To Strengthen Democracy, Invest in Our Public Schools | Deborah Meier on Education

To Strengthen Democracy, Invest in Our Public Schools | Deborah Meier on Education:

To Strengthen Democracy, Invest in Our Public Schools
By Emily Gasoi, Deborah Meier

Who could have imagined that, more than 150 years into this bold project of preparing successive generations for informed citizenship, our system of universal education would be as imperiled as it is today? One of the original ideas behind establishing a system of “common schools”—as one of the early advocates for public education, Horace Mann, referred to them—was not that they would all be mediocre, but that children from different backgrounds, the children of workers and the children of factory owners, would be educated together. As Mann wrote in 1848, “Education … beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”1

Of course, Mann’s own understanding of equality and citizenship was surely limited, as he wrote these words at a time when only white men had the vote, the Emancipation Proclamation was yet to be signed, and the children of workers were more likely to be working in factories themselves than they were to be attending school. And while schools have historically mirrored society’s inequities as much as they have inoculated against them, our public institutions nevertheless have at their foundation the ideals set forth in Mann’s quote and in our most soaring rhetoric about individual freedom and the common good.

And yet, in our current reform climate, our system of public education is often referred to as a “monopoly” rather than a public good. As such, in districts around the country, public schools are being shuttered at an alarming rate, with more than 1,700 schools closed nationwide in 2013 alone.2

Nowhere is this trend more dramatically played out than in Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s home state of Michigan, where entire school districts are losing the battle against unregulated privatization through for-profit charter management entities and voucher programs. And while there is no evidence that school choice alone helps to To Strengthen Democracy, Invest in Our Public Schools | Deborah Meier on Education:

My latest books

Posted on March 24, 2018 by debmeier

Emily Gasoi and I published last fall These Schools Belong to You and Me: Beacon Press, and so we have been busy promoting it around the country.

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I will mention again that Matthew Knoester and I had a book published by TC Press last summer:  Beyond Testing: 7 Assessments of Students and Schools More Effective Than Standardized Tests.  And, by the way, more compatible with the purposes of schools.

A Merger for the Rabbi and the Labor Leader - The New York Times

A Merger for the Rabbi and the Labor Leader - The New York Times:

A Merger for the Rabbi and the Labor Leader

Randi Weingarten and Rabbi Sharon Anne Kleinbaum are to be married March 25 at La Marina, a restaurant in New York. Judge Michelle Schreiber of the New York City Housing Court, is to officiate, with Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, the president of Hebrew College, leading the religious ceremony, which will include the signing of the ketubah.

Ms. Weingarten (left), 60, is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has headquarters in Washington. She graduated from Cornell and received a law degree from Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.

She is the daughter of Gabriel Weingarten of Suffern, N.Y., and the late Edith Appelbaum Weingarten.

Rabbi Kleinbaum, 58, is the senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Simhat Torah in New York, a synagogue with a significant number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender congregants. She graduated from Barnard College and from Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncott, Pa.

She is the daughter of Josephine Leve Kleinbaum of Teaneck, N.J., and the late Max M. Kleinbaum.

In the mid-1990s, Rabbi Kleinbaum and Ms. Weingarten knew each other peripherally.

“We were two lesbians in New York fighting for different things,” Ms. Weingarten said. “We liked each other. We had good banter. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of high-profile gay women who were active in leadership roles. I thought she was fun, witty and smart.”It continued that way until 2006. Both were at the Empire State Pride Agenda dinner, when Rabbi Kleinbaum asked Ms. Weingarten to speak at the Gay Pride Shabbat service.

“I’d just turned 50, I’d never publicly come out and said, ‘I’m a lesbian,’” Ms. Weingarten said. “Sharon allowed me to see myself as who I was. It shifted my thinking that it wasn’t simply about having a gay pride speaker. It was about shifting me. I was very moved by it.”

Rabbi Kleinbaum recalls the “ask” a little differently.

“She’s one of the most significant labor leaders in America,” Rabbi A Merger for the Rabbi and the Labor Leader - The New York Times:

Watch Live: March for Our Lives: A rally to end gun violence - #MarchForOurLives #NeverAgain @MomsDemand

 Watch Live: March for Our Lives: A rally to end gun violence - YouTube:

 Watch Live: March for Our Lives: A rally to end gun violence

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018
https://wp.me/P9J85t-6 via @AMarch4OurLives

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018

https://wp.me/P9J85t-6 via @AMarch4OurLives

 March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018
https://wp.me/P9J85t-6 via @AMarch4OurLives

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018
https://wp.me/P9J85t-6 via @AMarch4OurLives

 March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018
https://wp.me/P9J85t-6 via @AMarch4OurLives

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018
https://wp.me/P9J85t-6 via @AMarch4OurLives

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018
https://wp.me/P9J85t-6 via @AMarch4OurLives

Parkland students: our manifesto to change America's gun laws | #MarchForOurLives The Guardian

Parkland students: our manifesto to change America's gun laws | Editorial staff of the Eagle Eye | US news | The Guardian:
Parkland students guest edit the Guardian US
Our manifesto to fix America's gun laws

After the massacre at our high school, our lives have changed forever – so we’re proposing these changes to halt mass shootings

• Parkland students take over the Guardian

by Editorial staff of the Eagle Eye

As a student publication, the Eagle Eye works to tell the stories of those who do not have a voice. Today, we are the ones who feel our voice must be elevated.

In the wake of the tragedy that occurred at our school on February 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, our lives have changed beyond what we ever imagined. We, along with our publication, have been transformed. We will remain so for the rest of our lives.

We have a unique platform not only as student journalists, but also as survivors of a mass shooting. We are firsthand witnesses to the kind of devastation that gross incompetence and political inaction can produce. We cannot stand idly by as the country continues to be infected by a plague of gun violence that seeps into community after community, and does irreparable damage to the hearts and minds of the American people.

That’s why the Eagle Eye has come together and proposed these following changes to gun policy. We believe federal and state governments must put these in place to ensure that mass shootings and gun violence cease to be a staple of American culture.

We will be marching this Saturday, 24 March, for those that we loved and lost, and we write this in the hope that no other community or publication will ever have to do the same.

The changes we propose:

Ban semi-automatic weapons that fire high-velocity rounds

Civilians shouldn’t have access to the same weapons that soldiers do. That’s a gross misuse of the second amendment.

These weapons were designed for dealing death: not to animals or targets, but to other human beings. The fact that they can be bought by the public does not promote domestic tranquility. Rather, their availability puts us into the kind of danger faced by men and women trapped in war zones.

This situation reflects a failure of our government. It must be corrected to ensure the safety of those guaranteed the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Continue reading:  Parkland students: our manifesto to change America's gun laws | Editorial staff of the Eagle Eye | US news | The Guardian:

Big Education Ape: Parkland students featured on cover of Time: 'Enough' | #MarchForOurLives TheHill - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/03/parkland-students-featured-on-cover-of.html



Big Education Ape: School Shootings in America Since 2013 #MarchForOurLives -
http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/03/school-shootings-in-america-since-2013.html

What students really think about school shootings

Parkland students featured on cover of Time: 'Enough' | #MarchForOurLives TheHill

Parkland students featured on cover of Time: 'Enough' | TheHill:
Parkland students featured on cover of Time: 'Enough'

How Parkland Teens Are Leading the Gun Control Conversation | Time - 

http://time.com/longform/never-again-movement/ on @TIME

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018 

#MarchForOurLives

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018 

#MarchForOurLives

Students who survived last month's shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. are featured on the cover of Time magazine's latest issue.

Students including Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg and Cameron Kasky — who have all become vocal advocates for gun control — are among those featured on the cover.

The cover has the word "ENOUGH" in large white letters across the photo.

TIME's new cover: The school shooting generation has had enough https://t.co/4YI173gqTx pic.twitter.com/7yFEXuVjyb

— TIME (@TIME) March 22, 2018

Students who survived the shooting last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have been leading the charge in recent weeks for new gun laws. 

The students have been speaking out against gun violence and demanding that lawmakers take action to keep their schools safe.

Last week, students in schools across the country walked out of their classrooms to protest gun violence. Students at many schools held 17 minutes of silence to remember the 17 people killed in the Florida school shooting.

This weekend, a march is being held in Washington, D.C. and cities across the country to call for change.

President Trump and lawmakers have been discussing new gun laws to keep schools safe.

The Trump administration earlier this month unveiled a series of proposals on school safety and gun restrictions, including a push for states to provide firearms training for school staff members.Parkland students featured on cover of Time: 'Enough' | TheHill:

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018 

#MarchForOurLives

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018 

#MarchForOurLives

School Shootings in America Since 2013 March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018 

#MarchForOurLives

Emma González, Alex Wind, Cameron Kasky and Jaclyn Corin dine at Pasquales in Coral Springs near Parkland on March 6.

Gabriella Demczuk for TIME

How Parkland Teens Are Leading the Gun Control Conversation | Time - 

http://time.com/longform/never-again-movement/ on @TIME

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018 

#MarchForOurLives

John Barnitt, Matt Deitsch, David Hogg, Diego Pfeiffer and Adam Alhanti meet at the #NeverAgain office in Coral Springs, Fla.

Gabriella Demczuk for TIME

How Parkland Teens Are Leading the Gun Control Conversation | Time - 

http://time.com/longform/never-again-movement/ on @TIME

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018 

#MarchForOurLives

Delaney Tarr, Emma González and Sofie Whitney open mail at the #NeverAgain office.

Gabriella Demczuk for TIME

How Parkland Teens Are Leading the Gun Control Conversation | Time - 

http://time.com/longform/never-again-movement/ on @TIME

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018 

#MarchForOurLives

How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party | Jennifer C. Berkshire

How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party | Jennifer C. Berkshire:

How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party
The Democrats and DeVos have more in common than they’d care to admit

IN A FACEBOOK POST THIS SUMMER, hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb took aim at the highest ranking Black woman in the New York legislator, Andrea Stewart-Cousins. “[H]ypocrites like Stewart-Cousins who pay fealty to powerful union thugs and bosses,” wrote Loeb, “do more damage to people of color than anyone who has ever donned a hood.” The rant, which had the exquisite misfortune of appearing just days before the actual KKK took to the streets of Charlottesville to menace nonwhite people and their allies, struck a familiar Loeb theme. In a previous post he implored his peer to take up the fight against the teachers union: “the biggest single force standing in the way of quality education and an organization that has done more to perpetuate poverty and discrimination against people of color than the KKK.”

It would be easy to dismiss all this frothing as just Loeb being Loeb. This is, after all, the same crusader for justice who once lambasted a CEO for his imperial lifestyle, not an easy charge to level from a ten-thousand-square-foot penthouse. But the NYC financier is not just any hedge fund billionaire. As the chair of the board of Success Academy, New York’s largest network of charter schools, he is a leading force within the nexus of big money and self-proclaimed school “reformers” within the Democratic party. While Loeb doesn’t limit his donations to Dems (as his profile on the married-but-looking dating site, Ashley Madison, indicated, he is not one to be tied down), he exerts the kind of outsized influence that $3.2 billion in net worth reliably commands these days.

There’s another reason why we can’t dismiss Loeb’s view that teachers unions promote income inequality and serve as a barrier to progress of any sort as just another crackpot rich-bro outburst. That’s because it’s now a key policy plank of responsible elite opinion almost everywhere. Flip back to The Economist—the bible of savvy, entrepreneurial-minded social criticism—circa 2012, and you’ll find Loeb’s screed rendered in assured magazine prose, minus the overt racist incitements. To wit: “no Wall Street financier has done as much damage to American social mobility as the teachers’ unions have.”

And where The Economist goes, influential “thought leaders” are sure to follow. So now, as America ponders the mounting economic disequilibriums that gave rise to the Trump insurgency, concerned plutocrats can all agree on one key article of faith: what is holding back the poor and minority children who figure so prominently in the glossy brochures of charter school advocates is not the legacy of racist housing policy or mass incarceration or a tax system that hoovers up an ever growing share of income into the pockets of the wealthy, but schoolteachers and their unions.

It was thus no great shock to see that, just weeks after Loeb apologized for his offensive language, attributing it to his passion for “education choice,” David Osborne, a professional Democratic party thinker who heads up something called the Reinventing America’s Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, said essentially the same thing. On a swing through Philadelphia to promote his new book on the wonders of school privatization, Osborne told an interviewer that teachers unions belong in the same category with segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace. “They’re  Continue reading How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party | Jennifer C. Berkshire:

School Choice May Be Accelerating Gentrification - The Atlantic

School Choice May Be Accelerating Gentrification - The Atlantic:
School Choice May Be Accelerating Gentrification
The ability to opt out of a neighborhood school increases the likelihood that a black or Hispanic neighborhood will see an influx of wealthier residents.

When Francis Pearman was studying at Vanderbilt, he and a fellow graduate student noticed a striking phenomenon in Nashville: White, affluent families were moving into low-income neighborhoods without sending their children to the neighborhood schools.

“We were really curious to see what that relationship looked like at the national level,” said Pearman, now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

When he and that student, Walker Swain, looked at national data, a pattern emerged. The ability to opt out of the neighborhood school increased the likelihood that a mostly black or Hispanic neighborhood would see an influx of wealthier residents.

“As school choice expands, the likelihood that low-income communities of color experience gentrification increases,” Pearman said.

Their finding adds to the already-contentious policy debates over school choice, gentrification, and segregation. And now another study, focusing on Charlotte, North Carolina, has come to similar conclusions: Housing prices spiked in areas where students were given new ability to switch schools away from one deemed failing.

“What is remarkable in this moment is that schooling and housing are decoupled in a way that hasn’t been the case before,” said Carla Shedd, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, who has written about school choice and housing.

To choice advocates, this separation of available school options from segregated housing systems is a key feature. To critics like Shedd, it raises tough questions about whether those newcomers help or harm a community. “What is a neighborhood without a school?” she asks. “What is a school without a neighborhood?”

Pearman and Swain’s national study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Sociology of Education, looked at four different types of school-choice programs: magnet schools, charter schools, private school vouchers, and open enrollment across school districts.

When school choices are limited, poor communities with more white people are School Choice May Be Accelerating Gentrification - The Atlantic:

WSW: How A One-Time Advocate Of Charter Schools Became A Vocal Critic | WMUK

WSW: How A One-Time Advocate Of Charter Schools Became A Vocal Critic | WMUK:

WSW: How A One-Time Advocate Of Charter Schools Became A Vocal Critic

Diane Ravitch was a supporter of charter schools when she worked in the Education Department of the George H.W. Bush administration. But she says evidence convinced her that education choice is “just moving kids around” and doesn’t address the needs of children.

Listen

Listening...

19:41

WestSouthwest with Diane Ravitch

Ravitch will speak at Western Michigan University on Thursday, March 22nd. Her address called Education Reform and the Promise of Public Education begins at 7:00 in the Dalton Center Recital Hall. It’s sponsored by the University Center for the Humanities.

Ravitch worked in the Education Department when Lamar Alexander was Secretary of Education. He was a supporter of charters and vouchers. Ravitch held similar views, but she says research continued to show that charters are not better, and kids who attend them lose ground. Ravitch says the same is true for vouchers which allow people to take the tax dollars that would be spent for their child to attend public school, and use it for private school tuition.

Part of the problem, Ravitch says, is the importance put on standardized tests. She says heavy reliance on test scores leads to cheating, and gaming the system. Ravitch says all students should have an opportunity to get a well-rounded education that includes the arts, music, physical education, access to advanced courses and foreign languages.

Ravitch says the idea of school choice doesn’t mean much when the choice is to go to a worse school. She says the state of Michigan spends a lot of money every year on school choice, she says that money would be better-spent on making all of the state’s public schools better.WSW: How A One-Time Advocate Of Charter Schools Became A Vocal Critic | WMUK:

School Shootings in America Since 2013 #MarchForOurLives

School Shootings in America Since 2013:

School Shootings in America Since 2013

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018

School Shootings in America Since 2013:

Since 2013, there have been more than 300 school shootings in America — an average of about one a week.

School Shootings in America Since 2013:

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018

How many more before our leaders pass common-sense laws to prevent gun violence and save lives? Communities all over the country live in fear of gun violence. That’s unacceptable. We should feel secure in sending our children to school — comforted by the knowledge that they’re safe.

Consistent with expert advice and common sense, Everytown uses a straightforward, fair, and comprehensive definition for a school shooting: any time a firearm discharges a live round inside or into a school building or on or onto a school campus or grounds, as documented by the press and, when necessary, confirmed through further inquiries with law enforcement or school officials. Incidents in which guns were brought into schools but not discharged are not included. The database is updated as new shootings occur or as new evidence emerges about prior incidents.

When it comes to American children being exposed to gunfire, these shootings are just the tip of the iceberg. A report by the Urban Institute showed that in the single school district of Washington, DC, there were at least 336 gunshots in the vicinity of schools over a single school year. And school shootings have long-term impacts on the school community as a whole: a recent analysis of school shootings found that those involving a homicide reduced student enrollment in the affected schools, and depressed students’ standardized test scores by nearly 5 percent.

Since 2014, Everytown has analyzed these incidents for trends that might help prevent future violence. Click here to read the full report

School Shootings in America Since 2013:

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018

March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018

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School Shootings in America Since 2013: