Phony Stories About Schools - Bridging Differences - Education Week

Phony Stories About Schools - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

Phony Stories About Schools

by Deborah Meier

Dear Diane,
Yes, Diane. Why? Why? Why are "they" doing it, and why are people buying it? I tend to speak to teachers, who are less inclined to buy into the idea that they are the source of the trouble and must be replaced. But ... the others?
I'm counting on you for some wise advice on how to tackle the larger fear that feeds it.
Like you, I find that the totally uninitiated tend to be surprised when I tell them I'm against the school/teacher/public bashing. That the best schools are those that have not abandoned respect for their teachers, students, and families comes as a welcome surprise to many. Yes, read about Finland, I say. Read Richard Rothstein's "old" The Way We Were?. Read Diane Ravitch. Read me.
Most find it unbelievable that there was no past golden age of schooling, or that our economy didn't tank 

Was Derrick Bell’s “Space Traders” an Antisemitic Work? « Student Activism

Was Derrick Bell’s “Space Traders” an Antisemitic Work? « Student Activism:

Was Derrick Bell’s “Space Traders” an Antisemitic Work?

by Angus Johnston

One of the most unfortunate elements of the Breitbart organization’s attempt to smear President Obama on the basis of his support, as a law student, for professor Derrick Bell has been the claim that Bell was somehow antisemitic. The claim rests on “Space Traders,” a 1993 short story Bell wrote, a sci-fi parable that sketches an encounter between the United States and mysterious space aliens who offer the country unimaginable wealth in exchange for the abduction of the nation’s black population.
The Breitbart folks link to a review of a book critical of Bell which includes a gloss on the Space Traders story. Here’s the relevant portion:

“Jews condemn the trade as genocidal and organize the Anne Frank Committee to try to stop it. Empathy from another group that has suffered oppression? Not according to Bell. Instead, Jews worry that ”in the absence of blacks, Jews could become the scapegoats.” … The story is … a poke in the eye of American Jews, particularly those who risked life and limb by actively participating in the civil rights protests of the 1960′s. Bell clearly implies that this was done out of tawdry self-interest. Perhaps most galling is Bell’s 

Happy International Women’s Day! A Blog Carnival Calling All Women to Send a Message of Strength « MomsRising Blog

Happy International Women’s Day! A Blog Carnival Calling All Women to Send a Message of Strength « MomsRising Blog:

Happy International Women’s Day! A Blog Carnival Calling All Women to Send a Message of Strength

by Anika Rahman

Happy International Women’s Day, and welcome to the first #callingallwomen blog carnival. This March – Women’s History Month – 25 women’s funds from across the U.S. are uniting to promote solutions to the critical issues that women face.
Against the backdrop of an intensified war on women, the “Calling All Women: Send a Message of Strength” campaign is raising awareness of the inequality that exists and highlighting the change that women’s organizations are advancing in communities around the country. The campaign is encouraging women to “Sound Off” about the issues that matter most in their lives.
Popout
As this video demonstrates, equality for women has not yet been fully realized in 2012. With women still earning only 77 percent of men’s pay – and disparities in access to health care and education pervasive, we cannot afford to take any steps backward. Yet, some politicians are openly supporting a reversal of women’s rights – from attempts to deny us access to contraception to deeming us unfit for military combat.

The Value Of A Woman

Joy Rose at MomsRising Blog - 1 minute ago

In theory, a year of human life is priceless, or so says Kathleen Kingsbury in her Time/Health Article ‘The Value Of A Human Life.’ In reality, she goes on to write, it’s worth $50,000. That’s the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical [...]

Women Voters and Voter ID

Faye M. Anderson at MomsRising Blog - 1 minute ago

This week marks the 47th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” a seminal event in voting rights history. The televised images of protesters being brutally assaulted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge sparked a national outcry and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Fast forward to today, voting rights are under assault. The [...]

State-Sanctioned Shaming and the Battle for Reproductive Rights

Madeleine Gyory at MomsRising Blog - 1 minute ago

For almost all American women, reproductive rights are not mere fodder for political debate. Rather, they encompass highly personal decisions. Do I want to get pregnant? Do I want to remain pregnant? They are unavoidable choices made by heterosexually active women—including Catholic women, who use contraception at the same very high rates as other U.S. [...]

Challenging Women’s Imprisonment in the United States, the World’s Top Jailer

Rachel Roth at MomsRising Blog - 1 minute ago

On many measures of well-being, women in the United States fare better than their counterparts around the world, but when it comes to imprisonment, the situation changes: Of all the women and girls in prison in the world, one in three is confined right here in the United States. With only five percent of the [...]

Latte Factor: End Breastfeeding Discrimination

Genevieve Colvin at MomsRising Blog - 1 minute ago

Joanne* had her baby, took a 12 week job protected leave through the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and then dutifully returned to work. She spoke with her supervisor about her desire to continue pumping her breast milk and they worked out a reasonable schedule for her to use a back room to pump. Her [...]

Rhode Island: We’ve got your back for paid family leave

Gayle Goldin at MomsRising Blog - 1 minute ago

Ten years ago I was standing on a balcony, trying to coax my puppy, Sabrina, back inside. Sabrina was barking wildly, but not moving. As I stepped towards her, the balcony collapsed. I fell two stories, directly against a brick wall, and landed on cement stairs. Thankfully, for me, there had been a late spring snow that [...]

Barefoot and Pregnant: What This “War on Women” is Really About

Phoebe Taubman at MomsRising Blog - 1 minute ago

Women’s History Month is arriving this year in the midst of a “War on Women.” Many of the battles in today’s war are being fought on familiar ground—around women’s reproductive health and choice—but the surrounding context is quite different from that of wars gone by. In today’s America, women make up half of the workforce [...]

We’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Women’s History Creates the Future

Gloria Feldt at MomsRising Blog - 1 minute ago

“If women want any rights more than they got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.” — Sojourner Truth, 1797-1883, former slave, abolitionist, women’s rights activist, Methodist minister Truth’s admonition seems archaic now. Why are we still “talking about it?” Is women’s history of struggle for equal rights relevant in [...]

Happy International Women’s Day! Dedicate Your Day.

Homa Tavangar at MomsRising Blog - 1 minute ago

I love International Women’s Day. I remember great lectures in honor of this day in college, visiting my old hometown Fort Wayne, Indiana for their 99th annual city-wide celebration of the day, and just love the thought of a pause in the calendar to honor heroic women. I realize everyday should be International Women’s Day, [...]

Education Research Report: Charter-Schools: no statistically significant effects on middle school youths

Education Research Report: Charter-Schools: no statistically significant effects on middle school youths:

Charter-Schools: no statistically significant effects on middle school youths

by Jonathan Kantrowitz

Ω

What is the study about?

Charter-School Management Organizations: Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts examined the effect of non-profit charter-school management organizations (CMOs) on middle school academic achievement, rates of high school graduation, and post-secondary enrollment. Within eight geographically diverse states, the authors matched each charter school student with similar students attending conventional public schools. The sample included nearly 14,000 students attending 68 middle schools operated by 22 CMOs and nearly 3,000 students who attended 13 high schools operated by six CMOs.

What did the study report?

The study reported that, on average, there were no statistically significant effects of attending a CMO-operated 

This Week In Education: Maps: Where Walton Spends Money (Differently From Gates)

This Week In Education: Maps: Where Walton Spends Money (Differently From Gates):

Maps: Where Walton Spends Money (Differently From Gates)

by Alexander Russo

Earlier this week we learned that Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst organization was one of the beneficiaries of the Walton Foundation's ramped-up education grantmaking -- not really a surprise but something that hadn't been confirmed. Here's a look at where some of the rest of that money is going, provided by the foundation:

Valerie Strauss has a roundup here, or click "read more" to read the WFF press release. Click back to a recent post (More Evidence Gates Is "Over" Charters) and see if you can glean the differences between WFF and Gates.
WFF PRESS RELEASE:
Dear Friends:
2011 was a watershed year for school choice in the United States. For the first time, more than two million

AM News: States Add Testing To Accommodate Value-Added

by Will Treece

Teacher Evaluations Pose Test for States WSJ: Efforts to revamp public education are increasingly focused on evaluating teachers using student test scores, but school districts nationwide are only beginning to deal with the practical challenges of implementing those changes.
Teachers' Morale Reaches 20-Year Low NYT:  The outpouring of reaction to the release of the teacher data reports, as well as the stream of recent articles in blogs and other publications, has provided a pretty good sense of how many teachers in New York are feeling these days: disappointed, angry, depressed, put-upon and fed up.
Who won millions in Walton Foundation grants in 2011 Washington Post: The pro-charter Walton Foundation 

Modern School: Wealth Makes You a Jerk (and this is News?)

Modern School: Wealth Makes You a Jerk (and this is News?):

Wealth Makes You a Jerk (and this is News?)

by Michael Dunn

Stealing Candy from Babies (Images from Flick, by Qfamily and jantik)

As people’s wealth increases, so does their tendency to engage in unethical behaviors, according to researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto, whose work was published in last week’s PNAS.  (A summary of the report can be read at Wired).

The researchers conducted seven different experiments. In the first, they found that wealthier individuals were more likely to cut off other drivers and pedestrians at busy intersections in the San Francisco Bay Area, even when controlled for time of day, gender, age, and traffic conditions.

In one experiment, participants were asked what they would do if given change for $20 if they had paid with a $10 

The Education Games: Reform as Doublespeak | Truthout

The Education Games: Reform as Doublespeak | Truthout:

The Education Games: Reform as Doublespeak

Thursday 8 March 2012

by: Paul Thomas, The Daily Censored | News Analysis

Although we currently live in a world informed by George Orwell’s dystopian unmasking-as-novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, we seem unable to acknowledge that the Ministry of Peace is actually waging war. In our current education reform debate, educators must come to terms with Orwell’s recognition of the essential nature of political speech:

“I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of 

Derrick Bell, Race Radical. « Student Activism

Derrick Bell, Race Radical. « Student Activism:

Derrick Bell, Race Radical.

by Angus Johnston

The Breitbart machine’s attempt to smear President Obama for his 1990 embrace of civil rights activist and legal theorist Derrick Bell is an act of cynical, craven maliciousness. There was nothing covert about Obama’s support for Bell, nothing hidden about a video clip that appeared on television during the 2008 campaign and has remained online ever since. It’s a ginned up non-story grounded in a long list of lies and distortions.
Which is a shame not least because Bell is a figure around whom real, important arguments could easily be built. A civil rights lawyer who grew skeptical of the Brown vs. Board of Ed decision, a Harvard Law professor who wrote an agitprop sci-fi story that was adapted into a schlocky HBO production, Bell was a strange and complicated man. His views on race and justice were contrarian, pessimistic, and deeply unsettling to those — of any race — who regard the project of achieving American racial equality as having entered its mopping-up phase.
I’ve been going back and reading (often re-reading) some of Bell’s writings since this story broke yesterday, and 

45th District Democrats Pass Anti-Charter Resolution | Seattle Education

45th District Democrats Pass Anti-Charter Resolution | Seattle Education:

45th District Democrats Pass Anti-Charter Resolution

by seattleducation2011

Resolution for Continued Prohibition of Charter Schools in Washington State

Whereas the platforms of the King County Democrats and the Washington State Democrats specifically oppose publicly funded charter schools and vouchers; and
Whereas the voters of Washington State have defeated charter measures three times; and
Whereas peer-reviewed research shows that 83% of charter schools perform no better than public schools, and charter schools more frequently harm their students than help them; and
Whereas charter schools often serve only a select group of students; and
Whereas some charter schools shift public moneys to private for-profit firms; and

Schools Matter: Krash Course with P.L. Thomas

Schools Matter: Krash Course with P.L. Thomas:

Krash Course with P.L. Thomas

by P. L. Thomas

* I plan to start a series of brief posts dedicated to the wise and persistent plea from Stephen Krashen for short and accurate commentary on education; thus, "Krash Course."

Krash Course #1

Journalism is failing U.S. public education. See two examples from Education Week:

Growing Gaps Bring Focus on Poverty's Role in Schooling 

This piece perpetuates as experts self-proclaimed reformers who have no or little experience as teachers or scholars. Even when journalists explore a valuable topic—the weight of poverty on education in the U.S.—that examination is ruined by the context (see THIS discussion of the same phenomenon at The New York Times). Journalists need to seek educators and scholars who are credible.

AERA Erasing Line Between Scholarship and Partisanship [blog by Rick Hess]

Encourage girls to prioritise education: iLIVE - Times LIVE

Encourage girls to prioritise education: iLIVE - Times LIVE:

Encourage girls to prioritise education: iLIVE

Nomvula Mokonyane, Premier of Gauteng Provincel | 08 March, 2012 13:10

Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane. File photo.
Image by: THYS DULLAART

As the world celebrates the 101st International Women’s Day, as women we must assess how far we have come in our battle for equality and development.

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Yesterday (8 March), we celebrated this day with our sisters from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) sharing ideas that can help us face the past and better prepare for the future.

It is apparent, that even now in 2012, after many years our countries have attained independence and democracy, African women remain significantly marginalised. We remain the majority in the unemployment lines.  We continue to bear the brunt of the worst of poverty; and our education standards are still not reflective of our majority status in many of our countries.

However, while there is still a lot of work to be done to empower women in the SADC region; the