Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

 The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Video: Watch Oscar Nominated “A Night At The Garden” – About 20,000 Americans Celebrating Nazism

by Larry Ferlazzo / 33min

You’ll want to watch this short Oscar-nominated film (and you might want to show it to your students) about a pro-Nazi 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden. A Night At The Garden has a lot of potential for classroom use. You can also read about the lone protester who tried to disrupt it at The Washington Post’s When Nazis rallied in Manhattan, one working-class Jewish man from Brooklyn took them o

Two Top-Notch Articles For Understanding What’s Happening In Education Today

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1h

geralt / Pixabay There is obviously a lot of teacher unrest these days in education and, this week, two excellent articles have been published to give overviews of its cause and potential solutions (as well as challenges to those answers). First, NPR’s piece, Oakland, Los Angeles And More To Come: Why Teachers Keep Going On Strike provides a good national overview. Then, Ed Source’s article, Cali

YESTERDAY

This Week In Web 2.0

by Larry Ferlazzo / 9h

In yet another attempt to get at the enormous backlog I have of sites worth blogging about, I post a regular feature called “The Week In Web 2.0.” (you might also be interested in The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education In 2018 – So Far ). I also sometimes include tech tools or articles about them that might not exactly fit the definition of Web 2.0. You might also be interested in: SIX TOOLS

Pins Of The Week

by Larry Ferlazzo / 10h

I’m fairly active on Pinterest and, in fact, have curated 17,000 resources there that I haven’t shared on this blog. I thought readers might find it useful if I began sharing a handful of my most recent “pins” each week (I’m not sure if you can see them through an RSS Reader – you might have to click through to the original post). You might also be interested in My Seven Most Popular Pins In 2018

Five Most Popular Posts Of The Week

by Larry Ferlazzo / 10h

Here’s the latest edition of this regular feature . These are the posts appearing this blog that received the most “hits” in the preceding seven days (though they may have originally been published on an earlier date). You might also be interested in IT’S THE TWELFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THIS BLOG – HERE ARE THE FORTY ALL-TIME MOST POPULAR POSTS and THE TWENTY MOST POPULAR POSTS FROM THIS BLOG – 2018.

New History Channel Video: “Life Aboard a Slave Ship”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 10h

KlausHausmann / Pixabay I’m adding this new – and horrifying – History Channel video to the resources on slavery at our class’ U.S. History blog:

This Seems So Cool – Have Your Students Design A Message To Aliens & Possibly Have It Sent To Space!

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

O12 / Pixabay The #NewAreciboMessage is an effort by astronomers to enlist students and teachers to design a message to be sent to help contact possible aliens: The main goal of this activity is to educate the youth on Radio Astronomy techniques and Exoplanetary cutting-edge science, presenting the uniqueness of the Arecibo Observatory capability and raising the awareness of the possible risks in

UPDATE: Oakland Teachers On Strike Today

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

succo / Pixabay Here’s the latest on today’s Oakland teacher’s strike, just down the road from us: ‘I can’t afford to live here’: Oakland teachers strike in city changed by tech wealth is from The Guardian. Distrust is a central issue in Oakland teachers’ strike is from EdSource. Oakland school strike: Teachers picket, classrooms empty and no end in sight is from The San Francisco Chronicle. Teac

New TED-Ed Video & Lesson Is On Bayard Rustin

by Larry Ferlazzo / 14h

WikiImages / Pixabay In TED-Ed’s newest lesson and video: Learn about the life of Bayard Rustin, a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, a gay rights activist, and one of Martin Luther King’s closest advisors. I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Teach About African-American History

Malcolm X Was Assassinated 54 Years Ago Today – Here Are Related Resources

by Larry Ferlazzo / 14h

OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay Malcolm X was assassinated 54 years ago today. You might be interested in The Best Resources For Learning & Teaching About Malcolm X . 54 years ago today, #MalcolmX was assassinated. I’m holding his daughters close to my heart and praying for their strength. Love to you, my friend, @ilyasahShabazz . pic.twitter.com/s90HwmUYIh — Be A King (@BerniceKing) February 21, 2

Scholars Appropriately Rip Research Saying Grade Retention Good For ELLs

by Larry Ferlazzo / 14h

OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay Ridiculous research came out earlier this month saying that English Language Learners can benefit from being retained in third grade. I didn’t share it on this blog at the time because it was obviously ridiculous – overwhelming research has documented the damaging effects of grade retention (see The Best Resources For Learning About Grade Retention, Social Promotion

“How Should Schools Respond to Discipline Disparities Affecting Black Girls?”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 15h

How Should Schools Respond to Discipline Disparities Affecting Black Girls? is a special edition of Classroom Q & A at Education Week Teacher. Today’s introduction is written by Dr. Terri N. Watson, who is also guest-editing the series. Feel free to leave responses in the comments section there or here….

Video: “What is the difference between a migrant and a refugee?”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1d

12019 / Pixabay UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, just published this animated video. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About World Refugee Day .

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack

CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack

OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack

I began my career in Lorain, Ohio, so the ever-spinning mess there is of personal interest to me. But it is also a picture of much of the damage being inflicted on public education in the name of reform. This is going to be a really long read, the longest I've ever posted on this blog, but it's a story worth telling, because here we find most of the problems of ed reform on display.

I: Lorain Back in the Day

I arrived in Lorain in the fall of 1979, fresh out of college and desperate for a job within 40 miles of downtown Cleveland. It was a rough start-- Lorain was the 16th interview I landed that summer, and August was ticking away. I signed a contract on Thursday. New teacher orientation happened on Friday. Monday was set to be the first teacher day, with students arriving to start the new year on Tuesday. But on Sunday, the union met and voted about 750-6 to go out on strike. The strike lasted for six weeks.

What do I remember about Lorain in 1979. A population of about 83,000 people (I had to write a report for grad school). Several auto plants. Steel plants. At least one ship-building plant. Of the 83,000 people, roughly 82,500 were blue collar workers, with a few doctors and lawyers thrown in. Lorain was a labor town; supposedly there was a city ordinance that fined anyone who crossed a picket line to scab.

My first teaching job was right about here.

Most of the things you would expect in a city of that size weren't there. Tiny newspaper and radio stations, because Cleveland was less than 30 minutes away. A stretch of one street displayed the vestiges of a downtown, but there was no real center to Lorain. Instead, there were blocks after blocks of neighborhoods, with a mom and pop grocery store on every other corner.

There was a reason for that, just as there was a reason that Lorain called itself an "international" city. Virtually every possible ethnicity was represented in Lorain. Having student taught in Cleveland Heights just seven months earlier, I was exceptionally on edge about racial tensions in a CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Lorain, HB 70, And A Reformy Attack

Badass Teachers Association Blog: An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes by Seth Khan

Badass Teachers Association Blog: An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes by Seth Khan
An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes by Seth Khan

Originally posted at:  An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes

Dear Ms. Villanueva Beard, CEO, Teach for America:

The current wave of teacher strikes across the United States leads us to request that Teach for America leadership rethink your organization’s stance towards your members’ participation in those strikes.

An Associated Press article (“Teach for America Slammed over Oakland Strike”, Feb 12) indicates that your advice to TFA members in the event of a strike is to do what they think is right, but to understand that joining the strike may come at substantial financial cost to them. To be fair, your spokesperson hints that TFA “is exploring if it could help supplement an AmeriCorps education award if a teacher loses it.”This advice is troubling for three reasons. 

First, it’s textbook coercion to lay a decision and the penalty for making it alongside each other while acting like you don’t mean to connect the dots. The fact that AmeriCorps has a policy preventing participants in its programs from striking doesn’t make the threat less of a threat. That is, it’s no less coercive by virtue of being accurate.

Second, there’s a conflict between the fact that your members are fully faculty at the schools where they teach, including their right to become members of the union, and your policy that they face penalties for participating in perfectly legal activities attached to their membership. They’re allowed to pay dues; they’re allowed to file grievances; they’re allowed to vote in union elections; but they are penalized for striking. It’s difficult to see any logic in which those propositions are consistent.

Finally, TFA’s claim not to have a position on strikes rings awfully hollow in the context of your support for and collaboration with publicly anti-union forces; this piece from Gary Rubinstein names just a handful, and anyone who has followed TFA over the years is likely familiar with more.

We understand you’re trying to thread a needle: recognizing the right of your members to participate in legal activity while recognizing a policy of your partner organization. To be candid, we would be more sympathetic to the difficulty of that position if TFA hadn’t been so unfriendly to CONTINUE READING: Badass Teachers Association Blog: An Open Letter to Teach for America Regarding Teacher Strikes by Seth Khan

Appreciating Teachers: Responding to Donald Trump Jr. | janresseger

Appreciating Teachers: Responding to Donald Trump Jr. | janresseger

Appreciating Teachers: Responding to Donald Trump Jr.

Recently at the President’s rally in El Paso for his border wall, his son, Donald Trump, Jr., warmed up the crowd with a speech in which he gratuitously attacked teachers: “Bring it to your schools… You don’t have to be indoctrinated by these loser teachers that are trying to sell you on socialism from birth.”  It is hard to know what all that means, although I suppose we can infer that attacks on so-called socialists are going to be a centerpiece of the campaign if the President runs for reelection in 2020.

Valerie Strauss covered responses to this disgusting ad hominem attack on schoolteachers. Teachers themselves have been speaking up, she explains, on twitter with the hashtag #loserteachers.

Strauss also published a response to Trump Jr. from three teachers—Jelmer Evers (the Netherlands), Michael Soskil (2017-18, Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year) and Armand Doucet (Canada) who co-authored a 2018 book, Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the Precipice. Evers, Soskil, and Doucet write that for them, Trump Jr.’s speech was a chilling moment: “Throughout history, schools and teachers have always been among the first to be targeted by authoritarian regimes and extremists.  Independent thinking, creativity, compassion and curiosity are threats to dogmatic beliefs and rule.”  “Whether Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative, right, left, center, blue or red—seeing and reinforcing the value of a teacher should be a national pillar that rises high above partisan politics and cheap applause…  If we can be accused of anything, it is that we are on the front line of democracy.  Education reformer John Dewey famously said, ‘Democracy has to be born again each generation and education is its midwife.’  As members of a global profession, we reject the narrowing of the mind and we stand by our colleagues defending academic freedom.”

President Trump and his son were both educated in private schools.  I suspect that neither has even visited a public school, and I wonder if either one has ever considered what teachers do, or what shapes teachers, or what teachers consider as they work every day with children and CONTINUE READING: Appreciating Teachers: Responding to Donald Trump Jr. | janresseger

The Internet Is Sowing Mass Confusion. We Must Rethink How We Teach Kids Every Subject (Sam Wineburg) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Internet Is Sowing Mass Confusion. We Must Rethink How We Teach Kids Every Subject (Sam Wineburg) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Internet Is Sowing Mass Confusion. We Must Rethink How We Teach Kids Every Subject (Sam Wineburg)

Sam Wineburg, a professor of education at Stanford University, is the author of “Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone).”  This op-ed appeared in USA Today, February 12, 2019

In 2016, months before the presidential election, my research team surveyed nearly 8,000 students from middle school through college on their ability to judge material from the internet. We concluded that students’ ability to navigate online information could be captured in one word: bleak. We released our findings two weeks after Donald Trump’s election and were immediately swept up in the media maelstrom.

Our most reported finding was that 82 percent of middle school students couldn’t tell the difference between an ad and a news story. But putting it that way isn’t really fair to kids: While dozens of outlets reported this nugget, none mentioned an industry study that showed 59 percent of adults couldn’t tell the difference, either.

We are all in the same boat. That boat is taking on water.

In the wake of mass confusion caused by the internet and social media, there have been calls for a renewed commitment to teaching civics and instructing students in the foundations of democracy. But if we think this challenge is only about civics, we’re deluding ourselves. Bringing education into the 21st century demands that we rethink how we teach every subject in the curriculum.

We’re still teaching history using only print texts even as kids are being CONTINUE READING: The Internet Is Sowing Mass Confusion. We Must Rethink How We Teach Kids Every Subject (Sam Wineburg) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

ERIC BLANC: Oakland Teachers Are Striking Against Billionaire Privatizers #Unite4OaklandKids #WeAreOEA #WeAreCTA #strikeready #REDFORED

Oakland Teachers Are Striking Against Billionaire Privatizers

Oakland Teachers Are Striking Against Billionaire Privatizers 
Oakland teachers are on strike today to defeat plans by the superrich to take over and dismantle their public schools.

The project of free market education reform is so widespread in America that many cities and states insist on claiming the title of “ground zero” of education privatization. Whether or not Oakland can claim that unfortunate title, it’s clear that the privatizershave made huge headway in the city: Oakland is now the city in California with the highest percentage of students in privately run charters, and the city’s school district is aiming to deepen its downsizing project by closing twenty-four of the city’s eighty-seven public schools.

Which makes the teachers’ strike that kicked off today in Oakland all the more crucial.

Stopping and reversing the privatization offensive will take mass collective action. It will also require understanding the billionaires and their political proxies who are behind these attacks on public education. Here’s a crash course on the powerful enemies of Oakland’s public schools.

The Rogers Family

Recently deceased, Gary Rogers was the CEO and owner of the multibillion-dollar ice cream company Dreyer’s. His Rogers Family foundation was and remains the largest financial contributor to GO Public Schools, a front group through which the ultrawealthy have funded the takeover and privatization of Oakland public education.

To ensure the election of pro-charter candidates to the school board in 2012, 2014, and 2016, Rogers teamed up with fellow billionaires including former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Walton Family, which founded Walmart, to spend millions dollars in campaign contributions. By all accounts, their investment has paid off. If the Rogers Foundation and GO get their way, well over 50 percent of Oakland schools will soon be charters.

The rich may be greedy, but they are not stupid. Rather than openly announce their hopes to bust unionsand make profits in the $600 billion industry that is public education, Rogers and his friends have funneled their money into GO, which claims to be an organization to improve schools for Oakland students and parents. Its website affirms that “quality education is the path to opportunity for our kids and can interrupt historical inequity and oppression. Student needs drive our work.”

The irony of such claims is that, in practice, the spread of charter schools has greatly exacerbated educational inequities.

In Oakland, and across the nation, charters systematically cherry pick certain students, while leaving high-needs children — with disabilities, traumatic family backgrounds, or a lack of proficiency in English — to regular public schools. As such, it’s not surprising that privatization has greatly increased racial resegregation in Oakland: 19.2 percent of charter students are African American, compared to 29.5 percent in district schools.

At the same time, charters drain over $57 million in funds from Oakland schools yearly. This is why Oakland Education Association president Keith Brown has said that “the privatization of education is a blatant attack on our black and brown students.”

Eli Broad

Ever since the state takeover of Oakland public schools in 2003, the district has been led by a revolving door of apparatchiks trained by Eli Broad, the fourth-richest person in the United States, worth over $7.4 billion.

Though Broad has no professional experience in education, this hasn’t stopped him from using his immense personal fortune to impose his vision upon Oakland schools. After making a killing in the home building and insurance industries, he founded the Broad Academy in 2002 to train a new generation of privatizing school leaders.

By 2012, the center was boasting that it had “filled more superintendent positions than any other national training program.” In Oakland, Broad graduates include superintendents Randolph Ward (2003–2006), Kimberly Statham (2006–2007), Vincent Matthews (2007–2009), and Antwan Wilson (2014–2017).

The Broad Foundation has also directly influenced decision-making in Oakland by granting $6 million for “staff development” and paying for the salaries of no less than ten top administrators. Under the tutelage of Broad trainees, the number of students in Oakland charters has skyrocketed upwards to 30 percent.

Part of the reason why Eli Broad has, until recently, largely avoided public vilification is that he’s a liberal — as well as a major funder of the Democratic Party establishment, including leading lights such as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and Chuck Schumer. “The unions no longer control the education agenda of the Democratic Party,” Broad bragged to the Wall Street Journal. The unspoken subtext: billionaires like him do.

His trainees have also smartly draped themselves in the veneer of corporate antiracism. Former Oakland superintendent, and Broad Academy graduate, Antwan Wilson thus framed his corporate reforms — which, among other things, wrecked the district’s budget — as a means to achieve social justice.

Behind this rhetoric, however, lies a neoliberal ideology that blames public services and individuals for  CONTINUE READING: Oakland Teachers Are Striking Against Billionaire Privatizers