Sunday, December 20, 2020

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION + ICYMI: Santa's Almost Here (12/20)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Santa's Almost Here (12/20)

Santa's Almost Here

And the Board of Directors has just about figured out this Christmas thing and twigged onto the notion that presents are coming (but why not right now). I am going to try not to think constantly about all the family and children and grandchildren that I am not seeing this week, because that sucks. In the meantime, here's some reading from this week.

The Logjam that Awaits Biden's education secretary

Derek Black at CNN, with hard dose of reality therapy for everyone imagining that a new administration will bring dramatic change. What a grinch. Okay, he may have some points, too.

How to assign writing when you don't teach writing

Paul Thomas with some great thoughtful practical advice for assigning writing when that's not really your lane.

For Black educators when school systems aren't doing enuf

Dena Simmons at ASCD with some powerful personal reflections for the times.

Reaganland: Public education and America's right turn

Have You Heard talks to Rick Perlstein and takes us back to the seventies. Really interesting stuff about how schools became a target in the culture wars.

Black students most likely to be going to school remotely

Samantha Fields at Marketplace looks at an emerging trend. Safety and trust seem to be the issues (and not that they are dupes of the teachers unions).

Testing students this spring would be a mistake

Can't say this enough, but this time it's not me, but testing expert Lorrie Shepard at EdWeek.

Fifty years of trickling down didn't work

Not directly related to education, exactly, but important validation for what everyone already knew.\

How teachers are sacrificing student privacy to stop cheating

From Vox, one more article pointing out that surveillance software is a bad idea, and schools should knock it off.

The 2020 snow day is here. It must include "sleducation."

Okay, I wish Joshua Goodman at Education Next had the courage to write sleducation without the quotation marks, but still a nice little piece.

A rural school under pressure to stay open

This is how ugly it's getting in places like rural Idaho, where the 'rona is still a big hoax and people are too tough to mask up. Kirk Siegler at NPR.

Sen. Jon Tester on Democrats and rural voters

Tester has some thoughts, including the novel idea of standing up for public education. From New York Times.

Florida lets voucher schools hire dropouts as teachers--and keep it secret

The Orlando Sentinel has been a great source of watchdogging the Florida shenanigans. You may or may not be able to scoot past the paywall, but if you can, this story is amazing. You will not believe how bad it is down there.

As the gap between students and teachers of colors widens in PA, Black families demand change

Sojourner Ahebee reporting for WHYY, Philly's NPR station. This is a great piece of reportage, with plenty of nuance and detail for a difficult topic. If you don't read anything else this week...

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Santa's Almost Here (12/20)

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION

AND DON'T FORGET PETER GREENE ON FORBES CLICK HERE

Here’s What Needs To Be Done To Rebuild K-12 Education In This Country - https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/12/19/heres-what-needs-to-be-done-to-rebuild-k-12-education-in-this-country/?sh=7cd7a8e73a1c by @palan57 on @forbes

Six Arguments For Giving The Big Standardized Tests This School Year (And Why Biden’s Education Secretary Should Ignore Them) - https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/12/15/six-arguments-for-giving-the-big-standardized-tests-this-school-year-and-why-bidens-education-secretary-should-ignore-them/?sh=d87b97f7b476 by @palan57 on @forbes

Pennsylvania's Teacher Problem

45by Peter Greene / 20h

We already know that the teaching profession is primarily composed of white women (average age 43). But sometimes, when you break data down in particular ways, it becomes even more striking. Research for Action is a Philly-based group that has done some great work over the years, and they've done some research about the TOC/SOC balance in PA that are featured both in this article from Sojourner A

1776 Commission Members Appointed (And It's About What You'd Expect)

by Peter Greene / 1d

You remember just six 2020 weeks ago (that's roughly a year and a half in regular time), Dear Leader proclaimed that the 1776 Commission would be formed in order to create a more perfect set of teaching stuff that would teach our young people to think about our country in the Correct Way. The proclamation announcing this was a piece of work , among other things laying out how we should teach stud

Children are not our future

31by Peter Greene / 2d

There are plenty of warm fuzzy teacher sayings that I could well do without, emphasizing as they do that teachers are too noble to ever want to do things like, say, insist on being paid a decent wage or have control over their working conditions. But there's a child-focused saying that I would like to banish to the Island of Misfit Cliches-- Children are our future. Or, sometimes, children are the

More Teacher Effectiveness Mirages

100+by Peter Greene / 2d

The Fordham Institution has a new report entitled " Teacher Effectiveness and Improvement in Charter and Traditional Public Schools. " Despite what it claims to study, the report is a neear-perfect demonstration of Campbell's Law in action. The study starts with a question that, as used car salesmen put it, assumes the sale: Study after study has found that urban charter schools, and non-profit c

How Does Education Fix Poverty? Spoiler alert...

21by Peter Greene / 4d

The idea that we can educate poverty away has been a popular one with policymakers and politicians for years now. Here's just one example , from Janet Yellen, former Fed Chair and, possibly, future Treasury Secretary , back in 2017: Yellen spoke to a conference on community development today, where she says that providing children with the opportunity to learn important skills earlier is essentia

Schools, Supposedly, Have Caused the Fall of US Religion

41by Peter Greene / 6d

The Christian Church has been suffering a steady and rapid decline for a few decades now, a trend noted by many social scientists, and a source of struggle within many churches that are looking for ways to fill newly-emptied pews. You can look at many data sets on the subject. The folks at Pew Research find that there's a stark generational factor; in the Silent Generation and Baby Boomer cohort,

ICYMI: Still Shopping Edition (12/13)

by Peter Greene / 7d

Trying desperately to shop at small local stores, and it's a real challenge right now. And what has to be ordered comes with the special When Will It Actually Arrive suspense. Happy holidays, one and all. In the meantime, some reading.... San Joaquin Valley in the DPE Crosshairs Thomas Ultican peels back the layers on yet another assault on public education, this one out in California. Interestin

Schools Are Still Not Like Ubers

by Peter Greene / 8d

Betsy DeVos (who will soon not be a humble servant in the education secretary's office, but will instead be a very rich lady who wants to dismantle public education) likes to compare her vision of education to the same kind of disruption offered by outfits like Uber, a comparison that many folks like to

CURMUDGUCATION - http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/

Kelsey Sends Grinchy Voucher Christmas Card – Tennessee Education Report

KELSEY SENDS GRINCHY VOUCHER CHRISTMAS CARD

Tennessee’s “Mr. Voucher” State Senator Brian Kelsey sent Christmas greeting cards with a grinchy message about his non-stop work to privatize Tennessee’s public schools. Apparently, even the “Season of Giving” is one where Kelsey spends his time thinking about how to send taxpayer money to public school privatizers.

Here’s that fun card:

Of course, public school advocates are fighting back, asking the Supreme Court not to hear Kelsey’s appeal. It seems Kelsey’s just mad because after doing all that work to help Gov. Bill Lee pass a voucher scheme, the Tennessee courts have repeatedly held the law to be unconstitutional.

Parents Fight Back

Here’s a press release from the group Public Funds for Public Schools:

Parents of students in the Nashville and Memphis public schools, who are plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging a state law imposing a private school voucher program on their counties, have told the Tennessee Supreme Court there is no basis to review lower court rulings striking down the voucher program as unconstitutional.

In 2019, the Tennessee legislature passed, by a one vote margin, a law to divert funding from the already under-resourced public schools in Shelby (Memphis) and Davidson (Nashville) Counties to private schools through an “education savings CONTINUE READING: Kelsey Sends Grinchy Voucher Christmas Card – Tennessee Education Report

Arizona Charters Hit Jackpot with Federal Paycheck Protection Program | Diane Ravitch's blog

Arizona Charters Hit Jackpot with Federal Paycheck Protection Program

The federal CARES Act included the Paycheck Protection Program to help struggling small businesses and nonprofits survive the pandemic. Lobbyists for the charter industry slipped in a provision enabling charter schools to apply for PPP funding, even though they experienced no financial losses. Charter schools got a share of the $13.2 billion allotted to the nation’s early 100,000 public schools. The average public school received about $135,000 to meet the expenses of the pandemic. On the advice of their lobbyists, some 1200 charters also sought and won PPP funding. Thus charters drew funding from two sources; public schools were not eligible for PPP funding. Charters that applied for PPP funding won six times as much federal money as public schools.

The Arizona Republic reported that the Primavera online charter school in Arizona won a sizable “loan” (1% interest, forgivable), at the same time that its owner took CONTINUE READING: Arizona Charters Hit Jackpot with Federal Paycheck Protection Program | Diane Ravitch's blog

CURMUDGUCATION: Pennsylvania's Teacher Problem

Pennsylvania's Teacher Problem

We already know that the teaching profession is primarily composed of white women (average age 43). But sometimes, when you break data down in particular ways, it becomes even more striking.

Research for Action is a Philly-based group that has done some great work over the years, and they've done some research about the TOC/SOC balance in PA that are featured both in this article from Sojourner Ahebee and a "supplemental" Twitter thread (and you can read the research here).

Some of the PA data is just striking. First, PA is an outlier when it comes to the gap between students and teachers of color. Nationally, the share of SOC is 2.5 times the share of TOC, but in PA the SOC share is 6 times greater (only NE, NH and Indiana have a bigger gap). I'm not totally shocked and surprised by that; PA suffers from a fairly severe urban vs. rural divide, and the rural parts of the state are pretty white.

But when RFA starts breaking down by districts, it gets even starker. There are 500 school districts in PA (which is its own problem) and 184 of those districts employ zero teachers of color. Only about twenty-five districts in the entire state have staffs that are more than 5% TOC. Here's a map from Research for Action, breaking it down district by district: CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Pennsylvania's Teacher Problem

Los Angeles: Billionaire-funded Group Complains about Remote Learning Pact | Diane Ravitch's blog

Los Angeles: Billionaire-funded Group Complains about Remote Learning Pact

In Los Angeles, the UTLA reached an agreement with the LAUSD and superintendent to extend remote learning as COVID surges and every ICU bed is filled in the city. The billionaire-funded “Parent Revolution” complained (billionaires are parents although they have no children in LA public schools).

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-18/la-teachers-increase-live-online-classes-students

With children mired in distance learning and many struggling academically, Los Angeles teachers will take on more live online interaction with students next semester, under an agreement announced Friday. Also under the deal, school nurses will conduct campus-based coronavirus tests.

The pact between the teachers union and the Los Angeles Unified School District was essential for the nation’s second-largest school system; the agreement’s predecessor would have expired Dec. 31. And, based on current infection rates, a return to campus in January is almost impossible under state health guidelines.

“This progress in online instruction reflects the shared learning of all who work in schools about the need to maximize the interaction between teachers and students and their families,” Los Angeles schools Supt. Austin CONTINUE READING: Los Angeles: Billionaire-funded Group Complains about Remote Learning Pact | Diane Ravitch's blog

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Sunday, December 20, 2020