Media “Experts” + Parental Zeal + Political Knee-jerk Legislation + Market Forces = Failing Reading, Again – radical eyes for equity

Media “Experts” + Parental Zeal + Political Knee-jerk Legislation + Market Forces = Failing Reading, Again – radical eyes for equity

Media “Experts” + Parental Zeal + Political Knee-jerk Legislation + Market Forces = Failing Reading, Again

In the pre-pandemic world that seems much further in the past than it is, I traveled from South Carolina to Milwaukee in February of 2020 to speak at the Wisconsin State Reading Association (WSRA) annual convention.

My public work had been dominated by refuting the “science of reading” movement for more than a year at that point—including having a book in press on the “science of reading” as another version of the Reading War—so I arrived in Milwaukee a bit apprehensive about how I would be received.

My session was well attended by an energetic crowd of teachers who seemed eager to engage in why the “science of reading” movement was misguided, but I also encountered another distinct frustration among teachers I had not anticipated.

A significant part of the “science of reading” agenda has been to attack popular reading reading programs, notably programs associated with Lucy Calkins and Teachers College (see here and here, for example).

As I interrogated and discounted many aspects of the “science of reading” agendas, the attendees were supportive of my analysis, but teachers often expressed very negative experiences with Calkins’s programs, the third most CONTINUE READING: Media “Experts” + Parental Zeal + Political Knee-jerk Legislation + Market Forces = Failing Reading, Again – radical eyes for equity

Hybrid school might be worse than remote or all in-person school - Vox

Hybrid school might be worse than remote or all in-person school - Vox

Hybrid school might be the worst of both worlds

Part-time school during the pandemic might create as many problems as it solves.

Hybrid learning was supposed to be an improvement.

When school buildings closed in the spring due to the pandemic, students, teachers, and families all struggled with remote classes. But come fall, the virus was still raging across much of America. So many districts — including the nation’s largest, New York City — struck a compromise.

They would bring kids into buildings, but only for part of the day or week. That way, they’d reduce the number of students in schools at any one time, limiting viral spread, while still giving students crucial in-person time with their teachers and peers.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice, however, hybrid models could turn out to be the worst of both worlds, as David Zweig predicted at Wired in July.

To begin with, hybrid schedules don’t really solve one of the pandemic’s biggest problems for parents: the lack of child care. While having kids in school a few days a week or a few hours a day might give parents a bit more flexibility to do their jobs, “the benefits of being able to work a little less part-time and a little less erratically are not going to be anything like what you’d be getting from full-time school,” Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Center for American Progress who studies the impact of child care, told Vox.

And while some parents may be able to stay home with their kids on the days they’re out of school, others will need outside child care. That means kids will spend part of the week in child CONTINUE READING: Hybrid school might be worse than remote or all in-person school - Vox

Money and Power in LAUSD Contests - LA Progressive

Money and Power in LAUSD Contests - LA Progressive

Money and Power in LAUSD Contests

“When you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows” -Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, 10/13/20

Senator Whitehouse laid out beautifully on Tuesday the context surrounding Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings in Washington as the pushing and pulling of ‘actors inside the frame of a puppet theater.’ He argues that not only are outside forces controlling these actors in the main show but they are integral to the narrative of it. And some of the evidence for broadening focus beyond the proscenium is when characters in the drama adopt “the practice of claiming … moral standards or beliefs to which [their] own behavior does not conform”:  hypocrisy.

Just so has Marilyn Koziatek – or the independent expenditure committee (IEC) from which she proudly accepts endorsement of her West San Fernando Valley campaign for school board in the LAUSD3 board district – swerved from insinuation of responsibility for scandals that occurred before his tenure, to antisemitism to anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice bigotry. Schmerelson’s defeated opponent who has endorsed Koziatek, has even hypocritically alluded to Scott Schmerelson’s former republican registration. Meanwhile, swearing brand new allegiance to a political party is precisely the maneuver employed by her endorsed-candidate, Ms Koziatek. The hypocrisy is not CONTINUE READING: Money and Power in LAUSD Contests - LA Progressive

NYC Public School Parents: Questionable DOE contracts to be voted on Oct. 21 by the PEP -lack of compliance with student privacy law & lack of training

NYC Public School Parents: Questionable DOE contracts to be voted on Oct. 21 by the PEP, concerns about DOE lack of compliance with student privacy law & ongoing issues about PEP process & lack of training

Questionable DOE contracts to be voted on Oct. 21 by the PEP, concerns about DOE lack of compliance with student privacy law & ongoing issues about PEP process & lack of training

I sent this memo to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy last week; questions about their busing contracts, DOE's lack of compliance with the state student privacy law by failing to post their district data privacy policy and contracts with vendors that have access to personal student data, and problems related to PEP governance.   

Update on busing: After this memo was written, it was also revealed that the DOE is planning purchasing Reliant bus company, for an unknown amount, acquiring one thousand buses and thousands of new employees, with ongoing considerable costs to the DOE budget. As I said to the NY Post, this move raises all sorts of questions, including how can the city afford this in the face of huge budget shortfalls? And why are they adding more city employees while threatening to lay off thousands of others? 

Update on the Covid testing contracts:  As of Friday 10/16/20, DOE has now posted the three vendor Parent Bill of Rights agreements here,  after we and others urged them to do so.  We still have concerns about the provisions regarding deletion of the personal student data portions in their Parent Bill of Rights, which do not clearly state when the data is to be deleted and thus do not appear to comply with the state student privacy law Education Law 2D, or regs, which fully came into force January 2020.  There still are no contracts or PBOR posted on the DOE website for the 75+ ed tech companies that DOE has acquired and encouraged teachers to use, many of which also have access to personal student data.

The meeting of the PEP contract is Monday Oct. 19 at 11 AM today; you can see livestream here.  Meeting of the PEP is Wed. Oct 21 at 6 PM; more info including agenda here.  The agenda has a link to the proposed contracts.  You can listen or sign up to speak starting at 5:30 PM here.

Teacher Tom: "Radical Empathy"

Teacher Tom: "Radical Empathy"

"Radical Empathy"

In Rutger Bregman's book Humankind, he writes about an experiment in which psychologists told volunteers a sad story about a 10-year-old girl who was suffering from a deadly disease. She is, according to the story, on a waiting list for a life-saving treatment, but time is of the essence. The volunteers are told that they can move her up on the list, but they are instructed to be objective in their decision. Most people, understanding that all the children on the list were in dire straits, opted to not give this specific girl an advantage over the others.  A second group of volunteers, however,  was given the same set up, but this time they were asked to imagine how this specific girl must be feeling, to dwell on her pain, suffering, and fear. In this case, the majority chose to allow her to jump the line.

As Bregman points out, this is, at best a shaky moral choice. After all, giving this girl, who the second group of volunteers now "know" through their empathy, an advantage, they are in fact disadvantaging all the other kids, violating the principles of what most of us would consider even-handed fairness. Those other children have stories as well, but because the volunteers spent time empathizing with this one specific girl, they favored her. Bregman sees this as an example of how empathy can blind us:

(Empathy) is something we feel for people who are close to us; for people we can smell, hear and touch. For family and friends, for fans of our favorite band, and maybe for the homeless guy on our own street CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: "Radical Empathy"

CURMUDGUCATION: Call Made For DeVos To Cut Off Fraudulent College Chain

CURMUDGUCATION: Call Made For DeVos To Cut Off Fraudulent College Chain

Call Made For DeVos To Cut Off Fraudulent College Chain

Last week, an assortment of organizations signed off on a letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, from the AFT to the Feminists Majority Foundation to the Education Trust to the Young Invincibles. 

This crew came together to insist that the time has come for the department to finally cut the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE) off from any federal money. Let me give you the short form explanation of what's going on, because among other things, it's a great demonstration of how the non-profit private school dodge is still a great way for hucksters and grifters to collect a mountain of money, much of it from the taxpayers, and how these profiteers have burrowed into the department of education.

I'm going to lean heavily on the work of one other co-signer-- attorney David Halperin, who has followed this tale for years. And I'll warn you up front--this is a twisty mess.

We can start back in 2012. Carl Barney the owner-operator of several for-profit colleges including Stevens-Haneger, CollegeAmerica, and California College. According to Patricia Cohen in 2015 at the New York Times, in 2012 Barney sold these profit schools to a Denver non-profit, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education. According to court documents, that non-profit consisted entirely of just one guy--Carl Barney. Hold onto your hat for this next part.

Barney has always been a busy guy, but only a few critics have really gone digging as much as this CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Call Made For DeVos To Cut Off Fraudulent College Chain

NYC Educator: Making the Best of the Impossible

NYC Educator: Making the Best of the Impossible

Making the Best of the Impossible

 There's no magic bullet to ease our anxiety. There's no certain answer to solve our dilemmas. And no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse.

We just had a positive case in our building. Of course our building doesn't look the way it usually does. More than half of our students are all remote, and most of those who aren't come in once or twice a week. 

It's freaky, and it's scary. But everyone who came into contact with that person is out of the building for two weeks. Is it perfect? Of course it's not. Nothing ever will be.

We have fewer students this year, I'm told, because some parents are pulling their kids from public schools. They're finding private ones that will see them in person five days a week. I'm mystified as to what would make parents find that an acceptable risk. I don't even allow my dog to socialize the way he used to, and my dog adores attention anywhere he can find it.

I'm teaching online, and so far I've only seen two of my students studying from the building. I was surprised to see them there, but I'm glad they managed to catch their classes one way or another. I have a feeling after this week there hapwill be fewer of them choosing to go in. It doesn't really take much. Since they're only going in a CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Making the Best of the Impossible

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

A VERY BUSY DAY
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...
The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Big Education Ape: THIS WEEK IN EDUCATION Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... The latest news and resources in education since 2007 - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/10/this-week-in-education-larry-ferlazzos_17.html

“Readers Respond: Should Politics Be Kept Out of the Classroom?”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 11h

Readers Respond: Should Politics Be Kept Out of the Classroom? is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. Many readers share their responses to the question of politics in the classroom, ranging from the importance of separating it from “partisanship” to stating that “teaching is political.” Here are some excerpts:

Monday’s Must-Read Articles On School Reopening

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

Skitterphoto / Pixabay Here are new additions to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL : California teacher unions fight calls to reopen schools is from The L.A. Times. ‘Out of Control’: When Schools Opened in a Virus Hot Spot is from The NY Times. Remote learning is deepening the divide between rich and poor is from The Washington Post. CDC Offers Cautions, Guidance f

The National Day Of Writing Is On Oct. 20th – Here Are 37 Related Teaching & Learning “Best” Lists

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

Free-Photos / Pixabay From The National Council Of Teachers Of English : Writing is an important part of life. It helps us communicate and work with each other, supports our learning, and helps us remember. The National Day on Writing® celebrates writing—and the many places, reasons, and ways we write each day—as an essential component of literacy. Since 2009, #WhyIWrite has encouraged thousands

The Best Social Studies Websites – 2020

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

The end-of-the-year “Best” lists continue. I’m adding this one to ALL END-OF-YEAR “BEST” LISTS FOR 2020 IN ONE PLACE! You can see all previous Social Studies lists here . Here picks for this year: HERE’S THE “COLUMBUS DAY” LESSON I DID WITH MY ELL HISTORY CLASS THE BEST RESOURCES FOR TEACHING & LEARNING ABOUT HOW THE STOCK MARKET WORKS FREE NY TIMES SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR ANY US HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER &

Everything You Wanted To Know About Teaching With Movies & Video Clips But Were Afraid To Ask

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

15299 / Pixabay I have over 2,100 frequently revised and updated “Best” lists on just about every subject imaginable, and you can find them listed three different ways in three different places (see Three Accessible Ways To Search For & Find My “Best” Lists ). I’m starting to publish a series where each day I will highlight the “Best” lists in a separate category. Today, it’s on Teaching With Mov

What Is The Most Simple & Best Lesson You Have Done On Information Literacy & “Fake News”?

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1d

pixel2013 / Pixabay I want to teach a lesson on information literacy/fake news to my IB Theory of Knowledge class in a week or so. I have a ton of ideas at The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy – Help Me Find 

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