Pennsylvania: Republican Legislators Target State’s Neediest Districts for Failed Takeover Strategy | Diane Ravitch's blog

Pennsylvania: Republican Legislators Target State’s Neediest Districts for Failed Takeover Strategy | Diane Ravitch's blog

Pennsylvania: Republican Legislators Target State’s Neediest Districts for Failed Takeover Strategy

The York Dispatch, a newspaper in a district that has been targeted for state intervention, blasted the state with a scathing editorial. 

I hope the editorial board will forgive me for reprinting it in full. “Financial recovery” has not helped any district; it is a disaster for the students, teachers, and schools. It accomplishes nothing but disruption.

The vultures are circling, and York City School District officials would be wise to take notice.

York City is among four Pennsylvania districts placed in state-mandated financial recovery in 2012 under a new law proponents said would finally hold to account school districts that have failed taxpayers and students alike.

York City schools clearly earned the dubious designation, one it will keep after state officials in August denied the district’s request to be removed from recovery.

Its graduation rates are among the lowest in the state — among, unsurprisingly, its peers also listed on the state’s initial list of underperformers: Harrisburg, Chester Upland and Duquesne. Its financial condition has been a CONTINUE READING: Pennsylvania: Republican Legislators Target State’s Neediest Districts for Failed Takeover Strategy | Diane Ravitch's blog

Kentucky’s Governor Beshear dumps state school board. Kentucky teacher Randy Wieck comments. – Fred Klonsky

Kentucky’s Governor Beshear dumps state school board. Kentucky teacher Randy Wieck comments. – Fred Klonsky

KENTUCKY’S GOVERNOR BESHEAR DUMPS STATE SCHOOL BOARD. KENTUCKY TEACHER RANDY WIECK COMMENTS

When Democrat Andy Beshear defeated Kentucky Republican Governor Matt Bevin last November it was seen as a defeat for Donald Trump in a sold red state.

Although that is a fair interpretation, there were local issues that played a role in Bevin’s defeat, education and public pensions among them.

On Tuesday Beshear signed an executive order Tuesday in his first day in office to create a new state school board. The displaced board members promptly said they would file a lawsuit.

Beshear has said for weeks he would act quickly when he took office to dismiss the state Board of Education.

“This morning, I reorganized the state board of education and appointed new members who support public education,” announced the new governor.

Eddie Campbell, president of the Kentucky Education Association, which backed Beshear’s campaign, said, “The KEA supports Gov. Beshear’s decision to reconstitute the Kentucky Board of Education.

“Under the previous administration, board appointees were based more on CONTINUE READING: Kentucky’s Governor Beshear dumps state school board. Kentucky teacher Randy Wieck comments. – Fred Klonsky

Vice: Pete Buttigieg’s Financial Relationships with Charter Advocates | Diane Ravitch's blog

Vice: Pete Buttigieg’s Financial Relationships with Charter Advocates | Diane Ravitch's blog

Vice: Pete Buttigieg’s Financial Relationships with Charter Advocates

Rachel Cohen writes here about the charter supporters backing Pete Buttigieg. 

Billionaire Reed Hastings held a fundraiser for Mayor Pete. Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has given millions to the California Charter Schools Association. He has said he looks forward to the day when there are no elected school boards. He likes schools run by corporate boards. He says they didn’t discuss charter schools, which is one of Hastings’ causes about which he is passionate.

Cohen writes:

Linda Lucy, who has served as the president of the South Bend teachers union since June 2018, told VICE she had never met with Pete Buttigieg, and had “nothing to add” about the union’s relationship with the mayor. “Politicians have hijacked the teaching profession in our public schools,” she said.

Buttigieg does appear to have made time for Heather Willey, one of Indiana’s top charter school lobbyists, who co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg in Indianapolis on October 4, according to an invitation obtained by VICE.

Willey served on the board of the Institute for Quality CONTINUE READING: Vice: Pete Buttigieg’s Financial Relationships with Charter Advocates | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ohio Burdens Public School Districts with Huge Unfunded Voucher Mandate at the Expense of Public School Students | janresseger

Ohio Burdens Public School Districts with Huge Unfunded Voucher Mandate at the Expense of Public School Students | janresseger

Ohio Burdens Public School Districts with Huge Unfunded Voucher Mandate at the Expense of Public School Students

The Plain Dealer‘s education reporter, Patrick O’Donnell recently published an important article piecing together a mass of the complicated reasons for this school year’s explosive growth in the number of Ohio students qualifying for private school tuition vouchers at public expense. Public school districts across Ohio are watching their budgets unexpectedly collapse as more and more students carry away state and local tax dollars in vouchers for religious education.

Before examining O’Donnell’s explication of the overly complicated—maybe intentionally convoluted—mechanics of the qualification process, however, one must start with what O’Donnell reports is Ohio State Senator Matt Huffman’s attitude toward public schools and public school teachers.  O’Donnell quotes Huffman blaming public schools for failing to improve: “State Sen. Matt Huffman, one of the strongest supporters of vouchers in Ohio, said some of the rules are subtle and have changed a few times. But districts should have known, he said, and should be blaming themselves for not improving their schools.”

Huffman is a member of the Ohio Senate Education Committee.  Back in September, when the latest Ohio school district report cards came out,  this blog quoted other members of the Ohio Senate Education Committee who openly disdain public schoolteachers.  One senator repeatedly asked: “How much time should we give those who drove the bus into the ditch to get it out?”  Another mused, “I think its maybe the wrong people are running the show and we need to try something different.”

At the time, I wondered how these guys can go on clinging to the old idea that teachers can fix social inequality merely by working harder.  Maybe they imagine that if we were merely to CONTINUE READING: Ohio Burdens Public School Districts with Huge Unfunded Voucher Mandate at the Expense of Public School Students | janresseger

Federal class action lawsuit filed vs College Board’s predatory practices | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Federal class action lawsuit filed vs College Board’s predatory practices | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

FEDERAL CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT FILED VS COLLEGE BOARD’S PREDATORY PRACTICES

UPDATE: Another lawsuit was filed today vs the Univ. of CA system for requiring College Board/ACT exams for admission; the lawsuit claims these exams are unconstitutional since they are racially biased and provide no meaningful info about a student’s ability to succeed.

Today a federal class action lawsuit was filed against the College Board for selling student data and for deceptive practices.  See the legal complaint here and the press release below.  If any parent wants to join the lawsuit, please email us at info@studentprivacymatters.org

There are lots of reasons to oppose the College Board selling student data through their “Student Search program” – the most obvious of which is that when they’re acting as a school vendor, this practice violates the law in 23 states (see list here) without special exceptions for the College Board and ACT, including NY.

In July 2018, the NY Times revealed that an organization to which College Board had sold student data had resold it to a for-profit company that markets expensive programs to families with dubious benefits, and that this practice may contribute to a thriving and largely unregulated commercial market in student data.  To this day, CONTINUE READING: Federal class action lawsuit filed vs College Board’s predatory practices | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

News literacy lessons: Manipulating social media and letters to soldiers - The Washington Post

News literacy lessons: Manipulating social media and letters to soldiers - The Washington Post

News literacy lessons: Manipulating social media and letters to soldiers

Here is the fourth installment of a new weekly feature on this blog — lessons from the nonprofit News Literacy Project. Each installment offers new material for teachers, students and everybody else who wants a dose of reality.

You can learn about the News Literacy Project and all of the educational resources it provides in this piece, but here’s a brief rundown:

Founded more than a decade ago by Alan Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Los Angeles Times, the News Literacy Project aims to teach students how to distinguish between what’s real and fake in the age of digital communication and a president who routinely denounces real news as “fake.”

Now the leading provider of news literacy education, it creates digital curriculums and other resources and works with educators and journalists to teach middle school and high school students how to recognize news and information to trust — and provides them with the tools they need to be informed and engaged participants in a democracy. It uses the standards of high-quality journalism as an aspirational yardstick against which to measure all news and information. Just as important, it provides the next generation with an appreciation of the First Amendment and the role of a free press.

The following material comes from the project’s free weekly newsletter, the Sift, which takes the most recent viral rumors, conspiracy theories, hoaxes and journalistic ethics issues and turns them into timely lessons with discussion prompts and links. The Sift, which publishes weekly during the school year, has more than 10,000 subscribers, most of them educators.

New lessons from the Dec. 9 edition of the Sift, as provided by the News Literacy Project:

Manipulating social media is still too easy

Despite the steps that social media companies have taken in recent years to limit the spread of CONTINUE READING: News literacy lessons: Manipulating social media and letters to soldiers - The Washington Post

Peter Greene: New Report: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought

New Report: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought

New Report: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought

Last March, the Network for Public Education released a report showing that the federal government has lost a billion dollars to charter school waste and fraud. But the organization had not stopped sifting through the data. Their follow-up report, “Still Asleep At The Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in as Pileup of Fraud ands Waste,” reveals that the situation is even worse than shown in the first report, while laying out more state by state details. Particularly striking—the vast amount of money that has been wasted on ghost schools that never served.

NPE is a group co-founded by Diane Ravitch, the Bush-era Assistant Secretary of Education who has since become an outspoken critic of education reform. The organization's executive director is Carol Burris, a former award-winning New York principal. Burris was the primary author of this report.

The reports examine what happened to money disbursed by the Federal Charter Fund, a charter grant source created in 1994 as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Since 1995, it has handed out almost $4 billion.

Some new findings in this follow-up report:

The original report underestimated the number of charters that had CONTINUE READING: New Report: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought

Failed charter schools cost federal government almost $505M in nine years: report | TheHill

Failed charter schools cost federal government almost $505M in nine years: report | TheHill

Failed charter schools cost federal government almost $505M in nine years: report

Charter schools that never opened or that have opened then closed between 2006 and 2014 have cost the federal government almost $505 million, according to a recent report.

The Network for Public Education, an advocacy group, released a report Friday that found more than 35 percent of charter schools never opened or ended up closing down in that time frame, The Washington Post reported. Those schools received more than a half of $1 billion, or 28 percent, of the funding from the federal Charter School Program (CSP). 

Through analysis of almost 5,000 schools, researchers found almost 540 schools never opened between 2006 and 2014 but were funded $45.5 million, the report said. Michigan, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s home state, had the most charter schools that never opened at 72.

The Hill reached out to the Education Department for comment. The department did not respond to the Post’s request for comment about the report. 

Casandra Ulbrich, the president of the Michigan State Board of Education, told the Post she thought the report was “extremely troubling.”

“It raises some very legitimate questions about a federal grant program that seems to have been operating for years and years with little oversight and very little accountability,” she said.

This report served as a follow-up to a March report that found up to $1 CONTINUE READING: Failed charter schools cost federal government almost $505M in nine years: report | TheHill

Schools Spy on Kids to Prevent Shootings, But There's No Evidence It Works - VICE

Schools Spy on Kids to Prevent Shootings, But There's No Evidence It Works - VICE

Schools Spy on Kids to Prevent Shootings, But There's No Evidence It Works
Spyware like GoGuardian, Bark, and Gaggle are monitoring students’ internet habits, both on and off school grounds.

It was another sleepy board of education meeting in Woodbridge, N.J. The board gave out student commendations and presented budget requests. Parents complained about mold in classrooms. Then, a pair of high schoolers stepped up to the podium with a concern that took the district officials completely off guard.

“We have students so concerned about their privacy that they’re resorting to covering their [laptop] cameras and microphones with tape,” a junior said at the October 18, 2018 meeting.

Woodbridge had recently joined hundreds of other school districts across the country in subscribing to GoGuardian, one of a growing number of school-focused surveillance companies. Promising to promote school safety and stop mass shootings, these companies sell tools that give administrators, teachers, and in some cases parents, the ability to snoop on every action students take on school-issued devices.

The Woodbridge students were not pleased.

“We just want to ask again: How are you going to assure our right to privacy when we have been having these problems and we have so many fears CONTINUE READING: Schools Spy on Kids to Prevent Shootings, But There's No Evidence It Works - VICE

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy - https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/

AFT’s Weingarten urges members: Push lawmakers to impeach Trump – People's World

AFT’s Weingarten urges members: Push lawmakers to impeach Trump – People's World

AFT’s Weingarten urges members: Push lawmakers to impeach Trump

WASHINGTON—With the House Judiciary Committee scheduled to vote on impeachment articles against GOP President Donald Trump the week of Dec. 9, Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten is urging her members to strongly lobby their lawmakers now to vote to impeach Trump for bribery and obstruction of justice.

At this point, with reports in hand of Trump’s constitutional crimes from both the Judiciary and Select Intelligence Committees, the lone remaining question seems to be whether the lawmakers will stick to impeaching the president for bribery by endangering national security with his demands to Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, using $391 million in U.S. military aid to get the Ukrainians to act – or how far to go beyond that.

The Judiciary panel also plans to impeach Trump for obstruction of justice in stonewalling the Ukrainian investigation. Still uncertain: Whether the Democratic-run committee will add obstruction counts for Trump’s refusal to cooperate in any way with the congressional probes.

Weingarten, a New York City high school civics teacher, says in her open letter to her union’s 1.6 million members that Trump committed impeachable offenses in his dealings with Ukraine.

That follows up on the AFT board’s earlier decision supporting the opening of the impeachment CONTINUE READING: AFT’s Weingarten urges members: Push lawmakers to impeach Trump – People's World

The Lure of Bad News | Teacher in a strange land

The Lure of Bad News | Teacher in a strange land

The Lure of Bad News

I have this Facebook friend—a woman I haven’t seen in decades but who was my actual pal and work partner in high school.  As it happens, with relationships like this—threadbare, based on outgrown commonalities—we have taken two very diverging roads in the yellow wood of life.

And not just politically and socially. She is that person who continually reposts urgent TV reports of missing children, including children who have mercifully been found safe, six months ago. I don’t know where she gets her news and information, but you can count on her to post flamingly incorrect horror stories every three or four days:

Did you know the Obama White House banned nativity scenes?  Not a single flag at the Democratic debate! There once was a time the president was honored, no matter who he was—let’s get that back! Christians are being persecuted! We could feed and house all the homeless in America with what the Democrats have spent on impeachment!

About that last one, which Snopes doesn’t touch—there are an estimated 553, 742 homeless people in the United States. Spending $10K on each homeless person (which might, optimistically, feed them and get them off the streets for six months) would cost us $5.5 billion.  A far cry from the actual costs of investigating the President since 2017, CONTINUE READING: The Lure of Bad News | Teacher in a strange land

CURMUDGUCATION: Can Rich Content Improve Education?

CURMUDGUCATION: Can Rich Content Improve Education?

Can Rich Content Improve Education?

Modern high-stakes testing really kicked into gear with No Child Left Behind, and then got another huge boost with the advent of Common Core. All through that era, teachers pushed back against the fracturing of reading instruction, the idea that reading is a suite of discrete skills that can be taught independent of any particular content. 

The pendulum has begun its swing back. Content knowledge is coming back into vogue, and while there are plenty of cognitive science-heavy explanations out there, the basic idea is easy to grasp. If you know a lot about dinosaurs, you have an easier time reading and comprehending a book about dinosaurs. If you are trying to sound out an unfamiliar word on the page, it’s easier if you already know the word by sound. If you learn and store new information by connecting it to information you already have banked, that process is easier if you actually have plenty of information already stored away. 

Classroom teachers have known this. Some have argued that the Common Core acknowledged this (but did so in the appendix, none of which is tested material). And while much of the education reform crowd joined the “skills” push (one attempted catchphrase of the new SAT created under Common Core creator David Coleman was “skilled it”), some reformers never lost faith in the work of Ed Hirsch, Jr., who has himself stayed committed to the idea through his Core Knowledge Foundation.

So if we restore rich content to education and provide students with a wealth of background knowledge, will that revitalize education and fix some of the issues that have plagued us? Or will this, like the great skills revolution at the beginning of the century, turn out to be a terribly CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Can Rich Content Improve Education?

Steeling Myself | radical eyes for equity

Steeling Myself | radical eyes for equity

Steeling Myself

Forget it, nothing I change changes anything

“Walk It Back,” The National

Just come outside and leave with me

“The Day I Die,” The National

Yesterday I met with my four classes for the last time this semester. The classes include about 75% first-year students, something I very much enjoy about teaching at the college level.

As I have started doing more purposefully, I ended these last class sessions by telling the students I feel very fortunate to have taught them, that I love them, and that I am always here to help if they need anything since once they have been my students, they are always my students.

While I was telling the first class of the day, my foundations education course, all of this, I felt myself flushed with cold chills, the urge to cry rising up through my chest toward my eyes.

This is nothing unusual because I am a world-class crier, but except for people very close to me, my crying is usually reserved for times when I am alone—often in the car listening to music and being very melodramatically maudlin.

I toyed with that this morning, in fact, as I sang along to The National’s Sleep Well Beast; the rising drums of the opening of the album, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” always pulls at my chest and then by “Hey baby,” the CONTINUE READING: Steeling Myself | radical eyes for equity

Report: Federal government wasted millions of dollars on charter schools that never opened - The Washington Post

Report: Federal government wasted millions of dollars on charter schools that never opened - The Washington Post

Report: Federal government wasted millions of dollars on charter schools that never opened

More than 35 percent of charter schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP) between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers more than half a billion dollars, according to a new report from an advocacy group that reviewed records of nearly 5,000 schools. The state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The report, titled “Still Asleep at the Wheel,” said that 537 “ghost schools” never opened but received a total of more than $45.5 million in federal start-up funding. That was more than 11 percent of all the schools that received funding from CSP, which began giving grants in 1995.

In Michigan, where the billionaire DeVos has been instrumental over several decades in creating a charter school sector, 72 charters that received CSP money never opened, at a total cost of some $7.7 million from 2006 to 2014. California was second, with 61 schools that failed to open but collectively received $8.36 million.

The Education Department did not respond to a query about the findings. DeVos has made expanding alternatives to school districts — including charters and programs that use public money for private and religious schools — her top priority as education secretary, and has said her metric for a state’s education success is how much they expand school “choice.”

Casandra Ulbrich, president of the Michigan State Board of Education, said in an interview that she found the new report “extremely troubling.”

“It raises some very legitimate questions about a federal grant program that seems to have been operating for years and years with little oversight and very little accountability,” she said.

The report — published by the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group that supports public education and was co-founded by education historian and advocate Diane Ravitch — says the Education Department has failed for years to properly monitor how its charter grant funding is spent. The new CONTINUE READING: Report: Federal government wasted millions of dollars on charter schools that never opened - The Washington Post

Big Education Ape: Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel” | Diane Ravitch's blog - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/07/carol-burris-responds-to-charter.html

NYC Educator: The Thing

NYC Educator: The Thing

The Thing

Nothing strikes fear into a teacher's heart quite like the prospect of another day of PD on the New Thing. There are all these programs, based on the presumption that you're doing everything wrong, and trying to get you to correct yourself and do everything right. Right there you've already lost. It's like you're five years old and someone is telling you to drink castor oil for your own good.

First, no one wants to do anything for their "own good." Doing something for your own good is virtually always synonymous with doing something you don't want to do. More importantly, the people who claim to know what's good for you, well, they're often way off base. The implicit assumption of a whole lot of PDs is that we don't know what we're doing. I sat for several hours a few weeks ago while some highly paid corporate functionary told me what is and is not a good story.

It wasn't as bad as the first time they came, when we compared and contrasted crap with good writing, but all in all it was not a productive use of my time. I'd argue that if I, as an English teacher, were unable to distinguish between cleverness and crap there would be something amiss that a three-hour workshop would be unlikely to correct. The assumption that I don't know the difference, though, is insulting, and that's what you get from a lot of PD.

At a friend's school they simulated a sweat shop and had to make things. I saw pictures of baskets they created. This might be a great activity for a social studies class. In fact, given that I teach immigrants, it might be a great activity for my class. This is the sort of work my grandparents had to do when they came here. For all I know, this is what my students' parents are still doing. And in the US of A in 2019 working newcomers are reviled for doing work a whole lot of Americans wouldn't dream of doing. It's great to see someone break out of the New Thing Mode.

I wonder why PD can't consist of us going somewhere and doing something, perhaps as a model for something we'd go and do with our students. I once took my students to the CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: The Thing

NYC Public School Parents: Achieve Inc. seriously misleads the Board of Regents on graduation exit exams

NYC Public School Parents: Achieve Inc. seriously misleads the Board of Regents on graduation exit exams

NYC Public School Parents: Achieve Inc. seriously misleads the Board of Regents on graduation exit exams 

Thanks for Stan Karp of the Education Law Center for much of the data here.

Achieve Inc. has been commissioned by the Board of Regents to research what other states are doing with their graduation exit exams, and review the current New York high school graduation requirements which mandate that students have to pass five high-stakes exit exams to graduate from high school. They are now engaged in an "information gathering phase" that is being being funded with an $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation.

Accordingly, the organization gave a presentation to the Regents today,  entitled "Graduation requirements review," which included the following statements: that "states are making adjustments to their assessments required for high school graduation" followed by this claim: "28 states administer an ELA, mathematics, science and/or social studies exam(s) that factors into students' grades or graduation requirements."

Missing from their presentation are the following facts:
FairTest reports that currently, only 11 states currently have high school graduation exit exams, down from high of 27.

For the year 2018-2019, Education Week wrote this:  "Thirteen states require students to pass a test to get a high school diploma,...Exit exams used to be more popular: In 2002, more than half the states required them.”

Yet their list included Washington which recently approved an end to exit tests for the class of 2020.

The Fordham Institute put out a report over the summer, with the following information:  "just 12 states will require students in the class of 2020 to pass exit exams, falling from a peak of 30 states requiring them for the class of 2003."

When challenged on Twitter about the disparity in their figures compared to other sources, Achieve responded that they "define them [exit exams] as assessments that matter for students - impacting course grades or graduation."  Yet to conflate states that require students to pass a test to graduate from high school with those that assign ordinary CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Achieve Inc. seriously misleads the Board of Regents on graduation exit exams