Superintendent: ‘I lose sleep at night’ about the ‘logged out’ kids - The Washington Post

Superintendent: ‘I lose sleep at night’ about the ‘logged out’ kids - The Washington Post

Superintendent: ‘I lose sleep at night’ about the 'logged out’ kids whose top priority is ‘survival’ — not remote learning

Marlon Styles Jr. is superintendent of the high-poverty Middletown City School District in southwestern Ohio. This week, he was one of several superintendents who gave a virtual presentation to the House Committee on Education and Labor during a briefing about remote learning in the time of the covid-19 pandemic. I am publishing his testimony for his portrayal of the challenges his students, teachers and administrators are facing in these times when school buildings are closed.

The Thursday briefing focused on how the school closures that resulted from the spread of the coronavirus have exacerbated long-standing disparities in school funding, curricular resources, school facilities and teacher quality.

Styles introduced himself to committee Chairman Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) and other members and noted that he is one of nearly 4,000 superintendents who pledge to use technology to personalize education for all students through the Future Ready Schools initiative of the nonprofit Alliance for Excellent Education. Then he said the following:

I have five key areas of focus in my comments for the committee today: Our obligation to educate, basic needs, closing the equity gap for marginalized populations, funding, and recommendations.

It’s an honor and privilege to serve my community and our students. It’s also a constitutional obligation for our states to provide students with a public education. In the midst of this crisis, we are called to redouble our efforts to fulfill that obligation.

This crisis has demonstrated the critical role of public schools in not only educating students, but also in meeting their basic needs.

Many parents and grandparents are expressing their number one priority is survival. In my district, remote learning is not the priority as many families are trying to figure out how to keep food on the table, pay bills, stay healthy, maintain or find employment all while taking on the stress of assuming the primary role as educator for their children.

Imagine being a grandparent responsible for raising multiple kids right now. You don’t have laptops in the home, and you have no clue how to teach proportions, order of operations, or help the 12th grade student in your home meet all the CONTINUE READING: Superintendent: ‘I lose sleep at night’ about the ‘logged out’ kids - The Washington Post

Here's how grassroots groups are making a difference, and how you can help them. | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Here's how grassroots groups are making a difference, and how you can help them. | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Here's how grassroots groups are making a difference, and how you can help them.

Learn how the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization is bringing people together to respond to the crisis >

The Schott Foundation’s partners are providing critically-needed aid in their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, just as they’ve done during previous crises. At the same time they are fighting to ensure those most impacted by school closures, job and housing insecurity, and hunger are included in shaping policies and allocating resources, especially in historically marginalized Black and brown communities.

We formed the Loving Communities Response Fund (LCRF) to make sure people have the resources they need to respond, and we’re doing so in partnership with national networks Journey For Justice Alliance, Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and Dignity in Schools Campaign, who all have extensive grassroots impact across the country.

Below are just a few of the organizations we’re supporting — with your help — through the Fund.

Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) Chicago, IL
KOCO is a pillar of the North Kenwood and Oakland communities in Chicago, and now are providing direct assistance, including grocery delivery through their Mutual Aid Program. KOCO organizers are also fighting to ensure that the people most impacted are not left behind by city and state emergency measures.

One PA Pennsylvania statewide
The statewide group One PA has built a comprehensive policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its core message being that low-income communities of color must have a seat at the decision-making table to ensure that the recovery is just, equitable, and doesn’t leave them even worse off. One PA advocates are organizing to press Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolfe to ban evictions and cancel both rent and mortgage payments for the duration of the crisis.

Grassroots Arkansas Little Rock, AR
The education justice organization Grassroots Arkansas has been systematically assessing the needs of most-impacted residents in Little Rock and beyond to connect them with resources and immediate support. Advocates are pushing the Little Rock School District to ensure that all students have computers and internet access from home, and pressing the state to mandate habitable living standards for renters. Members are also fighting for a release process for non-violent inmates and for safety measures in state and federal prisons.

Massachusetts Jobs With Justice (JWJ) Massachusetts statewide
JWJ organizers are currently providing large-scale coordination and support to local mutual aid groups across Massachusetts. They recently launched a fund to support undocumented workers, who are both among the worst-hit by the crisis and least able to access government support. JWJ also joined efforts to push against standardized testing in the fall and successfully pressed the state to suspend MCAS tests for the remainder of this year, allowing educators and students to focus on learning and personal wellbeing during the crisis.

Camden Parents Union (CPU) Camden, NJ
CPU members are raising their voices against education inequities during the pandemic and working with other local groups, recently holding virtual community town halls with policymakers to discuss responses to the crisis. Organizers stepped up when they saw that the city's COVID response was woefully insufficient in reaching Black communities, especially for seniors: CPU has helped distribute food and cleaning supplies through an accessible storefront as well as safely doorknocking and disseminating important health information.

Massachusetts Communities Action Network (MCAN) Massachusetts statewide
At the statewide level, MCAN is doubling down to meet people’s needs and move responsive legislation, like an eviction and foreclosure moratorium, a mortgage forbearance bill, and an expansion of paid family medical leave. Grassroots MCAN affiliate groups in towns and cities across the state are establishing local relief funds, mobilizing resources, and reaching out to at-risk individuals in their communities.

Step Up Louisiana Louisiana statewide
Step Up Louisiana is expanding its work during this crisis, adding team members focused on a community-centered COVID-19 response and support, from parent organizing to job loss assistance. Step Up is also assembling local resource guides, providing virtual meeting space for advocates, fighting for better treatment of healthcare and hospitality workers, and pushing back against austerity and budget cuts.

Organizations and communities supported by the Schott Foundation come from generations of people grounded in community, organized and resilient in the face of structural violence and institutionalized racism. The inequities and challenges they must confront now are even greater. We must stand in solidarity to sustain and strengthen this vital network of advocates and the families and students whom they support, to both survive in the months ahead and sow the seeds of a better world in the future.

This critical, life-saving work can’t be accomplished without your help. Donate to the Loving Communities Response Fund today.

Join us in giving today:Here's how grassroots groups are making a difference, and how you can help them. | Schott Foundation for Public Education

A teacher predicts what his classroom will look like in fall - The Washington Post

A teacher predicts what his classroom will look like in fall - The Washington Post

A teacher predicts what his classroom (and others) will look like in the fall

I last posted something from Larry Ferlazzo, a veteran high school teacher in Sacramento, in April, when he was tweeting about his experiences teaching online during the coronavirus pandemic and saying unequivocally: However hard you think it might be, it’s harder. Now he is back with a prediction of how his class — and many others — will look in the fall, assuming school buildings actually open at all.

School districts are starting to make plans for how to reopen for the new school year in the fall, coming up with contingency options for continued remote learning, in-school learning or a blending of the two. Emerging plans call for schedules, seating arrangements, lesson planning and other things to be vastly different from what was customary before the coronavirus pandemic forced most schools around the country (and the world) to close.

Under pressure to reopen this fall, school leaders plot unprecedented changes

Ferlazzo teaches English and social studies at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento. He has written or edited 12 books on education, writes a teacher advice blog for Education Week Teacher and has a popular resource-sharing blog. He has written pieces for this blog over the years, including one on how teachers can help students motivate themselves and this one, one of my favorites, titled: “NEWS BREAK (not breaking news): Teacher asks students to grade him. One wrote: ‘I give Mr. Ferlazzo an A at being annoying.’ ”

Every year, he sums up the best and worst in education news of the year, and then he predicts what will happen in the coming year. He did not predict that a pandemic would shut down schools in 2020 and send tens of millions of students home to do their schoolwork. (But really, who did?)

On his resource-sharing blog, he has been posting pieces about what the next school year might look like, and now, he has his own prediction in a piece titled, “It’s Going To Be A New Classroom World In The Fall – Here Is What I Think It Might Look Like.” He gave me permission to publish this.

By Larry Ferlazzo

Here is what I think it’s going to look like in many high school classrooms, including mine (and very possibly in elementary and middle schools, too):

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

• There will be some kind of staggered attendance — either by days or morning/afternoon shifts (more likely the former), and done in a way that there will be a maximum of 10 students in a CONTINUE READING: A teacher predicts what his classroom will look like in fall - The Washington Post

Expanding the Writing Process: Drafting Edition – radical eyes for equity

Expanding the Writing Process: Drafting Edition – radical eyes for equity

Expanding the Writing Process: Drafting Edition

To be a scholar is to be a writer—often a writer seeking publication. Part of my career-long journey to teach writing well, or at least always trying to teach writing better, has been to bring the necessarily reduced experience of writing as a student closer to the authentic experiences of writers in situations, for lack of the better phrase, in the real world.

Recently on Twitter, scholars (notably Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco) discussed choices scholars/writers make when working through the revise-and-resubmit phase common in almost all submissions for scholarly publication:

Jess Calarco@JessicaCalarco

This! With every single-authored journal article I've ever published, there was a point post-R&R where I started over with a blank document. Better to start fresh and build the right foundation than try to tinker with something that needs a new core. https://twitter.com/tressiemcphd/status/1257765358083153921 …

Tressie McMillan Cottom

✔@tressiemcphd

Let me tell you what no one wants to hear from me right now: there’s a stage of synthesis where you have to stop editing the document from your pre-synthesis document and re-write the whole thing from scratch with your new synthesis understanding. Sorry!

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3:22 PM - May 5, 2020

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Encouraging and facilitating drafting by students has always been a struggle for me. Some students resist drafting at all (I have students who fear sharing drafts with me until they are “perfect” and many students simply do not have the tools to revise and edit in ways that make the process seem valuable), but I also recognize that an authentic writing process and the many ways we draft are often more complicated than we allow in classrooms.

Two problems at the root of working with students and fostering an effective CONTINUE READING: Expanding the Writing Process: Drafting Edition – radical eyes for equity

Naomi Klein: Beware the Tech Billionaires and Their “Pandemic Shock Doctrine” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Naomi Klein: Beware the Tech Billionaires and Their “Pandemic Shock Doctrine” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Naomi Klein: Beware the Tech Billionaires and Their “Pandemic Shock Doctrine”

Naomi Klein coined the iconic book Shock Doctrine, about the way that the powerful elites use emergencies to expand their power because of the crisis. New Orleans was one of her prime examples of “disaster capitalism,” where the devastation of a giant hurricane created an opportunity to break the teachers union and privatize the public school system.

In this brilliant essay, published in The Intercept, Klein describes the many ways in which the plutocrats of the tech industry are turning the pandemic into a gold mine for themselves and planning a dystopian future for the rest of us.

Please read this provocative and frightening essay, which has numerous links to support her argument.

What she details is not just a threat to our privacy and our institutions but to our democracy and our freedom.

It is no coincidence, she writes, that Governor Andrew Cuomo is enlisting a team of tech billionaires to reimagine the future of the Empire State. They know exactly what they want, and it’s up to us to stop them.

She writes:

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.

Anuja Sonalker, CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking technology, recently CONTINUE READING: Naomi Klein: Beware the Tech Billionaires and Their “Pandemic Shock Doctrine” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Teachers – thank you! | Cloaking Inequity

Teachers – thank you! | Cloaking Inequity
TEACHERS – THANK YOU!

𝒥𝓊𝓁𝒾𝒶𝓃𝒱𝒶𝓈𝓆𝓊𝑒𝓏𝐻𝑒𝒾𝓁𝒾𝑔@ProfessorJVH

Teachers – thank you. Words cannot describe the level of appreciation we have for the important work you do. #TeacherAppreciationWeek #TeacherAppreciationWeek2020 @UKCollegeofEd @Lily_NEA @rweingarten @DianeRavitch @Network4pubEd @lucywaterbury @carolburris

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Teachers – thank you! | Cloaking Inequity

Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Network Needs 1,000 Hires. Don’t Bother Unpacking. | deutsch29

Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Network Needs 1,000 Hires. Don’t Bother Unpacking. | deutsch29

Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Network Needs 1,000 Hires. Don’t Bother Unpacking.

Eva Moskowitz’s New York-based charter school chain, Success Academies (SA), burns through teachers and other employees. For 2020-21, the charter chain needs another thousand, a devouring that spins well into the “who’s hiring” announcement in the May 08, 2020, CNN Business:

Education

Success Academy Charter Schools

The New York City-based charter schools program told CNN Business it needs to fill 1,000 full-time positions at 45 schools for the 2020-21 school year.

The program is looking for 700 to 800 New York City teachers, including entry-level K-12 teaching positions in science, math, chess and debate. The company is also looking for assistant principals and school business operations managers in addition to filling associate roles in operations, assessment and special education.

“Our operations positions support schools and families and frequently candidates coming from the retail or hospitality industries do well in these roles,” a Success Academies spokesperson said via email.

SA’s goal of hiring 1,000 individuals was posted on Glassdoor on April 10, 2020, at which time SA advertised a “virtual information session” for April 14, 2020:

Company Updates

• Success Academy Charter Schools

  29 days ago
  Join Success Academy Charter Schools’ on 4/14 for a virtual information session to learn about the 1,000 open teaching and school-based positions being offered for 2020-2021. #HiringNow

Eva Moskowitz

A pressing question is why Moskowitz’s schools have so many open positions at CONTINUE READING: Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Network Needs 1,000 Hires. Don’t Bother Unpacking. | deutsch29

Stop the Pandemic’s School Pushout – Dignity in Schools Campaign California

Stop the Pandemic’s School Pushout – Dignity in Schools Campaign California

STOP THE PANDEMIC’S SCHOOL PUSHOUT

Parent Racial Justice Demands for Emergency Schooling During COVID19

Table of Contents

• Emergency Education, the New Pushout and the Lie of “Remote Learning”
• Our Demands
• Demand #1: Redress Civil Rights Harms In Emergency Education Now!  
• Demand #2: Remove All SRO’s and Police from Schools; Reinvest Police Budgets
• Demand #3: Ensure School Families’ Basic Needs Are Met for Food, Housing, Water, Medical Care
• Demand #4: Redress Civil Rights Harms Impacting Students With Disabilities
• Demand #5: Restore Access to School Nursing and Mental Health Services
• Demand #6: Equitable, Transparent School District Governance
• Demand #7: Massive Post-COVID19 Education Recovery Package 
• Demand #8: Data Reporting and Monitoring on Racial Harms and Risks Associated with Emergency Education
• Demand #9: Statewide Free High-Speed Internet Access (Broadband) and Hotspots
• Conclusion: Education Reparations
• About DSC CA

Who We Are

We are the parents, grandparents, foster parents, families and guardians of the children and youth of color whose voices have been missing from schools’ response to this pandemic.  We will not have politicians and administrators talking about us or talking over us about what they think our schools need to do.  

These are our demands.  We expect our school districts and state agencies to read them with urgency and bring back to us their plans for concrete action. 

Feel free to download and share these demands

We know what our schools need to do because COVID19 is hitting our communities in a targeted way.  We are the “essential workers” on the frontlines–nothing would still be running without us and without our work. We are domestic workers, bus drivers, health care aides, janitors, childcare providers, day laborers, farmworkers, rideshare and instacart delivery drivers.  We are these and so much more.

As communities, we are speaking for children and families whom schools won’t hear unless we raise our voices. We are the survivors of a 40-year war against the Black community in the form of mass incarceration, disenfranchisement and joblessness. We are facing now-illegal evictions and water and electricity shut-offs and we are flying under the radar because we are homeless.  We are currently incarcerated and on probation or parole.  We are undocumented.  

Long before the arrival of this virus, we have been fighting to stop our children from being pushed out of school and denied their right to education.  The call now rising across the state for “Counselors, Not Cops” began with our organizations over a decade ago.  Through Dignity In Schools Campaign California, we dare to imagine and fight for an education system that loves our children the way we do.

Through it all, we have each other’s backs. We are communities standing in solidarity with each other and we will not stand aside and watch our children and families fall through the cracks of this education system.  There is more at stake for our children than “falling behind” while schools are closed.  Before the pandemic we were already “behind by design,” routed from racially segregated neighborhoods into underfunded and overpoliced schools.   Under the pandemic, we are in a fight to stop the death of our children’s education. On top of the policing and pushout that our children’s bodies have always been subjected to, we are seeing physical punishment and incarceration being extended into a mental and spiritual incarceration through the COVID19 lockdown and isolation.

Emergency Education, the New Pushout and the Lie of “Remote Learning”

We reject all attempts to call what schools are now providing to our children as anything but  emergency education.  To call it “distance learning” or “remote learning” only hides how completely inadequate and discriminatory it is.  From cities to rural areas, while white and wealthier families move ahead, our students and families are left in confusion, waiting and shut out.  

School districts remain deeply disconnected from what our students and families need.  Whether it’s how to get laptops and high-speed internet access for online classrooms or how to continue IEPs and mental health services during the pandemic, or how to support students who are homeless or in foster care.  Schools are scrambling to figure out how to reach our folks.  They refuse to meet our communities’ needs.  

None of this is news to us.  These are the same public school systems that have always pushed out and criminalized our Black, Indigenous, Brown, and LGBTQ students and families.   The racialized patterns of death from COVID-19 in our regions, map directly onto the myriad ways our communities are already subjected to poverty, discrimination, and poor health.  In the same way, the harms from COVID-19-related school closures fall heaviest on those of us already suffering the brunt of a failing education system.  

The pandemic has pulled the mask off of the structural racism and poverty that have always dominated our lives– from education to jobs, from healthcare to housing.  And COVID19 exposes the complete failure of this society’s political leadership to address these problems.  All of a sudden, our governments are moving to prevent evictions and they are unlocking the gates of their prisons and jails.  Why wasn’t this done before? They always told us they couldn’t do these things.  And now we know the truth.  We will not accept any excuses that our demands are not “realistic.”  We demand action.

Our Demands CONTINUE READING: Stop the Pandemic’s School Pushout – Dignity in Schools Campaign California