Find Your Opt Out Group in FL | The Opt Out Florida Network

Find Your Opt Out Group in FL | The Opt Out Florida Network:

Find Your Opt Out Group in FL

Find Your Opt Out Group in FL | The Opt Out Florida Network:

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Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Diagnosing Rahm Emanuel: Does he have 'affluenza'?

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Diagnosing Rahm Emanuel: Does he have 'affluenza'?:

Diagnosing Rahm Emanuel: Does he have 'affluenza'?

No citizen is a second-class citizen in the city of Chicago. If my children are treated one way, every child is treated the same way. -- Rahm's tearful apologia

Don Rose, a long-time activist/critic/observer of the Chicago political scene, thinks Rahm Emanuel is suffering from some kind of learning disability.

I’m not saying he is dumb, but rather what we used to call a “slow learner.” He just doesn’t get things as quickly and easily as most folks. It’s also possible that he suffers from the fashionable malady called adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)–though I’m not qualified to make a clinical diagnosis.

 Instead of condemning Emanuel, perhaps he deserves our compassion and pity as a slow learner and possible ADHD patient. At Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Diagnosing Rahm Emanuel: Does he have 'affluenza'?:

Holiday Retailers Staffed with NC Teachers / Public News Service

Holiday Retailers Staffed with NC Teachers / Public News Service:

Holiday Retailers Staffed with NC Teachers

RALEIGH, N. C. – During your holiday shopping, you may have bumped into your child's teacher working in a seasonal retail job. According to many teachers, in most cases it's not just to earn mad money or take advantage of an employee discount. The average teacher's salary in North Carolina is slightly more than $45,000 a year, with some making as little as $30,000. Christina Burchette, a science teacher at a North Carolina school, said she has to work at a retail job to pay her bills. "I'd love to spend more time doing things for my students – spend more time tutoring them, spend more time on lesson plans and things like that," Burchette said. "But I'm not able to, because I do have to work a second job in order to pay my bills." Beginning teachers recently received a small pay raise, but many others got a one-time $750 bonus in lieu of a 2 percent pay raise. This year, the state had a $400 million surplus. North Carolina now ranks 47th nationwide when it comes to teacher pay. Burchette says while many citizens claim to value the state's teachers, few people are willing to fight for action. "I have a Master's degree and I don't feel like I should have a second or third job with that, if it's something that North Carolina, or our country, really values," she said. According to the state Department of Public Instruction, the teacher turnover rate for last school year was almost 15 percent. That's up for 11 percent in the 2010-2011 school year - See more at: http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2015-12-24/education/holiday-retailers-staffed-with-nc-teachers/a49601-1#sthash.gYDgmDij.dpuf

The Best Way To Honor Tamir Rice is by Reforming Our Broken Justice System | gadflyonthewallblog

The Best Way To Honor Tamir Rice is by Reforming Our Broken Justice System | gadflyonthewallblog:

The Best Way To Honor Tamir Rice is by Reforming Our Broken Justice System

Michael Brown – no indictment.

Eric Garner – no indictment.

Sandra Bland – no indictment.

And now Tamir Rice.

How many times will our justice system refuse to charge police with killing unarmed black people?

What will it take for our courts to accept the responsibility for at least attempting to seek justice?

When will our judicial system deem the death of people of color at the hands of law enforcement to at least be worthy of a trial?

Brown had no weapon but was shot to death by law enforcement.

Garner had no weapon but was choked to death by police.

Bland had no weapon but was found hanged in her jail cell after being assaulted by police during a traffic stop.

Rice had a legal pellet gun that was not pointed at anyone yet he was shot to deathtwo seconds after police arrived.

This is not justice. This is a national travesty that continues to be played out daily. How many more human beings will be ground under the boot of a system that finds The Best Way To Honor Tamir Rice is by Reforming Our Broken Justice System | gadflyonthewallblog:

Ed Reform Groundhog Day | Save Maine Schools

Ed Reform Groundhog Day | Save Maine Schools:

Ed Reform Groundhog Day

During a conversation about education reform at a holiday party I attended last week, a long-time high school teacher said to me, “You’ll see as you get more years of experience.  You start to feel like: haven’t we seen this already?”

I laughed and said it’s like that cliché you always hear about insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

When it comes to ed reform, of course, it’s really not a cliché. It’s par for the course.

Check out the quote below, and see if you can guess the year it was written:

 …schools will offer a common core of learning and, at the same time, provide diversity and choice. In short, individualized education implies the personalization of the entire educational process.

If you guessed 1974, you were right.

This was written by Robert G. Scanlon, former Pennsylvania Education Secretary, in an article called: “A Curriculum for Personalized Education.”

Recently, with endorsements and investments from Mark Zuckerberg, the U.S. Department of Education, and members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, personalized learning has been heralded as the latest, greatest “innovation” to hit our reform-battered schools.

But a close look into the internet archives of educational history reveals that there is nothing innovative about this idea at all.

In “A Curriculum for Personalized Education,” Scanlon describes a curriculum that “permits student mastery of instructional content at individual learning rates,” “encourage[s] student evaluation of progress toward mastery,” and includes “a variety of paths for mastery of any given objective.”

Flash forward forty years to a portion of a documentpublished by the Gates Foundation titled “Proficiency-Based Pathways”:

“Learning solutions—units, courses, and subjects—should have 

Ed Reform Groundhog Day | Save Maine Schools:

Schools Matter: Guest Post: Pennsylvania is failing Philly's schools – so, close the schools?

Schools Matter: Guest Post: Pennsylvania is failing Philly's schools – so, close the schools?:

Guest Post: Pennsylvania is failing Philly's schools – so, close the schools?

Students walk the halls at De Burgos Elementary School. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

by Daun Kauffman
Daun Kauffman is  North Philadelphia public school teacher. This article is posted on his blog  LucidWitness.com


December 28, 2015
 
The Pennsylvania Senate's effort to amend the PA School Code (H.B. 530), is part of the backroom wrangling over our state budget.

Senate amendments to the bill require the state to directly take over or close five individual schools every year. This Senate incursion into education is a textbook example of aggression and obstruction with no advance intelligence, no input, from "frontline ground troops." So politicians with uninformed philosophies push more and more state bureaucracy into sectors where the state is ignorant and, in fact, failing.

It is impossible to continue silently enduring simplistic views of learning and teaching practice (by non-practitioners) and simplistic "solution pills" to "fix" or increase learning, which instead continue generating more and more collateral damage: academic damage, systemic damage, financial damage, social damage, personal damage, and more.

Newsflash: There is no simplistic, quick fix, or someone would have done it long ago! In fact, Pennsylvania took over the School District of Philadelphia 15 years ago already! The state's record of academic decline, and their consistent record of Schools Matter: Guest Post: Pennsylvania is failing Philly's schools – so, close the schools?:

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Common Core Revealed: the Bad and the Ugly (Jury's out on the Good)

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Common Core Revealed: the Bad and the Ugly (Jury's out on the Good):

Common Core Revealed: the Bad and the Ugly (Jury's out on the Good)

Fortune Magazine

Fortune magazine has a special report that came out this week on Common Core -Business Gets Schooled. It provides a window into the thinking of big business and public education and folks, it is, by turns, sad and horrific.  This being Fortune, they kind of "tsk tsk" but more over the naviete of some (see Bill Gates) than what these titans of industry say about children and learning. 

Please - if you don't read the article, don't read my entire thread - scroll down to read what Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil has to say to you as parents about your children. (I'll highlight it in red.)

What's equally fascinating is that any dissent mentioned in the article by ordinary folks gets the "blogger moms" attitude with a complete brush-off of what noted education experts have said about CC.  It's like all the dissenters are just the anonymous, ignorant and unwashed masses.  You know, the little people.

They also chose to leave out who really wrote those standards (hint: it wasn't educators.)

The main takeaway from Fortune:

When Exxon Mobil, GE, Intel, and others pushed for the education standards, they incurred the wrath of Tea Party conservatives and got a painful lesson in modern politics. 

To CEOs, the issue has always been a no-brainer. In an increasingly global economy, what sense does it make for America to have 50 different sets of Seattle Schools Community Forum: Common Core Revealed: the Bad and the Ugly (Jury's out on the Good):



Seattle Schools Community Forum: Tuesday Open Thread http://bit.ly/1SkVZlq



A lot to catch up on so here we go.

The latest interactive map on our geographically challenged city is out fromSeattle’s Office of Emergency Management. Check your home, office and especially, your child's school.   This is not a scare tactic but to get people to think about and get prepared for a natural disaster in our area.

Uh oh, the Times is reporting that Washington is one of 12 states whose test-participation rate was lower than 95% and the state could face federal sanctions because of it.  Washington had about a 91% test rate, mostly because of high school juniors (grades 3-8 were fine.)  Among the sanctions, schools and districts have to prove a plan on how they will get those rates up. 

One of the districts with a high refusal rate was Seattle Public Schools, where 43 percent of juniors opted out of the English-language arts test, and 44 percent opted out of the math test. Other nearby districts had even higher rates — preliminary data showed more than three-quarters of juniors in the Bainbridge Island, Issaquah, Enumclaw and Snoqualmie Valley school districts refused to take the tests.

First Lady Michelle Obama has launched a college resource website called BetterMakeRoom.org.  From ABC News:

BetterMakeRoom.org will be a place for students ages 14-19 to get information on such matters as signing up for the SAT and ACT exams, filling out federal financial aid forms and applying to college, aides said. Students will also be able to share stories about their goals, their progress and what’s inspiring them to go to college.

From Diverse - Issues in Higher Education - comes word of a "scorecard" for U.S. cities for working to improve education and life outcomes for black men and boys.   Oakland, Detroit and Washington, D.C. come out on top.  Seattle is in the bottom third.

Seattle's Red Tricycle blog has several ideas for New Year's Eve activities with kids.  Speaking of, here are "28 Pictures that prove 2015 wasn't a completely terrible year."  Very heart-warming - show the kids.

One other idea for a peaceful, clearing-of-the-mind activity for the new year - walk the Labyrinth at St. Mark's.  I've done this and it's quite the beautiful experience.  (I do not recommend this for kids unless they are able to be extra quiet and mindful of their surroundings and what other participants are trying to achieve.)

What's on your mind?http://bit.ly/1SkVZlq

Will Charter face Class Action Lawsuit? | Cloaking Inequity

Will Charter face Class Action Lawsuit? | Cloaking Inequity:

Will Charter face Class Action Lawsuit?

Will a prominent corporate charter school chain face a class action lawsuit for their alleged refusal to serve special education students?

I first blogged about BASIS in the post What BASIS?: Nepotism and aggrandizement in charters? At the time, I included Charter School Scandals uncovered special report about BASIS.

The first BASIS charter school was founded in Tucson in 1998 by Michael Block and Olga Block. BASIS is a rapidly grown charter school. Since my first BASIS blog post, they have doubled in size. In 2015, BASIS opened its 18th Arizona school in Goodyear, AZ.

Their Arizona campuses are located in:

BASIS Ahwatukee | Grades 4-12	2013
BASIS Goodyear | Grades K-8	2015
BASIS Chandler | Grades 5-12	2011
BASIS Chandler Primary North Campus | Grades K-4	2016
BASIS Chandler Primary South Campus | Grades K-4	2015
BASIS Flagstaff | Grades 4-12	2011
BASIS Mesa | Grades 4-12	2013
BASIS Oro Valley | Grades K-12	2010
BASIS Peoria | Grades 5-12	2011
BASIS Phoenix | Grades 5-12	2012
BASIS Phoenix Central | Grades K-8	2014
BASIS Prescott | Grades K-12	2014
BASIS Scottsdale | Grades 4-12	2003
BASIS Scottsdale Primary | Grades K-3	2015
BASIS Tucson Primary | Grades K-4	1998
BASIS Tucson North | Grades 5-12	2012

Their Texas campuses are located:

BTX SCHOOLS	Year Started
BASIS San Antonio Medical Center | Grades 5-11	2013
BASIS San Antonio North Central | Grades 5-10	2014

Their DC campus:

Washington, DC Schools Year Started BASIS Washington DC | Grades 5-11 2012

I wouldn’t doubt that they would like to locate near you. Currently they are scheduled to open in Louisiana, Illinois and Colorado.

I probably receive 5-7 comment about BASIS in my email box each week (Check out the 51 comments at the bottom of this post). Many are from parents and students who basically say “stupid” students don’t belong at BASIS. The purposeful attrition of students is one of the major issues with this particular corporate charter chain, but there are many other critiques. From Wikipedia:

Both BASIS schools and their parent organization have been the subject of criticism and controversy. Critics contend that BASIS is failing to provide adequate financial transparency and accountability as it uses for-profit management company.^[12] Another investigative article in 2010 questioned the founders’ salary compared to the teachers and other public school administrators.^[13]

Other critics take issue with BASIS’s accelerated curriculum and general educational philosophy. Some argue that BASIS focuses too much on standardized testing.^[14]Critics also point out that BASIS’s performance in national ranking systems like the U.S. News & World Report Will Charter face Class Action Lawsuit? | Cloaking Inequity:

Jersey Jazzman: Corporate Education Reform Gets a Stranglehold On the Media

Jersey Jazzman: Corporate Education Reform Gets a Stranglehold On the Media:

Corporate Education Reform Gets a Stranglehold On the Media

Fortune magazine as a big, new article about the Common Core State Standards out this week. I first got wind of it from Julie Borst, who was as stunned as I was at the hubris of this quote from Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson:

“I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.” 

The Exxon CEO didn’t hesitate to extend his analogy. “Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?” American schools, Tillerson declared, “have got to step up the performance level—or they’re basically turning out defective products that have no future. Unfortunately, the defective products are human beings. So it’s really serious. It’s tragic. But that’s where we find ourselves today.” [emphasis mine]

You read that right, folks: Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson thinks students are "products" that he gets to "consume." Any idea that the American education system might have a purpose other than producing human "products" for corporations is not even worth considering.

This is the sort of thinking that leads corporations like Exxon to have such regressive records on things like LGBT rights and workplace safety and climate change and environmental protections. It's the sort of thinking that justifies insanely low taxes on those same corporations. It's the sort of thinking that rationalizes salaries for their CEOs that are - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/12/corporate-education-reform-gets.html#sthash.UOKlRTxQ.dpuf