As students return to school, US teachers face nationwide struggle to defend education - World Socialist Web Site

As students return to school, US teachers face nationwide struggle to defend education - World Socialist Web Site
As students return to school, US teachers face nationwide struggle to defend education

As the new school year begins across the United States, teachers are angry and determined. None of the demands teachers and school employees raised in last spring’s strikes and protests in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina have been met. Many of the supposed gains touted by the teachers’ unions have proven to be fictitious, and next to nothing has been done to restore the billions of dollars in education cuts carried out over the past decade.

West Virginia teachers protesting on the steps of the state capitol in Charleston

It has not taken long for the claims of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) and their pseudo-left allies such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) that the spring struggles resulted in “victories” to be exposed as lies.

In each state, teachers are returning to school facing broken promises. In West Virginia, there is no fix for health care funding under the Public Employee Insurance Agency. In Arizona, the $1 billion in school funding has not been restored and wage increases for many teachers have fallen far short of the contract terms announced by the unions.

As the new school term begins, contract battles are ongoing in Seattle and Spokane, Washington. Teachers in the Los Angeles United School District, the second largest in the US, have been working without a contract for a year and negotiations are at an impasse. In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers has agreed to work under an expired contract until after the midterm elections, pointedly avoiding any action in November that might prove embarrassing to Democratic Party candidates. Unions are similarly forcing educators to work under expired or extended contracts in other locations such as Denver, Colorado and Oakland, California.

The conditions are emerging for teachers to link up their struggles with those of hundreds of thousands of other workers in the US and internationally. Some 230,000 United Parcel Service workers, who voted by more than 90 percent to strike when their contract expired on July 31, are battling a conspiracy between the company and the Teamsters union, which extended the contract indefinitely in an effort to force through a sellout that establishes a second tier of lower-paid “hybrid” driver-warehouse workers and maintains poverty wages for the bulk of the workforce.

Some 200,000 postal workers face contract expiration in September, and contracts will soon expire for steel, telecom and entertainment workers.

A report by the Brookings Institution looked at teachers’ salaries and per-pupil spending on a state-by-state basis and concluded that conditions were “favorable” this fall for statewide teachers’ strikes in such largely nonunion states as Mississippi, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, New Mexico, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah. Brookings added that growing calls for action have been reported in Indiana and Texas. An Education Weekblog predicted that Louisiana would be next.

As school doors open, what is the state of education in America?

• According to Education Week, the average teacher in 30 states makes less than a “livable wage.” One in five holds down a second job to make ends meet; many have three jobs. In rural Colorado districts, the earnings of 95 percent of teachers are less than the cost of living.

• In addition to spending hundreds of dollars out of their own pockets for school supplies, teachers are using charity appeals through crowdsourcing sites to Continue reading: As students return to school, US teachers face nationwide struggle to defend education - World Socialist Web Site

Black Lives Matter in Our Schools: Developing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Black Lives Matter in Our Schools: Developing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Black Lives Matter in Our Schools: Developing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy

First published in TruthOut.org

Empowering Black students to become change makers is a key goal of the book, Teaching for Black Lives. Editors Dyan Watson, Jesse Hagopian and Wayne Au have assembled a cogent group of essays that offer the opportunity for developing an anti-racist pedagogy.

Truthout interviewed one of the editors, Jesse Hagopian, who is also a Truthout contributing writer.

Mark Karlin: You note in your introduction that “We must teach for black lives in our classrooms.” How did you and your fellow editors come up with the idea for a textbook that can also be used as a reader by adults?

Co-editor Jesse Hagopian.

Rethinking Schools

Jesse Hagopian: As I answer these questions, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are readying plans to march on Washington, DC. Hate crimes are on the rise around the country. Police violence against Black people continues unabated and the school-to-prison pipeline is helping to fuel the nation’s system of mass incarceration. And yet, there are also a growing number of educators who are organizing and fighting back against anti-Black racism.

In this way, I think the Black Lives Matter (BLM) at School movementand the broader movement for Black lives inspired the idea for Teaching for Black Lives as a book that could be used by educators, students, activists and community organizers. The BLM at School movement went national during the 2017-2018 school year and educators in over 20 cities participated in a week of action from February 5 to 9, to affirm the lives of Black students and challenge institutional racism. The BLM at School movement developed three demands: (1) End “zero tolerance” discipline and implement restorative justice; (2) Hire more Black teachers; (3) Mandate Black history and ethnic studies in K-12 curriculum. In addition, educators taught lessons throughout the week that corresponded to the 13 guiding principles of #BlackLivesMatter Global Network including restorative justice, empathy and loving engagement, diversity and globalism, trans-affirming, queer-affirming, collective value, intergenerational, Black families and Black villages, Black women and unapologetically Black.

Seeing this movement spread from Seattle to Philadelphia during the 2016-2017 school year, and then explode nationally the following year, made the editors at Rethinking Schools want to find ways to contribute and arm teachers with lesson plans that can help them empower students to become change makers. I was truly blessed to be able to work with co-editors Dyane Watson and Wayne Au on this project whose expertise in anti-racist pedagogy was invaluable.

How did you decide on the five sections of the book?

The five sections of the book are:

• Making Black Lives Matter in our Schools;
• Enslavement, Civil Rights and Black Liberation;
• Gentrification, Displacement and Anti-Blackness;
• Discipline, the Schools-to-Prison Pipeline and Mass Incarceration; and
• Teaching Blackness, Loving Blackness and Exploring Identity.

Each section represents a major aspect of the Black experience that we believed is not often taught–or not taught well—yet is critical for empowering Black students to understand their own identities and challenge the institutional racism they face. As we write in the introduction to the book,

“We recognize that anti-Black racism constructs Black people, and Blackness generally, as not counting as human life. The chapters here in Teaching for Black Lives push back directly against this construction by not only providing educators with critical perspectives on the role of schools in perpetuating anti-Blackness, but also by offering educators concrete examples of what it looks like to humanize Black people in Continue reading: Black Lives Matter in Our Schools: Developing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy – I AM AN EDUCATOR

DPE 2.0 The City Fund | tultican

DPE 2.0 The City Fund | tultican
DPE 2.0 The City Fund

Billionaire Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, has joined with billionaire former Enron executive, John Arnold, to launch an aggressive destroy public education (DPE) initiative. They claim to have invested $100 million each to start The City Fund. Neerav Kingsland declares he is the Fund’s Managing Partner and says the fund will help cities across America institute proven school reform successes such as increasing “the number of public schools that are governed by non-profit organizations.”

Ending local control of public schools through democratic means is a priority for DPE forces. In 2017, EdSource reported on Hastings campaign against democracy; writing, “His latest salvo against school boards that many regard as a bedrock of American democracy came last week in a speech he made to the annual conference of The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in Washington D.C., attended by about 4,500 enthusiastic charter school advocates, teachers and administrators.”

When announcing the new fund, Kingsland listed fourteen founding members of The City Fund. There is little professional classroom teaching experience or training within the group. Chris Barbic was a Teach for America (TFA) teacher in Houston, Texas for two years. Similarly, Kevin Huffman was also a TFA teacher in Houston for three years. The only other member that may have some education experience is Kevin Shafer. His background is obscure.

The operating structure of the new fund is modeled after a law firm. Six of the fourteen founding members are lawyers: Gary Borden; David Harris; Kevin Huffman; Neerav Kingsland; Jessica Pena and Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo.

Ready to Pilfer Community Schools and End School Boards

In a 2012 published debate about school reform, Kingsland justified his call for ending democratic control of public education writing,

“I believe that true autonomy can only be achieved by government relinquishing its power of school operation. I believe that well regulated charter and voucher markets – that provide educators with public funds to operate their own schools – will outperform all other vehicles of autonomy in the long-run. In short, autonomy must be real autonomy: government operated schools that allow “site level decision making” feels more Orwellian than empowering – if we believe educators should run schools, let’s let them run schools.”

This is a belief in “the invisible hand” of markets making superior judgements and private businesses always outperforming government administration. There may be some truth here, but it is certainly not an ironclad law.

The City Fund has distinct roots stretching back to early 2016. On April 4 that year, Kingsland announced on his blog, Relinquishment, “Very excited about this update: Ken Bubp and Chris Barbic are joining the combined efforts of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and Hastings Fund.”

In January of 2016, Philanthropy News Digest reported, “Netflix founder and Continue Reading: DPE 2.0 The City Fund | tultican

COPPA in the Smart Home: Who Protects Our Children’s Data?

COPPA in the Smart Home: Who Protects Our Children’s Data?

Inside the Decades-Long Fight to Protect Your Children’s Data From Advertisers

Photo-Illustration: Jed Egan, Photos: Getty Images

When Kathryn Montgomery walked into the Digital Kids conference in New York, she didn’t know what to expect. This was 1995 — the internet was new and full of promise. She still believed that access to books and unlimited information could mean a lot for children’s development.

But sitting through presentations on online playgrounds populated by the likes of Chester Cheetah and Ronald McDonald — places where kids could build personal relationships with these corporate mascots — she began to feel panicked. The internet was supposed to be something different, but the ad men from Madison Avenue just saw a new opportunity. They wanted one-to-one advertising and they wanted to target kids.

Montgomery went back to Washington, D.C., and told her husband, Jeff Chester, and the rest of their team at the Center for Media Education about what she’d seen. Right away, they began working on a report that would become Web of Deception, a study that documented the way companies were using websites to target children. They filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and, within two years, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) passed through Congress and was signed into law.

That 1998 legislation, which has been updated by the FTC multiple times since its passage, is still the most stringent internet privacy law on the books. Today, kids under 13 are the only class of American internet user who must opt in rather than opt out of having their data collected. (Children under 13 were identified as a class especially vulnerable to the effect of targeted marketing.) At the time, Chester explained the collection of cookies — small bits of information about a user’s browsing history that travel with that user — as “Orwellian” to the press. Two decades later, the characterization seems quaint. Today, Montgomery and Chester face a much more existential fight for privacy online: the Internet of Things. They’re helping to lead a cadre of activist groups in a battle against some of the largest companies on the planet, and Apple, Google, Amazon, and the rest of the tech world are now entrenched forces in Washington. Chester admits: “We would never have been able to get COPPA through Congress today.”

Even at a time of growing public distrust of social media, consumers are rushing to put the tech industry’s voice-activated devices into their homes. In April, there was reporting about an Amazon patent which posited technology that could eavesdrop on all conversations around Alexa and then send recommendations to users. Though the patent is forward-looking, it led to a news cycle of Big Brother–fueled fear regarding Amazon’s devices. And yet, sales of smart speakers in the United States more than tripled from 2016 to 2017, according to research from the Consumer Technology Association. A Canalys report from January projects 2018 U.S. sales to eclipse 38 million units.

Montgomery remembers the moment she first saw a television — she was four or five and her father lugged it home to set up in the living room. Montgomery and Chester’s daughter, who is in her mid-20s, is of the generation that remembers their first connected device (this writer remembers playing BrickBreaker on his father’s Blackberry at the age of 15). But the next generation will have spoken to a device before they form memories. “When all of this becomes part of the automobile that you drive, the appliances that you use, when it’s all become so much a seamless part of your everyday life,” Montgomery explains, “it will be easy to forget what the potential is of this system to really do harm by invading our privacy.”

The husband-and-wife team believe the moment to regulate privacy in IoT is right now, before everyone has a voice-activated speaker in every room. So the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the subsequent piqued interest in privacy and data protection seemed fortuitously timed for their mission. But seeing senator after senator stumble through their questioning of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discouraged the activist couple. “It was embarrassing,” Montgomery says. “And the Internet of Things, of course, is now moving forward so quickly and nobody quite grasps that either.”

It’s instructive to think of Jeff Chester as an Old Testament prophet or Howard Beale from Network. He speaks quickly, rarely finishing his sentences before he’s onto another point. He’s an expert on the internet, and that expertise keeps him perpetually annoyed — Continue reading: COPPA in the Smart Home: Who Protects Our Children’s Data?

There is an important role for State Attorneys General in protecting children from for-profit companies collecting and using their data, a new frontier in law and privacy that demands attention. https://t.co/ylcCrQSj7r

— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) August 18, 2018

What Betsy Devos Did Before Becoming Education Secretary Shows She's Long Been A GOP Powerhouse

What Betsy Devos Did Before Becoming Education Secretary Shows She's Long Been A GOP Powerhouse
What Betsy Devos Did Before Becoming Education Secretary Shows She's Long Been A GOP Powerhouse

Betsy DeVos is a wealthy, Christian, conservative Midwesterner who also happens to be the current U.S. Secretary of Education. She's a businesswoman who’s known best for her efforts to promote school choice, a controversial idea that critics say takes money out of public schools. But what did DeVos do before she started working as Trump's secretary education?

DeVos comes from family money, both from her parents and her husbands’. Her dad, Edgar Prince, founded a company that eventually came to be worth a billion dollars, according to Politico, a fortune that was built in part due to innovations like a light-up vanity mirror on the sun visor in cars. Her father-in-law founded the lucrative marketing company Amway.

Even before she pulled up a seat to the table in Washington, DeVos was a power player. In fact, the DeVos family fortune is so plentiful that they get help managing their funds from a family office named RDV Corp., which has something called a Family Council made up of DeVos relatives who vote on family business decisions, according to theWall Street Journal. (DeVos resigned from the council in 2016.)

One perk of having so much money and power is that the DeVoses are loaded with assistants. Through RDV Corp.'s Family Council, they reportedly have a household administrative assistant, a person who makes sure “doors are well-oiled,” and a “boat matinee assistant” who is tasked with making sure proper table etiquette is followed, among other things, WSJ reported. They even have an assistant for the Christmas season, including managing the Christmas card list, wrapping presents, and coming up with gift ideas for the DeVoses and their business associates.

Given her breadth of experience, some might say DeVos, 60, is a jack of all trades — but certainly almost all of those trades have had something to do with promoting Christian and conservative ideas.

What DeVos Did Before She Was Secretary Of Education

DeVos started getting active in politics at a young age. As a freshman earning her degree in business economics at Christian liberal arts Calvin College in the ‘70s in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she volunteered for Gerald Ford’s presidential campaign, as Politico's Zack Stanton reported in a profile about the secretary.

She got involved with the Republican Party starting in 1982, with school choice almost always at the top of her agenda of important issues to take on. She served as the National Committeewoman in Michigan from 1992 to 1997 and was the chair of the state’s Republican Party from 1996 to 2000, as The New York Times reported.

She resigned in 2000 after the state’s governor at the time, John Engler, opposed her ideas to change the laws surrounding school vouchers. But after Engler was out of office, she was re-elected in 2003.

She also served as a chair of the privately held investment company, Windquest Continue reading: What Betsy Devos Did Before Becoming Education Secretary Shows She's Long Been A GOP Powerhouse

Opinion | The Bane That Is Betsy DeVos - The New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/opinion/betsy-devos-for-profit-colleges.html

Transgender students asked Betsy DeVos for help. Here's what happened. - POLITICO

Transgender students asked Betsy DeVos for help. Here's what happened. - POLITICO
Transgender students asked Betsy DeVos for help. Here's what happened.
The Trump administration 'has absolutely no clue' what families go through, one mother said.

Alex Howe dreaded the long walk he had to take just to use the bathroom at his Texas high school — two unisex stalls in the middle of the sprawling building, far from his classrooms.

Because he’s a transgender boy, his school district barred him from the much more convenient boy’s restrooms. “It was isolating and alienating,” Howe, who was identified at birth as female, told POLITICO, the first time he has spoken publicly about being a transgender high school kid. And it didn’t stop there.

Conservative parents told the debate coach they didn’t want Howe sharing a room with their sons on trips to competitions. The frustrated coach argued that Howe should be treated the same as the other kids, but school administrators sided with the parents and wouldn’t budge. He roomed alone, singled out again.

Howe struggled with depression and his mother, Stacey Burg, said the treatment at school took its toll. “He would see his therapist and they would increase his antidepressants,” she said. “He would say it’s school work and debate, but I thought it was more. He was stressed all the time. He was upset, he was depressed, he was anxious. He would get angry at home.”

After his graduation in 2017 Howe filed a complaint with federal civil rights officials at the Department of Education, hoping to ease the way for other transgender students at his school to use the bathrooms of their choice. But an examination of federal records by POLITICO shows that his complaint is one of at least five involving transgender students denied bathroom access that was thrown out by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has halted such investigations.

Another transgender student interviewed by POLITICO and also speaking publicly for the first time said his bathroom-related complaint hasn’t been dismissed, but his case has stalled for three years. He doesn’t know why.

Both Howe and the second student, who wants to be identified only by his first name, Drake, described the human cost of DeVos’ decision to turn down and hold Continue reading: Transgender students asked Betsy DeVos for help. Here's what happened. - POLITICO

Trump and DeVos are moving on a radical anti-student agenda

Trump and DeVos are moving on a radical anti-student agenda

Anti-student agenda at Education Department under DeVos is Trump's most radical move
The Trump Education Department is operating like a K Street lobbying firm. Betsy DeVos now wants your tax dollars to fund for-profit colleges that defraud students.

A week ago, on a sleepy August Friday in Washington, Betsy DeVos took what is her most radical step yet. The Education Department proposed to eliminate — not just weaken, as many people had expected — so-called “gainful employment” guidelines  that cut off federal student loans to colleges if the majority of graduates earned so little that they were not able to pay off their loans.

Under the DeVos proposal, for-profit colleges could use any trick in the book to lure in students with grandiose images of career success, charge them far above the actual cost of instruction, and leave them steeped in debt and unable to find a good paying job. And that’s exactly what will happen.

The gainful employment rules, like the DeVos plan last month to limit loan relief for defrauded students, were designed in response to a long history of predatory recruiting and abuse in the for-profit college sector. When I was in the Obama administration, we thoughtschools like Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institutes should be held accountable for trapping students — often vulnerable people like veterans, low-wage workers and first-generation college-goers — in programs that give them worthless degrees.

For-profit colleges have a history of abuse

At the very least, taxpayers shouldn’t be propping up these predatory schools in the form of billions of dollars in federal student aid flowing to for-profit colleges. In putting a measure of accountability into a largely unregulated, scandal-ridden sector, the gainful employment rules were a baseline minimum standard of consumer and taxpayer protection.  

Betsy DeVos thinks students are just not being good shoppers, but the real problem is that the federal government enables and endorses career programs that are way overpriced. By how much? A whopping 78 percent, according to economists who compared tuition at training programs where federal aid was available to those where it was not. To for-profit schools, the amount of aid available is a signal of the price they should charge for tuition, regardless of the underlying costs. Taking every penny maximizes profits, after all. The gainful employment rule would have repaired that problematic incentive.

The Education Department would make it so that even if schools cheat students, it is the student who must navigate a byzantine process and prove that the school acted with malicious intent. And if a borrower succeeds in that near impossible feat, they’ll be granted only partial relief on their loans. Say you’re buried in debt and can’t earn enough to dig out? Too bad, you should have done a better job recognizing charlatans and researching default and earnings data before enrolling. 

More: Don't ask college applicants about juvenile records. Teens grow up and need opportunity.

Charter schools want to share how they are helping more low-income students finish college

College dorms are training grounds in political civility. Could they save democracy?

Betsy DeVos insists that the gainful employment rule unfairly targets for-profit schools. But by eliminating the rules, for-profit colleges will now be held to lower standards than public and nonprofit schools, which have strict financial controls to prevent the misuse of federal funds. Those financial controls, n determining an institution’s incentives, make a big difference.

As the Century Foundation revealed this year, of the more than 130,000 borrowers who have filed fraud complaints with the Education Department, more than 98 percent involved for-profit colleges. Put differently, students who enrolled at a for-profit college in recent years were 1,000 times more likely to file a fraud claim than someone who enrolled at a public university.

The Trump administration’s proposal is sure to lead to a repeat of the scandals that have besieged the federal student loan program time and again, harming hundreds of Continue reading: Trump and DeVos are moving on a radical anti-student agenda

Fewer and Fewer States Escaping School Privatization's Reach

Fewer and Fewer States Escaping School Privatization's Reach

Fewer and Fewer States Escaping School Privatization’s Reach

According to a 2017 national poll, a strong majority of public school parents give the traditional public schools in their neighborhoods either an A or a B – higher grades than they have given in years. The same survey also found that the majority of the public believes that lack of funding is the biggest problem facing schools today.

While creating and supporting great public schools should be the focus of lawmakers across the country, the reality is quite different. The commitment in state legislatures to the “great equalizer” that is public education has eroded quite dramatically.

That is the sobering conclusion of a recent report released by the Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation titled “Grading the States: A Report Card on the Nation’s Commitment to Public Schools.”

“Grading the States” examines the far reach of the school privatization movement and its impact on public schools and students. Across the nation, states have implemented and expanded charter schools that are unaccountable to the public and voucher programs that have siphoned off public taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition.

The proponents of these policies and the corporate interests that bankroll them insist their goal is to improve the quality of education – a dubious claim, the report states, “in the face of the reality that too often there is little to no public accountability, fiscal transparency, or maintenance of civil rights protections for students in privatized programs.”

Private schools and charters are not designed to serve all students, but this hasn’t stopped these programs from establishing a strong foothold in communities across the country. Every state except three have charter schools and 28 states have in place some sort of school voucher program. The trend – which shows little sign of letting up – has sown exclusivity and division into the educational system and depleted public schools of valuable resources.

“Although parents always have a right to send their children to private schools at their own expense,” the report states, “they are not and never can be the model for educating all of this nation’s children, nor should they be supported by public dollars.”

The State Report Card

The researchers assigned all 50 states and the District of Columbia with a letter grade, deducting points based on the presence of charter schools and voucher or “neo-voucher” programs (merely voucher programs tweaked to circumvent legal restrictions against giving public money to private schools through tuition tax credits and education savings accounts.)

Twenty-two states received overall grades between a C and a B+. Six states and the Continue reading: Fewer and Fewer States Escaping School Privatization's Reach

What Is DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)? | Diane Ravitch's blog

What Is DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)? | Diane Ravitch's blog

What Is DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)?

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) was created by a group of guys who work as hedge fund managers. Some are Democrats, other are Republicans. They support charter schools and high-stakes testing. They never support public schools. They support Teach for America. They think that teachers should be evaluated by the test scores of their students, even though research overwhelmingly shows that this method is a failure (see the recent RAND-AIR report on the flop of the Gates-funded demonstration of evaluating teachers by test scores). They believe in merit pay, even though merit pay has never worked anywhere. There is no evidence that any active member of DFER ever attended a public school, ever taught in a public school, or ever sent his children to a public school. DFER doesn’t like public schools. Like Betsy DeVos, which it pretends to oppose, DFER believes in free-market reform of schools. If I am wrong, I hope that one of these hedge fund managers contacts me to let me know.

DFER loves corporate charter chains and doesn’t like local democratic control of schools. They see nothing unsavory about out-of-state billionaires buying an election for their favorite candidate, even in a local school board election.

Here is the DFER list for this year’s election. Cory Booker and Michael Bennet are perennial favorites of DFER. I don’t know if Congressman Bobby Scott of Virginia is aligned with their philosophy or if DFER is trying to establish a relationship. He is chair of the House Education Committee in the Congress. His predecessor, Congressman George Miller of California, was fully aligned with DFER’s views and was richly rewarded with fundraisers, even when he didn’t have an opponent. His former chief of staff, Charles Barone, now runs the DFER office in D.C.

Suffice it to say that DFER pays no attention to research that does not  Continue reading: What Is DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)? | Diane Ravitch's blog