Save Public Education By Raising Teacher Salaries To $60k Federal Minimum

Save Public Education By Raising Teacher Salaries To $60k Federal Minimum

Save Public Education By Raising Teacher Salaries To $60k Federal Minimum

Demonstrators hold a sign reading "Our Students Deserve Better" during a rally inside the Oklahoma State Capitol building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S., on Tuesday, April 3, 2018. Photographer: Scott Heins/Bloomberg

Betsy DeVos and her for-profit “education reformer” friends would like to slash public school teacher salaries, increase class sizes, and sell more standardized testing programs to schools. They operate with the belief that teachers are the problem and that technology should replace living, breathing, loving humans in our public schools.

This approach is reckless because teachers have, by far, the single greatest measured impact on student success of any school factor. Sadly, despite this, 40 U.S. states and the District of Columbia are experiencing severe teacher shortages.

This is not a fluke. Since the No Child Left Behind era began almost 20 years ago, teacher pay has dropped an average of $30 per week when adjusted for inflation. In that period of time, pay for other college graduates has risen by $124 per week as the cost of living in the American middle class has risen by 30%. To make matters worse standardized testing, teacher evaluations, and scripted curriculum have decimated teacher creativity and autonomy. Needless to say, teacher satisfaction has plummeted and professional teachers have had to take night and summer jobs just to survive.

American public school teachers make a median annual salary of just over $55,000. Meanwhile, doctors make a median salary of just under $200,000. What a demotivating embarrassment for master’s level professionals who work long hours day-in and day-out to level the very unlevel playing field here in America.

I have heard educational and political leaders argue that there is no panacea for the poor international outcomes and chronic inequity rampant in America’s public school system. As a master’s educated professional who made just over $38,000 in my first year as a classroom teacher, I couldn’t disagree more. If we want to attract and retain top talent in the teaching profession so that we can build a world-class K12 public education system, we have no choice but to Continue reading: Save Public Education By Raising Teacher Salaries To $60k Federal Minimum

WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY LEARN FROM NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE STORM? – School Finance 101

WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY LEARN FROM NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE STORM? – School Finance 101
WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY LEARN FROM NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE STORM?

Full Review: https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/BBaker.NPE_.NOLA_.pdf

SUMMARY

In July of 2018, the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans released a comprehensive, summative longitudinal report on the effects on student outcomes of the package of reforms implemented in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005. The following policy brief reviews the findings of this recent report by Douglas Harris and Matthew Larsen, offers critique of their methods and interpretation of findings and attempts to provide broader policy context for those findings.

In summary, Harris and Larsen find significant positive effects of Post-Katrina New Orleans school reforms on short-term student achievement measures, and longer term college attendance, persistence and completion. They attribute these results to the “market-based” reforms adopted following Katrina, and go to great lengths to dismiss or downplay threats to the validity of this conclusion. But for many reasons, that attribution may be misguided.

1. First, the authors downplay the potential influence of significant changes in the concentration of poverty across neighborhoods and schools—specifically the reductions in extreme poverty which may contribute significantly to the improved student outcomes in the years following Katrina;
2. Second, the authors understate the importance of the substantial increases to funding which occurred concurrently with organizational and governance changes in the district, specifically disclaiming the importance of increased funding by suggesting that the funding increases would not have existed but for the reforms;
3. Third, the authors argue, without evidence, that similar funding increases provided to the old, New Orleans school system would not likely have had similar impact, claiming they would have been inefficient or wasteful. At the same time the authors sidestep the fact that much of the funding increase in the new system was allocated toward increased and duplicative overhead expenses, as well as increased transportation costs resulting from citywide choice;
4. Fourth, the authors define the treatment as the package of market-based reforms, which are largely changes to the governance and organization of New Orleans schools, rather than focusing on the types of schools, programs and services, and qualifications of incoming staff who entered this

Adopting similar governance and organizational changes, and citywide choice in other contexts may lead to very different results. It remains unclear whether population change and redistribution, coupled with the infusion of resources could have resulted in similar effects, even without structural reforms.

WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY LEARN FROM NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE STORM? – School Finance 101

Duncan and DeVos Are Both Wrong, We Need Old-School Reform Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog
Duncan and DeVos Are Both Wrong, We Need Old-School Reform

Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spent the last few months trying to rehabilitate his work and distinguish it from DeVos. This spring he implored us to ignore current claims that education reforms of the past have failed.  On his book tour, he has been arguing that “education lies” often drive education policy. Yet, Duncan was an extremely disappointing Secretary Education who too often fell victim to the education lies himself: money does not matter, ineffective teachers are ruining public schools, charter schools will outperform public schools, and federal leadership on rigorous standards will save us all.

To his credit, Duncan believes in public education and gets a lot right in his current critiques.  He is a strong advocate of prekindergarten education and poignantly says that presidential elections show that Americans love their guns more than the love children.  Yet, Duncan refuses to be candid about his own mistakes. So he feeds the idea that the current problem in education, like every other public policy problem, is the Trump Administration. Our education reform problems, unfortunately, are more endemic than the current administration.  They need better solutions than rose-colored glasses.

The “education reforms” that Duncan says worked—desegregation and more equalized school funding—preceded his tenure as Secretary.  He did nothing to further those reforms.  Instead, he routinely pushed through reforms that didn’t work.  An honest appraisal of the past decade reveals that Duncan caused more harm than good. 

Secretary Duncan created the Race to the Top grant program and offered states money in exchange for major policy changes. In the aftermath of the recession, he could demand almost anything he wanted. He got states to do three things: adopt new teacher evaluation systems that they could use to hire, fire, and promote teachers largely based on statistics; expand charter schools; and adopt college and career ready standard, aka Common Core. Two Continue reading: Education Law Prof Blog

The real story of New Orleans and its charter schools - The Washington Post

The real story of New Orleans and its charter schools - The Washington Post

The real story of New Orleans and its charter schools

School choice proponents love to talk about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005 and the public school system was decimated. A collection of charter schools opened to replace the troubled traditional school district that had previously existed, and since then the city is often pointed to as a success for school choice and state takeovers of local schools.

Why is this effort called a success?

Standardized test scores are up from before the hurricane. But is the increase really impressive? The 2018 results for the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program exams found that only 26 percent in the Orleans Parish-Recovery School District had achieved “mastery” or above, less than the 34 percent state average.

(It is worth nothing that I don't think test scores should be viewed as significant measures of accomplishment, but school choice proponents do, so that is why they are being cited.)

So what is really going on in the schools of New Orleans? Are whatever improvements are being made happening for the reasons that charter school supporters say? Is it the “charterness” of the schools themselves or other factors that speak to traditional public schools as well?

That's what is discussed in this post by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is executive director of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Burris was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the National Association of Secondary School Principals named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Burris has been chronicling problems with modern school reform and school choice for years on this blog. She has previously written about problems with charter schools in California and a number of other states.

[What and who are fueling the movement to privatize public education — and why you should care]

By Carol Burris

New Orleans, post-Katrina, is undoubtedly the most cited example of the success of state takeovers, charters and choice.

Former education secretary Arne Duncan once said that Hurricane Katrina was the “best thing” that ever happened to education in the city (though he later apologized). The New York Times’s opinion columnist David Leonhardt recently praised the city in his series on New Orleans school reform. And the City Fund, led by Neerav Kingsland, the former chief executive of New Schools for New Orleans, uses New Orleans as a tool to pry open the coffers of philanthropy for its portfolio approach of school governance — one that would Continue reading: The real story of New Orleans and its charter schools - The Washington Post

LOIS WEINER: A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor

A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor

A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor
This Labor Day, with public opinion firmly in favor of unions and teachers racking up victories across the country, the news for the labor movement is actually hopeful.

A Chicago teacher takes a break from picketing during the union's 2012 strike. yooperann / Flickr

Despite many setbacks, this Labor Day, the news for the labor movement is hopeful. Public support for unions has been increasing with the realization that they improve working and living conditions for both unionized and non-union workers.

Sustaining this reversal requires that we fight for good unions — democratic unions that make demands for the whole working class central to their agenda, integrate struggles against social oppression, and are willing to take direct action like strikes.

This is what the past year’s #RedforEd teacher walkouts has taught labor. It’s also why we should, yet again, thank a teacher this Labor Day.

Workers are suffering from capital’s successful attacks on the political and economic gains that labor and its allies have won in a century of struggle and sacrifice. Labor is still reeling from its diminished influence in politics, and young workers especially are suffering from capitalism’s offensive. As the New York Times “workologist” advised readers, employees who are dissatisfied with their working conditions have almost no legal protections.

They may think suing an employer will bring relief, but the only legal protections workers have are in cases of discrimination. The exception, ignored by the “workologist,” is if you have a union contract and are willing to enforce it.

Labor desperately needs vision and courage. And this is the context in which teachers have demonstrated a new grammar for unions to build political support as well as win economic gains.

The state-wide walkouts in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona and a one-day protest in North Carolina occurred because working teachers dared to challenge conditions their unions had accepted as inevitable. While some teacher activists were officers of their local unions in state affiliates of the National Education Association (NEA) or the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), neither union represented more than a handful of school employees.

The vast majority of teachers who walked out were “ordinary” teachers and school workers. They weren’t union members. Moreover, this was a movement started and sustained by workers, independent of and often in defiance of the union apparatus.

The “red state” walkouts follow in the steps of teacher activists in US cities who have been transforming their unions through reform caucuses, inspired by the bold strike of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in 2012. #RedforEd and the burgeoning movement of reform caucuses in both NEA and AFT show how we might create workers’ organizations that are democratic, defend labor’s political purposes, and build collective action at the workplace.

Unions can’t bring democracy to the workplace if they are autocratic and hierarchical, or if they continue to cast the union as a business that provides services to members, who in turn, pay dues and do little more. The term “free riders,” workers who are represented by a union but don’t join and pay dues, which the Right intends the new Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME to produce, in droves, is symptomatic of this destructive mindset. It casts workers’ alienation from their unions as an individual moral failing, as occurs when dining out with friends but then refusing to pick up your share of the bill.

Organized labor has not yet figured out how to mount a counter-offensive against what was identified forty years ago as a one-sided class war against us. Yes, we need laws that defend workplace rights. How will we win this legislation when we can’t even win the right to strike and don’t demand it from Continue reading: A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor

Project Lead the Way's new exam could be the future of testing

Project Lead the Way's new exam could be the future of testing

This exam feels more like a game. It could be the future of testing.

Imagine a high school final that feels more like a computer game than a test. Instead of only answering questions with A, B, C or D, you also demonstrate you can hone a set of materials into a functional object – like a water filter. You keep working until the water runs clear.

Meanwhile, the test is scoring how creatively you approached the challenge or how critically you thought through the steps.

In short, imagine being tested on what you can do rather than only on what you know.

That's exactly what hundreds of thousands of high school students nationwide will experience this school year as an Indianapolis-based STEM education nonprofit rolls out its new end-of-course assessments, which one teacher described as "gamified."

Project Lead the Way— which trains teachers and offers biomedical science, engineering and computer science curriculum to schools in all 50 states — created the test to more accurately reflect students' classroom experience. As many as 400,000 high schoolers in Indiana and across the nation are expected to take the new test this school year.

Sure, the problems are about science or engineering, not fighting zombies, and the simulations aren't made to look like a game. But some educators say it will still be more engaging, and more akin to what students do during class.

Some experts familiar with the new test say this could be the direction all tests are heading, although it may be more difficult for standardized exams such as the SAT or ACT.

Changing applications: SAT and ACT will soon be optional at Ball State. Here's what they'll use instead.

Not done with testing yet: Why high schoolers are still told to take the SAT/ACT as some colleges drop requirements

How the test will get rid of familiar multiple choice questions

Instead of multiple choice questions, Project Lead the Way students will watch videos, respond to scenarios and go through simulations, some of which won't have a right or wrong conclusion. The test, administered entirely on a computer, will use artificial intelligence to measure students' success against all potential outcomes.

The simulations will echo projects students do in class. Some may encourage them to test a few different options before selecting the best one.

The old test would have been limited to asking, "What is your next step?" and listing Continue reading: Project Lead the Way's new exam could be the future of testing

Is Education a Fundamental Right? | The New Yorker

Is Education a Fundamental Right? | The New Yorker

Is Education a Fundamental Right?

The history of an obscure Supreme Court ruling sheds light on the ongoing debate over schooling and immigration.

Before sunrise on a morning just after Labor Day, 1977, Humberto and Jackeline Alvarez, Felix Hernandez, Rosario and Jose Robles, and Lidia and Jose Lopez huddled together in the basement of the United States Courthouse in Tyler, Texas, the Rose City, to decide just how much they were willing to risk for the sake of their children, for the sake of other people’s children, and for the sake, really, of everyone. Among them, the Alvarezes, Hernandez, the Robleses, and the Lopezes had sixteen children who, the week before, had been barred from entering Tyler’s public schools by order of James Plyler, Tyler’s school superintendent. On the first day of school, Rosario Robles had walked her five children to Bonner Elementary, where she was met by the principal, who asked her for the children’s birth certificates, and, when she couldn’t provide them, put her and the kids in his car and drove them home.

This hadn’t been the principal’s idea, or even Plyler’s. In 1975, when Texas passed a law allowing public schools to bar undocumented immigrants, Plyler ignored it. “I guess I was soft-hearted and concerned about the kids,” he said. Also, there weren’t many of them. About sixteen thousand children went to the schools in the East Texas city of Tyler, which considered itself the rose-growing capital of America and was named for John Tyler, the President of the United States who had pushed for the annexation of Texas in 1844, which led to a war with Mexico in 1846. Of those sixteen thousand students, fewer than sixty were the children of parents who had, without anyone’s permission, entered the United States from Mexico by crossing a border established in 1848, when the war ended with a treaty that turned the top half of Mexico into the bottom third of the United States. Jose Robles worked in a pipe factory. Humberto Alvarez worked in a meatpacking plant. They paid rent. They owned cars. They paid taxes. They grew roses.

Nevertheless, in July of 1977 Tyler’s school board, worried that Tyler would become a haven for immigrants driven away from other towns, insisted that undocumented children be kicked out of the city’s schools unless their parents paid a thousand dollars a year, per child, which few of them could afford, not even the Robleses, who owned their own home. Turned away from Bonner Elementary, the Robleses sent some of their kids to a local Catholic school—Jose did yard work in exchange for tuition—but they were put in touch with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which sent an attorney, Peter Roos, who filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Eastern District Court of Texas. It was presided over by a judge whose name was Justice. “There were two judges in Tyler,” Roos liked to say. “You got Justice, or no justice.”

Participating in a lawsuit as an undocumented immigrant is a very risky proposition. In a closed-door meeting, Roos asked that the parents be allowed to testify in chambers and so avoid revealing their identities, which could lead to deportation. They had come to the courthouse knowing that, at any moment, they could be arrested, and driven to Mexico, without so much as a goodbye. Judge William Wayne Justice refused to grant the protective order. “I am a United States magistrate and if I learn of a violation of the law, it’s my sworn duty to disclose it to the authorities,” he said. Roos went down to the basement, near the holding cells, to inform the families and give them a chance to think it over. They decided to go ahead with the suit, come what may. Justice did make efforts to protect them from publicity, and from harassment, decreeing that the Continue reading: Is Education a Fundamental Right? | The New Yorker

Why there's so much inconsistency in school shooting data

Why there's so much inconsistency in school shooting data

Why there’s so much inconsistency in school shooting data

How many school shootings happen in the U.S. in a single school year? The answer is surprisingly hard to figure out.

In April, the U.S. Department of Education released a report on the 2015-2016 school year, stating that “nearly 240 schools (0.2 percent of all schools) reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” However, the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety’s database lists only 29 school shootings for the same period.

When National Public Radio investigated the inconsistency, they found that 161 of the Department of Education’s 240 shootings either did not occur or could not be confirmed by the school districts involved. Similarly, the American Civil Liberties Union contacted each school that allegedly had a shooting and found that 138 of the reported shootings were errors.

So where does school shooting information come from? How could these counts be so far apart?

The laws on guns in schools

Students are legally prohibited from bringing guns to school. That means they can be in serious trouble, even if they never fire the gun.

The Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 requires schools in any state receiving certain federal funding to implement a one-year expulsion rule for students who bring a firearm to school. Students found in possession of a firearm must also be referred to the criminal justice or juvenile justice system.

Each year, schools must report any firearm-related expulsions. Those can include shootings, but also firearm possession and other firearm crimes. Schools report firearm offenses like these to the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), which is operated by of the Department of Education.

In a biennial survey, the CRDC asks schools and other public local educational agencies like charter schools: “For the regular (…) school year, not including intersession or summer, was there at least one incident at the school that involved a shooting (regardless of whether anyone was hurt)?”

The U.S. Department of Education used the results of this question to estimate the number of school shootings for 2015-2016.

Schools are expected to report any incidents that occur during school hours on school grounds. In addition to shootings, schools report the number of incidents that involved possession of a firearm, as well as the number of robberies, homicides, physical attacks and physical fights that involved a “firearm or explosive device.”

Room for error

A closer look at this survey shows why the U.S. Department of Education’s data was so inaccurate.

First, there are problems with the definition of the term “shooting.” Nowhere in the CRDC survey is that word clearly defined. Is it a shooting if a student has a gun that accidentally Continue reading: Why there's so much inconsistency in school shooting data

"Local Context." The New Gates K-12 Strategy is Coming Into Sharper Focus — Inside Philanthropy

"Local Context." The New Gates K-12 Strategy is Coming Into Sharper Focus — Inside Philanthropy
"Local Context." The New Gates K-12 Strategy is Coming Into Sharper Focus

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced the first $92 million in grants for its new K-12 initiative Networks for School Improvement. The first of three planned rounds included 19 grantee organizations. The foundation plans to invest $460 million in the initiative over the next few years.

Under the new initiative, groups of schools will work together to identify challenges and implement solutions. The goal is to increase the number of black, Latino and low-income students who graduate high school and enroll in higher education.

The new initiative arrived as Bill Gates himself conceded that the results of the billions the foundation has poured into K-12 education had been disappointing. 

The foundation has admitted failure and moved onto new strategies and ideas in the past. In 2009, Gates determined that the $650 million the foundation invested to break up large high schools into smaller ones had largely fallen short of the funder’s goals. Last year, Gates said the foundation would no longer invest directly in teacher evaluation, an idea that once had a central place in the foundation's education strategy. A RAND study revealing that the foundation’s five-year Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative did not improve high school graduation rates, teacher effectiveness or retention of the best teachers followed the announcement several months later.

Some critics argue that it is not enough for Gates to learn from past missteps. Instead these failures should discourage the foundation from future work in education. Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University and long-time critic of the foundation, says the funder’s work has demoralized teachers and pulled attention away from the need to adequately fund schools with public money.

Ravitch would like to see the foundation move away from education and instead use its experience in global health to promote better medical care for low-income kids at home. “The schools are not failing,” she said. “Our society is failing.” 

But Bill and Melinda have said that they have no intention of abandoning their commitment to improving education. To its credit, the foundation has acknowledged its past failures and responded to underwhelming K-12 results by changing tactics. Earlier this year, Gates launched a national initiative to take on poverty at home at the urging of education leaders, who insisted that the foundation needed to consider factors outside the classroom that affect learning. 

Related:

• Game Changer? Just Maybe. Why Gates' Move Into Anti-Poverty Work Is a Big Deal
• It's One of the Biggest Failures Yet in K-12 Philanthropy. What Are the Lessons?

The anti-poverty work is a major departure for Gates, a grantmaker that long resisted engaging the larger social and economic problems that heavily shape the education outcomes and life chances of young people. 

Meanwhile, the Networks for School Improvement initiative represents a major about-face in its own right. 

A striking feature of the new initiative is the emphasis on local leadership and solutions. It fits a growing Continue reading: "Local Context." The New Gates K-12 Strategy is Coming Into Sharper Focus — Inside Philanthropy 

Randi Weingarten Labor Day Message: It’s the union movement that can and must be the catalyst for change #LaborDay #RedForEd #Solidarity @aft @AFSCME @NEAToday @SEIU

It’s the union movement that can and must be the catalyst for change

It’s the union movement that can and must be the catalyst for change

A growing and enduring middle class, great public schools, a living wage, affordable healthcare and college, a decent retirement, a voice at work and in our democracy, communities that are safe and welcoming — these are American aspirations, and they are what the American labor movement has fought for, for generations. We have fought to ensure these aspirations are attainable for everyone, no matter your ZIP code, race, religion, ethnicity, sex or gender identity.

That’s who we are as a labor movement and as the American Federation of Teachers. And what further binds AFT members together, whether you started working just this week or 30 years ago, is that we make a difference in the lives of others. Every day, we care, we fight and we show up for our families; for the patients, children and citizens we serve; for our communities; and for the freedoms we cherish as Americans.

This is the 10th year I’ve penned a Labor Day message. It allows me to honor the work of the 1.7 million educators, nurses and health professionals, and public service workers who constitute our union. But this Labor Day can’t just be a day to honor working people, or to march or picnic or go shopping or take those last deep breaths of summer.

Everything we’ve fought for and have attained is on the line right now — labor rights, civil rights, voting rights, educational opportunities and our democracy itself. Just as it fell to our founders who forged our unions long ago, it falls to our generations, millennials and baby boomers alike, to be the ones who stop the march toward a new Gilded Age and ensure everyone who calls America home has the freedom to secure a better life.

That’s what the labor movement does: We fight for voice and freedom at work and at the ballot box, just as striking teachers did this past winter and spring. Unions are the best vehicle for working people to secure a better life. Together, we make possible what would be impossible for individuals acting alone. We are the best hope for a fair and decent America.

The other side — Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers — they know this. That’s why they’ve spent so much of their time and money trying to take unions out. They call it freedom, but, in reality, they want people to fend for themselves. Alone. They like the current system of winners and losers, and will use their money and power in our economic and political system to keep their power. What they didn’t expect is that working people would see through their facade and overwhelmingly rejected right-wing efforts to divide us and destroy unions.

Despite the Janus case and other court cases (there are now more than 40) designed to strip workers of their freedoms, despite the glossy mailings trying Continue reading: It’s the union movement that can and must be the catalyst for change

RED for ED: Union is Getting Stronger - YouTube #LaborDay #RedForEd #Solidarity @aft @AFSCME @NEAToday @SEIU

RED for ED: Union is Getting Stronger - YouTube

RED for ED: Union is Getting Stronger

WHAT IS RED FOR ED?

When we think about the promise of education today, we see the future leaders of our nation and the qualifed educators who reach, teach and inspire them. We see classrooms with modern tools that help students prepare to make an impact on the world. We see students getting the support they need to thrive and educators having the support they need to serve.

We see progress and hope.

But today we also see budgets being cut, overcrowded classrooms and outdated materials. We see educators working around the clock to make a difference in the lives of their students and standing up to lawmakers to ask for better pay and school funding. We're raising our voices together for our students, for our schools and for ourselves as educators.

That's why we’re wearing Red for Ed.