Immigrant students tweet to Trump: This is how our families help make America great - The Washington Post

Immigrant students tweet to Trump: This is how our families help make America great - The Washington Post:

Immigrant students tweet to Trump: This is how our families help make America great

Bruce Randolph School is a public school in Denver with this mission: “to graduate 100 percent of seniors prepared to succeed without remediation in a four-year college or university.” With more than 850 students in grades 6 to 12, the school mainly serves low-income and minority families, many from Hispanic and immigrant backgrounds. That makes it all the more remarkable that each year 100 percent of the senior class is accepted to college, according to its website.

Recently, sixth and seventh graders from immigrant families at Bruce Randolph undertook a project in their English language development class to come up with something that school leaders could take with them on an upcoming trip to Washington to meet with Colorado’s representatives in Congress,  as the education website Chalkbeat reported.

It came at a time when immigrant communities around the country have been concerned about President Trump’s actions to crack down on undocumented immigrants and when the Denver Board of Education passed a resolution promising to protect the information of its immigrant students and work to prevent any interruption to their education. (See the resolution below.)

Chalkbeat reported that teachers decided students should learn about the contributions of immigrants to the United States, how President Trump won the 2016 election and how he uses Twitter to communicate with Americans:

Last week, the students watched the film “A Day Without a Mexican,” which takes a satirical look at what would happen if all of California’s Mexicans suddenly disappeared. They watched a short PBS “Frontline” piece about Trump’s ascendancy. And they learned the language of Twitter — character counts, how to tweet at people, how hashtags work.

Then students wrote their own tweets about why immigrants are valuable to American society, and teacher Mandy Rees posted them to a newly created Twitter account.

Here are some of the tweets students wrote:

 Follow

Bruce Randolph ELD @BRSELD

Without immigrants there would not be enough money for the government. #mexicoislife

1:24 PM - 1 Mar 2017

 
•  Retweets
 
•  66 likes

 Follow

Bruce Randolph ELD @BRSELD

@realdolnaldtrump Immigrants are part of this community! #imalreadyhome

1:15 PM - 1 Mar 2017

 
•  11 Retweet
 
•  33 likes

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The Line: Yet Another Not New Voice

1by Peter Greene / 2h

Apparently we are in the season of website launches. An outfit called FutureEd has entered the thinky tank and website world with a spirited return to the ed reform greatest hits of yesteryear . Refugees of the Obama education department have launched a website that is... I don't know. Cementing their legacy? Shaping the narrative? Keeping a bunch of out-of-work pols busy? And then there's The Lin

YESTERDAY

Finding the Good Teachers

100+by Peter Greene / 22h

Modern ed reform has always embraced a binary view of teachers-- there are good ones and bad ones. We should sort them out. Maybe find the good ones so we can give them a nice reward. Find that bad ones so that we can fire them. The problems with this view are (or at least should be) obvious. Teaching is a complex multi-faceted web of human relationships. And teachers are human beings, and therefo

MAR 02

FutureEd Launches New Website, Old Voice

6by Peter Greene / 1d

There's a new education reform website on the scene, another "new voice" representing a new thinky tank, slick and pretty and well-endowed and charter-friendly and made out of smooshed-together words. Welcome FutureEd Much of the pitch is familiar. FutureEd is "grounded on the belief that every student should be effectively prepared for postsecondary learning and that performance-driven education

MAR 01

NPR Explains Charter Schools

70by Peter Greene / 2d

Claudio Sanchez at NPR decided to kick off March with a charter school explainer, and boy did March come in like a big, fuzzy, lamb. Sanchez decided that the best way to get a fully rounded explanation of charters was to talk to three charter advocates, a journalistic technique akin to interviewing the NRA about guns or the RJ Reynolds company about cigarettes. The resulting piece assures us all

DeVos, HBCU, and Justice

48by Peter Greene / 3d

There is just so much to unpack about Betsy DeVos's bonkers attempt to rewrite the story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities into an advertisement for school choice. They started from the fact that there were too many students in America who did not have equal access to education. HBCUs are real pioneers when it comes to school choice. They are living proof that when more options are p

FEB 28

TX: Senator Ambushed by Students

21by Peter Greene / 4d

Texas GOP Senator Don Huffines is a huge fan of choice systems, and does his best to shill for them. But he ran into a rough time trying to pitch them to 7-12 grade students at Richardson ISD on, of all things, Texas PTA Day. While the senator might have gotten just a bit over-salty with the students, his spokesman spun Huffine's behavior as nobly passionate: It was dark. There were so many of the

Dangerous Amateurs

43by Peter Greene / 4d

Not all amateurs are a problem. I live in a small town world, and much of the community's important work is done by amateurs. Most of our major local organizations are run by amateurs, and our elected officials are all folks with a real day job-- there's no real money in being a professional politician on the local level. I have been one kind of amateur or another most of my adult life. My actual

FEB 26

The Free Market vs. Customers

11by Peter Greene / 6d

I write so much about the free(ish) market that one might assume that I hate it. I don't. I think the profit motive, properly harnessed and directed, can accomplish a great deal. Making money is not inherently bad. However, there are certain things that the free market will not do, and those weaknesses are in direct conflict with the purposes and goals of public education. If you want to see what

ICYMI: Here Comes March Edition (2/26)

7by Peter Greene / 6d

A wide assortment of stuff today, because fake spring is over and real winter is back. Homeschoolers Revolt Against Republican School Choice Bill Yeah, it's Breitbart, so it may be 100% crap. But it might also be an interesting look at how very conservative folks end up opposing school choice. Charter Schools Have 

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Jeremy Scahill proves that Betsy DeVos is a corrupt Christian supremacist - YouTube

Jeremy Scahill proves that Betsy DeVos is a corrupt Christian supremacist - YouTube:

Jeremy Scahill proves that Betsy DeVos is a corrupt Christian supremacist 

Jeremy Scahill proves that Betsy DeVos is a corrupt Christian supremacist - YouTube:

What You Should Know About “Pay for Success” as Testing Season Approaches – Wrench in the Gears

What You Should Know About “Pay for Success” as Testing Season Approaches – Wrench in the Gears:

What You Should Know About “Pay for Success” as Testing Season Approaches

From this week’s newsfeed:

• Chicago schools may end classes three weeks early due to lack of funding.
• Several dozen Detroit schools close temporarily due to a “boil water” advisory.
• Some Boston schools anticipate 20%+ cuts to already meager budgets.
• Philadelphia teachers crowd-fund a billboard explaining they’ve been working without a contract or raises for nearly five years.

Against this backdrop we enter another high-stakes testing season where teachers and students are expected to relinquish their classrooms to the demands of big data, praying they score high enough to avoid the turnaround list. Each year this becomes more difficult as schools are deprived of even the most-basic levels of public support. Test scores are used to punitively grade schools and rate teachers even as the most important human aspects of education, the ones that cannot be uploaded to data dashboards, are carelessly dismissed. It makes no sense until you realize that data, rigorous assessment and ranking systems are demanded to accomplish the true goal of transforming public education into a vast market for private investment. Tim Scott offers a detailed analysis in his piece “Social Impact Bonds: The Titans of Finance as the Altruistic Merchants of Schooling and the Common Good.”

Pay for Success (PFS) is an investment model where public institutions seek infusions of private capital to finance programs that would otherwise remain unfunded. Returns are paid if programs demonstrate they’ve met predetermined metrics for “success” as outlined in the Social Impact Bond (SIB) deal. Deal brokers determine the metrics without input from the What You Should Know About “Pay for Success” as Testing Season Approaches – Wrench in the Gears:

CURMUDGUCATION: The Line: Yet Another Not New Voice

CURMUDGUCATION: The Line: Yet Another Not New Voice:
The Line: Yet Another Not New Voice

Apparently we are in the season of website launches. An outfit called FutureEd has entered the thinky tank and website world with a spirited return to the ed reform greatest hits of yesteryear. Refugees of the Obama education department have launched a website that is... I don't know. Cementing their legacy? Shaping the narrative? Keeping a bunch of out-of-work pols busy? 

And then there's The Line.

The Line enters the interwebs with the umpty-gazillionth call for reasonable happy voices in the debate "written by education leaders for education leaders, that endeavors to encourage civil discourse and action around the most challenging issues facing K-12 education. Engagement and thoughtful debate isn’t a choice but an imperative to bettering pubic education. Leaders need a forum for the exchange of ideas and information – they’ll find that at TheLineK12.com. "

Who has gotten a big fat check to make this new, slickly produced call for civil discourse a reality?

John Deasy.

Yes, the John Deasy whose failure as the superintendent of Los Angeles schools was spectacular enough to merit national press attention. Not that his failure there ended his career-- his patron Eli Broad hired him for the Broad Faux Academy of You're A Superintendent Because I Say So. And now the folks at Frontline Education have hired him to editor-in-chief his way through this operation.

The Line promises "an editorial advisory board of diverse backgrounds, politics and opinions" and it is true that the board runs the entire reform gamut from A to B. The group includes CURMUDGUCATION: The Line: Yet Another Not New Voice:

Same Old Story

Nobody's buying
There ain't any truth to it
The fact is you're lying
But I'm getting used to it
Promising we'll stay together
Down in your heart, you know better
I know what I lost before it's gone

[Chorus]
Tell me slowly
Over and over again
Same old story
Over and over again
Tell me slowly
Over and over again
Over and over again

[Verse 2]
Oh, say I'm overreacting
As if you believe in that
But you answer questions
That nobody even asked
Although we may stay together
Down in your heart, you know better
You pictured all the ways that you'll move on

[Chorus]
But you just tell me slowly
Over and over again
Same old story
Over and over again
Tell me slowly
Over and over again
Over and over again

[Bridge]
I will try to pull the wool over my eyes
You thought it would keep me warm
You said it was cold outside

[Chorus]
Tell me slowly
Over and over again
Same old stories
Over and over again
Tell me slowly
Over and over again
Over and over again
Over and over again
Over and over again
Oh, over and over again

[Outro]
Oh, say it again, yeah
Keep on, yeah
Over and over