical professional’s recommendation to self-quarantine or care for someone in their household during the pandemic.

▪ All parties should deliver education through “practical means,” including distance learning and independent study. Educators “may need to perform functions that are reasonably similar to their typical roles prior to the COVID-19 emergency, but nothing in this section should be construed to relieve the district of its obligation to negotiate additional duties with the exclusive representative.”

▪ Meals should continue to be provided to students.

The agreement provides a framework so teachers and school leaders can minimize the effect school closures have on students. Both Newsom and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said it was very unlikely schools will physically reopen for the remainder of the school year.

The collaboration will benefit school districts like Sacramento City Unified, which has laid out a three-step plan to implement such a program with its labor partners.

Sacramento City Unified plans to implement its program by April 13, around the same time several other districts in the area plan to officially begin. Officials said while they support the efforts of CONTINUE READING: Labor unions and school officials agree on terms | The Sacramento Bee

Carol Burris: Charter Schools Ask for Federal Money Though They Suffered No Loss | Diane Ravitch's blog

Carol Burris: Charter Schools Ask for Federal Money Though They Suffered No Loss | Diane Ravitch's blog

Carol Burris: Charter Schools Ask for Federal Money Though They Suffered No Loss

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, expresses outrage because the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has asked for federal rescue money for charter schools, although they have suffered no losses.

She writes:

Shame on the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools!

I have great sympathy for small businesses that are devastated by COVID-19. And I am glad that the Small Business Administration is giving those businesses low-interest loans to cushion the blow. It is shocking, therefore, that the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools is actively encouraging its members to take advantage of those taxpayer funds intended for small businesses, although their income has not been interrupted at all.

Read below what the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools included in its weekly newsletter:

“SBA Emergency Loans Now Available to Charter Schools

“The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) now has authority to offer emergency loans to both small businesses and nonprofits under its Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program in eligible areas. While SBA authorities are focused on small businesses, we worked with federal lawmakers to ensure that the loan funding for this crisis is offered to charter schools and other nonprofits to borrow up to $2 million for up to 30 years at 2.75 percent for nonprofits. These loans are designed to help businesses and nonprofits meet CONTINUE READING: Carol Burris: Charter Schools Ask for Federal Money Though They Suffered No Loss | Diane Ravitch's blog

How Children With Disabilities Are Getting Left Behind | HuffPost

How Children With Disabilities Are Getting Left Behind | HuffPost

How Children With Disabilities Are Getting Left Behind
Schools are struggling to educate 7 million students who receive special education services in the absence of physical classrooms.

Adrienne Stuart’s 5-year-old son, Jack, has never told her “hello.” It’s a milestone she was hoping to reach within the next year. 

But in mid-March, his school was closed, at least until May. Now, she’s coming to terms with the fact that she’ll likely have to wait longer to hear from her son.

A vast majority of the nation’s schools ― over 120,000 in all ― have closed in an effort to combat the spread of coronavirus. For students with disabilities, the stakes of these school closures are especially high. These students often rely on a litany of services at school, from speech therapy, to physical therapy, to occupational therapy, that parents simply aren’t trained to do on their own. Parents and educators worry that fragile gains made this year could disappear with so much time off. An eventual transition back to school could prove especially difficult.

“I know a lot of people are, but we are especially reliant on the school system,” says Stuart, who lives in Tacoma, Washington. 

Schools have struggled to educate the 7 million students who receive special education services in the absence of physical classrooms. In mid-March, the U.S. Department of Education fueled confusion when it suggested that schools that cut off academic services for all students would not be required to serve students with disabilities. Some schools CONTINUE READING: How Children With Disabilities Are Getting Left Behind | HuffPost

The First Taste is Free: Ed Tech Follows Drug Dealer Sales Techniques with Schools During Coronavirus Crisis | gadflyonthewallblog

The First Taste is Free: Ed Tech Follows Drug Dealer Sales Techniques with Schools During Coronavirus Crisis | gadflyonthewallblog

The First Taste is Free: Ed Tech Follows Drug Dealer Sales Techniques with Schools During Coronavirus Crisis

“Pst! Hey, Kid! Come here!”

Educational technologies are a multi-billion dollar industry.

“Who? Me?”

The coronavirus pandemic has closed schools across the globe, and districts have tried to solve this problem by putting their classes online.

“Yeah, you. I’ve got some… candy I want to give you.”

Nearly every ed tech company has offered help with this processes.

“Oh boy! I sure love candy… Wait a minute! How much does it cost?”

Teachers, parents, students and education activists are wary of educational technologies in the classroom, and research backs them up. Ed tech has been shown to widen socioeconomic divides, it hasn’t lived up to its promise of increasing CONTINUE READING: The First Taste is Free: Ed Tech Follows Drug Dealer Sales Techniques with Schools During Coronavirus Crisis | gadflyonthewallblog

Cartoons about Strange Times | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Cartoons about Strange Times | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Cartoons about Strange Times

Amid the sick and dying from a virus, it is hard to see a funny side to the damage that this protein does to the individual, community, nation, and world. One way that I cope with my fears and anxieties in this bizarre moment in time that everyone is experiencing is to laugh–when I can.

While that sounds macabre in of itself, I have managed my panic by seeing the humor–surely not in the sick or dying and the havoc that it does to families–but in my fear-laden responses and those of my family, friends, colleagues, and Americans. Cartoonists, as is their wont, have not sat idle as this disease has spread and reactions have ranged from sane to insane.

So I offer this selection of cartoons on the responses to coronavirus and Covid-19 for those who seek a moment to laugh amid the anxiety and fear that surround all of us.

MORE CARTOONS: Cartoons about Strange Times | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Mike Klonsky's Blog: Like a bad penny, Vallas turns up again in Chicago.

Mike Klonsky's Blog: Like a bad penny, Vallas turns up again in Chicago.

Like a bad penny, Vallas turns up again in Chicago.

Bad penny.

Paul Vallas is like that proverbial bad penny. He always turns up, uninvited. When he does, he's usually part of the problem rather than the solution.

The bad penny turned up again this week in Chicago in the midst of the city's battle with COVID to offer us his unsolicited budgeting advice in a Tribune op-ed. Vallas decided to take a public backhanded swipe at Mayor Lightfoot's management of the city's crisis budget (she's "disingenuous") and offer advice on how best to put the city on a "wartime financial plan."

As if he had a clue.

In the year since her election, and especially during this, the worst crisis to befall our city since the Great Fire, the mayor has gained high marks and become Chicago's acknowledged and highly regarded leader while Vallas has sunk into political obscurity.

This from the mayor:

“Unfortunately, some people are desperate to be relevant,” Lightfoot said. “The suggestion that somehow our city budget is in tatters, as Mr. Vallas dramatically suggests, it's just foolish.”

When I say, the bad penny turned up again, I mean, it seems like I've written this "we thought we were done with Vallas" post several times before.

After all, he ran against Lightfoot for mayor on these ideas a year ago and the voters heard them CONTINUE READING: Mike Klonsky's Blog: Like a bad penny, Vallas turns up again in Chicago.

Big Education Ape: Jessica Baghian and Paul Vallas Among 7 Candidates for La. State Superintendent | deutsch29 - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/03/jessica-baghian-and-paul-vallas-among-7.html

A Teacher in South Dakota: I Will Not Send Home Any Packets | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Teacher in South Dakota: I Will Not Send Home Any Packets | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Teacher in South Dakota: I Will Not Send Home Any Packets

A teacher in South Dakota writes here about her love of teaching, her love of her students, and how she is handling the current crisis.

She writes:

Let me preface this by saying that I am passionate about education. I enjoy being a student, and I love being a teacher. Of all of the things that I joke about in life, my job as a teacher is taken very seriously. Also, I love my students. LOVE THEM. Would-bring-them-all-home-with-me-without-calling-my-husband-first kind of love.

Right now, I can’t sleep at night. I have this turmoil built up inside of me that physically hurts. If you are a teacher who can say with 100% certainty that you are not worried about any of your students or their ability to do learning from a distance, then you are blessed and this isn’t about you. I am not that lucky. I didn’t really feel like going out and gathering numbers but just knowing what I know, I have to assume that there aren’t many teachers out there who can say with 100% certainty that their students are just as fine at home as they would be at school.

You have to love the zealousness of teachers across the nation right now. Admire it. Be inspired by it! Governors across the country said, “We are going to close the CONTINUE READING: A Teacher in South Dakota: I Will Not Send Home Any Packets | Diane Ravitch's blog

School Choice and Segregation: New Name, Same Game – Seattle Education

School Choice and Segregation: New Name, Same Game – Seattle Education

School Choice and Segregation: New Name, Same Game

Why ‘School Choice’ is Rooted in White Supremacy

A new book highlights how the movement to privatize education started with the effort to keep schools segregated.

In Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement, Steve Suitts provides much needed context for the current debate raging over “school choice,” charter schools, school vouchers, and other forms of privately operated schools that compete for public money. At 128 pages, the book is a fairly quick read but full of important content, through documentation and an impressive number of photos.

Suitts, a founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, makes an impressive and convincing case that the phrase “school choice”—a term influenced by libertarian economist Milton Friedman—is the latest foray in the long effort to resegregate public schools.

Segregationists began to talk in terms of “school choice,” rather than saying they wanted to keep black children out of their white schools.

Overturning Brown begins with the origin of school vouchers in the Southern states, where they emerged as an attempt to keep schools segregated after the CONTINUE READING: School Choice and Segregation: New Name, Same Game – Seattle Education

New Guides for Researchers, Bloggers and Parents | tultican

New Guides for Researchers, Bloggers and Parents | tultican

New Guides for Researchers, Bloggers and Parents

By Thomas Ultican 4/4/2020

Two new sources provide guidance for researching and decoding education jargon. At the beginning of the year, Teacher College Press published Diane Ravitch’s and Nancy Bailey’s EdSpeak and Doubletalk; A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling. At February’s completion, Garn Press published Mercedes Schneider’s new book, A Practical Guide To Digital Research: Getting the Facts and Rejecting the Lies . Schneider explains the investigative tools and techniques she uses plus provides examples from her own work.

A Practical Guide to Digital Research

The fifth Network for Public Education (NPE) conference was held in Indianapolis, Indiana during October of 2018. I attended the session “Where did all this Money Come from: Locating and Following the Dark Money Trail” which was presented by Darcie Cimarusti, Andrea Gabor and Mercedes Schneider.

Cimarusti writes a blog called Mother Crusader which opens with the line “Never intended to become a parent advocate until I watched the great schools in my little town come under attack.” Darcie also works part time for NPE where she is half the two person staff and does research. Gabor is a Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College. She is a researcher who currently has ten books listed on Amazon. The MC of the session was the author of Guide to Digital Research, Mercedes Schneider.

The session had three presentations and a question and answer period. Darcie introduced the LittleSis data base and oligrapher. She shared a LittleSis map she had created titled “Louisiana 2011: Jeb Bush Calls and Billionaire Dollars Follow” and demonstrated its interactive functions. Andre presented “990S: Mining Nonprofit Tax Returns” where she used forms from the Eli and Edythe CONTINUE READING: New Guides for Researchers, Bloggers and Parents | tultican

YONG ZHAO: Beyond Does It Work: Meaningful Questions to Ask about Online Education Amid COVID-19 - Education in the Age of Globalization

Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Beyond Does It Work: Meaningful Questions to Ask about Online Education Amid COVID-19

Beyond Does It Work: Meaningful Questions to Ask about Online Education Amid COVID-19

There are many meaningful and productive questions to ask about online education depending on the circumstance. Given that education systems and schools around the world are at the moment in the middle of either offering or deciding to offer education online due to the COVID pandemic, I focus this post on meaningful questions in this particular context.

Why Online?

This seemingly obvious question deserves a lot more consideration than it has typically been given because the answer appears to be simple, clear, and unequivocal: we have to since schools are closed as if online education is a natural and only alternative to schools. But there are a number of problems associated with this answer.

Online education cannot replace all functions schools play in our society. If the purpose to offer online education when schools are closed is to create a sense of normalcy or a sense that schooling is still happening, we need to be mindful of the other functions that schools serve but are not served by online education such as childcare, healthcare, free meals, physical setting for friendship and socializing, collection of trained education professionals, and other social services.

Online education can do a lot more than being a lesser version of face-to-face schooling. While online education cannot deliver free meals to students in need, it holds great potentials that f2f schools have been encouraged to take advantage of for a long time. It can help make learning more authentic, more relevant to the real world, more learner-centered. It provides access to resources and expertise beyond the immediate classroom or school. Students can collaborate with peers from around the globe and can learn from, with, and for anyone in the world at anytime. If the purpose of moving online is simply to make online education fill in the void created by school closures, it is a tremendous waste of the potentials.

There may be other options besides/in addition to online to educate students than converting f2f schools CONTINUE READING: Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » Beyond Does It Work: Meaningful Questions to Ask about Online Education Amid COVID-19

Children May Miss Meals As School Food Service Workers Fall Ill | 89.3 KPCC

Children May Miss Meals As School Food Service Workers Fall Ill | 89.3 KPCC

Children May Miss Meals As School Food Service Workers Fall Ill

In Clark County, Nev., the nation's fifth-largest school district, a school food service worker has reportedly died of COVID-19. That death is one of around 40 recorded in the state of Nevada as of Friday afternoon.

Just a few weeks ago NPR reported on the swift efforts to continue to get meals to children and their families, as schools shut their doors in response to the spreading coronavirus. The school lunch program in typical times feeds nearly 30 million U.S. children.

Now those efforts seem to be faltering. Across the country, in Detroit, Raytown, Mo., Tonganoxie, Kan., Pasadena, Calif., Memphis, Tenn., and Kanawha County, W.Va., school districts have stopped or scaled back meal distribution to families in need, at least temporarily, as their food service workers test positive or are suspected of having coronavirus.

Houston Independent School District is relaunching its service with new safety protocols. Memphis schools haves partnered with the YMCA to resume food service there. Some districts in Louisiana and Texas are getting help from a program out of Baylor University that is mailing shelf-stable food directly to families.

In other places, districts say they're scaling back food offerings simply because they've run out of money. St. Landry Parish in rural Louisiana said they were looking for partners to keep feeding families. The $2 trillion federal coronavirus rescue CONTINUE READING: Children May Miss Meals As School Food Service Workers Fall Ill | 89.3 KPCC