Ed Notes Online: Buying the So-called Ed Press: Bill and Melinda Drop a Half Million on Chalkbeat

Ed Notes Online: Buying the So-called Ed Press: Bill and Melinda Drop a Half Million on Chalkbeat:

Buying the So-called Ed Press: Bill and Melinda Drop a Half Million on Chalkbeat

Purpose: to inform low-income parents and parents of color in Newark, Detroit, and New York about K-12 education 

Amount: $525,042

Sure -- to really "inform" low-income parents of color or to propagandize for ed deform policies of Bill Gates?

I remember back when I used to go to Gotham/Chalkbeat events when we raised questions about their donors the response was that Randi also gives them money and even that I had given them $50. Trying to equivocate what Randi and I might give with Gates alone makes the reporting more than suspect.

I think it important to understand and analyze what biased coverage is and Chalkbeat must be looked at as much as what they don't cover as what they do and how they do or don't do it. We know Gates is against opt out so watch CB coverage of that issue - it will be subtle how they lean in to Gates' issues. And you will never see a word of criticism about all the Gates failures in ed policy. We know Gates is not pro-Trump so we might see a more aggressive crit of Betsy DeVos than we saw about Duncan and King -- even though when you shake those trees a lot of the same crap comes out of the leaves.

Gates Foundation: How We Work

Grant

CHALKBEAT, INC.

---

Date: October 2016 
Purpose: to inform low-income parents and parents of color in Newark, Detroit, and New York about K-12 education 
Amount: $525,042 
Term: 18 
Topic: Global Policy & Advocacy 
Program: United States 
Grantee Location: New York, New York 
Grantee Website: http://www.chalkbeat.org 
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2016/10/OPP1159098

 Ed Notes Online: Buying the So-called Ed Press: Bill and Melinda Drop a Half Million on Chalkbeat:

It's time for Congress to keep it's promise to our IDEA students

It's time for Congress to keep it's promise to our IDEA students:

Congress made this promise 41 years ago…Time to keep it!

All students deserve the opportunity for a great education that meets their needs and opens doors for them. Thanks to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), all students have a right to access the support and resources they need to realize their full potential.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that for the 41 years the law has been on the books, funding has always fallen shamefully short of the goal. 

IDEA began in 1975 as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. The law gives children with disabilities the right to a free and appropriate education, individually designed for each of them. Through the law, federal funding goes to states and local communities to help meet the educational needs of infants, toddlers, children and youth, in the least restrictive environment possible. The law also provides parents with a voice in their children’s individualized education plan and a means for disputing the plan. 

Before this law was enacted, most children with disabilities were either excluded from public schools, or segregated within schools from peers without disabilities. Schools could refuse to educate students that were deemed “uneducable,” a designation often determined by standardized IQ testing.

Students were placed in specialized private schools, or they were institutionalized, or they were at isolated at home. A 1972 Congressional investigation revealed just how bad things were: Almost 2 million children with disabilities were receiving no education at all, while 2.5 million more were receiving a “substandard” education. 

With the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the status quo changed. Congress at that time committed to pay 40 percent of the average cost to educate children with disabilities, a level considered full funding. But in the years since the law’s passage, that promise has never been realized; IDEA today covers only about 16 percent of the cost, leaving states and localities to pick up the remaining tab for the nearly 7 million students with disabilities in our nation’s public schools.

This is not good enough.  It is not good enough for our students with disabilities and it is not good enough for our public school students as a whole.  When funding falls short of its promise, states and local districts are forced to make tough decisions about what—and how much—to cut in other areas to make up for the shortfall – a shortfall created by a Congress unwilling to keep its funding promise.

The proposed IDEA Full Funding Act, introduced in Congress in 2015, would increase spending over a decade to achieve full-funding level, from 16 percent to 40 percent.  The Act was referred to committee last April, but this Congress has refused to move it forward. It is unlikely that this Congress will take further action.

We are calling on the next Congress, the 115th, to finally fulfill its promise to all students and fully fund IDEA, as promised 41 years ago.  Parents, educators, and school leaders should come together and make sure that we hold Congress accountable.  Promises are not good enough.  They must do their jobs.  Please join me in calling on Congress to fully fund IDEA. Now.It's time for Congress to keep it's promise to our IDEA students:

Addressing bias and hate in school: Our experts speak. - http://wp.me/p2mU9Y-1hX

CURMUDGUCATION: Unionizing Charters (PT. 3)

CURMUDGUCATION: Unionizing Charters (PT. 3):

Unionizing Charters (PT. 3)

So I've been working my way through the newly-launched conversation about how teacher unions and charter school fans could become BFFs. (Here are Part 1, Part 2, and a sort of Prelude). After plowing through all that, I'm going to try to articulate what I think we're looking at and how I feel about it.

The Need

This is all in reaction to the Ascent of Herr Trump and his Secretary of Education-in-Waiting Betsy DeVos. As many have noted, their arrival creates a bit of a problem for folks who have worked the progressive side of the street for the reformsters. On the one hand, much of the proposed policy, including especially the emphasis on charters, is right in line with the policies of the last sixteen years and fully in keeping with what we would have had under a Clinton Presidency.

On the other hand, having Clinton and her old CAP hands out in front of this would have made lots and lots of Democrats and progressives feel pretty okee-dokee about dismantling public education and selling off the pieces. Teacher unions would have had a comfy seat at the table, and faith in the Dems would have reassured many folks that what was happening with charters and public schools couldn't possibly be bad for children or education.

Democrats and progressives, however, are not nearly so comfortable when these policies are being championed by an unbalanced cheeto-skinned narcissist and a public-school hating billionaire heiress.So folks like Peter Cunningham have a doubly-difficult double task. Task 1 is to watch and see just how many CURMUDGUCATION: Unionizing Charters (PT. 3):

 

Betsy DeVos and a national system of market-based schools. The only problem would be stupid parents. | Fred Klonsky

Betsy DeVos and a national system of market-based schools. The only problem would be stupid parents. | Fred Klonsky:

Betsy DeVos and a national system of market-based schools. The only problem would be stupid parents.

Trumps choice of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is a terrible one for the country’s parents and students.

Naturally, for most of those who want an end to public schools and a national system of market-based education, the DeVos choice is a gift.

It does appear that it has caused a bit of a kerfluffle among the market-based crowd who fear that Betsy’s extremism may scare away some from their movement.

It is a polite debate among thieves.

Jason Crye is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The anti-school choice crowd, of course, opposes DeVos. In Florida, some teachers are already planning protests to decry DeVos’s nomination. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have condemned the choice, too.

We might expect criticism from teacher’s unions and other anti-school choice groups, but not from fellow education reformers. And yet some of them have been quick to join the chorus.

Some reject DeVos merely because she is willing to join the Trump cabinet. According to them, anyone who supports Trump is a misogynist and bigot.

That’s simplistic and unfair.

Crye says that the only problem with market-based schools is stupid parents Betsy DeVos and a national system of market-based schools. The only problem would be stupid parents. | Fred Klonsky:

Adichie’s “danger of a single story” and the Rise of Post-Truth Trumplandia | the becoming radical

Adichie’s “danger of a single story” and the Rise of Post-Truth Trumplandia | the becoming radical:

Adichie’s “danger of a single story” and the Rise of Post-Truth Trumplandia

In an effort to understand post-truth Trumplandia, this is one explanation:

 Follow

Patrick Thornton 

✔@pwthornton

Why coverage is so off: Journalists literally have no framework or training with how to deal with a president who denies basic reality.

9:46 AM - 28 Nov 2016

 
•  2,4802,480 Retweets
 
•  4,8984,898 likes

However, this fails to confront that the rise of Trumplandia is but an extreme and logical extension of a mainstream media and political elite existing almost entirely on false narratives—the denial of basic reality.

The bootstrap and rising boat narratives, black-on-black crime, the pervasive threat of terrorism, the lazy poor, the welfare queen, and the relentless “kids today” mantra—these are all powerful as well as enduring claims but also provably false.

With Trump’s election, the post-truth reality now focuses on lamenting the plight of the white working class (also provably false) and masking racism and white supremacy as “alt-right.”

The media simply report that Source X makes Claim A—but never venture into the harder story that Source X is making a false Claim A—especially when false Claim A rings true within the Great American Myths that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie powerfully warns about:

I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call “the danger of the single story.”…

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.

Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

Adichie artfully shares more examples in her talk, but her message from 2009 rings much more horrifying today in post-truth Trumplandia, where the elected leader of the free world can say damn near anything one minute, deny it the next, and remain safely cloaked in the lies that endure as the “one story” many in the U.S. believe despite ample evidence to the contrary.

The one story of black men as criminals that allows police to disproportionately execute those black men in Adichie’s “danger of a single story” and the Rise of Post-Truth Trumplandia | the becoming radical:

Major New Report Shows that Charters Are Too Often Parasites Weakening Host School Districts | janresseger

Major New Report Shows that Charters Are Too Often Parasites Weakening Host School Districts | janresseger:

Major New Report Shows that Charters Are Too Often Parasites Weakening Host School Districts

On Wednesday, The Economic Policy Institute published a comprehensive report by Rutgers economist Bruce Baker, Exploring the Consequences of Charter School Expansion in U.S. Cities.  Reviewing Baker’s report for The American Prospect, Rachel Cohen explains that Baker speaks to the very question that became central in the $34 million political fight that just concluded in Massachusetts, where Question 2—to expand charter schools statewide—went down to resounding defeat.  Opponents of unregulated expansion of charter schools defeated Question 2 by asking: How will charter school expansion affect all of the children including the children who remain in traditional public schools?  Usually instead promoters of charter school growth make their argument based on a very different question: How will expanding charter schools affect the test scores of the relatively few children who leave the public schools to enroll in charter schools?

Cohen reports on her interview with Bruce Baker about his new report: “Baker suggests moving the conversation away from the individualistic, consumer-choice narrative, that market-driven reformers have promoted over the past two decades, and towards one that centers public education as a collective responsibility for communities to provide as efficiently, and equitably, as they can.  In an interview with The Prospect, Baker emphasizes that we need a far better understanding of all the costs and benefits associated with running multiple, competing school systems in a given space—public policy questions that are surprisingly ignored on a regular basis.”

In the new report, Baker questions the economic viability of the charter school model based on what is now 25 years of experience with school choice: “If we consider a specific geographic space, like a major urban center, operating under the reality of finite available resources (local, state, and federal revenues), the goal is to provide the best possible system for all children citywide….  Chartering, school choice, or market competition are not policy objectives in-and-of-themselves. They are merely policy alternatives—courses of policy action—toward achieving these broader goals and must be evaluated in this light. To the extent that charter expansion or any policy alternative increases inequity, introduces inefficiencies and redundancies, compromises financial stability, or introduces other objectionable distortions to the system, those costs must be weighed against expected benefits.”

Baker grounds his argument in some history: “Since its origins in the early 1990s, the charter school sector has grown to over 6,500 schools serving more than 2.25 million children in 2013.  In some states, the share of children now attending charter schools exceeds 10 percent (for example, Arizona and Colorado), and in select major cities that share exceeds one-third (for example the District of Columbia, Detroit, and New Orleans.”  The vast majority of America’s children and adolescents, 50 million of them, remain in the roughly 90,000 traditional public schools across the states. Baker examines the impact of charter school Major New Report Shows that Charters Are Too Often Parasites Weakening Host School Districts | janresseger:

A Challenge for Campbell Brown’s The 74: Publicize Your Detailed History | deutsch29

A Challenge for Campbell Brown’s The 74: Publicize Your Detailed History | deutsch29:

A Challenge for Campbell Brown’s The 74: Publicize Your Detailed History

In June 2015, former CNN anchor and anti-union, corporate reform pusher Campbell Brown officially launched The Seventy Four, which she describes as follows:

I am excited to announce the launch of a project I’ve been working on for some time now. As profiled in The Wall Street Journal today, The Seventy Four, a non-profit, non-partisan news site about education, is now a reality.

There are 74 million children under the age of 18 in the United States. And the unfortunate reality is that for many of these children, the public education system is broken.

Our mission at The Seventy Four is to lead an honest, fact-based conversation about how to give America’s 74 million children the education they deserve.

Visit our website at the74million.org.

When Michigan billionaire and democracy wrecker Betsy DeVos was nominated as US secretary of education, Brown was all in, as one might expect: DeVos is among the funders of Brown’s Seventy Four.

Brown wants the public to believe that her Seventy Four is an unbiased news source. On November 30, 2016, Politico reported that Brown decided to limit her role in covering DeVos on the Seventy Four because they “are friends”:

CAMPBELL BROWN STEPS BACK FROM COVERAGE: Campbell Brown, editor-in-chief of The 74, is “recusing herself” from her website’s news coverage of Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary. That’s according to a note from Romy Drucker, CEO of The 74, which will post online today. The note comes after reporters and activists in the last week have raised questions about Brown’s ties to DeVos and the ethics of covering her in The 74, which Brown maintains is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news site. Critics have labeled the site as advocacy journalism.

— “We’ve received some inquiries about The 74’s relationship with Betsy DeVos,” Drucker’s note says. “In particular, her family foundation’s philanthropic donations to the site, our disclosures of any possible conflict of interest, and our standing policy on editorial independence. While we typically allow our article disclosures to stand by themselves, the current situation is unexpected and unprecedented — and deserves further transparency and explanation.”

— Brown and DeVos are friends, and Brown sits on the board of DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, the American Federation for Children. (DeVos resigned as chair last week after accepting Trump’s Cabinet offer.) In 2014, the Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation helped launch The 74 with a two-year grant — the amount of which wasn’t disclosed to Morning Education. 

A Challenge for Campbell Brown’s The 74: Publicize Your Detailed History | deutsch29:

Campbell Brown’s The 74:  Detailed History

CURMUDGUCATION: Measuring Charter Success

CURMUDGUCATION: Measuring Charter Success:

Measuring Charter Success

The charter business is going to boom soon. Let's imagine how we could become really successful in that industry.

Let's imagine a world where schools are judged on how healthy their students are. And since overall health is a complicated metric, let's choose an easily-measured metric as a proxy. We'll say that the students' height will be the measure of student achievement.

We'll start advertising our charter school. We'll advertise spacious rooms with nice high doorways. We'll highlight our larger-than-average student desks and our room arrangements that allow for extra leg room. If that advertising doesn't really appeal to smaller children of smaller parents, oh well. That's the free market for you-- you can't sell to everyone.

Parents are free to stop by the office and pick up an application-- right off that top shelf over there in the corner. Too short to reach it? That's okay-- we have a step-stool for your kind. No reason to feel awkward or out-of-place at all. Yes, when you've finished filling out your forms, just put them in that basket on that other top shelf.

Once we've selected students here at Top Shelf Academy, they can CURMUDGUCATION: Measuring Charter Success:

Locally Owned and Operated: The Logical Fallacy At the Center of Trump’s Education Plans - Badass Teachers Association

Badass Teachers Association:

Locally Owned and Operated: The Logical Fallacy At the Center of Trump’s Education Plans

By:  Cheryl Gibbs Binkley 

Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign and in his recent announcements he has come out swinging on education that, "There's no failed policy more in need of change than our government-run education monopoly and you know that's exactly what it is."

There’s just one problem.  Schools are not a monopoly! In fact, they are the last vestige of the old Mom-and-Pop local democracy holding out against Corporate driven Federal takeover! They are not managed by a single entity.

There are well over 14,000 different local school districts across the country, and 80% of them are managed by locally elected school boards, providing every parent in the district with a direct conduit of someone to meet with, complain to, and fire through the next election if they don’t like the service they are getting.  Each school system is directly responsible to the people who own it-- the people in that district.

Each district is different,  in size, demographics, and services- just like the locally owned stores that we once had; the locally owned department stores, where you could get alteration services, often for free; the hardware stores where you could get someone who would not only sell you the part, but explain how to put it on; the medical care where you got follow up calls, free samples if the doctor knew you were laid off, and even the occasional house call.  That’s the kind of service we still have available from our schools in most communities across the country.  

Think about what your child’s teacher does for their classes every day: buying crayons and pencils, supplying newsprint, bandaiding booboos,  and keeping extra changes of children’s clothes in their cabinet, just in case, and waiting with them for you to arrive when they miss the bus. The service our children are getting -- when the district is not impoverished, is a very person to person service.  

Who then, is so dissatisfied with the schools, that they want them leveled, closed, and remade? Those who would like them to be managed by Corporations (profit and non-profit) whose offices are almost always hundreds of miles away; people like Betsy DeVos, who never attended a public school, and whose children never attended a public school, but who along with her husband contributes heavily toBadass Teachers Association: