CURMUDGUCATION: How Teachers Avoid the Common Core

CURMUDGUCATION: How Teachers Avoid the Common Core

How Teachers Avoid the Common Core

Here's an important thing to understand about the Common Core Standards--nobody is in charge of them.

Many standards have official gatekeepers. For instance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado is the official civilian source for the answer to "What time is it?" through the national atomic clock.

There is no such body for the CCS. When the standards were first unleashed, the official word was that a state could not change a single word of them, and the states could add no more than 15%. The unanswered question was, "Or what...?" There has never been an official body to monitor state use of the standards. The folks who wrote the standards might have fulfilled such a function, but they dispersed almost immediately to new jobs (David Coleman took over the College Board, Jason Zimba booked some consultant gigs, etc). Sure, there's a site where you can look at the standards and read some PR, but it's the equivalent of a business site that won't let you contact the company or order product.

There has never been an official Common Core office to say, "This is correct, but that is not."

The implications for the use of the standards are huge. There is not, for instance, a body that approves whether or not a textbook can call itself "Common Core ready." Some organizations have tried to fill that gap by doing reviews based on textbook alignment to the Core, but those groups are themselves taking an unauthorized stab at what the Core says.

When the Core started finding its way to individual districts and schools, an army of consultants was unleashed to lead sessions on "unpacking" the standards. At these sessions, teachers would be put Continue reading: CURMUDGUCATION: How Teachers Avoid the Common Core

Quit Saying Special Ed. Costs Too Much! 8 Cost-Cutting Signs to Watch Out For

Quit Saying Special Ed. Costs Too Much! 8 Cost-Cutting Signs to Watch Out For

Quit Saying Special Ed. Costs Too Much! 8 Cost-Cutting Signs to Watch Out For

In 1975, President Gerald Ford signed Public Law 94-142. The law guaranteed every child a free appropriate public education. This positively impacted millions of children across the country. The law was later reauthorized and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Many politicians never wanted to fund special education. From the start, there was no Rose Garden ceremony for signing the bill. Why? Shouldn’t such compassionate commitment to America’s kids be cause for a celebration? We should have been proud of a country that valued its children.

Since the signing of that law, we still have local, state, and federal policymakers who don’t want to pay for special education. IDEA gets in their way.

Now, corporate school reformers seek to privatize public schools and create charter schools for students with disabilities. When parents leave public schools they lose the protections afforded their child through IDEA.

This is not a poor nation. Legislators think nothing of giving the wealthiest Americans huge tax breaks. They find money to pay for what they prioritize.

Here are cost-cutting messages meant to Continue reading: Quit Saying Special Ed. Costs Too Much! 8 Cost-Cutting Signs to Watch Out For

Latinx LGBTQ Youth Report | Human Rights Campaign

Latinx LGBTQ Youth Report | Human Rights Campaign

Latinx LGBTQ Youth Report

In 2017, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation partnered with researchers at the University of Connecticut to conduct a groundbreaking survey of over 12,000 LGBTQ youth and capture their experiences in their families, schools, social circles and communities. More than 2,900 LGBTQ Latinx youth responded to the survey. This resource presents data collected from these Latinx youth, shedding light on their challenges and triumphs encountered while navigating multiple, intersecting identities. 

Additionally, you can learn more about the intersectional challenges that LGBTQ Latinx Americans can face when coming out in HRC's Living Authentically as LGBTQ Latinx Americans.  

Download the 2018 LGBTQ Latinx Youth Report or flip through the digital version below. 

Latinx LGBTQ Youth Report | Human Rights Campaign

NAACP Legal Defense Fund Asks Florida DoE to End Biased Hair Policies

NAACP Legal Defense Fund Asks Florida DoE to End Biased Hair Policies

Education, Not Discrimination: NAACP Legal Defense Fund Asks Florida Schools to End Biased Hair Policies

As children returned to school this fall, new teachers and classmates weren’t the only things that greeted some students. More than one story surfaced of children being turned away, or sent home from school, because of culturally-specific hairstyles like braids or dreadlocks. One such child was six-year-old Clinton Stanley, Jr., whose story went viral when he was denied his first day at A Book Christian Academy in Apopka, Fla., because his dreadlocks were deemed non-compliant with the school’s dress code.

The Dress Code Is Discrimination? First Grader Denied His First Day of School for Dreadlocks

Imagine this: You escort your son to his first day of first grade, all buttoned up in his brand new …

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A Book Christian Academy is only one of many private evangelical schools in Florida enacting this type of policy. Many of the schools participate in the Hope Scholarship program, Florida’s new school voucher program. (A Book Academy is not part of the voucher program but does benefit from government funding.) While the publicly-funded scholarship program was, ironically, implemented to help students escape bullying in public schools, an investigation by the Huffington Post revealed that as many as Continue reading: NAACP Legal Defense Fund Asks Florida DoE to End Biased Hair Policies

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

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

We’ve known since the 1940s that kids don’t do well in school when they’re hungry

We’ve known since the 1940s that kids don’t do well in school when they’re hungry

We’ve known since the 1940s that kids don’t do well in school when they’re hungry

National School Lunch week is here (October 15-19), a time for shining the spotlight on this essential program that feeds hungry children.

For just a moment, let’s take a step back in time to see what President Harry Truman and the United States Army were doing about school lunches in the fall of 1946.

Truman had recently signed the National School Lunch Act, which provided meals for needy children.  This meant free or reduced price school lunches for children of families living in poverty. The school lunches meant better health and education.

“The well-nourished school child is a better student. He is healthier and more alert. He is developing good food habits which will benefit him for the rest of his life” explained the President.

Truman sought to spread the initiative as far as possible. This was vital for the health of children, and of the nation.

President Truman proclaimed “The school lunch program provides a cooperative means of assuring adequate nutrition for millions of our children who otherwise might be denied this basic need.”

But Truman also cautioned that more needed to be done. Hunger is relentless.  We must keep advancing school feeding. Truman said “This is a splendid start, but we must look forward to the day when the lunches are available in every community in every State and territory.”

Our National School Lunch Program has been expanded in the decades since Truman. Thirty million children depend on these meals during the school year today. But the Continue reading: We’ve known since the 1940s that kids don’t do well in school when they’re hungry

CURMUDGUCATION: John White Remains Confused

CURMUDGUCATION: John White Remains Confused

John White Remains Confused

Last week the Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) network held its annual meeting, this time in New Orleans. It's a jolly gathering of all our reform friends, and this year it featured a speech from Louisiana school chief John White, the test of which was run by Fordham's Flypaper blog. I'll warn you-- this starts out just sort of ill-formed, and ends up pretty awful. But it is a window, once again, on how fully lost some reformsters are.

White has a hefty reform pedigree-- Teach for America, TFA director, Joel Klein's team in NYC, Broad Academy of Faux Superintendency). The headline that gave this piece some legs and attention was White's observation that education is no longer a political winner, which is only slightly more insightful than suggesting that Barack Obama will probably win the Democratic nomination over Hilary Clinton. Or as I've commented elsewhere, 2018-- the year I run out of new ways to say "And you just figured this out now..."

White does note that the 2016 election put paid to the notion that education would be an important political issue. Jeb! Bush tried to make education a chunk of his campaign foundation, and Campbell Brown tried to set up a website that would position her as arbiter of the education discussion (remember when she staged education summits and nobody came). In 2016, people who banked on education as an issue were like folks who speculated in real estate, but the railroad went through some other town.

But White believes this lack of political interest in education is a serious problem. I don't disagree with that basic point-- it sucks that politicians, leaders, media outlets, and strangers on the street aren't more interested in what goes on in the world of education. But beyond that-- well, I find White's analysis suspect at best.

Education reform has made positive gains in this country for the people whom it’s set out to serve without question.

Yes, "without question" probably belongs somewhere else in that sentence, but it's a sentence that Continue reading: CURMUDGUCATION: John White Remains Confused

Save The Date: BLM At School National Week of Action, 2019, Feb 4th-8th – Black Lives Matter At School

Save The Date: BLM At School National Week of Action, 2019, Feb 4th-8th – Black Lives Matter At School

Save The Date: BLM At School National Week of Action, 2019, Feb 4th-8th

Mark your calendar! The Black Lives Matter at School action this school-year will be held from February 4-8th, 2019.

Black Lives Matter At School is a national committee educators organizing for racial justice in education.  We encourage all educators, parents, students, unions, and community organizations to join our annual week of action during the first week of February each year.

If you or your organization would like to support or endorse the week of action, please email us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail.com.   

During the 2017-2018 school year, from February 5 to 9, thousands of educators around the U.S. wore Black Lives Matter shirts to school and taught lessons about structural racism, intersectional black identities, black history, and anti-racist movements for the nationally organized Black Lives Matter at School week of action. Educators in over 20 cities participated in this national uprising to affirm the lives of Black students, teachers, and families including, Seattle, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and beyond.

BLM at School started nationally with these 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

The lessons that educators teach during the week of action corresponded to the thirteen guiding principles of Black Lives Matter:

Monday: Restorative Justice, Empathy and Loving Engagement

Tuesday: Diversity and Globalism

Wednesday: Trans-Affirming, Queer Affirming and Collective Value

Thursday: Intergenerational, Black Families and Black Villages

Friday: Black Women and Unapologetically Black

With your help, this year’s BLM at School week of action can be even bigger and have more of an impact.  Let us know what you are planning for BLM at School week this school year or ask us how to get involved with the action by emailing us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail.com.

Save The Date: BLM At School National Week of Action, 2019, Feb 4th-8th – Black Lives Matter At School

Charter Schools: When 'School Choice' Means the Opposite - Bloomberg

Charter Schools: When 'School Choice' Means the Opposite - Bloomberg

When ‘School Choice’ Means the Opposite
The U.S. charter-school movement was meant to stimulate innovation. Instead, it’s enforcing uniformity.

When Albert Shanker, the legendary teachers’ union leader, promoted the idea of charter schools 30 years ago, he was hoping to create flexibility from the constraints of education bureaucracies and union contracts so teachers and communities could experiment and innovate.

In the years since the first charter-school law was passed in Minnesota, in 1991, the charter movement has strayed far from Shanker’s original vision. Instead of community-based, educator-driven innovation, charters have grown into an industry dominated by like-minded management organizations that sometimes control hundreds of schools — some nationwide.

These charter organizations have proliferated with the help of deep-pocketed philanthropists and businesspeople who have sought to transform the public-education system so that both charters and traditional public schools operate like companies competing in an economic market. Schools survive by producing the greatest gains, usually measured by test scores. The rest lose students as families choose the highest-performing schools or have their charters revoked by state-designated organizations that authorize charters.  

Now the charter industry is reaching an inflection point. Business backers are pushing to expand charter schools at an unprecedented rate, doubling down on the idea that free markets are the best approach to improving K-12 education. At the same time, critics — some from within the charter movement — are shining a Continue reading: Charter Schools: When 'School Choice' Means the Opposite - Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg Switches to Democratic Party Ahead of Possible 2020 Presidential Campaign

Michael Bloomberg Switches to Democratic Party Ahead of Possible 2020 Presidential Campaign

The Democrat turned Republican turned Independent re-registers as a Democrat with 2020 on his mind.

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in an Instagram post on Wednesday morning that he was changing his party affiliation for the third time this century.

“Today, I have re-registered as a Democrat,” part of the post read, “because we need Democrats to provide the checks and balance our nation so badly needs.”

Also, perhaps, because it’s the only way he can achieve his on-again, off-again aspirations of winning the White House. Speaking to the New York Times a few weeks ago about a possible candidacy in 2020, he conceded that winning as a Democrat was his only realistic option—as well as the only tasteful one. “It’s impossible to conceive that I could run as a Republican—things like choice, so many of the issues, I’m just way away from where the Republican party is today,” he said.

Yes, about that—he was “way away” from it well before yesterday, too. In October 2000, he switched his registration from Democrat to Republican, despite having donated $5,000 to NARAL in the recent past and telling the Washington Post just 12 months prior that he was “probably more of a liberal Democrat than most of [Bloomberg L.P.’s] customers.” But the 2001 mayoral race was a year off, and Bloomberg wanted no part of the four-way Democratic primary.

Despite rarely discussing his plans on the record in the lead-up to his campaign launch in June, it was openly acknowledged that his jump to the GOP was only for electoral convenience. A Daily News profile in March even claimed, unattributed, that “[h]e has said his reasons are purely strategic, aimed at separating himself from a crowded Continue reading: Michael Bloomberg Switches to Democratic Party Ahead of Possible 2020 Presidential Campaign

Marshall Tuck’s Financial Support of Convicted Felon Ref Rodriguez

Marshall Tuck’s Financial Support of Convicted Felon Ref Rodriguez

Marshall Tuck’s Financial Support of Convicted Felon Ref Rodriguez

Rodriguez’s misdeeds…made a mockery of the laws governing elections.”

– LA Times Editorial Board

By the time the last vote was counted in the 2015 LAUSD School Board election, it was the most expensive school board race in the history of the country. The impending cost to run for the Board District 5 seat was clear from the beginning when challenger Andrew Thomas loaned his campaign $51,000 during the filing period ending September 30, 2014.  In order to show that he was competitive, charter industry candidate Ref Rodriguez knew that he had to prove that he was also capable of filling his campaign coffers. He ended 2014 showing that he had raised $50,001. The choices that he made in reaching this achievement would eventually lead to him pleading guilty to felony charges and resigning his Board seat in disgrace.

State Superintendent of Education candidate Marshall Tuck made his first donation to the Rodriguez campaign during the December 2014, push. However, his $500 donation was dwarfed by the “$21,000 in campaign donations from employees of his charter school network, Partnerships to Uplift Communities” that were also made in  Continue reading: Marshall Tuck’s Financial Support of Convicted Felon Ref Rodriguez

A Plan to Improve California's Public Schools

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Tony Thurmond for State Superintendent of Public Instruction -https://www.tonythurmond.com/

Stunning New Book Contextualizes Tragedy of 2013 School Closures in Chicago’s Hyper-Segregated History | janresseger

Stunning New Book Contextualizes Tragedy of 2013 School Closures in Chicago’s Hyper-Segregated History | janresseger

Stunning New Book Contextualizes Tragedy of 2013 School Closures in Chicago’s Hyper-Segregated History

Eve Ewing’s new book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, explores the blindness, deafness, and heartlessness of technocratic, “portfolio school reform”* as it played out in 50 school closings in Chicago at the end of the school year in 2013. After months of hearings, the Chicago Public Schools didn’t even send formal letters to the teachers, parents and students in the schools finally chosen for closure.  People learned which schools had finally been shut down when the list was announced on television.

Eve Ewing, a professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and a former teacher in one of the closed schools, brings her training as a sociologist to explore this question: “But why do people care about these failing schools?” (p. 13)  In four separate chapters, Ewing examines the question from different perspectives: (1) the meaning for the community of the closure of Dyett High School and the hunger strike that reopened the school; (2) the history of segregation in Chicago as part of the Great Migration, followed by the intensification of segregation in thousands of public housing units built and later demolished in the Bronzeville neighborhood; (3) the narratives of community members, teachers, parents and students about the meaning of their now-closed schools in contrast to the narrative of the portfolio school planners at Chicago Public Schools; and (4) the mourning that follows when important community institutions are destroyed.

We hear an English teacher describing the now-closed school where she had taught: “I never considered us as a failing school or failing teachers or failing students. I felt like pretty much everyone in that building was working really hard for those kids…. Trying to push them forward as far as they could go.” (p. 135)

And we hear Rayven Patrick, an eighth grader speaking about the importance of Mayo elementary school at the public hearing which preceded the school’s closure: “Most of my  Continue reading: Stunning New Book Contextualizes Tragedy of 2013 School Closures in Chicago’s Hyper-Segregated History | janresseger

New Jersey: Charter School Situation Under Review, Pro-Charter Folks Wary | deutsch29

New Jersey: Charter School Situation Under Review, Pro-Charter Folks Wary | deutsch29

New Jersey: Charter School Situation Under Review, Pro-Charter Folks Wary

New Jersey education commissioner, Lamont Repollet, is in the process of reviewing the state of New Jersey’s education system. In the meantime, noticeably fewer charter schools are being approved or expanded.

Repollet is trying to assure stakeholders that he is neutral concerning charter schools and that he simply wants “quality schools.” And even though Repollet says that charters in New Jersey are under no “deliberate moratorium,” still, it seems that the NJ charter slowdown has charter advocates on edge.

John Mooney of the NJ Spotlight offers the following summary of the NJ-school-review situation, excerpts of which I offer here:

State Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet is embarking on a review of the state’s burgeoning charter school movement, with an eye on addressing both performance and budget issues in the schools and their host districts. …

In the latest cycle of applications, the administration this month rejected the last of the bids for new charter schools opening next year, after also rejecting five expansions last spring. One new school is opening under a previous cycle of applications, but it is a clear slowdown from former Gov. Chris Christie’s tenure and the state’s explosive growth of charters.

Repollet, at last week’s State Board of Education meeting, sought to assuage questions about the administration’s stance on the controversial schools, specifically saying there was no deliberate moratorium on approvals and the review was only part of a system-wide assessment.

“Before we do anything, we are going to assess the landscape and get feedback from everybody,” the commissioner said. “We are not going to get it  Continue reading: 

New Jersey: Charter School Situation Under Review, Pro-Charter Folks Wary | deutsch29

Lack Of Charter School Accountability Was Baked Into the System From the Start | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch

Lack Of Charter School Accountability Was Baked Into the System From the Start | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch

Lack Of Charter School Accountability Was Baked Into the System From the Start

Note [of exasperation]: I'm beginning to think the Star has a policy: "Never write the words, 'According to an article by Craig Harris in the Republic . . .'" Harris has written a groundbreaking series of articles on charter school corruption and profiteering which has statewide relevance, but to my recollection, the Star hasn't mentioned any of them, nor has it done similar investigations on its own.

Craig Harris has a new article in The Republic that takes another look at the lack of charter school regulation and accountability. Not only does the State Board for Charter Schools conduct minimal charter school oversight, it doesn't acknowledge public complaints about charters on its website. 

For the past three years, each charter school's profile on the site displayed the message: "This charter has no complaints."

According to Harris, the board received 91 complaints during the 2017-18 school year. Two months into this school year, it has already received 141 complaints.

The board's motto: See no evil. Hear no evil. Post no evil.

According to Harris, the website has addressed the problem, though the board has yet to release complaints, which are public records, to the paper.

None of this is recent, or accidental. It's part of a pattern that goes back to charter school beginnings in Arizona. The state charter board has always been more a promoter of charters than a regulator. Here's some historical background.

Lisa Graham Keegan was the state senator who shepherded Arizona's charter school law through the legislature in 1994. She became education superintendent in 1995. While charter schools were sprouting up all over the state, she was cutting the size of the department of education. The staffing went from over 450 employees to 350 in her first year.

The cuts were part of Keegan's overall educational philosophy: cut regulations and accountability for public schools, and keep charters as regulation-free as possible. In an article titled The Continue reading: Lack Of Charter School Accountability Was Baked Into the System From the Start | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch