Teachers unions battle court ruling on tenure laws - SFGate

Teachers unions battle court ruling on tenure laws - SFGate:

Teachers unions battle court ruling on tenure laws

 The fate of nearly a century of job-security protections for California teachers is in the hands of a state appellate court, which is preparing to review a judge’s bombshell ruling that found tenure and seniority laws protect incompetent instructors, serve no educational purpose and, in particular, discriminate against poor and minority students.

The state and teachers unions have launched a frontal attack on the June 2014 ruling, arguing that neither the judge nor the nine student plaintiffs in the well-funded suit presented any evidence that the laws have harmed students or violated their constitutional rights.

In written arguments filed this month with the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers said the laws are based on sound policies — tenure protects experienced teachers from arbitrary or politically motivated dismissals, and basing layoffs on seniority is an objective process that promotes educational quality.

But the unions said those policy questions are legally irrelevant, because the students who filed the suit never showed that the laws affected their education. They showed no evidence that they were taught by an incompetent teacher who would have been fired or laid off had it not been for tenure or seniority protections, the unions said.

“The challenged statutes do not target plaintiffs (or any identifiable group of students) for discriminatory treatment,” said lawyers for the unions, which represent about 400,000 teachers. “None of the plaintiffs established that the challenged statutes ever caused them any harm or will do so in the future.”

Courts or Legislature?

Representing the state, Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office told the court that the California Constitution “does not give courts the right to make policy judgments of this sort,” but leaves those decisions to the Legislature.

The ruling in June by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu was the first to strike down a teacher tenure law in any state. The appellate court will hear the case late this year or early next year. If its ruling is appealed further, the case could reach the state Supreme Court by the end of 2016.

Although the laws remain in effect during the appeal, the nonprofit Students Matter, which filed the suit, said it is confident of winning appellate rulings that will require fundamental changes in the system.

The briefs by the state and the unions “recycle many of the same flawed arguments that (Treu) considered and rejected at trial, and fail to rebut any of the trial court’s findings that California’s teacher tenure, dismissal and layoff laws violate the constitutional rights of students throughout California,” the group, founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch, said in a statement.

The tenure laws, which date from 1921, allow a school to fire a teacher for any reason during the first two years of employment, but a dismissal after that requires a showing of “good cause” before an independent panel. The seniority laws say schools must dismiss the least-experienced teachers first during layoffs, but make exceptions for newer teachers whose specialized training and experience meet the district’s needs.

Treu’s ruling followed an eight-week trial that included testimony by four students, one parent and competing groups of experts. He found that the laws violate the right of students to educational equality and “impose a disproportionate burden on poor and minority students.” The latter finding was based on a 2007 state report that found that students at “high-poverty, low-performing schools” were more likely than others to be taught by inexperienced and unqualified teachers.

'Grossly ineffective’

Treu also said two years is too short to evaluate teacher competency, the dismissal procedures are so expensive and time-consuming that many schools don’t even try to dismiss “grossly ineffective” teachers, and the seniority rules shield incompetence.

“Grossly ineffective teachers are being left in the classroom because school officials do not wish to go through the time and expense to investigate and prosecute those cases,” the judge said.

President Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, praised the ruling when it was issued and said it gave California an opportunity to build “a new framework for the teaching profession.” After the trial, in the weeks before the ruling, the Legislature quickly passed a law streamlining the dismissal process to shorten timelines and reduce costs. Some legal analysts, Teachers unions battle court ruling on tenure laws - SFGate:

How To Transform Education With Video Games

How To Transform Education With Video Games:

How To Transform Education With Video Games

Video games are essentially complex systems that very young children can learn to navigate very quickly.

What if we could leverage the skill with which games teach players to play? Consider the ease with which you learn the physics in Angry Birds, how quickly you came to understand Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. What if we could use similar strategies to help students to master traditional academic content? Many people are trying to do just that.

In Greg Toppo’s new book, The Game Believes In You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter, he explores game-based learning in detail.

Jordan: I really enjoyed reading your book. You do a fantastic job not only of surveying the game-based learning landscape, but also of explaining the ways of thinking that are driving it.

I was struck by an observation you made about learning game developers. You write, “I found that most of them had gotten into this discipline not because they love games, but because they love children and want something better for them. After a while, I stopped counting the number of times that someone leaned in and told me, ‘I am not a big gamer.’”

I’ve also discovered a related trend that I think of as the game developer late-life moral crisis. Entrepreneurs, designers and producers who were so instrumental in forming the commercial game industry—former execs from Atari and Activision and LucasArts and Electronic Arts—now seem to be using their talents to build social impact games and educational games. I’m thankful for their commitment. But culturally speaking, both the educators’ impulse to not identify themselves as gamers and the seasoned gamers’ impulse to consider their recent projects to be ‘career shifts’ seem indicative of a strange moral polarization in the way we think about video games.

What is it about video games? We don’t talk about ‘social impact’ movies; nor do we talk about ‘educational’ books. Why do we have these bipolar gaming categories? Despite the 1.5 billion people worldwide that play games, there still seems to be a stigma—or at least there’s a narrative of alienation or marginalization that goes along with gaming, a sort of adolescent outsider rebellion kind of thing. Games have an aura of sinful pleasure about them. Perhaps this is why they are often discussed as an unhealthy and addictive temptation from which we need to protect our kids. How do you think our collective neuroses around games and screens impacts the larger conversation around education technology?

Greg: You put your finger on an unspoken piece of the conversation that really fascinates me. You’re right: We don’t talk about “social impact” movies and the like, and I think that’s for a reason. Most other forms of media don’t suffer from the same kind of odd inferiority complex that games do.

A couple of years ago at the Games for Change Festival, game designer Eric Zimmerman observed that art educators don’t spend their time thinking about “art for learning.” They’re not concerned with “educational art,” whatever that is. Book lovers don’t worry whether books are educational, he said. They’re not trying to “bookify” the world.

Yet here we are, trying to make the rather counterintuitive case that games can have a positive impact on learning. When you look at the processes happening when people play digital games, it makes perfect sense. But it still seems a surprise to many. I think in part it’s because games have always had a whiff of immorality and danger to them that other media don’t.

I blame pinball.

If you read about the history of pinball, it was originally a form of gambling, more a game of chance than skill. Flippers, which introduced the element of skill, weren’t added until after the machines were banned in many cities. It’s been more than 70 years since New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called the pinball machine a “real larceny machine” and gathered reporters together so they could watch him smash a few units to pieces, then dump them in the Hudson River – nice visuals! Pinball spent more than 30 years underground and behind curtains. Coin-op video games, which grew up alongside newly legalized machines in the 1970s and 1980s, couldn’t help but catch a whiff of danger, even though they were basically advanced hand-eye coordination trainers.

We’re still recovering, in a way – think about all those gamers in basements today, far from the watchful eyes of adults. But as more adults become gamers, they’re beginning to understand what’s really going on in gamers’ brains. To complete that process, we need to keep talking about games as naturalized parts of our intellectual lives, as tools rather than just toys. It helps, I think, that you don’t have to feed a quarter into your PlayStation to make learning happen.

I’ve always loved Georgia Tech theorist Ian Bogost’s idea for how we should understand “serious” games. He has said, only half-jokingly that he’s fine with the term if we think about games as we do cheesecake. “When you say, ‘Dude, that was a serious cheesecake,’ in that case, serious means two things,” he says. “There is a kind of care and an attention to detail, and there’s this desire and realization of a thing’s fundamental structure. This is the apotheosis of cheesecake. You have realized it.”

Jordan: You point out that any resistance we have to games in schools is really more of a general resistance to change. You write: “Even chalkboards got an icy reception from teachers in one-room school houses where large-group instruction was rarely emphasized.” Of course, any big change is likely to be met with resistance. And one of the crazy things going on in education right now is that a transition toward data-driven, digital, and interactive tools and games which provide exploratory and iterative learning experiences seems not only necessary, but How To Transform Education With Video Games:

With A Brooklyn Accent: When Veteran Teachers are Called "Developing"- The Orwellian Language of School Reform

With A Brooklyn Accent: When Veteran Teachers are Called "Developing"- The Orwellian Language of School Reform:

When Veteran Teachers are Called "Developing"- The Orwellian Language of School Reform

All around the country, the story is the same. Numbers crunching administrators and evaluators, some who have never taught or only taught a few years, go into the classrooms of teachers who have inspired students for decades, mark a few things off on a checklist, and then, after consulting student test scores, assign them labels- "Beginning" "Developing" "Ineffective"- which erase a lifetime of achievement. Beyond the humiliation, beyond the destruction of careers, lies a contempt for history which is the hallmark of all dictatorial regimes. Whether you do it to an individual or an entire population, erase their past and you can more easily destroy their humanity. Such has been wreckage of lives and reputations registered by what is euphemistically called "School Reform," whose excesses are still going on unchecked. Inevitably, cruelty to teachers  leads to cruelty to children, which the Opt Out movement is trying to address. But even if Opt Out succeeds, it won't be able to restore the jobs and reputations of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of veteran teachers, unfairly humiliated and forced out of the profession they loved.When With A Brooklyn Accent: When Veteran Teachers are Called "Developing"- The Orwellian Language of School Reform:

1984 - The Test

BY N. P. Education

unitedoptout.com

Report: Growth in state-run preschool programs moving at snail’s pace - The Washington Post

Report: Growth in state-run preschool programs moving at snail’s pace - The Washington Post:

Report: Growth in state-run preschool programs moving at snail’s pace

A new report on state-funded pre-kindergarten programs says that funding, enrollment and quality was up somewhat in 2014 but that the pace of progress was way too slow and that wide disparities exist in states across the country. Just how slow is slow? If the 2013-2014 growth in enrollment continues, it would take 150 years to reach 70 percent enrollment.

Quality early childhood education — recognized as a key element in preparing children for school – has become a priority of the Obama administration, which last year announced a $1 billion public-private spending initiative.  The annual report on the state of preschool, published by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers Graduate School of Education University, says that total state funding for pre-K increased in 2013-2014 by more than $116 million across 40 states plus the District of Columbia — a 1 percent increase in real dollars. Per child,  that was a $61-dollar increase from the previous year, $4,125.

Enrollment was up, too, but by small amounts –a total of 8,535, after a loss of 4,000 seats in 2012-13 — leaving only 4 percent of 3-year-olds and 29 percent of 4-year-olds to be served in state-run pre-K. These figures do not include Head Start or special education; when combining general and special education enrollments, 32.4 percent of 4-year-olds and 7.4 percent of 3-year-olds are served by public pre-K. When including Head Start programs, 41.5 percent of 4-year-olds and 14.5 percent of 3-year-olds are served in these publicly funded programs.

However, the report said that these percentages are similar to last year’s, “indicating that enrollment in publicly-funded programs more generally has stagnated.” Also, there is overlap with some of these programs, so that the number of children being served by publicly funded preschool could be overstated, the report says. In fact, progress is so slow that the report says this:

At the 2013-2014 growth rate it would take about 75 years for states to reach 50 percent enrollment at age 4 and 150 years to reach 70 percent enrollment. Even a return to the average rate of growth since 2001-2002 would leave the nation 25 years away from enrolling 50 percent of 4-year-olds in state funded pre-K.

The National Institute for Early Education Research, or NIEER, cites 10 benchmarks as markers of a quality program, including a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and specialized training in early education –and the report says only 15 states could be verified as providing enough per-child funding to meet all 10. “As only 13 percent of the children enrolled in state-funded pre-K attend those programs, the vast majority of children served in state-funded pre-K are in programs where funding per child may be inadequate to provide a quality education,” the report says.

More than half a million children, or 40 percent of nationwide enrollment, were served in programs that met fewer than half of the quality standards benchmarks, it says, though an unprecedented seven programs improved their quality standards and gained against NIEER’s Quality Standards benchmarks checklist. Also,

*Five states (now including Mississippi) plus one of Louisiana’s three programs continue to meet all 10 benchmarks for state pre-K quality standards.

*Seventeen states met eight or more.

Here are the recommendations from the report:

State pre-K programs may have turned a corner in 2013-2014, but progress remains slow. If pre-K is to be made available to even all children under 200 percent of the poverty level within the next 20 years, state investments will have to grow at a much faster pace. At the 2013-2014 growth rate it would take about 75 years for states to reach 50 percent enrollment at age 4 and 150 years to reach 70 percent enrollment. Even a return to the average rate of growth since 2001-2002 would leave the nation 25 years away from enrolling 50 percent of 4-year-olds in state funded pre-K.

States should set goals to increase enrollment much more rapidly than has been the case in the past, while raising quality standards and providing funding at the level needed to support those high standards. Every state is capable of delivering high quality pre-K to all 4-year-olds within 10 years, if they set high-standards and commit adequate resources. Many states could reach this goal in less than 10 years.

Many states need to raise their quality standards for pre-K and implement policies to ensure continuous improvement. Without sufficient quality, programs will not fulfill their promise with respect to children’s learning and development or longterm economic returns. NIEER’s 10 benchmarks for quality standards are a starting place for state policy.

Particularly worrying is the number of states with inadequate requirements for preschool teacher preparation. A new Institute of Medicine and National Research Council report calls for all 

Report: Growth in state-run preschool programs moving at snail’s pace - The Washington Post:

yearbook2014_full[1].pdf

Death of a Salesman - Russo Leaves Chicago

Time To Say Goodbye | District 299: The Inside Scoop on CPS:

Death of a Salesman - Russo Leaves Chicago 

 As some of you may have already noticed, I'm shutting down District 299.

I created the blog way back in the day (2005) when when I realized that Chicago educators didn't care much about national news and national educators didn't care much about Chicago.At the time, I was running a weekly email newsletter rounding up local and national news.

I thought -- and still think -- that Chicago's education scene is fascinating and important. You can see the first two years of the blog here. However, that was long ago. I've been away from Chicago for almost nine years now -- that's superintendents Huberman, Brizard, and Byrd-Bennett -- and have a bunch of new projects going on (including my newest launch over at the Washington Monthly, The Grade).

District 299 has been hosted over the years by Chicago's Catalyst Magazine and by the Chicago Tribune's "Chicago Now" hive of local blogs.Thanks to them for sponsoring the blog so that I could keep it full of news and gossip, and specifically to Linda Lenz at Catalyst and Bill Adee and Jimmy Greenfield at the Chicago Tribune. According to Jimmy, there are 6,800 blog posts on the Tribune version of the site.

And of course thanks to all of you who read the site, commented, and even shared tidbits with me along the way. For a long time, District 299 was a particularly satisfying experience for me because the relationship between me and the readers (longtime CPS veterans and insiders, many of them) was so close.

Thanks, everyone! I'll be mothballing the site and shutting down the @district299 twitter feed in the next few weeks. You can follow me at @alexanderrusso if you want national and local education news.

This Week In Education

It’s Not Nothing: Why I Support the ‘Every Child Achieves Act’ | gadflyonthewallblog

It’s Not Nothing: Why I Support the ‘Every Child Achieves Act’ | gadflyonthewallblog:

It’s Not Nothing: Why I Support the ‘Every Child Achieves Act’

No more federal intervention.

No more reducing schools to a number.

That’s the promise of the Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA).

Sure, it’s not perfect. But this Senate proposed rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) could do a lot of good – even if it includes some bad.

Imagine it.

States would be in control of their own public schools. The U.S. Department of Education and its appointed Secretary would lose much of their power to impose unfunded federal mandates.

For example, the federal government could no longer force states to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores. It could no longer force states to adopt Common Core or Common Core look-a-like standards. It could no longer label high poverty schools “Failing” and then demand they be closed.

That’s not nothing.

But to realize these goals, we may have to compromise.

This federal law (currently known as No Child Left Behind) governs K-12 public schools. It has to be reauthorized.

We tried in 2007, but no one could agree. So the Obama administration took over – offering states a waiver from the worst consequences of the current disastrous law if they just doubled down on those same failing policies.

The result? Seven years of continued educational failure. Policies to privatize, punish the poor and enrich profiteers.

And now we have another chance to reauthorize the law!

We can change course! We can right the ship! We can get our heads out of our collective asses and actually do what’s right for our children!

But this is politics. It’s never that simple.

We have a divided Congress. We have a President who never met a corporate school reform scheme he didn’t like.

But we also have a citizenry who is fed up with all the bullshit. People are demanding change.

We have a real opportunity. If we can seal the deal, a generation of children will be the better for it. If not, the current calamitous law will stay in place for at least 7 more years.

That’s just unacceptable.

The biggest flaw in this proposed act is that it keeps annual testing in place. If approved in its current form, public schools would still have to give standardized tests to children in grades 3-8 and once in high school.

If you’re like me, you just threw up in your mouth a little bit.

However, supporting ECAA doesn’t have to mean supporting testing. There is anamendment proposed by Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) that would replace annual testing with assessments only once at the elementary, middle and high school levels.

Yes. It’s not enough. We really should have zero standardized tests in our schools. If we have to accept Grade Span Testing – as Tester’s proposal is called – it should be done by a random sample. Don’t test all kids. Just test some small group and extrapolate their scores to the whole.

But Tester’s amendment is not nothing.

Even if it weren’t approved – even if all schools are mandated to continue annual testing as is – the ECAA requires no minimum length for those tests.

How many questions do we need to have on our exams? How many sections? Right It’s Not Nothing: Why I Support the ‘Every Child Achieves Act’ | gadflyonthewallblog:

Lauderhill plans tighter regulation of charter schools - Sun Sentinel

Lauderhill plans tighter regulation of charter schools - Sun Sentinel:

Troubled charter schools getting new scrutiny from cities

New charter schools will have to show they have the resources to last a full school year before Lauderhill officials will let them open for business, under proposed rules city commissioners will consider Monday.

Officials say they've learned a lesson from financially unstable schools that go belly-up within months of opening, a pattern that disrupts student education and creates chaos for families.

More than three dozen South Florida charter schools have gone out of business or been ordered to close since the fall of 2012, with at least 10 lasting two months or less. A Sun Sentinel investigation last year found it doesn't take much for operators to get taxpayer dollars to open a charter school and it's difficult for school districts to track how those dollars are spent.

"The School Board is powerless," Lauderhill Mayor Richard Kaplan said. "They don't have the authority to do what they feel they need to do."

Some cities are preparing to step into the void and demand more accountability to protect their residents, saying they cannot treat the charters as typical public schools.

Sunrise and Lauderhill imposed moratoriums on new charter schools this year to have time to develop new rules. Tamarac approved some changes last year, including requiring new schools to be on a minimum 3-acre site, in free-standing buildings and to have dedicated drop-off areas for students.

Lauderhill's proposal includes some of the most comprehensive regulations so far, going beyond zoning and traffic safety considerations to look at an organization's financial resources, educational background, criminal history and past track record running charter schools. If approved Monday, the changes will come back before commissioners for final approval in June.

"We have to address a bad situation. It's virtually outrageous what's going on," Kaplan said. "If the pendulum swings too far, you've got a situation where students and parents are not getting the education they're supposed to get, and on top of that, they're put in an unsafe situation."

Some charter school proponents say existing state and school district regulations are sufficient, that cities should work with local districts and not create new hoops for schools to jump through.

"There's so many checks and balances for a charter school," said Lynn Norman-Teck, spokeswoman for the Florida Consortium of Public Charter Schools. "It just seems that some cities want to restrict parental choice and the growth of charter schools."

Keith Poliakoff, an attorney who has represented about 20 charter schools over the past few years, said he understands why cities are looking at new rules, even though charter schools have been part of the state's educational landscape for a generation.

"A lot of municipalities just had no regulations," Poliakoff said. "That put them in the situation they're in today, where unfortunately they've been burned by charter schools that were not being properly run or managed."

Poliakoff said the new rules might not withstand a court challenge because they could run afoul of state laws "that give charter schools so much protection." But he said recent court rulings have been favorable to cities.



Tamarac last year rejected the charter high school application of one of Poliakoff's clients, American Charter Development. The company sought to force the city to reconsider its decision, but lost its challenge in Broward Circuit Court and on appeal in April to Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal.

Under Lauderhill's proposed rules, charter schools would not be able to come in at the last minute and expect city approval. Applications would have to be filed in December for schools planning to open the following September.

Operators have to show they have the finances to cover any potential losses, the success or failure of their previous charter school ventures, and evidence they are qualified to run a school.

Proposed locations will have to meet a minimum 1,000-foot separation between schools serving primary and secondary students. They must also must meet minimum per-student space requirements for classes, lunches and outdoor areas.

The regulations also cover student safety and require information about how the school will ensure surrounding properties are protected both before and after school as students are arriving and leaving.Lauderhill plans tighter regulation of charter schools - Sun Sentinel:

Why the Common Core won’t do what supporters say it will — principal - The Washington Post

Why the Common Core won’t do what supporters say it will — principal - The Washington Post:

Why the Common Core won’t do what supporters say it will — principal

A school bus passes a sign encouraging parents to refuse that their children take state tests on Monday, April 13, 2015, in Rotterdam, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

This is the seventh in a continuing series of letters between two award-winning school principals, one who likes the Common Core State Standards and the other who doesn’t. The debate over the Common Core State Standards has become so polarized that it is hard to get people who disagree to have reasonable conversations about it. The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news Web site focused on inequality and innovation in education, is hosting a conversation between Carol Burris of New York and Jayne Ellspermann of Florida (in a format that Education Week once used with Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier as the authors).  The Report’s editors as well as both principals have given me permission to republish each letter.

Burris has served as principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in New York since 2000. In 2010, she was recognized by the School Administrators Association of New York State as their Outstanding Educator of the Year, and in 2013, she was recognized as the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Ellspermann is principal of West Port High School in Ocala, Florida.  She has served as a principal in elementary, middle, and high schools for the past 24 years and is the 2015 Principal of the Year for the National Association of Secondary School Principals. 

The first letter was written by Burris, a Core opponent, to Ellspermann, a Core supporter. Burris explained why she once liked the Core but changed her mind after New York State schools began to implement them several years ago. You can read her letter to Ellspermann here. Ellspermann’s reply letter,which you can read here, explained why she thinks the schools in her district benefit from the Common Core. In the third letter, Burris explains why she thinks Core testing hurts disadvantaged students.  The fourth letter, by Ellspermann, says that critics should not blame the Common Core standards for bad implementation and she writes why she likes the English Language Arts emphasis on reading text rather than allowing students to rely on personal experience. In the fifth letter, Burris asked Ellspermann why she thinks she needs the Core. In her response, the sixth letter between the two, Ellspermann discusses why she opposes the opt-out movement and how the Core is working in her school. Here is the seventh letter, from Burris to Ellspermann.

Dear Jayne,

In my last letter, I asked a question that I think lies at the heart of the Common Core debate. I was disappointed that you did not respond to it. Here it is again, with context:

Jayne, there was nothing to prevent you from challenging all children before the Common Core arrived. I am certain you had strategies to level the playing field for economically disadvantaged students prior to 2010. Why do you believe you need the Common Core?

You told me in a previous letter that Florida parents and teachers reviewed the Common Core and made minor revisions. But this wasn’t the first time standards were reformed in Florida. In 2006-07, your state adopted the Sunshine State Standards, then changed to the Florida (Common) Core Standards in 2010, and then tweaked and renamed them the Florida Standards in 2014. My question remains, why did you need to go from one set of standards to another?

According to a report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Sunshine State Standards were at about the same level of rigor and quality as the Common Core. In English Language Arts, Fordham gave the Sunshine State standards a B while the Common Core grade was B+. In math, the Sunshine State were rated A and Common Core received A-. Do you agree with Fordham’s findings that the level of difficulty was about equal? If so, do you support Common Core because you believe that all states should have the same standards?

Here is why I ask the question. Those who support the Common Core standards often claim they are needed because state standards were weak and, if states would adopt the same standards, the achievement of all students would rise. The problem is there is no evidence that standards per se make a difference in student performance, and there is some impressive scholarship that says they do not make any difference.

Tom Loveless of the non-profit Washington D.C.-based Brookings Institutionhas shown that similar reforms over the past three decades have not Why the Common Core won’t do what supporters say it will — principal - The Washington Post:

Principal: The Common Core isn’t to blame for high-stakes testing and test prep - The Washington Post http://wapo.st/1H9L07B

The ESEA: A Pivotal Civil Rights Milestone - Education Week

The ESEA: A Pivotal Civil Rights Milestone - Education Week:

The ESEA: A Pivotal Civil Rights Milestone

By Sherrilyn Ifill

This year, we are commemorating significant milestones in our civil rights history, including the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the 75th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the 61st anniversary of theBrown v. Board of Education decision, and the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law.

Although the ESEA is not often mentioned in the context of these other civil rights milestones, I believe that it is very much a pivotal piece of civil rights legislation: It opened doors to educational opportunities for many low-income students who had been relegated to substandard education. In fact, I echo the sentiments of our country's first lady and others who have called education the civil rights issue of our time.

But what will we say about the ESEA another 50 years from now? Will we say that we acted, during the reauthorization of this landmark legislation, to ensure that we fulfilled its original promise to provide all children with quality educational opportunities?

—iStockphoto

As President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill into law in 1965, the federal government assumed the role of holding states accountable for providing equal access to quality educational opportunities for all students, regardless of income level. It is indisputable that quality education opens opportunities, including access to high-wage employment and economic security. Today, the bill that President Johnson believed would be a weapon in the "war on poverty" is threatened with erosion in our current Congress.

Political gamesmanship and calls for a small federal government and state autonomy have triggered collective amnesia of what our public school system looked like when the ESEA was first signed into law. More than a decade before the ESEA's passage, a sophomore at Moton High School in Virginia, Barbara Rose Johns, led a student walkout in protest of the deplorable conditions at the majority-African-American school, including the lack of a gymnasium, a cafeteria, heat, and even desks. That walkout resulted in the filing of the court case Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which would later be consolidated with four other cases to become Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated racial apartheid and the doctrine of "separate but equal" in our nation's public schools. On May 17, we commemorate the 61st anniversary of this landmark decision.

“Political gamesmanship and calls for small federal government and state autonomy have triggered collective amnesia of what our public school system looked like when the ESEA was first signed into law.”

Certainly, the passage of the ESEA has not been a panacea—inequities like academic-achievement gaps and high dropout rates for poor and minority students persist. However, these disparities signal that we must move forward, not backward, in ensuring that all students have access to high-quality education. The Every Child Achieves Act, which unanimously passed out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in April, does not include the federal accountability so critical to holding states accountable for identifying and addressing educational disparities. We must retain the federal mechanism through which we can strengthen supports and services to states to ensure that they provide all public school students with the opportunity to learn and thrive in nondiscriminatory educational environments.

Most agree that the most recent iteration of the ESEA, the No Child Left Behind Act, which technically expired in 2007, was deeply flawed. The law's punitive sanctions did more to undermine achievement than promote it. We know that schools and administrators need support, not sanctions, in order to improve outcomes. That is why it is even more imperative that we get it right this time.

We need a reauthorization bill that ensures that students are not subjected to inequities such as being disproportionately taught by underqualified and inexperienced teachers, or being subjected to discriminatory discipline practices and pushed out of school for minor infractions. All students deserve access to rigorous coursework that will enable them to graduate college- and career-ready, and to compete in a global marketplace. We must also promote diversity and equity in our public schools. So, too, must we recognize that quality early-childhood education helps all students start elementary school on a more even footing and should be a component of the federal education law.

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Finally, we cannot afford to dilute critical funding intended to support districts serving high proportions of low-income students. Federal support for low-income districts is critical to ensuring that students who live in areas of concentrated poverty receive the services and programming necessary to help mitigate the impact of concentrated poverty and improve achievement.

I urge the full Senate, as it considers the Every Child Achieves Act and amendments to the bill, to retain the critical federal role and the authority of the U.S. secretary of education to hold states accountable for providing high-quality education on an equitable basis. This role must not be diminished, diluted, or compromised in any ESEA reauthorization. We have to remain vigilant to make sure that Congress passes a bill that does not renege on the law's original promise of equal access to educational opportunity.

Fifty years from now, we want to look back and be able to say that we did the right thing for children.The ESEA: A Pivotal Civil Rights Milestone - Education Week:

Just when you thought you had enough, the Seattle Public School district bought another standardized test, Amplify | Seattle Education

Just when you thought you had enough, the Seattle Public School district bought another standardized test, Amplify | Seattle Education:

Just when you thought you had enough, the Seattle Public School district bought another standardized test, Amplify

Created and funded by the Gates and Carnegie Foundations with $100 million, inBloom Inc. was designed to collect a maximum amount of confidential and personally identifiable student and teacher data from school districts and states throughout the country. This information — including student names, addresses, grades, test scores, economic, race, special education status, disciplinary status and more — was to be stored on a data cloud run by Amazon.com, with an operating system by Wireless/Amplify, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. InBloom Inc. planned to share this highly sensitive information with software companies and other for-profit vendors.

Leonie Haimson, InBloom and the need to protect student privacy

Just when you thought you had enough, the district is spending more money on more standardized tests. The Seattle Public School district wants to buy Amplify’s mClass Beacon to implement it district-wide in 2016. It is to be administered at the end of the school year but because of the testing that is already set into place, there is no time for students to take it in May or June so it will be given in February.

The cost of the pilot program implemented in 50 schools in 2014 came just under $250k. That is under the $250,000 threshold required for approval by the Seattle school board. Coincidence? I think not. This was the same tactic used when folks at the Stanford Center decided we needed more of the MAP test. The school board and public were not given the opportunity to discuss, debate or vote on either battery of tests.

Now the district wants to implement Amplify across the district at an estimated cost of $433,160.

Unfortunately there are those at the Stanford Center who have different agendas from that of the public’s best interest, but more on that later.

I asked Leonie Haimson with NPE, who is a founding member of Parents Across America and who also founded Class Size Matters, recently about Amplify. It was to be a part of a data collection and sharing system in New York State called in-Bloom until parents pressured the state to pull out of the agreement.

In Leonie Haimson’s post InBloom and the need to protect student privacy:

The backers of inBloom pitched the project as an effort to help students by providing more personalized learning tools, yet there are no proven benefits to online learning and there are huge risks involved in commercializing this data and storing it on a Just when you thought you had enough, the Seattle Public School district bought another standardized test, Amplify | Seattle Education:

The CPS No-Bid Investigation Spreads to CPEF, Once Chaired By Bruce Rauner | Chicago magazine | Felsenthal Files April 2015

The CPS No-Bid Investigation Spreads to CPEF, Once Chaired By Bruce Rauner | Chicago magazine | Felsenthal Files April 2015:

The CPS No-Bid Investigation Spreads to CPEF, Once Chaired By Bruce Rauner

The principal-training consultants who received the $20 million contract, the focus of a federal investigation, got seed funding from the Chicago Public Education Fund—whose board is a who’s-who of Chicago power brokers.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett is facing scrutiny for a $20.5 million contracted awarded to SUPES Academy, which previously received money from the Chicago Public Education Fund.

When I was writing a profile of Bruce Rauner last summer, his friends and admirers gushed over his dedication to creating and nurturing charters and improving Chicago Public Schools. CPEF—the Chicago Public Education Fund—came up time again as the nonprofit that allowed Rauner, who joined CPEF’s board in 2001, served as CPEF chairman, and is now an emeritus member, to pursue his passion for education reform. CPEF board member Susan Crown told me that the future governor was “incredibly dedicated to CPEF. Put everything he had into it.”

Now CPEF has been drawn into the latest CPS controversy—one that goes straight to the top.

The focus in early reporting from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times was on Rahm Emanuel-appointed CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s office regarding a no-bid $20.5 million contract awarded in June 2013 to a Wilmette-based for-profit company called SUPES Academy. Hardly a household name, SUPES was hired to provide training to CPS principals.

What made the story so damaging to “B-Three,” as Rahm calls Byrd-Bennett, is that until she joined CPS as a coach and a consultant in 2012, quickly becoming CPS’s Chief Education Officer and then CEO, BBB had worked for SUPES. According to Sarah Karp, who writes for Catalyst, an education watchdog, BBB was still listed as working as a senior associate for a superintendent search firm called PROACT Search—with the same ownership as SUPES—four months after joining CPS. (BBB denied at the time that she had ever workeded for PROACT.)

Why fund an obscure for-profit firm when the city is so rich in universities, several of which have programs to train principals?

Issued so far are subpoenas for grand jury appearances to aides close to BBB—three of whom she had worked with previously in other cities and brought to Chicago for six-figure jobs—seeking records pertaining to “financial benefits, gifts, honoraria, meals and reimbursements” from SUPES.

Over the last few days came reports that CPEF—its board loaded with wealthy friends and donors to both Rahm Emanuel and Rauner, and also with advocates of charter schools and Teach For America, both targets of the Chicago Teachers Union—was also in the headlights. The feds demanded CPS records pertaining to CPEF, which according to the Tribunehad provided the “seed money” to “launch” the SUPES training program for principals, called  Chicago Executive Leadership Academy (CELA).

Were there better options than SUPES?

Why CPEF funded SUPES is, at this point, anyone’s guess. True, one of CPEF’s published goals is to create better principals through training. “Everyone [at CPEF],” Susan Crown told me, “is interested in quality principals and how to get better leadership.” CPEF’s website describes its goal as “build[ing] a critical mass of great public schools in Chicago by investing in talented principals.”

But there should have been some warning flags about SUPES, not only BBB’s prior relationship with the company (which was no secret) but also the background of one of the company’s owners, Gary Solomon. A former dean and teacher at Niles West, Solomon, the Tribune reported in 2001, accepted a settlement with Niles Township High School District 219 after being “accused of sending sexually explicit e-mail messages to female students before he left his position in 1999.” The $50,000 settlement included the stipulation that Solomon could never again work in the District.

Solomon aside—he denied the allegations and was never criminally charged—why fund an obscure for-profit firm when the city is so rich in universities, several of which have programs to train principals?

Had anyone at CPS or CPEF ever heard of the University of Illinois or the University of Chicago? Catalyst’s Sarah Karp quotes UIC professor Steven The CPS No-Bid Investigation Spreads to CPEF, Once Chaired By Bruce Rauner | Chicago magazine | Felsenthal Files April 2015: