Ed. Dept. Outlines ESSA Transition on Tutoring, School Choice, Teachers - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Ed. Dept. Outlines ESSA Transition on Tutoring, School Choice, Teachers - Politics K-12 - Education Week:
Ed. Dept. Outlines ESSA Transition on Tutoring, School Choice, Teachers

The Every Student Succeeds Act may be an honest-to-goodness law, but it won't be fully in place until the 2017-18 school year, when we'll have a new president and secretary of education.

Between now and then, the feds, states, and school districts are in a sort of no-man's land between the previous version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, plus the Obama administration's waivers and ESSA.

ESSA will make the waivers null and void on August 1 of this year, making the 2016-17 school year a time of big transition. 

So how will that work? The U.S. Department of Education already gave states some specifics, and Thursday, they put out some more detailed information.

Some highlights of the latest guidance:

Choice and Tutoring for States Without Waivers

States that don't have waivers from the NCLB law (including California) have been asking the department if their districts will still need to set aside 20 percent of their Title I money for tutoring and school choice, for schools that don't meet achievement targets. The short answer: Nope, they won't have to do that anymore. 

Instead, non-waiver states will have a choice. They can either a) stick with tutoring and school choice, or b) come up with another plan that targets schools that have missed achievement targets for multiple years. If they go with Option B they don't have to set aside 20 percent  of their Title I funds for tutoring and school choice.

That piece of guidance affects just the eight states that don't have waivers from the NCLB law: California, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Washington, Wyoming, and Vermont. Those states can look forward to additional guidance from the department on how to craft their interim plans.

Teachers

States no longer have to continue to ensure that teachers meet NCLB's "highly qualified" definition (which calls for teachers to have a bachelor's degree and state certification in the subject they're teaching). That makes sense because ESSA gets rid of the requirement anyway. But importantly, states will still be expected to implement the plans for equitable teacher distribution that they submitted earlier this year. Many of those plans rely partly on HQT, but also other factors, including teacher effectiveness.

School ImprovementEd. Dept. Outlines ESSA Transition on Tutoring, School Choice, Teachers - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

As Scandals Plague Charter Schools, Calls for Oversight Grow - Yahoo News

As Scandals Plague Charter Schools, Calls for Oversight Grow - Yahoo News:

As Scandals Plague Charter Schools, Calls for Oversight Grow

Allegations of fiscal mismanagement at a now-defunct charter school in Kansas City. Questions in New Orleans about how taxpayer dollars are allocated and spent at charters. Sweetheart dealsamong charter officials in Rochester, New York, and charges that a flagship New York City charter is kicking out students who need the most help.  

Once hailed as a solution for struggling public schools—and still a favorite, education reform advocates, ambitious politicians, investment bankers, and some parents—charter schools from New York to New Orleans have made for ugly headlines recently, bad news that trails behind the industry like the tail of a high-flying kite.  

RELATED: Boot Camp or School? Critics Worry Charters for Minority Kids Are Too Militant

Given other longstanding problems, including charges of de facto segregation and accusations that charters cherry-pick the best students for more favorable test scores, some public school advocates are asking whether it’s time for increased oversight of charter schools. It’s an ironic idea, given that freedom from bureaucracy was a founding principle of the charter movement. And some education experts say provisions in the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act are a step in that direction.

Charter school advocates “argued for removing many if not most of the rules and regulations around schools because they saw those as unnecessary impositions,” that hindered academic performance, explains Christopher Lubienski, a professor at the University of Illinois.

When the movement launched nearly 20 years ago, charter school advocates envisioned publicly funded schools run by independent organizations, particularly in poor and underserved districts, where teachers would be encouraged to innovate in the classroom without asking permission from state or local education authorities. “But, as the saying goes, you might not want to tear down a fence until you know the reason why it was put up,” explains Lubienski.

According to a report released last year from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a nonprofit advocacy group, more than 6,700 public charter schools enrolled about 2.9 million students nationwide during the 2014-2015 school year. But although 500 new charter schools opened that school year, 200 also closed their doors.

“These schools closed for a variety of reasons, including low enrollment, financial concerns, and low academic performance. The public charter school model gives charters the freedom to be more innovative while being held accountable for improving student achievement,” wrote the report’s authors. “Charter schools that do not meet the needs of its students should be closed. The school closures during this school year provide evidence that the accountability part of the As Scandals Plague Charter Schools, Calls for Oversight Grow - Yahoo News:

From the People Who Brought You Walmart: $1 Billion for Charter Schools | The Range: Tucson Weekly

From the People Who Brought You Walmart: $1 Billion for Charter Schools | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch | Tucson Weekly:

From the People Who Brought You Walmart: $1 Billion for Charter Schools

In honor of School Choice Week (yes, that's really a thing), I'll be writing a few posts about charter schools. Today' post: The Walton Family Foundation plans to spend $1 billion on charter schools and other items on the school choice menu over the next five years.

Don't worry about the foundation funded by the Walmart fortune going broke spending all that money. It's already putting out about $200 million a year to promote the privatization/"education reform" agenda. Over the years, about one-quarter of the nation's charter schools have been recipients of Walton Foundation startup money. The foundation may be deciding to focus more of its regular expenditures on the charter sector, or maybe it's planning to pitch in a little more on top of what it's already giving.

The Foundation says it's planning to target low income communities in urban areas like Los Angeles and new Orleans, meaning it has a dual purpose of expanding charters in places like L.A. (the Waltons aren't the only philanthropists working on that, they have company) and tweaking the program in places like New Orleans which are already dominated by charters.

Which makes me wonder. Lots of big-bucks philanthropists along with mid-level players like hedge fund multi-millionaires and billionaires (yes, in today's wonderful world of growing income inequality, just having a billion or two makes you a minor player) are giving lots and lots of money to charters and the groups that support them. Yet one of the original selling points for charter schools was that they can do more than the bloated school districts, with their administrative overload and teacher union bosses, with less money. But if you look at the charters that get press for their accomplishments (some deserved, some not), they all get money beyond their state allotments, sometimes lots of it. Do charters, even successful charters, have any right to claim they're getting more educational bang for the buck, or are they proof that you can't do education on the cheap?

A "No, I Don't Hate Charters" Note: No, I don't hate charter schools. Some do a good job, some do an excellent job, some do a lousy job. But the charter school sector needs to be scrutinized more carefully in the press than is happening at the moment. No stone has been left unturned in criticizing what are usually referred to as "traditional schools," meaning schools run by school districts. There's a multi million dollar industry whose purpose is to portray those schools as failures—probably a multi-billion dollar industry if you start back in the Reagan years—and all too often, the media reads their press releases and "research papers" and reports on them like they're objective truth. And those same dollars are also being used to spread the idea that, "Traditional schools are the disease. Charters and private school vouchers are the cure." There are plenty of problems with charter schools that need to be exposed and explored, but no one is putting millions and billions into the process. So it falls to folks like me to point up some of the things going on in the charter school sector, hoping the national media will become more aware and will report on the entire spectrum of K-12 education more accurately.From the People Who Brought You Walmart: $1 Billion for Charter Schools | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch | Tucson Weekly:

When winners are losers: Private school vouchers in Louisiana | Brookings Institution

When winners are losers: Private school vouchers in Louisiana | Brookings Institution:

When winners are losers: Private school vouchers in Louisiana

This month’s Powerball winners collected $1.6 billion, but not all lotteries turn out well for winners. In Louisiana, students who won a lottery for tuition scholarships to private schools wound up with worse academic performance than their peers who were lucky enough to lose the lottery.[i]

The affected students had won a voucher to attend, at no cost, a private school in Louisiana. Nineteen states have such voucher programs, with Louisiana’s the fifth-largest in the country. The vouchers, averaging $5,311 per student, must be accepted as full tuition at the private schools that participate in the program; schools are not allowed to ask students to “top-up” their vouchers if the school has a higher sticker price. Further, schools can’t pick and choose among the voucher winners. Instead, they have to take any student who holds a voucher.[ii]

Nationwide, 141,000 students use a voucher to attend a private school.[iii] Louisiana’s voucher program launched in New Orleans in 2008. It was expanded to include the entire state in 2012. Students from families with incomes below 250 percent of the federal poverty threshold are eligible for the voucher as long as they attend a public school the state has labeled as low-performing. Over half of Louisiana’s public schools fall into this category.

Researchers have long attempted to understand the effectiveness of private schools. It’s a difficult task, because parents choose their children’s schools, either by living in a certain school district or by applying to a private or charter school. The challenges are identical to those in evaluations of charter-school effectiveness: kids who attend private school are different from those who attend a public, neighborhood school, who in turn are different from those who attend a charter school.[iv] When comparing school performance, researchers struggle to distinguish differences in schools’ effectiveness from variation in the types of students who choose those schools.

A voucher lottery provides an unusual opportunity to measure the effectiveness of private schools. The lottery serves as a randomized trial, which is the gold standard of research methods. Random selection means that lottery winners and losers are identical, on average, when they apply for the voucher. Any differences that emerge after the lottery can therefore be attributed to the private-school attendance of the winners.

The results were startling. The researchers, a team of economists from Berkeley, Duke, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the scores of the lottery winners dropped precipitously in their first year of attending private school, compared to the performance of the lottery losers. The effects were very large: roughly a quarter of a standard deviation in math, social studies, and science. There were no effects on reading scores. On a per-year basis, these negative effects are as large as the positive effects that a similarly-designed study found for charter schools in Boston (the authors of the Louisiana study are my collaborators in the charter research).[v] 

It’s possible that the students entering private schools simply had a difficult transition year, and that’s why their scores plummeted. But similar studies in charter schools, as well as other voucher studies, have found no such negative, first-year effect. The only way to know When winners are losers: Private school vouchers in Louisiana | Brookings Institution:

Tough-Minded Federal Accountability Is Dead: What Will the States Do Now? - Top Performers - Education Week

Tough-Minded Federal Accountability Is Dead: What Will the States Do Now? - Top Performers - Education Week:

Tough-Minded Federal Accountability Is Dead: What Will the States Do Now?

The age of federally driven school accountability is now dead.  Only traces of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind legislation, the Obama administration's signature education program Race to the Top and the waivers from No Child Left Behind that came with it are left. In their place is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a new bipartisan agreement to roll back what everyone, in time, came to perceive as an overbearing and counterproductive role for the federal government in education. 

In this blog I will share my interpretation of the events that led to the passage of No Child Left Behind and its progeny, the great shrinking of the federal role we have just seen and the nature of the challenge ahead.  In several blogs that follow, I will put forward the outlines of a plan for states that wish to take advantage of their new freedom to build a state education system that is competitive with the best education systems in the world.

The new federal education law largely restores the status quo ante, the world before No Child Left Behind. The nation has spent 15 years going down a blind alley, while more and more countries' education systems have been successfully redesigned to outperform ours, some by very wide margins. 

At the time No Child Left Behind was passed, the federal role in education had been largely focused for 35 years on improving the education of the nation's disadvantaged children.  As the years went by, there was strong bipartisan support for this program. Early on in that history, the public and policy makers expressed a lot of confidence in the nation's educators, and saw the problem largely in terms of lack of resources for disadvantaged students.  They were inclined to trust professional educators' judgment as to how best to use the increased funds.

But, over the years, that confidence eroded.  It started with A Nation at Risk, the Reagan administration report that portrayed the nation's schools as having fallen a long way from some standard they had formerly met. That charge was false.  But, by 2000, the year No Child Left Behind was passed, the cost of educating an average student in the nation's schools had more than doubled in the preceding 20 years after accounting for inflation, an enormous increase.  But the performance of the nation's high school students had not changed at all. Where had all the money gone?  The new President, George W. Bush, charged educators with embracing the "soft bigotry of low expectations," saying, in effect, that they had accepted the money but had never actually expected low-income, minority and handicapped students to perform much better.  The Democrats agreed.  Both parties were angry.  The nation had lost confidence in its educators.  Their solution was to hold them strictly accountable for the results of their work.  The age of tough-minded accountability had begun with a vengeance.

The Bush administration tried to hold the schools accountable by imposing tough consequences for whole faculties if the schools did not meet expectations. The Bush administration's goal of having every student proficient by 2014 was a fantasy and everyone knew it.  As the deadline approached, entire states were populated with schools deemed failing.  No Child Left Behind had become politically untenable.

Enter the Obama administration, which used the impending implosion to replace the discredited Tough-Minded Federal Accountability Is Dead: What Will the States Do Now? - Top Performers - Education Week:

 

How School Fundraising by Affluent Parents Can Increase Public-School Inequality - The Atlantic

How School Fundraising by Affluent Parents Can Increase Public-School Inequality - The Atlantic:

How Rich Parents Can Exacerbate School Inequality

Fundraising efforts often give their kids an academic edge.

I’m a card-carrying member of three parent school associations. I write the weekly newsletter for the special-education parents’ group and help organize social events for disabled kids. But my involvement is minimal compared to the extraordinary efforts by others who raise money for schools in our town. With fundraising skills honed by former careers in business and law, these parents tap into the deep pockets of residents to collect large sums of money, which purchase items as small as a doormat in front of the school for muddy boots to costly gifts, like Chromebooks for every child. These groups also assist those in the community who are less affluent, providing college scholarships and helping create social connections for marginalized families with special-needs children.

But is all this work from parent-school groups—work that is done with the best of intentions—unfairly increasing advantages in already privileged communities? Are my volunteer activities magnifying the differences between rich and poor school districts? Education policy experts disagree about the impact of these groups in schools.

Parents often raise money for their schools through local affiliates of the nationalParent Teacher Association or, more commonly, independent parent-teacher organizations. Booster clubs support specific activities at local schools, such as sports teams, raising money for football gear, cultural field trips, and the like. Some towns also establish nonprofit, parent-run foundations, that assist public schools but operate independently from the district. Corporations and individuals receive tax benefits for their donations to these groups.

Clearly, affluent communities have greater financial resources to support their schools. Parents there also have the time and social capital needed to organize elaborate fundraisers and fill out the lengthy legal paperwork required to How School Fundraising by Affluent Parents Can Increase Public-School Inequality - The Atlantic:

Court weighs potential overhaul of California school financing - SFGate

Court weighs potential overhaul of California school financing - SFGate:

Court weighs potential overhaul of California school financing

Photo: Associated Press

The First District Court of Appeals in San Francisco hinted Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016, that it was considering a potentially historic judicial intervention in California’s woeful school finance system — a ruling that it violates students’ constitutional right to an adequate education. (PRNewsFoto/SunPower Corp.)

A state appeals court indicated Wednesday that it is considering a potentially historic judicial intervention in California’s woeful school finance system — a ruling that it violates students’ constitutional right to an adequate education.

The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco heard arguments in a suit by many of the major participants in public education — school boards and administrators, the California Teachers Association and State PTA, and nine individual districts, including San Francisco and Alameda. They argued that the state’s 19th century constitutional guarantee of a school system to encourage “the promotion of intellectual ... improvement” is transgressed by a system that trails nearly every other state in student achievement, staffing and per-pupil funding.

During the 75-minute hearing, the three-justice panel seemed uncertain about how to define a legal standard that wouldn’t interfere with the Legislature’s authority to set funding levels for schools and other state programs. But when the state’s lawyer argued that no such standard exists and that courts should leave school financing to lawmakers, the justices responded sharply.

“The schools are inadequate. California’s at the bottom of the list,” said Justice Stuart Pollak, who noted that courts in other states have required wholesale changes in school financing. “Can’t we recognize that there is a basic, fundamental problem with our schools?”

“There must be a judicially manageable standard” to decide whether California is violating its students’ rights, Justice Martin Jenkins said. He suggested that the court could read “some broad policy standards” into the state Constitution and leave the details of any remedies to the experts.

That’s all the plaintiffs are asking, said their lawyer, Steven Mayer: for the court to declare that “the existing system’s inadequate. Legislature, fix it.”

Proposition 13 effect

The suit, filed in 2010, challenged a school finance system that plunged from the top to the bottom of the national rankings after passage of the Proposition 13 property tax cut in 1978 and subsequent reductions in state spending.

California, with more than 6 million public school students, has some of the nation’s most oversize classes, lowest staffing Court weighs potential overhaul of California school financing - SFGate:

Fact-checking Trump’s new anti-Common Core video - The Washington Post

Fact-checking Trump’s new anti-Common Core video - The Washington Post:

Fact-checking Trump’s new anti-Common Core video

I will end common core. It's a disaster.
https://t.co/d83XYrqZ3m
#MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Trump2016 pic.twitter.com/r0Sc6zm80I

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2016

In the race for the GOP presidential nomination, Donald Trump has said little about education except to occasionally bash Common Core, the new academic standards that have been adopted by more than 40 states.

Now Trump has released a new 45-second video that reiterates his disgust with Common Core, a favorite target for many conservative politicians, but sheds little additional light on his ideas for how to improve American public schools.

[Conservative activist James O’Keefe targets Common Core with new hidden-camera video]

“I’m a tremendous believer in education, but education has to be at the local level. We cannot have the bureaucrats in Washington telling you how to manage your child’s education,” Trump says in the video. “Common Core is a disaster. We can’t let it continue.”

Trump goes on to offer the nation’s high per-pupil spending and poor performance on international tests as proof of Common Core’s disastrous nature. His message is obviously resonating: The video has more than 1.7 million views. But is he right? Let’s take a look.

1. “We are rated 28 in the world, the United States. Think of it, 28 in the world. … Third-world countries are ahead of us.”

It’s not clear what Trump’s source for this figure is; his campaign spokeswoman did not respond to a request for clarification. It’s true, however, that the United States does not fare particularly well on Fact-checking Trump’s new anti-Common Core video - The Washington Post:

The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs - Remembering Joe Bower and His Love of Learning

The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs - Remembering Joe Bower and His Love of Learning:

The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs - Remembering Joe Bower and His Love of Learning

 Remembering Joe Bower 1978 - 2016

We miss our Top 12 Global Blogger Joe Bower very much. Joe, a progressive and gifted educator from Red Deer, Alberta, Canada recently died of a massive heart attack at the age of 37. Through his regular contributions to the Top 12 Global Teacher Blogger series each month, Joe inspired our team enormously as well as thousands of educators around the world.

On a personal note, I was delighted to discover I shared a mutual passion with Joe when I worked with him on our November 2015 blog that focused on games that really help students learn. During the back and forth on his article, he asked me if he could write about board games (versus video games). He explained that he'd been working in a Children's Inpatient Psychiatric Assessment Unit, and he found that board games were a great way in the first instance to establish a trusting, caring relationship with an emotionally challenged child. Being a lover and believer all my life in the many merits of board games, Joe's idea completely resonated with me. He wrote in his "For the Love of Learning" blog on this topic and noted that beyond being an important relationship builder, this form of play was also "a great way of assessing children's skills including their creativity, collaboration, adaptability, resiliency, critical thinking, problem solving, patience, literacy and numeracy."

And so Joe - thank you for your amazing mind, your compassionate soul, your ideas, your commitment to education - all of which will live on through your legacy. "For the Love of Learning" from you and from each other, so that we may ultimately help learners everywhere to shine, we shall continue to share teachers' perspectives each month as I know you would want us to.

This month, we posed this question to our Top 12 Global Teacher Bloggers: What The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs - Remembering Joe Bower and His Love of Learning:

How to end segregation in New York City’s gifted and talented program - The Hechinger Report

How to end segregation in New York City’s gifted and talented program - The Hechinger Report:

How to end segregation in New York City’s gifted and talented program

The problems with premises and politics

ch of the discussion surrounding New York City’s school segregation problem has focused not on serious policy moves involving school integration* for the nation’s largest district but rather on maximizing school choice and improving quality.

The city’s education department still has not taken into full account research evidence showing that school integration leads to positive social and academic benefits for all students, while school choicespurs more segregation.

Meanwhile, another type of school segregation occurring within the city’s schools has received much less focus in the media and popular press: The type of segregation caused by school-within-school gifted and talented programs.

Related: Bright black students taught by black teachers are more likely to get into gifted and talented classrooms.

These programs act as a magnet to attract higher income, white families to the public school system and increase achievement levels. Since the Bloomberg and Klein policy regime supported these programs and pushed to expand the number of programs across the city, the education department has used a single standardized test score to admit students to these high-status programs.

The admissions policy is also based on the faulty premise that all parents will get their children tested and apply. As a result, the city’s gifted programs remain disproportionately white, Asian, and higher income. General education programs housed within these same schools, however, tend to enroll a majority of low-income children of color. This practice can by default, desegregate schools at the building level. It can also have the unintended consequence ofsegregating students by race, class, and perceived academic ability inside schools.

Related: Can schools create gifted students?

Gifted and talented education has become a highly contested How to end segregation in New York City’s gifted and talented program - The Hechinger Report:

California lawsuit appeal pursues claim of inadequate education funding | EdSource

California lawsuit appeal pursues claim of inadequate education funding | EdSource:

California lawsuit appeal pursues claim of inadequate education funding

Students, parents and school officials stand at a podium to talk about their lawsuit.

CREDIT: CALIFORNIA SCHOOL BOARDS ASSOCIATION

Plaintiffs in the Robles-Wong v. State of California lawsuit announce the case at a press conference in Sacramento on May 20, 2010.

 As they presented oral arguments before an appellate court Wednesday, attorneys in a high-profile lawsuit hoped that justices will allow them to go to trial to prove that by inadequately funding public schools the state is violating California students’ constitutional right to a quality education.

The three justices on the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco must rule within the next 90 days on whether to overturn a ruling by an Alameda County Superior Court judge who dismissed the case, Robles-Wong v. California, on grounds that there’s no constitutional right to an adequately funded education. In that ruling, Judge Steven Brick said the Legislature has the right to set funding levels as it chooses.

The case consolidates two lawsuits filed in 2010 — Campaign for Quality Education v. California and the Robles-Wong case.

In a session lasting more than an hour, justices on the court focused on the issue in the lawsuits’ core claim, that insufficient funding levels are denying children their constitutional right to an education that prepares them to participate fully in economic and civil life.

The justices focused on the key idea of the concept of quality, while the attorney for the state, Joshua Sondheimer, said the state does not oversee quality.

Steven Mayer, an attorney for the plaintiffs in Robles-Wong, told the justices that the state Supreme Court has held that education is a constitutional right in the state, “and a violation of that right has occurred.”

The Legislature defines quality education in establishing high academic standards but it hasn’t provided enough funding so that all students can meet those standards, Mayer said.

While a ruling by the three justices won’t be issued for several weeks, it could be groundbreaking if the justices decide that a quality education is constitutionally guaranteed.

Justice Peter Siggins acknowledged that under the state’s current system there is “a disparity of opportunity” for California lawsuit appeal pursues claim of inadequate education funding | EdSource:

Mother of Autistic Child on “Got to Go List” Publicly Confronts Eva Moskowitz | deutsch29

Mother of Autistic Child on “Got to Go List” Publicly Confronts Eva Moskowitz | deutsch29:

Mother of Autistic Child on “Got to Go List” Publicly Confronts Eva Moskowitz

On Friday January 22, 2016, the Center for New York City Law at New York Law School hosted the 131st City Law Breakfast. The event speaker was the highly controversial Success Academies (SA) CEO, Eva Moskowitz.

The video for the event can be viewed here.

During the Q&A portion of the event, several individuals confronted Moskowitz about the manner in which she runs her schools.

One such individual was former SA Fort Greene parent, Shanice Givens.

  

Shanice Givens

I recognized the name because I have read and written about the lawsuit,Olgundiran et al. versus Success Academy Fort Greene et al., filed in US District Court (Eastern District of New York) against five defendants, including SA Fort Greene and its principal, Candido Brown, for his having created a “got to go list” of students whom he obviously intended to force out of SA Fort Greene. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the parents of four SA Fort Greene students whose names were on Brown’s list.

Shanice Givens is one of those four parents.

Here is her story as it appears among the charges in the lawsuit:

C.S., S.G.’s son, has been diagnosed with autism. While attending kindergarten at Success FG, C.S. did not receive an IEP. Repeatedly, while attending kindergarten, S.G. received calls from officials at
Success FG telling her to pick up her child from school. On one occasion, in or around January 2015, S.C. (typo) was told that if she did not pick up C.S. within 20 minutes, the ACS would be called to take custody of the child.

On another occasion, C.S. was physically lifted out of a chair by a teacher for 

Mother of Autistic Child on “Got to Go List” Publicly Confronts Eva Moskowitz | deutsch29:

CURMUDGUCATION: CATO, Choice and Freedom

CURMUDGUCATION: CATO, Choice and Freedom:

CATO, Choice and Freedom

It's School Choice Week, one more faux celebration created as a hook on which to hang a hundred press releases.

School Choice Week does indeed launch a thousand events and commentaries, and plenty of them are not very serious puff pieces by not very serious people. But some choice supporters are reasonably thoughtful people, and their words are worth reading if for no reason other than to spark the mental exercise of figuring out why, exactly, you disagree with them.

Which brings me to Neal McClusky's pro-choice piece for CATO, the Koch-flavored Libertarian thinky tank. It's short and sweet and draws a line directly between school choice and freedom. And I appreciate the clarity of his argument, because it helps me understand why I believe he's wrong.

First, the liberty part.

Freedom must have primacy because society is ultimately composed of individuals, and leaving CURMUDGUCATION: CATO, Choice and Freedom:

Design of a Decade: Moments From 10 Years Of Writing | The Jose Vilson

Design of a Decade: Moments From 10 Years Of Writing | The Jose Vilson:

Design of a Decade: Moments From 10 Years Of Writing

People forget that, ten years ago, the idea of blogging aloud made no sense to the average reader. The mainstream media had the stranglehold on public opinion, and trying to get an op-ed into any space requires a lot of know-how and a little know-who. Teachers were always talked about, but few were given the space to opine on education policy save for those connected to education professions or multi-million dollar non-profits. And even then. Social media wasn’t a “thing,” though I was already on Facebook. Some people still didn’t know what to make of education reform, and I was still working on my teaching craft.

So, instead of waxing nostalgic about how spectacular my blog is, I’ll just tell you what’s kept me writing. The one comment from a student who didn’t come out yet to his parent, but found strength in a story I shared about my student going through his journey. The letters I’ve received from educators across the nation who needed to know they weren’t alone in their thinking, and the ones who stayed one more year as a result. The tweets from people who aren’t in the education field but read my blog to get a better understanding of a teacher’s perspective. The professors who changed their syllabi to accommodate for conversations about race, class, and intersectionality, helping future Design of a Decade: Moments From 10 Years Of Writing | The Jose Vilson:

What Chicago Schools Need and Deserve – Troy LaRaviere's blog

What Chicago Schools Need and Deserve – Troy LaRaviere's blog:

WHAT CHICAGO SCHOOLS NEED AND DESERVE

 Absurd ProposalLast week, I listened to reports of a State attempt to takeover Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and pave the way for bankruptcy proceedings, the way one might listen to a report of UFOs spotted over Lake Michigan.  “Is this a joke?” I thought to myself.

While the Board of Education and Chicago’s Mayor have been reckless in their management of Chicago’s schools, the State has proven itself to be far more inept. Let’s not forget that it was the state that thought it would be a good idea to give control to the mayor in the first place. It is the state whose teacher pension system is in worse shape than the Chicago pension system. It is the state that can’t pass its own budget, and it is the state that passed the legislation enabling CPS to engage in the risky borrowing practices that lost the district over $100 million. Suggesting the state manage the affairs of Chicago Public Schools makes about as much sense as recommending a cocaine addict handle the affairs of an alcoholic.

A Failed StrategyGovernor Rauner–who backs the state takeover proposal–represents many of the same privatization interests as the mayor.  Emanuel’s privatization-friendly school policies have depressed student achievement, widened the academic achievement gap and redirected tax dollars intended for schools to private for-profit interests. From his reckless borrowing, to his wasteful spending on poor performing for-profit charter and alternative schools, this mayor has shown his cards repeatedly.  His policies What Chicago Schools Need and Deserve – Troy LaRaviere's blog: