Rock Solid Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

Rock Solid Diane Ravitch's blog

A site to discuss better education for all

The New York Times Discovers the “Bright Side” of Betsy DeVos

4by dianeravitch / 25min

Up until now, you probably thought of Betsy DeVos as an entitled billionaire who cares about nothing but charters and choice. You may have even concluded that she was indifferent to civil rights, since she has refused to say whether she 

Carol Burris: The Big Lie Behind Vouchers

3by dianeravitch / 1h

Carol Burris analyzes Betsy DeVos’ narrative about vouchers in this post. What she describes goes far beyond the whims of a billionaire zealot. She describes the step-by-step plans of rightwingers who have long planned to undermine the very idea of public education as a civic responsibility. DeVos said when she spoke at Brookings a few weeks ago that she in “not a numbers person.” She is also “no

Texas PTA Blasts Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and State Senate for Failure to Fix School Finance

5by dianeravitch / 2h

The Texas PTA is furious at Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and His allies to the State Senate. Just when it seemed that the legislature was going to increase funding for the stat’s woefully underfunded public schools, the Senate insisted on attaching voucher legislation. The House had already defeated vouchers, but the Senate came back a second time and was defeated again. The Senate Gelb the budget ho

D.C. Schools: A Miracle or a Tragedy?

1by dianeravitch / 3h

This is a case of cognitive dissonance. Or, when presented with two sharply contrasting narratives, whom do you believe? Tom Toch started a think tank in D.C., FutureEd, which is funded by foundations such as Walton, Bezos, and Raikes (Jeff Raikes previously led the Gates Foundation). In its latest bulletin, the lead article by Tom Toch says that the policies put in place by Michelle Rhee and her

YESTERDAY

Senator Warren Launching Project to Hold DeVos Accountable for Policies on Student Debt

20by dianeravitch / 23h

Senator Elizabeth Warrren has created an online program called “DeVos Watch” to hold Betsy DeVos accountable for her oversight of student debt. The online platform will be hosted on Senator Warren’s website. She wrote this opinion article for CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/31/opinions/devos-watch-opinion-warren The Trump administration is pondering whether to turn over responsibility for student

Dallas: Early Voting is Underway: Vote for Lori Kirkpatrick

5by dianeravitch / 1d

Dallas is holding a crucial school board election. Early voting started on May 30. The election is June 10. The balance of power hangs on this run-off election. Lori Kilpatrick is a teacher and a mother of a child in the Dallas public schools. Lori is in a run-off with businessman Dustin Marshall. Marshall supports all the failed corporate reform ideas, like Jeb Bush’s A-F school grading system ,

Mike Klonsky: Was There a D.C. Miracle?

7by dianeravitch / 1d

Mile Klonsky reviews Tom Toch’s paean to the “Revolutionary changes” launched by Michelle Rhee. He is impressed by Toch’s data. But…. “Okay, now that I’m done FBing about #convfefe, I can get down to more serious business — revolution. It seems a revolution has taken place in D.C. and I somehow missed it. “But Tom Toch didn’t. Toch, a leading pro-reform, education policy expert and a highly regar

Trump Plans to Gut Civil Rights Agencies in Every Cabinet Department

16by dianeravitch / 1d

How many times have you heard Trump or DeVos claiming that their privatization plan for public schools is “the civil rights issue of our time”? They heard the same line from Obama and Duncan and even Mitt Romney, so we can’t credit them with originality. Where they differ from Obama and Duncan is that they have made it clear that they intend to eviscerate the government agencies that enforce civi

Michigan: Charter School Closes Three Weeks Before School Year Ends

31by dianeravitch / 1d

Charter schools are not public schools. They are private schools that contract with the state. This week, a charter school in Southfield, Michigan, announced it was closing three weeks before the end of the school year. Staff and students were stunned. http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/258195926-story Taylor International Academy closed abruptly on Wednesday. No doubt, Betsy DeVos would

The Network for Public Education: Our View on Charter Schools

28by dianeravitch / 1d

NPE Statement on Charter Schools https://wp.me/p3bR9v-2st The Network for Public Education believes that public education is the pillar of our democracy. We believe in the common school envisioned by Horace Mann. A common 

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

Teachers are using facial recognition to see if students are paying attention

Teachers are using facial recognition to see if students are paying attention:

Teachers are using facial recognition to see if students are paying attention

Remember those days of being in school struggling to concentrate in class? Well, a school in France is hoping to tackle those wandering minds by using technology.

ESG Business School in Paris is starting an artificial intelligence program which will identify whether students are paying attention in class. 

From September, software called Nestor (like the butler in The Adventures of Tintin comic book) will use students' webcams to examine eye movements and facial expressions to establish whether they're actually attentive to a video lecture. 

"In the past decades, everybody thought taxi cabs would live forever. Uber destroyed the system to rebuild it. I wanted to do something similar in education, specifically for poor students and e-learning," Marcel Saucet, founder of LCA Learning, the company which created Nestor, told Mashable

Using 20 key landmarks on the face of the user — eyes, brows, lips, jaw — Nestor can understand how the user behaves in front of a 5-minute video lesson.

"We are using machine learning algorithms to improve performances of the tool. Besides, we are working with psychoanalysts, like Dr. Saverio Tomasella, to keep a human understandingTeachers are using facial recognition to see if students are paying attention:

Some Hires by Betsy DeVos Are a Stark Departure From Her Reputation - The New York Times

Some Hires by Betsy DeVos Are a Stark Departure From Her Reputation - The New York Times:

Some Hires by Betsy DeVos Are a Stark Departure From Her Reputation

WASHINGTON — Since her confirmation as the education secretary, Betsy DeVos has been the Trump cabinet member liberals love to hate, denouncing her as an out-of-touch, evangelical billionaire without the desire or capacity to protect vulnerable poor, black, immigrant, gay or transgender students.

But while Ms. DeVos has been reluctant to express sympathy for those groups, she has stacked her administration with appointees whose personal and professional backgrounds challenge the narrative that she has no interest in protecting those vulnerable students.

Among her appointees: a progressive Democrat who believes a broken education system is a form of white supremacy; a sexual assault survivor who is currently in a same-sex marriage; and a second-generation American who ran a federal program that helped undocumented immigrants.

While the education secretary has done little to highlight the diversity in her administration — the department declined to make any of the appointees available for interviews — DeVos watchers say that diversity should encourage critics to focus more on her actions than their preconceptions.

“It’s definitely surprising, and should make people question their assumptions about this administration,” Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank.

Ms. DeVos’s appointment of Candice E. Jackson to the department’s Office for Civil Rights has been among the most hotly disputed. Ms. Jackson is perhaps best known for her high-profile involvement in attacks against Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign, in which she elevated women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault or harassment, while denouncing women who accused Mr. Trump of the same.

Ms. Jackson will oversee some of the issues the Trump administration has Some Hires by Betsy DeVos Are a Stark Departure From Her Reputation - The New York Times:

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Public Education Story Round-Up

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Public Education Story Round-Up:

Public Education Story Round-Up

From NPR Ed via Huffington Post, a very good blog post about the push and pull of What Do We Do About Public Education?

Educators of all races, from various ideologies, and committed to very different school policies are also split over fundamental differences as to how we in a democracy work with each other. The unraveling of the corporate reform coalition is due, in large part, because of the ways they treat people who disagree with them.

A National Press Club panel discussion clarified the positions of today’s three dominant schools of education policy. Shavar Jeffries of the Democrats for Education Reform embodies theneoliberal wing of the corporate reform movement. Andrew Smarick, from Bellwhether Education Partners, displays the new face of their former partners, conservative reformers. The panel also included an open and welcoming face of teacher-led school improvement, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the president of the National Education Association.

My favorite from this debate?

The NEA’s Eskelsen Garcia best explains how the test-driven, competition-driven reform alliance held together for nearly a generation. In the 1980s, conservatives would demand “Results!” Liberals fought for “Equality.” The contemporary reform movement took the shortcut of demanding “Equal Results!”

In other words, reformers chose to pretend that equal results could be produced on the cheap, without tackling the inequality which defeats so many of the highest-Seattle Schools Community Forum: Public Education Story Round-Up:

Parents, Please Talk to Your Student

5by Melissa Westbrook / 11h

"I think they wanted to scare him straight," Maureen Walgren told the Tribune in story published earlier this week. "Instead, they scared him to death." Left by himself, Corey walked out of the school a few minutes later and headed toward a downtown Naperville parking garage. He climbed to the fifth floor and then committed suicide by plummeting 53 feet to the ground. One of the saddest and most

End of the Year Honors for Seattle Schools Students

by Melissa Westbrook / 11h

Tweets from SPS Communications: 2017 All Metro - Lacrosse - Kai Chamberlain, Tate Gilges and Dain Coddington from Ballard High, Nate Koidahl and Nicky Sweedin from Roosevelt, Charlie MacIntire and Sean McGlyn from Hale, Hank Halfaker from Garfield, and Jay Zhu from Franklin. Boys Soccer - Congrats to Roosevelt's team for winning the state championship! Girls Track and Field - Congrats to Garfield'

Seattle Schools Waitlist Updates

13by Melissa Westbrook / 11h

From SPS Communications, waitlist updates . Although more than 50 percent of the students who participated in the choice process received a placement, many students are still on school waitlists. Typically, staff do not move waitlists that positively or negatively affect staffing at attendance area schools. Due to the $50 million budget shortfall for 2017-18, the district is conducting additional

Network For Public Education's Stand on Charter Schools

by Melissa Westbrook / 14h

NPE Statement on Charter Schools The Network for Public Education believes that public education is the pillar of our democracy . We believe in the common school envisioned by Horace Mann. A common school is a public institution, 

Friday Open Thread

by Melissa Westbrook / 13min

It's near the end of the school year and a time when awards - both in yearbooks and at events come out. Unbelievably, there are grown people - in charge of watching over these awards - that seem to have the worst judgment. There's this one from Texas . A group of teachers are being disciplined after they thought it would be funny to name a student “most likely to become a terrorist.” Lizeth Villan

South Carolina Regulations Limit School Resource Officers’ Role - Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog:

South Carolina Regulations Limit School Resource Officers’ Role

By Josh Gupta-Kagan

South Carolina is making progress in limiting its school-to-prison pipeline, thanks to new state Department of Education regulations growing out of a school incident which went viral nearly two years ago.

The background:  in October 2015, a teenager at a Columbia, SC high school refused repeated demands to put away her cell phone. Both the cell phone and the teen were quiet, and not interfering with any other student.  When she refused, her teacher involved her assistant principal.  When she refused his demands to put away the phone, he involved the school resource officer (SRO).  And when she refused his demands, he arrested her for the crime of “disturbing schools” and was caught on video pulling the child out of her chair and, as the local sheriff later put it, “throwing [] the student across the floor,” making this another in a now-long list of questionable cases of SRO actions in school. To top it off, he arrested and charged a second student with disturbing schools for encouraging her classmates to record the incident (that is, the recordings which brought this incident to the public’s eye) and objecting to the officer’s treatment of the teenager with the cell phone.

Beyond the excessive force, advocates focused on two legal elements of this incident – the broad law which rendered petty non-violent teenage misbehavior criminal, and the SRO’s involvement in what ought to have been a purely school disciplinary, not law enforcement, matter.  Progress on the first point is stalled at least until 2018 – a bill to dramatically narrow South Carolina’s disturbing schools statute passed the South Carolina Senate, but not the House, before the General Assembly recessed for the year.

But there is progress on the second point – the South Carolina Department of Education just finalized regulations which impose some real limits on when schools can involve SROs in school discipline matters. (The regulations are available in the S.C. Register, published here. Open the link for the May 26, 2017 edition, and see pages 57-65. The Education Law Prof Blog:

wistv.com - Columbia, South Carolina

State Cuts to Education Funding Demonstrate Impact of National, Far-Right Tax-Slashing Agenda | janresseger

State Cuts to Education Funding Demonstrate Impact of National, Far-Right Tax-Slashing Agenda | janresseger:

State Cuts to Education Funding Demonstrate Impact of National, Far-Right Tax-Slashing Agenda

Emma Brown’s recent Washington Post report about four-day school weeks in Oklahoma provides the textbook example of the political phenomenon described by Gordon Lafer in his new book, The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time (Cornell University Press, 2017).

Here is Emma Brown: “A deepening budget crisis here has forced schools across the Sooner State to make painful decisions. Class sizes have ballooned, art and foreign-language programs have shrunk or disappeared, and with no money for new textbooks, children go without. Perhaps the most significant consequence: Students in scores of districts are now going to school just four days a week… Of 513 school districts in Oklahoma, 96 have lopped Fridays or Mondays off their schedules, nearly triple the number in 2015 and four times as many as in 2013. An additional 44 are considering cutting instructional days by moving to a four-day week in the fall….”

Gordon Lafer explains that in the November 2010 election, “Eleven state governments switched from Democratic or divided control to unified Republican control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature. Since these lawmakers took office in early 2011, the United States has seen an unprecedented wave of legislation aimed at lowering labor standards and slashing public services.” (p. 2) “In January 2011, legislatures across the country took office under a unique set of circumstances. In many states, new majorities rode to power on the energy of the Tea Party ‘wave’ election and the corporate-backed RedMap campaign…  (T)his was the first class of legislators elected under post-Citizens United campaign finance rules, and the sudden influence of unlimited money in politics was felt across the country. Finally, the 2011 legislative sessions opened in the midst of record budget deficits (from the Great Recession), creating an atmosphere of fiscal crisis that made it politically feasible to undertake more dramatic legislation than might otherwise have been State Cuts to Education Funding Demonstrate Impact of National, Far-Right Tax-Slashing Agenda | janresseger:

Reinventing High School (Stacy Teicher Khadaroo) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Reinventing High School (Stacy Teicher Khadaroo) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Reinventing High School (Stacy Teicher Khadaroo)

“Stacy is an education reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. She writes primarily for the Monitor’s EqualEd section and also covers youth issues, civil rights, justice, and gender. Based in Nashua, N.H., she currently reserves two days a week to focus on her young son and daughter.”

This post originally appeared in the CSM

May 21, 2017 MANCHESTER, N.H.—Two-dozen high school students are gathered around a large work table as manufacturing teacher Dan Cassidy holds out boxes of metal bars and gears. The students choose among the parts to build model bicycles. “What else are we going to use today? Let me hear some vocab here,” he says. When a student shouts out “chains,” he nudges them until they recall another term for it: “linkage.”

This isn’t a manufacturing class. It’s actually a combined geometry and physical science class. While clusters of students work at stations assembling miniature two-wheelers, others rotate through a lesson on the computer and reason through a problem about parallel triangles the old-fashioned way – with paper and pencil. Mr. Cassidy and co-teacher Athanasia Robinson, whose specialty is math, circulate and check on everyone’s progress.

“I have a really hard time just sitting in a class and focusing on a teacher and writing notes,” says sophomore Hope Nichols as she and a purple-haired classmate bolt together a bike. “But here, everything is hands-on … or I can kind of teach myself, which I really prefer.”

Students rarely see textbooks here at the Manchester School of Technology High School (MST-HS), a low-slung utilitarian building a few miles from the river where high-tech businesses occupy former textile mills. In most classes, they don’t get standard letter grades. They don’t automatically move on to the next level at the end of the school year, but instead advance once they have mastered the material. Students buttress their classroom learning with real-world experiences – such as building a house or working as a chef – to help prepare for future careers.

Welcome to what, in some ways, may be a prototype of the high school of Reinventing High School (Stacy Teicher Khadaroo) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

What Could Be More Democratic Than Pushing Vouchers for a Billionaire US Ed Sec? | deutsch29

What Could Be More Democratic Than Pushing Vouchers for a Billionaire US Ed Sec? | deutsch29:

What Could Be More Democratic Than Pushing Vouchers for a Billionaire US Ed Sec?

US ed sec Betsy DeVos has one principal goal for American public education: Slice up its public funding and dispense it in the form of vouchers that can (and will) take that funding out of the public purview and into private school coffers.

DeVos’ voucher push has created a dynamic in which many pro-charter advocates feel that their slice of public money is threatened as it would enable their *choice* students to exit in favor of private schools.

Charter schools often refer to themselves as “public schools”; however, charter schools are often not held accountable to the public for the spending of that public money. Thus, charter schools are schools that receive public money, not public schools (i.e., operated by publicly-elected school boards).

Charter schools further enjoy the reality of not having to educate all students in a country in which states have compulsory education laws. The public schools are the “catch-all” of compulsory education. Charter schools are not.

If DeVos has her voucherizing way, then charter schools– which operate like private schools that receive public money– would have to compete with both public schools and private schools for public money.

Therefore, it makes sense that the likes of Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman would appear in the Los Angeles Times blasting vouchers.

It also makes sense to me that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten would be by his side, even going so far as to promote charter schools as “schools that are accountable to voters”– even though charter schools are not accountable to voters. Weingarten has an established history of promoting corporate reform ideas, including VAM, Common Core, and charter schools, and she will slap the AFT endorsement on political candidates who push corporate reform so long as those candidates are Democrats who seem likely to win their races.

In this May 31, 2017, post, education historian Diane Ravitch takes issue with Weingarten’s promoting charter schools as schools accountable to voters:

Randi Weingarten and Jonah Edelman co-wrote an article in today’s Los Angeles Times, standing strong against vouchers.

I still remember Jonah Edelman as the guy who bragged at the Aspen Ideas Festival that he had crushed the teachers’ union in Chicago by buying up all the best lobbyists and raising the bar for a strike to 75% of the membership. I 

What Could Be More Democratic Than Pushing Vouchers for a Billionaire US Ed Sec? | deutsch29:

McCleary Crime Scene: Help Unscramble Governor Inslee and House Speaker Frank Chopp with this Fun Worksheet. | Seattle Education

McCleary Crime Scene: Help Unscramble Governor Inslee and House Speaker Frank Chopp with this Fun Worksheet. | Seattle Education:

McCleary Crime Scene: Help Unscramble Governor Inslee and House Speaker Frank Chopp with this Fun Worksheet.

Here at the temporary Olympia branch of TRAP Headquarters, nothing makes our eyes roll like politicians giving lectures on the value of compromise and the McCleary decision.

What Governor Inslee and House Speaker Frank Chopp fail to grasp is that students, parents, and teachers have been compromising for years – and our patience is running out.

Preaching compromise works best when you walk your talk. Does Inslee’s and Chopp’s lectures on compromise include corporate tax breaks or pleasing lobbyists?

Let’s take a look at the evidence.

Since September of 2012, the Legislature has been in contempt of the State Supreme Court, refusing to do their Constitutionally mandated job of fully funding public education.

Did Inslee and Chopp push the legislature to work hard and solve the problem? Not really. Instead, they allowed lawmakers to dawdle, make excuses, and promise to do the work next year.

However, while the contempt ruling was in place, there were two issues – which directly impacted education funding – where both Governor Inslee and House Speaker Frank Chopp refused to compromise.

The first example is Boeing’s unprecedented $8.7 billion tax break. Unlike fully funding public education, it took just three days of debate for the Legislature to approve that boondoggle.

The second example is when both Frank Chopp and Governor Inslee betrayed their own McCleary Crime Scene: Help Unscramble Governor Inslee and House Speaker Frank Chopp with this Fun Worksheet. | Seattle Education: