Campaign Finance Violations will follow Bronin (Win or Lose) - Wait What?

Campaign Finance Violations will follow Bronin (Win or Lose) - Wait What?:

Campaign Finance Violations will follow Bronin (Win or Lose)

Call it Pay-to-Play or Play and Pay…

Greenwich native and Hartford mayoral wannabee Luke Bronin has not only run the most expensive mayoral campaign in Connecticut history, but his campaign that has made a mockery of Connecticut’s Campaign Finance Laws.

Win or lose, Luke Bronin will be facing the State Elections Enforcement Commission to address his significant and far-reaching violations of the State’s laws about who can donate and how campaign donation’s must be reported.

As part of his unprecedented effort to buy the Hartford Mayor’s Office, Bronin and his political operation violated numerous provisions of the Connecticut’s election laws including the failure to properly disclose contributions from lobbyists and from companies and individuals who have contracts with the City of Hartford.

As Bronin’s campaign finance reports indicate, his campaign failed to accurately identify more than 80 percent of the lobbyists who donated to his campaign and well over 100 individuals who have contracts with the City of Hartford.

The reports suggest that Bonin and his campaign have also violated even more significant provisions of the law.

Any issues that have not already been raised in complaints to the State Elections Enforcement Commission will be included in a wrap-up complaint that will be filed with the state authority in the next couple of days.

Interestingly, while the breadth of campaign violations are obvious, the Hartford Court chose not to cover the issue at all.

The following are some of the Wait, What? posts about Bronin’s campaign, others can be found on the Blog;

Do I hear $170 a vote? Going Once, Going Twice, Sold to the man from Greenwich

Billionaires for Bronin

Bronin reports another $174,000 collected with seven days to go until Election Day

Once home to WFSB Channel 3 – the upscale apartment project is now a source of campaign donations for Luke Bronin.

And now Luke Bronin is collecting big bucks from developers of the Hartford Dunkin’ Donuts Stadium

Luke Bronin and his campaign know – Campaign Donation Limits are for Losers

Luke Bronin the “outsider” is looking more and more like an “insider” – the Carlos Lopez Story

Outside money turns Hartford Democratic Town Committee into a Luke Bronin slush fund

Campaign Finance Violations will follow Bronin (Win or Lose) - Wait What?:

This Week In Education: Campaign 2016: Standalone Education PACs - Is It Time?

This Week In Education: Campaign 2016: Standalone Education PACs - Is It Time?:

Campaign 2016: Standalone Education PACs - Is It Time?

I had the chance to chat for a few minutes yesterday afternoon with Naveed Amalfard, one of the co-founders of America's Teachers whose efforts have been written up recently in the LA Times among other places.

Describing the effort as a "a political startup," Amalfard laughs when asked and says "No, this is not a stunt." The organization is building a list of supporters, tolerating unsolicited queries like mine, and building out as much as it can given its two main heads are both still fulltime teachers. 

Funders aren't disclosed, but the organization's supporters include former DNC head Howard Dean and former Green Dot head Steve Barr.  The ultimate goal is to raise $1-2 million this cycle, says Amalfard.  According to this recent LA Times article, they've raised much less than that so far.

The question that everyone seems to want to know, says Amafard, is which side they're on. "I get asked this all the time. We take money from all sides."  But folks aren't entirely convinced, he says. They keep asking. "I know that it's literally unbelievable for some people, but we are not a proxy for anyone."

To be sure, the organization has picked three priorities (college costs, UPK, and the DREAM Act) that sidestep hot-button education reform items. "Let's solve these three issues first," he says. 

Meantime, the organization is legally prohibited from contact with the Clinton campaign it supports. He doesn't know if the campaign is even aware of its existence. He just wants his candidate to make education a central part of her agenda. A voter pledge drive is coming up later this month. Their inspirations are Democratic strategists David Plouffe and David Axelrod, according to Amalfard.

Other inspirations might be Lawrence Lessig, whose recently-shuttered presidential campaign was largely a vehicle to raise issues surrounding campaign finance, and DFER, the reform-minded Democratic organization created to use campaign contributions and other forms of political advocacy to pressure candidates. (Is there a PAC associated with the Badass Teachers, or with Diane Ravitch's NEPC, or United Opt Out? ) This Week In Education: Campaign 2016: Standalone Education PACs - Is It Time?:

Video: The Constitution and School Choice - Yahoo News

Video: The Constitution and School Choice - Yahoo News:

Video: The Constitution and School Choice

What do the U.S. and Pennsylvania Constitutions say about school choice, teacher tenure, standardized testing, and more? The National Constitution Center hosted three events on November 2 exploring these questions.

View photo

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If you would like to watch a video replay of the discussions, here are links to video along with a description of each event.

Event One: Education in Philadelphia

Mark Gleason of the Philadelphia School Partnership, Deborah Gordon Klehr of the Education Law Center, and Ina Lipman of the Children’s Scholarship Fund Philadelphia examine the state of Philadelphia public education, what an “equal education” in Philadelphia would look like, and their specific proposals for getting there. They also explain what, if anything, the Pennsylvania state constitution says about these questions, and how state government interacts with local government in setting education policy. Kristen Graham, education reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, moderates.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN4c5eT5wOY

Event Two: A Perspective from the Field

The keynote presentation features Dr. William R. Hite, Jr., Superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, who offers his perspective on the issues facing Philadelphia schools.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC3Z2H1lLDk

Event Three: Liberty and Equality in American Education

James Finberg of Altshuler Berzon and Joshua Lipshutz of Gibson Dunn—two attorneys involved in Vergara v. California, a landmark dispute over the legality of teacher retention policies—present the best arguments on both sides and discuss what’s next in the case. They also explain what the U.S. Constitution and major Supreme Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 say about education and our national debates. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the Center, moderates.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioLqoo00BMg

Video: The Constitution and School Choice - Yahoo News:

Bill Gates spent a fortune to build it. Now a Florida school system is getting rid of it. - The Washington Post

Bill Gates spent a fortune to build it. Now a Florida school system is getting rid of it. - The Washington Post:

Bill Gates spent a fortune to build it. Now a Florida school system is getting rid of it.

Here we go again. Another Bill Gates-funded education reform project, starting with mountains of cash and sky-high promises, is crashing to Earth.

This time it’s the Empowering Effective Teachers, an educator evaluation program in Hillsborough County, Florida, which was developed in 2009 with major financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A total of more than $180 million has been spent on the project since then  — with Gates initially promising some $100 million of it — but now, the district, one of the largest in the country, is ending the program.

Why?

Under the system, 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation would be based on student standardized test scores and the rest by observation from “peer evaluators.” It turned out that costs to maintain the program unexpectedly rose, forcing the district to spend millions of dollars more than it expected to spend. Furthermore, initial support among teachers waned, with teachers saying that they don’t think it accurately evaluated their effectiveness and that they could be too easily fired.

[Teacher: What it feels like to be evaluated on test scores of students I don’t have]

Now the new superintendent of schools in Hillsborough, Jeff Eakins, said in a missive sent to the evaluators and mentors  that he is moving to a different evaluation system,  according to this story in the Tampa Bay Times.  It says:

Unlike the complex system of evaluations and teacher encouragement that cost more than $100 million to develop and would have cost an estimated $52 million a year to sustain, Hillsborough will likely move to a structure that has the strongest teachers helping others at their schools.

Eakins said he envisions a new program featuring less judgmental “non-evaluative feedback” from colleagues and more “job-embedded professional development,” which is training undertaken in the classroom during the teacher work day rather than in special sessions requiring time away from school. He said in his letter that these elements were supported by “the latest research.”

Gates, the biggest education philanthropist in the country, has been through this before.

In 2000, he began investing in education reform through his foundation. By Bill Gates spent a fortune to build it. Now a Florida school system is getting rid of it. - The Washington Post:

Colorado School District Immersed In Political Turmoil Amid Recall

Colorado School District Immersed In Political Turmoil Amid Recall:

Colorado School District Immersed In Political Turmoil Amid Recall

"I think we are a harbinger of education reform, what can persist and succeed and what cannot."

Protesting students Adriana Gonzales, right, and Andrea Colmenero march against a Jefferson County School Board proposal to emphasize patriotism and downplay civil unrest in the teaching of U.S. history on Monday, Sept. 29, 2014. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

DENVER (AP) -- Angry parents and educators in a Colorado battleground county are trying to recall three conservative school board members Tuesday, citing several complaints, including a change in how teachers get pay raises and talk of reviewing the history curriculum to promote patriotism.

The idea prompted students to walk out of class and protest in the streets last year. Teachers staged sick-outs, the Jefferson County district claimed.

The board members facing recalls cruised to victory in 2013, but their arrival quickly caused a stir. The superintendent of the school district, Cindy Stevenson, left days after their election, saying she felt disrespected by them and couldn't do her job anymore.

Then came a decision to tie teacher pay increases to performance rather than seniority, and accusations that the three conservatives on the five-member board were meeting privately before scheduled meetings. Ken Witt, Julie Williams and John Newkirk have repeatedly denied holding secret meetings.

While school-board spats typically are confined locally, these recall efforts have attracted spending from special-interest groups in a battle over what education reform should look like. It's no surprise the setting for that question is Jefferson County, a politically diverse swing district where rural, mountain, and urban communities mingle.

"I think we are a harbinger of education reform, what can persist and succeed and what cannot," said Witt, the board's president.

Jefferson County, which has Colorado's second largest school district, drew national attention when the conservative-led majority considered reviewing a new Advanced Placement U.S. history curriculum to emphasize patriotism.

Ultimately, the board didn't do anything with the AP history class, an elective course that has been criticized by the Republican National Committee and the Texas State Board of Education. The course gives greater attention to the history of North America and its native people before colonization and their clashes with Europeans.

But the board members insist it's their duty to periodically look at curriculum, and that the Colorado School District Immersed In Political Turmoil Amid Recall:

Here’s why $7 billion didn’t help America’s worst schools - POLITICO

Here’s why $7 billion didn’t help America’s worst schools - POLITICO:

Here’s why $7 billion didn’t help America’s worst schools

What two troubled high schools tell us about why the government got so little for so much money.

In 2009, the Obama administration saw a chance to tackle a problem that had bedeviled educators for decades.

“Our goal is to turn around the 5,000 lowest-performing schools over the next five years, as part of our overall strategy for dramatically reducing the dropout rate, improving high school graduation rates and increasing the number of students who graduate prepared for success in college and the workplace,” said Arne Duncan, the administration’s new secretary of education in August of that year.

 The administration pumped $3 billion of economic stimulus money into the School Improvement Grants program. Six years later, the program has failed to produce the dramatic results the administration had hoped to achieve. About two thirds of SIG schools nationwide made modest or no gains — not much different from similarly bad schools that got no money at all. About a third of the schools actually got worse.

Even Duncan acknowledges the progress has been “incremental.”

School turnaround is “hard, but it’s not rocket science,” said Sarah Yatsko, a senior research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “We know a lot about what an effective turnaround strategy looks like.”

But then why has the SIG program, created in 2007 under President George W. Bush, produced such uneven results at a total cost of about $7 billion?

A comparison by POLITICO of two troubled high schools — one in Miami and one in Chicago — both of which received millions in SIG funds, both of which followed a similar turnaround strategy, reveals that education officials at the federal, state and local levels paid too little attention to a key variable for success. One school made impressive gains, rebounding in three years from an “F” rating to a “B.” At the other, less than 10 percent of juniors are proficient at reading, math and science — the same level as before the grant.

The difference between the schools was in their readiness to make use of the sudden infusion of money. In Miami, school district officials had prepared for the grants. They had the support of teachers, unions and parents. In Chicago, where teachers fought the program and officials changed almost yearly, schools churned through millions of dollars but didn’t budge the needle.

Now, the Department of Education is preparing for another multi-million grant competition. But interviews by POLITICO with nearly two dozen analysts, teachers, administrators and policymakers, who have studied the performance of SIG schools, raise questions about whether any of the changes ordered by the Department of Education or Congress will actually yield better results for the

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/failing-schools-education-white-house-214332#ixzz3qRZ5jkoF

Gulen charter school network: Overseas Junkets And Charter Schools – Part Two

Politicians, Overseas Junkets And Charter Schools – Part Two:

Politicians, Overseas Junkets And Charter Schools – Part Two

Readers of Friday’s edition of USA Today found out about an issue thatPlunderbund readers have known about for some time.  It’s nice to know that more folks are now in the loop.

The story,   “Turkish Faith Movement Secretly Funded 200 Trips for Lawmakers and Staff,” details the efforts of the Gulen Movement to provide Members of Congress and their staffs with free trips to Turkey that are of questionable legality, based upon U.S. House Ethics Committee rules.  The term Gulen Movement  describes a number of organizations that follow the teachings of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric and Turkish exile who lives in relative seclusion in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

An examination of the USA Today article offers some interesting tidbits of information. In addition to the “secretly funded” trips in the headline, readers were told about “$800,000 in free travel for lawmakers,” “the movement’s … funding hundreds of Islamic schools, and think tanks and media outlets,” and that at least one Gulenist organization “provided gifts in the form of impermissible travel expenses to congressional travelers in violation of House rules and regulations.”

If all of this wasn’t enough, there is this:

“The movement has founded hundreds of charter schools across the United States  and across the world, has its own media organizations, and was deeply entrenched with the Turkish regime until a falling out two years ago. That led President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to declare Gulen was running “a parallel state” inside the country with the intent of undermining the government.”

Whether or not Fethullah Gulen is indeed running a parallel government in his native land, there seems to be no question that he and his followers are establishing a “parallel” system of “public” charter schools in the United States, with one source listing 139 schools in operation in 2014.  Among these charter schools are 19 in Ohio that are administered under the Horizon and Noble Academy brands.

While the extent of the Gulen charter school network is relatively well-known, the USA Today article does shed more light on the proclivity of such allied groups to influence federal public policy by inviting so many lawmakers to Politicians, Overseas Junkets And Charter Schools – Part Two:

A Change in Leadership on K-12 for the Gates Foundation, But Not Direction - Inside Philanthropy

A Change in Leadership on K-12 for the Gates Foundation, But Not Direction - Inside Philanthropy: Fundraising Intelligence - Inside Philanthropy:

A Change in Leadership on K-12 for the Gates Foundation, But Not Direction

The U.S. Department of Education is not the only big player in K-12 policy undergoing a change of leadership.

Vicki Phillips announced recently that she would step down from her position as head of the K-12 program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the end of 2015. Phillips has been with the funder since 2007, occupying one of the most powerful positions in education philanthropy. Her appointment marked the funder's shift away from a focus on smaller high schools to an emphasis on instruction and teacher quality.

"The baton was passed to me eight years ago," Phillips wrote in a letter announcing her resignation. "I have been honored to run my leg, and I am ready to hand the baton forward to the next leader." Phillips' announcement comes only a few weeks after Arne Duncan announced his resignation as U.S. Secretary of Education. Duncan, appointed to the post by President Obama in 2009, plans to return to Chicago to spend more time with his family.

Tasked with identifying a strategic lever for improving U.S. education, Phillips and her team at Gates concluded that despite a mountain of evidence that teachers played the most crucial in-school role in driving student achievement, little research existed on how to identify the best teachers. That led to the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, a multi-year study that used videotaped observations, surveys, and extensive academic data to identify the measures most associated with effective teaching. Since beginning MET in 2009, Gates has spent an estimated $900 million on grantmaking in the area of teacher effectiveness, according to Education Week.

It was under Phillips' leadership that Gates embarked on another ambitious endeavor: underwriting the development of the Common Core State Standards in reading and math, which have since been adopted by more than 40 states and the District of Columbia.

Both initiatives have attracted their share of controversy. Teachers' unions opposed tying standardized test scores to teacher evaluations, while the A Change in Leadership on K-12 for the Gates Foundation, But Not Direction - Inside Philanthropy: Fundraising Intelligence - Inside Philanthropy:

Germany’s Approach to School Reform: Standards and Testing Without Any Penalties - The Atlantic

Germany’s Approach to School Reform: Standards and Testing Without Any Penalties - The Atlantic:

The Great German School Turnaround

The European country managed to raise test scores while reducing educational inequality. But with the dramatic influx of migrants, will its success last?

To make a good national school system, a country needs to help its most disadvantaged students. So says Andreas Schleicher, the man in charge of the most authoritative international test. “It’s the capacity of those systems to invest in those students from disadvantaged backgrounds” says Schleicher, the education director for the OECD, which administers the triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) among its roughly three dozen member countries. “What those education systems do is attract the best teachers and best principals to most challenging classrooms and schools.” Moreover, he notes, “reducing inequality is not just a social imperative but an economic imperative.”

While U.S. students have scored in the bottom half of nations on the PISA and have made no significant gains over 10 years, Germany—Schleicher’s home country—has managed to increase test scores while decreasing inequality in its school system. In fact, Germany was one of just three countries surveyed by the OECD that reduced inequality while raising math scores between 2003 to 2012, the other two being Mexico and Turkey.

And Germany has, notably, made these strides without closing or threatening to cut funding from its poorest-performing schools—a tactic used by the United States during the same time period. Germany now ranks 20th for math proficiency; the U.S., meanwhile, is 49th, just behind Turkey. (Some critics question the validity of PISA scores as a tool for gauging proficiency, but they offer the only reliable and consistent means of comparing achievement across countries.)

Germany’s reform efforts included the creation of national standards and standards-based tests for students in grades three and eight, which sounds much like the U.S. approach. But unlike the U.S., Germany doesn’t penalize schools for poor performance, nor does it publicize school-level test scores. Experts say its focus instead on providing school-based support and monitoring and targeting Germany’s Approach to School Reform: Standards and Testing Without Any Penalties - The Atlantic:

Jesse Hagopian: Rolling back the testing mania?

Rolling back the testing mania? | SocialistWorker.org:

Rolling back the testing mania?

In an article written for Diane Ravitch's blog, Jesse Hagopian, a teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle and editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing, responds to the Obama administration's recent announcement that "unnecessary testing" has gotten out of control.

Still from Barack Obama's video statement on over-testing (White House)

IN A stunning turn of events, President Barack Obama announced that "unnecessary testing" is "consuming too much instructional time" and creating "undue stress for educators and students." Rarely has a president so thoroughly repudiated such a defining aspect of his own public education policy. In a three-minute video announcing this reversal, Obama cracks jokes about how silly it is to over-test students, and recalls that the teachers who had the most influence on his life were not the ones who prepared him best for his standardized tests. Perhaps Obama hopes we will forget it was his own former Education Secretary Arne Duncan who radically reorganized America's education system around the almighty test score.

Obama's statement comes in the wake of yet another study revealing the overwhelming number of standardized tests children are forced to take: The average student today is subjected to 112 standardized tests between preschool and high school graduation. Because it's what we have rewarded and required, America's education system has become completely fixated on how well students perform on tests. Further, the highest concentration of these tests are in schools serving low-income students and students of color.

To be sure, Obama isn't the only president to menace the education system with high-stakes exams. This thoroughly bipartisan project was enabled by George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB became law in 2002 with overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Obama, instead of erasing the wrong answer choice of NCLB's test-and-punish policy, decided to press ahead. Like a student filling in her entire Scantron sheet with answer choice "D," Duncan's erroneous Race to the Top initiative was the incorrect solution for students. It did, however, make four corporations rich by assigning their tests as the law of the land. Desperate school districts, ravaged by the Great Recession, eagerly sought Race to the Top points by promulgating more and more tests.

The cry of the parents, students, educators and other stewards of education was loud and sorrowful as Obama moved to reduce the intellectual and emotional process of teaching and learning to a single score--one that would be used to close schools, fire teachers and deny students promotion or graduation. Take, for instance, this essay penned by Diane Ravitch in 2010. She countered Obama's claim that Race to the Top was his most important accomplishment:

[RttT] will make the current standardized tests of basic skills more important than ever, and even more time and resources will be devoted to raising scores on these tests. The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind, because of the link between wages and scores. There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHAT RAVITCH warned us about has come to pass, and Obama has now admitted as much without fully admitting to his direct role in promoting the tests. Duncan and Obama, with funding from the Gates Foundation, coupled Race to the Top with Common Core State Standards and the high-stakes tests that came shrink wrapped with them. Together, these policies have orchestrated a radical seizure of power by what I call the Rolling back the testing mania? | SocialistWorker.org:

Financial Woes Plague Common-Core Rollout - WSJ

Financial Woes Plague Common-Core Rollout - WSJ:

Financial Woes Plague Common-Core Rollout

After 45 states adopt educational standards, many have second thoughts

EDMOND, Okla.—Educators in this Oklahoma City suburb jumped into action when state leaders in 2010 adopted the Common Core academic standards that were sweeping states across the country.

The Edmond school district has a big military population that moves frequently, so officials liked the idea of using the same standards as other states. They also saw Oklahoma’s old standards as inferior. They spent about $500,000 preparing teachers and students, collaborating with educators in other states and buying materials and computers for a new Common Core test, finishing a year in advance.

Then state politicians backtracked, for reasons both financial and political. They dropped plans to give the new test, and during an election campaign in which the standards were hotly debated, they repealed Common Core. Edmond employees came in at the end of the summer last year to rewrite their curriculum again.

“The cost for me in time and training was phenomenally huge,” says Tara Fair, Edmond’s associate superintendent. “That’s one of the things that made me really sick when we went back to the old standards.”

Five years into the biggest transformation of U.S. public education in recent history, Common Core is far from common. Though 45 states initially adopted the shared academic standards in English and math, seven have since repealed or amended them. Among the remaining 38, big disparities remain in what and how students are taught, the materials and technology they use, the preparation of teachers and the tests they are given. A dozen more states are considering revising or abandoning Common Core.

One reason is that Common Core became a hypercharged political issue, with grass-roots movements pressing elected leaders to back off. Some conservatives saw the shared standards as a federal intrusion into state matters, in part because the Obama administration provided grant funding. Some liberals and conservatives decried what they saw as excessive testing and convoluted teaching materials. The standards are a hot topic in the Republican presidential race. Last month, Barack Obama recommendedlimiting the amount of class time students spend on testing, saying excessive testing “takes the joy out of teaching and learning.”

Money trouble

But politics isn’t the only reason for the turmoil. Many school districts discovered they didn’t have enough money to do all they needed to do. Some also found that meeting deadlines to implement the standards was nearly impossible.

The total cost of implementing Common Core is difficult to determine because the country’s education spending is fragmented among thousands of districts. The Wall Financial Woes Plague Common-Core Rollout - WSJ:

Obama’s regret: “Taking the joy out of teaching and learning” | Seattle Education

Obama’s regret: “Taking the joy out of teaching and learning” | Seattle Education:

Obama’s regret: “Taking the joy out of teaching and learning”

Obama’s call to reduce testing to 2% of the school year still requires students to take standardized tests for an outlandish twenty-four hours.  And it isn’t even all the time directly spent taking the tests that’s the biggest problem.

The real shame, which Obama never addressed, is that as long as there are high-stakes attached to the standardized tests, test prep activities will continue to dominate instructional time.

By Seattle’s own Jesse Hagopian

Obama regrets “taking the joy out of teaching and learning” with too much testing

In a stunning turn of events, President Obama announced last weekend that “unnecessary testing” is “consuming too much instructional time” and creating “undue stress for educators and students.” Rarely has a president so thoroughly repudiated such a defining aspect of his own public education policy.  In a three-minute video announcing this reversal, Obama cracks jokes about how silly it is to over-test students, and recalls that the teachers who had the most influence on his life were not the ones who prepared him best for his standardized tests. Perhaps Obama hopes we will forget it was his own Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, who radically reorganized America’s education system around the almighty test score.

Obama’s statement comes in the wake of yet another study revealing the overwhelming number of standardized tests children are forced to take: The average student today is subjected to 112 standardized tests between preschool and high school graduation. Because it’s what we have rewarded and required, America’s education system has become completely fixated on how well students perform on tests. Further, the highest concentration of these tests are in schools serving low-income students and students of color.

To be sure, Obama isn’t the only president to menace the education system with high-stakes exams.  This thoroughly bi-partisan project was enabled by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB became law in 2002 with overwhelming support from Obama’s regret: “Taking the joy out of teaching and learning” | Seattle Education:

Teachers For Social Justice: ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOL BOARD—THIS IS OUR MOMENT!

Teachers For Social Justice: ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOL BOARD—THIS IS OUR MOMENT!:

ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOL BOARD—THIS IS OUR MOMENT!

UPDATE! ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD—

THIS IS OUR MOMENT!

This is a game changer. 

The popularity of an elected representative school board in Chicago (2 advisory referendums with close to 90% of voters in favor) and CPS’s chaos and damaging policies have spurred the Democrats to introduce House Bill 4268 to end mayoral control and give Chicagoans the same right as every other Illinois school district to elect our school board. HB 4268l has 5 chief sponsors in the Illinois General Assembly; 50 State Reps have signed on. We are beginning work with the State Senate. This is OUR BILL (school bd members elected from geographic districts representative of Chicago’s majority Black and Latino voters). Grassroots Education Movement (GEM—city-wide coalition of community orgs, parent orgs, TSJ, CTU) is working closely with Rep. Martwick who is chairing the ERSB task force.  We need a veto-proof majority in the Assembly (71 votes) and comparable in the Senate.

WE CAN GET THIS BILL PASSED SPRING 2016! WE need to mobilize to make sure it happens. 

WHAT WE NEED TO DO:

* attend town hall meetings across the city to show support and make sure the elected officials follow through (see schedule below. Sign up to testify in favor. MAIN THING TO DO NOW.

*hang a window sign at your house and work and distribute window signs (coming soon) 

*help with phone baking (just one hour makes a difference)

*participate in a door-door canvas to mobilize support

*contact your elected official to ask if they are supporting. Thank them or tell them to get on board.   

*come out to mass rallies in Chicago and Springfield when we need to demonstrate mass support 

*donate to our crowdfund campaign for a lawsuit for an elected school board https://rally.org/ChiElectSchoolBoard

Email teachersforjustice@hotmail.com to let us know how you will be involved. Check TSJ website for updates.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Elected Representative School Board

Legislator Town Hall MeetingsTeachers For Social Justice: ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOL BOARD—THIS IS OUR MOMENT!:

Teachers For Social Justice: ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOL BOARD—THIS IS OUR MOMENT!:

Will we get more testing status quo from Presidential Candidates? — NAACP Now

Will we get more testing status quo from Presidential Candidates? — NAACP Now — Medium:

Will we get more testing status quo from Presidential Candidates?

Many were recently disappointed by the lack of conversation about K-12 education in the recent Democratic debate in Las Vegas. The Progressive Magazine asked me to reflect on the dearth of coverage. I wrote.

The recent Democratic Party presidential debate in Las Vegas left many observers scratching their heads. Why did the candidates and their CNN hosts ignore K-12 education?

Is education not important enough to merit discussion as a top national priority in 2016? The public clearly cares about education. US News reportsthat education is the third ranked search term on Google. When Gallup askedan open-ended question on the most important issues to voters in the 2016 campaign, education came in sixth.

We know that education is important to the public. What issues do voters identify as most important? A recentpoll found that “less testing” was tied with “parental involvement” for the most important issue.

High-stakes tests came to the nation with the passage of No Child Left Behind during the presidency of George W. Bush. The tests were framed as education reform. However, high-stakes tests were born in China to sort and stratify society. Thus, high-stakes testing is not a new educational reform. China has used tests to sort their society for more than 1500 years!

Closer to home, for about 100 years, high-stakes tests have been used to sort and track students in the United States. Tests were spurred early on by the racist Eugenics movement. The Seattle NAACP recently quoted W.E.B Du Bois, Co-founder of the NAACP

It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [first] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, Will we get more testing status quo from Presidential Candidates? — NAACP Now — Medium: