Big Education Ape

Saturday, September 1, 2018

2nd BANANA: Top Posts This Week 9/1/18

The NYT Editorial Board | Schools Can Keep Kids Safe Without Giving Their Teachers Guns - The New York Times

Opinion | Schools Can Keep Kids Safe Without Giving Their Teachers Guns - The New York Times
Schools Can Keep Kids Safe Without Giving Their Teachers Guns
Betsy DeVos’s latest scheme flies in the face of expert advice.

Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, floated a plan last week that stood out in its absurdity even among her many other foolish proposals: She is considering using an obscure federal grant program to let schools buy guns and pay for firearms training for faculty and staff members.

That news stoked the ire of educators and gun-control advocates. They argue that guns will contribute to a climate of fear in schools and note that study after study equates more guns with more injuries and deaths.

Still, Ms. DeVos is not alone in her thinking. Since the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., this past February, lawmakers in at least 14 states have proposed laws that would use taxpayers’ dollars to arm educators.

Only one of those state laws has passed. And Congress, for its part, has barred new school safety funds from being used to buy firearms. (Ms. DeVos’s plans would circumvent this restriction by drawing from a different fund.) But it’s clear that plenty of policymakers still see this as an option worth pursuing.

That’s too bad. In their rush to arm up, they are overlooking solutions that are both more promising and less contentious, and that violence prevention experts have spent years clamoring for.

Prioritize “school climate.” That term refers to the general level of well-being and comfort students and teachers experience on campus. Is bullying pervasive? Do students feel comfortable confiding in the adults around them? The concept might sound fuzzy and foreign — it rarely comes up in the national conversation about violence prevention — but experts say that a healthy school climate is crucial to reducing the threat of violence.

The Department of Education has developed at least some protocols for doing this: frameworks for how to respond to outbursts, guidelines for how to penalize students without alienating them. But there is no national requirement that schools implement such protocols, nor any dedicated funding for doing so.

Provide more mental health services. If you put an armed guard into a school, there’s at best a possibility of preventing a shooting there, says Dewey Cornell, a professor of education and a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia. But, he says, “put a counselor or psychologist in a school, and you have the potential to prevent shootings in any building anywhere in the community.”

The average student-to-counselor ratio in the United States is nearly 500 to one. According to the American School Counselor Association, it should be closer to 250 to one. Mr. Cornell and his colleagues say that schools also need far more psychologists and social workers than they currently have. Hiring more of these professionals is the key to helping students who are on a path to violence before they bring a gun to school.

Implement proven threat-assessment programs. Law enforcement has long used threat assessment to protect public figures, but after the Columbine massacre in 1999, psychologists began adapting the protocol for schools. In such programs, teams of educators, mental health professionals and law-enforcement officials work together to assess threats within a school and decide how to respond them on a case-by-case basis.

Since 2013, Virginia has required all of its K-12 public schools to employ threat-assessment teams. The results so far have been encouraging. Fewer than 1 percent of students seen for a threat assessment have carried out their threats; none of the threats to kill, shoot or seriously injure someone were carried out; and, in most cases, students deemed a threat were able to get help without having to leave school. This past July, the Secret Service endorsed this approach to school safety.

These three ideas for improving school safety, along with several others — including the obvious need to strengthen federal gun control laws — were included in a call for action published earlier this year. So far, it has been endorsed by some 4,000 experts in the field.

Similar reforms were called for in 2013, after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that killed 26 people, 20 of them small children. But those calls were never heeded, and in the years since, more than 100 students, teachers and school staff members have been killed in American schools. That should infuriate everyone, regardless of their personal feelings about guns.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion)Opinion | Schools Can Keep Kids Safe Without Giving Their Teachers Guns - The New York Times

The price of punishment — new report shows students nationwide lost 11 million school days due to suspensions | EdSource

The price of punishment — new report shows students nationwide lost 11 million school days due to suspensions | EdSource

The price of punishment — new report shows students nationwide lost 11 million school days due to suspensions

The data, from the 2015-16 school year, also show California students losing nearly 750,000 days

Children in America’s public schools lost more than 11 million instructional days due to suspensions during the 2015-16 school year, with California students losing nearly 750,000 days, according to a report released this week by the ACLU and the UCLA Civil Rights Project.

The report, based on federal government data, also found that racial disparities in suspensions remain an acute problem. Nationwide, African-American students lost 66 days of instruction per 100 students enrolled in 2015-16, which is five times as many days as white students lost.

In California, meanwhile, there are four times as many white students enrolled in public schools as African-American students, yet the total number of instructional days lost by African-American students due to suspension was nearly the same as the number of days lost by whites — 141,000 for African Americans compared with 151,000 for whites, the report said.

“There are too many evidence-based alternatives to suspensions for there to be this level of educational deprivation,” said Amir Whitaker, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California who co-authored the report with Daniel Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.

The disparities were also wide for California’s Native American students and students with disabilities. Native Americans lost 2.5 times as many days to suspensions as white students, and disabled students lost 2.6 times as many.

The gap between whites and Latinos was much smaller, with Latinos statewide losing 12 days of instruction per 100 students enrolled due to compared to 10 days for whites, the report said. Asian students were the least affected group — losing only three days of instruction per 100 students enrolled in California.

The report is based on data kept by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which collects suspension data from nearly every public school in the United States. The 2015-16 school year was the first time every school was required to collect and report data on the days of lost instruction due to out-of-school Continue reading: The price of punishment — new report shows students nationwide lost 11 million school days due to suspensions | EdSource

Friday, August 31, 2018

UPDATE SEA & SPS have reached a tentative agreement Seattle Teachers Poised to Strike Draw Solidarity from Their Brothers and Sisters In Puerto Rico - Progressive.org

Seattle Teachers Poised to Strike Draw Solidarity from Their Brothers and Sisters In Puerto Rico - Progressive.org

***UPDATE SEA & SPS have reached a tentative agreement***

SPS and SEA Negotiations 2018 - Seattle Public Schools - http://www.seattleschools.org/district/calendars/news/what_s_new/sps_and_sea_negotiations_2018

Seattle Teachers Poised to Strike Draw Solidarity from Their Brothers and Sisters In Puerto Rico
To prepare for what we are likely to face in our struggle for a just contract, Seattle educators recently organized a panel that included a representative from the Puerto Rico Federation of Teachers.

Seattle teachers and staff have authorized a strike unless negotiations with Seattle Public Schools don’t result in a tentative contract by the first day of school, September 5. Our vote to strike is part of a unified labor action across Washington to protest the lack of adequate and equitable funding for schools and teachers in this state.

Seattle teachers are hardly alone in the struggle for fair working conditions for educators and better learning conditions for students. The wave of teacher walkouts and protests that swept through West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and other states this spring brought to the fore the need for teachers to receive competitive pay raises and improved learning resources and smaller class sizes.

To prepare for what we are likely to face in our struggle for a just contract, Seattle educators recently organized a panel that included a representative from a community of educators that’s been hit hardest by financial austerity and the privatization movement: Mercedes Martinez, president of the Puerto Rico Federation of Teachers.

These teachers have been leading courageous struggles not only for their own pay, but to defend public education and create the schools Puerto Rican students deserve.

Their fight has escalated since the devastation of Hurricane Maria brought disaster capitalists flocking to the island in an effort to profit off the island’s vulnerability.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, Julia Keleher, Puerto Rico’s secretary of education, echoed former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s comment that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans schools. She called New Orleans a “point of reference” for the reorganization of schools in Puerto Rico into charter schools, and an “opportunity” to remake education according to a vision of outsiders.

Using what Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine” playbook for privatizing Continue reading: Seattle Teachers Poised to Strike Draw Solidarity from Their Brothers and Sisters In Puerto Rico - Progressive.org

Connecting School Quality Dots: Money, Race, Suspension, and Safety Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog

Connecting School Quality Dots: Money, Race, Suspension, and Safety

School quality and school discipline are intertwined. As I explain in Reforming School Discipline, "[s]ocial science increasingly demonstrates that while student misbehavior is a function of individual choices that students make, individual student misbehavior is also a function of the school environment in which they learn and act. Quality schools and orderly environments consistently produce higher student achievement and less misbehavior. Low quality schools with disorderly, hostile, and punitive environments produce lower student achievement and higher rates of suspension and expulsion." And as Bruce Baker, Kirabo Jackson, and official government reports establish, there is a direct link between school funding and school quality and student outcomes.

If we take these two basic insights about money and school discipline and throw some basic data points together, a pretty stark image emerges. This week, the ACLU and UCLA Civil Rights Project issued a new report on race, discipline, and school safety that gave me the tools to do just that. They issued heat maps that show on a district-by-district basis how many students are suspended, whether there is a shortage of school counselors. And earlier this year, Bruce Baker and his colleagues issued a report that measured school spending levels against what it would take for students in each district to achieve at average levels.

Side by side these maps nearly look like mirror images, even though they are measuring two seemingly different things.

The bright spots in the image on the left show districts with high rates of school suspension. The yellow, orange and red spots in the image on the right show districts that are the most underfunded. The dark blue on the left image and the green on the right image show the other end of the spectrum--schools with low discipline rates and high funding levels. There are, of course, exceptions. Texas, for instance, has a serious school funding problem, but relatively low discipline rates. Although you can still see that within Texas, there are discipline problems in the southern and eastern part of the state, where underfunding is also a problem.

Trying to draw an even more vivid picture, this morning I decided to do it the new, old-fashioned way--cutting and Continue reading: Education Law Prof Blog

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Former Schott Foundation Board Member Andrew Gillum Selected by Florida Voters to be Democratic Nominee for Florida Governor | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Former Schott Foundation Board Member Andrew Gillum Selected by Florida Voters to be Democratic Nominee for Florida Governor | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Former Schott Foundation Board Member Andrew Gillum Selected by Florida Voters to be Democratic Nominee for Florida Governor

On behalf of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, I would like to take this moment to congratulate Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum for being selected as the Democratic nominee for governor of the state of Florida. The media called it an upset victory, and certainly the results defied the experts and pundits. But I’ve known Andrew Gillum for close to two decades, as a friend, staunch advocate for an opportunity to learn for all students and ultimately as a colleague as a member of the Schott Foundation Board of Directors. Defying the odds is what Andrew does. Since his first election to the Tallahassee City Commission as a student, its youngest ever member, continuing throughout his career as a public servant, he has brought indefatigable energy, deep thoughtfulness, a compelling vision and courage to every organizing endeavor. Organizing — bringing people together, encouraging them to believe in themselves and what they can achieve together. Florida’s primary voters clearly saw these qualities in Andrew when they propelled him to victory.

Andrew shares Schott’s core belief that change comes from the bottom-up. That belief is a strong light in these dark times of rancor and divisiveness—it is our guiding light to a better future.

Andrew’s focus on public education reflects a deep understanding of the issues facing Florida’s children, families, and educators. He is a proud #PublicSchoolGrad who knows the struggles of low-income communities, and we applaud his emphasis on reinvestment, equity, and opposition to the failed privatization policies of the past.

All of us at Schott are proud of what our colleague and friend has accomplished, and can’t wait to see what Andrew Gillum, Florida voters and the growing movement for public education in Florida achieve next.

Yours in the struggle,

John H. Jackson
President and CEO

Former Schott Foundation Board Member Andrew Gillum Selected by Florida Voters to be Democratic Nominee for Florida Governor | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Support Andrew Gillum for Florida Governor - https://andrewgillum.com/

Image result for Andrew Gillum for Florida Governor

Support Andrew Gillum for Florida Governor - https://andrewgillum.com/

Today’s lesson, boys and girls? “G” is for guns in your schools. | Miami Herald

Today’s lesson, boys and girls? “G” is for guns in your schools. | Miami Herald

Today’s lesson, boys and girls? “G” is for guns in your schools.

Certainly no Republican (with the possible exception of the president who nominated her) has done more than DeVos has to antagonize and energize Democratic and independent voters, and particularly the student and parent activists awakened by the Parkland, Florida, school shootings. Confirmed by a single vote in February 2017 when Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaker, DeVos has spent most of her first year-and-a-half in office trying to emasculate the department Donald Trump selected her to lead.

This is not an act of insubordination, but a sabotage mission that has enjoyed the White House’s enthusiastic support. The big idea: Slash billions of dollars earmarked for public schools and divert part of the savings to initiatives to expand for-profit charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools.

It is of a piece with the agenda DeVos and her clan promoted with their privately bankrolled Great Lakes Education Project before Trump handed them the keys to the U.S. Department of Education. So far, though, members of the U.S. Congress have displayed little interest in DeVos’ grand scheme, routinely ignoring the administration’s proposals to decimate federal funding for education and passing budgets that maintain or increase support for the public school districts they represent.

Lawmakers have also taken pains to limit the administration’s discretion in spending funds earmarked for student safety. Just this past spring, after the president responded to another cluster of school shootings with a proposal to arm teachers, Congress allocated $50 billion to help local school districts bolster security but explicitly forbade them from spending the money to purchase firearms.

But now, according to the New York Times, DeVos and her merry band of public school saboteurs believe they have discovered a way to tap a $1 billion grant program established to benefit students in the nation’s most underfunded school districts to pay for the guns Congress forbade them to buy with school safety funds. Money allocated under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is supposed to be used to improve learning conditions and promote digital literacy. But because its congressional sponsors failed to include language specifically barring its use for firearm purchases, the Department of Education is considering allowing schools to use the money to purchase firearms for school staffers.

Until now, the Times reports, the Department of Education has encouraged grant recipients to spend ESSA money on mental health counseling, dropout prevention initiatives and programs to facilitate the re-entry of students returning to school from the juvenile justice system.

But departmental researchers have proposed that gun purchases could fall under ESSA’s charter to improve learning conditions in schools that serve low-income students. If it also bolsters revenues for firearm manufacturers and gun shop dealers, well, that’s just icing on the cake.

Surely anyone with the money and executive authority at DeVos’ command has the Continue reading: Today’s lesson, boys and girls? “G” is for guns in your schools. | Miami Herald

National Student-led Forum on Gun Safety and Safe Schools | KRWG

National Student-led Forum on Gun Safety and Safe Schools | KRWG

National Student-led Forum on Gun Safety and Safe Schools

Commentary: Today, students and teachers from across America announced a student-led educational and interactive forum on gun violence in America. The October 20-21st summit in D.C. will aggregate conversations and compromise by students to develop a “Students’ Bill of Rights,” which will be an organizing document for student led events and actions demanding elected officials and candidates address important issues like preventing gun violence, mental health, community and school safety, and illegal guns.

At the end of the school year, returning students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida began calling for students to come together in agreeance on meaningful policy proposals and develop an action plan to make them law. They began with the hashtag “#TimetoTalk.” The students formed a national student advisory committee and engaging with students from across the country. Additionally, teachers are being encouraged to come and serve as advisors to the Bill of Rights process as well as to chaperone.

“We wanted to create an environment where students could rise above the rhetoric, dig into the facts and discuss real solutions. When we return home, armed with ideas, we’ll talk to elected officials and candidates from school board members to senators and ask where they stand on achieving meaningful common sense change,” said Jack Macleod, student co-founder of Students For Change.

The goal of the summit will be to review existing student plans to reduce gun violence and combine them into a single “Students’ Bill of Rights” on school safety, along with a corresponding action plan. The Students’ Bill of Rights will be used by students across the country as an organizing document for civic engagement activity focused on reducing the gun violence that has affected far too many young lives.

“Virtually nothing has been done on a national level to confront the crisis imperiling students’ and educators’ lives. Indeed, Betsy DeVos’ insane and possibly illegal attempts to use federal funds to arm teachers shows how far she will go to advance the interests of the National Rifle Association rather than the children she’s charged with protecting. But if politicians don’t act, students and educators will—and we will organize and vote and call “BS” until change is won.

“The AFT is proud to be a part of this work, work we believe empowers students to seize their future and will help ensure public schools are safe and welcoming places to teach and learn,” said Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers.

“Gun violence has been a norm in our country for many years and the youth has finally stepped up to do something about this terrible epidemic. We are finally Continue reading: National Student-led Forum on Gun Safety and Safe Schools | KRWG

Image result for lily garcia nea students gun safety

BARBARA MADELONI: As the School Year Begins, More Teachers Across the Country Could Soon Strike

As the School Year Begins, More Teachers Across the Country Could Soon Strike

As the School Year Begins, More Teachers Across the Country Could Soon Strike

As teachers, school employees, and students head back to school, what’s ahead for the #RedforEd movement?

This spring, teachers mobilized on an unprecedented scale in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, North Carolina, and Colorado. They protested, walked out, and even held statewide strikes—in states with limited to no collective bargaining rights, where school unions have traditionally focused on state politics.

The springtime actions, led by rank and filers, inspired educators and unionists across the country. It looks like the cusp of a labor upsurge that could spread beyond schools.

The mobilizers met with varying degrees of support or resistance from their own state union leaders. The militancy made leaders anxious, but many were also savvy enough to see that the uprisings were effective—and that they’d better not get in the way.

Teachers saw just how powerful they can be when they act collectively. But now with midterm elections coming up, the impulse to turn toward electoral politics—and a strong push from statewide education unions to elect new faces into the statehouses—presents a challenge.

Will members go back to thinking that power resides mainly in electoral politics? Or will their newborn rank-and-file movement be able to use ballot measures and elections to extend their networks at the grassroots?

Here’s a state-by-state rundown of where the campaigns stand and what it might mean for ongoing organizing:

West Virginia Digs In

While West Virginia teachers were furious at Governor Jim Justice’s initial offer of a 1 percent raise, their nine-day strike was prompted in large part by cost increases in their state health plan, the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA).

Now the teachers are awaiting recommendations from the PEIA Task Force, established in the March agreement that ended the strike. With GOP heavies like Senate President Mitch Carmichael—teacher enemy number one—on the Task Force, many expect the recommendations to fall far short of what’s needed.

But teachers are getting ready, focusing on forming “really solid friendships and connections across the state,” said Jay O’Neal, a Charleston teacher who started the Continue reading: As the School Year Begins, More Teachers Across the Country Could Soon Strike

How America Is Breaking Public Education

How America Is Breaking Public Education

How America Is Breaking Public Education

The ultimate dream of public education is incredibly simple. Students, ideally, would go to a classroom, receive top-notch instruction from a passionate, well-informed teacher, would work hard in their class, and would come away with a new set of skills, talents, interests, and capabilities. Over the past few decades in the United States, a number of education reforms have been enacted, designed to measure and improve student learning outcomes, holding teachers accountable for their students' performances. Despite these well-intentioned programs, including No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act, public education is more broken than ever. The reason, as much as we hate to admit it, is that we've disobeyed the cardinal rule of success in any industry: treating your workers like professionals.

Everyone who's been through school has had experiences with a wide variety of teachers, ranging from the colossally bad to the spectacularly good. There are a few qualities universally ascribed to the best teachers, and the lists almost always include the following traits:

a passion for their chosen subject,
a deep, expert-level knowledge of the subject matter they're teaching,
a willingness to cater to a variety of learning styles and to employ a variety of educational techniques,
and a vision for what a class of properly educated students would be able to know and demonstrate at the end of the academic year.

Yet despite knowing what a spectacular teacher looks like, the educational models we have in place actively discourage every one of these.

The first and largest problem is that every educational program we've had in place since 2002 — the first year that No Child Left Behind took effect — prioritizes student performance on standardized tests above all else. Test performance is now tied to both school funding, and the evaluation of teachers and administrators. In many cases, there exists no empirical evidence to back up the validity of this approach, yet it's universally accepted as the way things ought to be.

Imagine, for a moment, that this weren't education, but any other job. Imagine how you'd feel if you found yourself employed in such a role.

Requiring teachers to follow a script in a variety of educational settings is one of the surest ways to squash creativity and kill student interest. It is a more widespread practice than ever before.JAMES FOLKESTAD / SLIDESHARE

You have, on any given day, a slew of unique problems to tackle. These include how to reach, motivate, and excite the people whose Continue reading: How America Is Breaking Public Education

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