Sunday, November 8, 2020

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION + ICYMI: That Was A Week All Righty Edition (11/8)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: That Was A Week All Righty Edition (11/8)

That Was A Week All Righty Edition

Has it only been a week since we got together here? Seems like that was in a whole different world, and I have a feeling that we have a few more to go through before we're done. But as soon as the last echoes of Beloved Leader's 1,732 lawsuits dies down, maybe we can get back to doing some important stuff and not dying and--well, won't it just be nice not to have to have him barging into our consciousness every damn day.

In the meantime, Other Stuff is still going on. Here's some reading.

When Jesus Needs a Visitor's Badge

Blue Cereal Education has been working his research muscles on the issues of church-school separation, and he has three reads to recommend.

Success Academy Will Be Remote Through March 2021

This Chalkbeat story is worth noting because to listen to some folks talk, the only reason any schools have closed in this country is because of those damned selfish teachers unions. Apparently not.

The Wildest of Wild Weeks

This post at eduhonesty is from way back on Thursday, and it offers some good thoughts on the ongoing discussion of how much political talk should be allowed into the classroom.

The Post-Espinoza End Game

This is from way back in July, but I find I keep going back to these insights from Bruce Baker and Preston Green, and something tells me the issues involved here are going to keep flaring up, so study up. Speaking of which...

How The Court Inverted Constitutional Protections Against Discrimination

Leah Litman is at the Atlantic looking at how SCOTUS has been flipping the First Amendment all sideways. Again, this is going to come up again. And again.

Schools Adopt Facial Recognition in the Name of Fighting Covid

Wired takes a look at these shenanigans. More surveillance state baloney.

Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student's critical tweets

This is a trick we've seen before, back when a certain test manufacturer was running around getting blog posts taken down because the brutal criticism involved vaguely describing test content. Proctorio has proven to be mighty aggressive in shutting up its critics. Here's one more example.

Overstating Nothing

Paul Thomas offers some excellent thoughts about student writing and the art of being both grandiose and vague.

In Some Ways, This Is Worse Than 2016

Nancy Flanagan says much of what I'm thinking. The actual election doesn't change the actual underlying issues.

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: That Was A Week All Righty Edition (11/8)

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION

AND DON'T FORGET PETER GREENE ON FORBES CLICK HERE

Election Polling And Education’s Big Standardized Test. - https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/11/06/election-polling-and-educations-big-standardized-test/?sh=369405602021 by @palan57 on @forbes

How The Pandemic Is Playing Out In Some Rural And Small Town Schools. - https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/11/02/how-the-pandemic-is-playing-out-in-some-rural-and-small-town-schools/?sh=3a6419bee264 by @palan57 on @forbes

Betsy DeVos Will Be Leaving. Prepare To Curb Your Enthusiasm.

9Kby Peter Greene / 23h

It has been a few hours since the race was finally called, and now, once we get past a few hundred petulant lawsuits, the Trump Train will be leaving DC (undoubtedly kicking over every table it can find on the way out). That means that Betsy DeVos will be leaving the department of education, and that is unquestionably, undeniably a good thing. And if you want to celebrate it for the rest of the w

New Update From What Is No Longer The Trailing Edge of the Pandemic

by Peter Greene / 3d

It has been just about two months since I told you that if anyone had a shot of starting school up without major Covid consequences, it would be my little corner of the world. I'm here to report that things are not going well. Back on September 7, the number of cases for the whole county, since March, was 70. People were not panicked, but cautious, with the usual outlying groups of deniers and to

Trump's Executive Order for 1776 Commission

33by Peter Greene / 4d

Like many of you, I'm hoping that Trump's Executive Order establishing a 1776 Commission will be rendered moot sometime within the next 12-2,215 hours. But because, like many of you, I need something to distract me from doomscrolling (and the board of directors is napping), I'm going to go ahead and look at this damn fool executive order . The short form is that this is all empty political hooey

Survey: Pandemic Effects on Early Childhood Education

by Peter Greene / 5d

Defending the Early Years is an organization whose stated mission “is to work for a just, equitable, and quality early childhood education for every young child, by informing educators, administrators, and parents about how children develop and learn best and advocating for the active, playful, experiential approaches to learning informed by child development theory and evidence-based research.”

School Choice Disempowers (Almost) Everybody

100+by Peter Greene / 6d

The standard argument for school choice is that it will empower all sorts of folks, but it's just not so. In fact, modern school choice is designed to deliberately strip power from all sorts of public education stakeholders. Unions Let's start with the most obvious--one big dream of choiceniks is to finally break the damned teachers unions. You can see in pieces like the one I discussed yesterday

ICYMI: Dear God Let It Please Be Over Soon Edition (11/1)

by Peter Greene / 7d

Of course, it probably won't be. This is probably going to drag out for weeks. But we can hope that we're, as they say, turning a corner this week. Hope you en joyed that extra hour. Happy All Saints Day. In the meantime, here's some stuff to read. A Voting Rights Battle In A School Board Coup In Georgia, the battle over voting, schools, and race, surfaces in yet another battle. New York Times re

The National Review Vs. Evil Teachers Unions

39by Peter Greene / 7d

Upon first reading " Teachers Unions and the Myth of 'Public' Schools " at National Review, my immediate impulse was to just mutter "fatuous bullshit" and move on. But this piece is a fine distillation of a current genre of writing--the piece that blames current school closures on the self-serving teachers' unions, who see distance learning as a great way to pursue their dream of being paid for d

Psychic AI and Plagiarism Detection

by Peter Greene / 9d

Artificial Intelligence is used to sell a lot of baloney. It would be bad enough it were used only to teach badly and provide poor assessments of student work, but AI is also being hawked as a means of rooting out plagiarism. For an example of this phenomenon at its worst, let's check in on a little webcast from Mark Boothe at Canvas Learning Management System . He's talking to Shouvik Paul at Co

DeVos New NAEP Baloney Sandwich

91by Peter Greene / 10d

Betsy DeVos would like you to know--again, some more--that public schools are failing. Her exhibit this time is the newly-released NAEP results for 12th graders in 2019. And as usual at NAEP time, her brief exhortation is riddled with baloney. America is the greatest country on the face of the earth, and we should deliver our rising generation the greatest educational opportunities possible. Sadl

Another Skills of Tomorrow Pitch

by Peter Greene / 10d

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat has made a small hobby out of tracking one of the pervasive made-up statistics of education-- "65% (or 80% or what-have-you) of the jobs that this years kindergartners will fill don't exist yet." Well, the folks at the World Economic Forum have another variation on this kind of crystal

CURMUDGUCATION - http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/

Labeling Students Then and Now (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Labeling Students Then and Now

Two decades ago, Sarah Deschenes, David Tyack and I wrote an article published in the Teachers College Record called: “Mismatch: Historical Perspectives on Schools and Students Who Don’t Fit Them.”

Part 1 described the labels educators used in the 19th and 20th century for children who didn’t keep pace with the majority of other students in the age-graded school. This post includes the arguments we used to explain why these labels were used then and, perhaps, even now.

We first look at four ways educators and reformers have assigned blame for failure. We then propose a different historical explanation that locates this problem in a mismatch between students and the structure of schools and in schools’ resistance to adapting to the changing needs of their student populations. We also consider how the current standards movement might reinforce existing age-graded institutional structures.

A. Students who do poorly in school have character defects or are responsible for their own performance. [L]ocating responsibility in the individual—a response with deep roots in American ways of thinking—has been the dominant way of framing the problem. In the educational system of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this manifested itself in a focus first on character deficiencies, which reformers believed children could overcome, and later on students’ low IQs, which students were thought to have no control over. Labels like ne’er-do-well, sleepy-minded, and limited exemplify this way of thinking about students….

In the twentieth century, when the “science” of education informed professional decision making, educators leaned heavily on psychological interpretations for CONTINUE READING: Labeling Students Then and Now (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Texas: What I Said to Public Education Advocates | Diane Ravitch's blog

Texas: What I Said to Public Education Advocates

The Pastors for Texas Children, great friends of public schools, invited me to come to Texas in April 2020. I was going to speak in Houston, Dallas, and Austin to activists for public schools. The events were organized by Charles Foster Johnson, the remarkable, wise, and tireless leader of PTC. He has launched similar groups in other states, including Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Then came COVID and my trip was scratched and replaced with a Zoom meeting in late October. I had a spirited conversation with Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune, a superb interviewer who had read my book Slaying Goliath carefully and asked incisive questions. This is the recording of the Zoom. I come in about minute 15 and the conversation is about 40 minutes.

I prepared for the day by studying up on what’s happening in my native state. Texas right now is ground zero for the hungry charter industry. The state commissioner, Mike Marath, who is not an educator, is gung-ho for more charters.

The public schools, which enroll more than five million students, have been underfunded since at least 2011, when the legislature cut the schools’ budget by more than $5 billion. That funding was never fully restored even though enrollment increased. The majority of the state’s public school students and Hispanic and African CONTINUE READING: Texas: What I Said to Public Education Advocates | Diane Ravitch's blog

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Will Be Leaving. Prepare To Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Betsy DeVos Will Be Leaving. Prepare To Curb Your Enthusiasm.

That means that Betsy DeVos will be leaving the department of education, and that is unquestionably, undeniably a good thing. And if you want to celebrate it for the rest of the weekend, I don't want to take that away from you--just put a pin in this post and come back to it Monday.

Feel better? I certainly do. Now then...

DeVos is almost certainly not going away. She has devoted her entire adult life to the pursuit of privatized, Christianized education, to a system that aids the Betters and keeps the Lessers in their proper place, to a world in which the wealthy can hold onto their well-deserved piles of money without having to use any of it to pay for nice things for Those People. She is not going to stop now.

She is far more experienced and suited to the life of a billionaire political operative than that of a government bureaucrat. That is what she knows how to do (hell, Secretary of Education is the only actual job she's ever had). In some ways, she did more damage as a private citizen then a government functionary. Ask any education advocate from Michigan--the DeVos family has mastered the art of checkbook advocacy, of backing politicians who will do their bidding and threatening those that won't. In fact, the DeVos family never stopped--they raised money for John James, even though he ultimately lost.

That loss (and a few others) may signal how things have changed for DeVos. For much of her career, she was able to operate somewhat stealthily. She now has spectacular name recognition--and it's not very good recognition at that. "This candidate is back by Betsy DeVos," is likely to be an albatross around the neck of any future politicians willing to answer her call. She has attained a huge level of unpopularity among the general public, and teachers at one point reported they dislike her more CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Will Be Leaving. Prepare To Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Carol Burris and Diane Ravitch: What public education advocates want to see in Biden’s successor to Betsy DeVos - The Washington Post

What public education advocates want to see in Biden’s successor to Betsy DeVos - The Washington Post

What public education advocates want to see in Biden’s pick to succeed Betsy DeVos

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is on her way out of office now that Joe Biden has defeated President Trump, and the education world is eager to see who her successor will be. Whoever it is, Biden has said that the new education secretary will be on a mission to undo things the controversial DeVos accomplished — such as making school choice the primary priority of the department — and work to support traditional public school districts.

Follow the latest on Election 2020

Public education advocates are hoping that he picks someone who will bolster public schools and move away from the past two decades of school policies that emphasized charter schools, standardized testing and operating schools through a business model.

They have been fiercely opposed to DeVos and her agenda to expand alternatives to the public education system, which she once called “a dead end.” Trump voters are likely to be as unhappy with Biden’s selection as public school advocates were with DeVos.

This post looks at what these public education advocates want, written by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris.

Ravitch is the most prominent public education advocate of the past decade, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education in the administration of President George H.W. Bush who turned against the school reform movement after seeing its effects on teaching and learning. She is an education historian, author and co-founder of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Another prominent public education advocate is Carol Burris, a former award-winning high school principal in New York who is executive director of the Network for Public Education, which opposes the expansion of alternatives to publicly funded and publicly operated schools and districts, including charter schools, which are privately operated but funded with taxpayer dollars.

By Carol Burris and Diane Ravitch

Betsy DeVos just got her pink slip. Throughout her four-year tenure, she did everything she could to undermine public education. Instead, she promoted the idea that schooling should be a competitive free-for-all in which parents shop for schools with tax dollars and then hope it all works out. Now it is time to end that war against public schools as she walks out the door. It is time to chart a course away from the failed reforms that began with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB), accelerated CONTINUE READING: What public education advocates want to see in Biden’s successor to Betsy DeVos - The Washington Post

For his tuition-free college plans and more money for poor school districts, Biden needs Congress on board - POLITICO

For his tuition-free college plans and more money for poor school districts, Biden needs Congress on board

The president-elect also is likely to face pressure from the left on widespread student debt cancellation.

President-elect Joe Biden wants to eliminate tuition for all students at community college and for families earning under $125,000 at four-year public colleges and universities. He’s also proposed doubling funding on Pell Grants, tripling federal spending on low-income school districts and boosting the money the government spends on special education.

But all of those big plans depend on which party holds the reins of the Senate.

At the Education Department, Biden has vowed to use his regulatory powers to restore a wide range of Obama-era policies that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has gutted. In many cases, that will require a Biden administration to rewrite rules or seek to postpone DeVos’ rules — a process that the Trump administration has fumbled more than once. Federal courts have blocked DeVos’ attempts repeatedly.

Biden has vowed to restore Obama-era regulations and policies aimed at cracking down on abuses by for-profit colleges. That includes the now-dead “gainful employment” regulation that cut off federal funding to low-performing college programs and the “borrower defense” rule, which governs debt relief for defrauded students.

Biden also pledged to put a “quick end” to DeVos’ new Title IX rules governing sexual misconduct at schools and colleges. And Biden has said he would restore Obama-era protections for transgender students that the Trump administration withdrew.

Biden likely will face pressure from the left on widespread student debt cancellation, which has emerged as a major priority of progressives in recent years. Biden has called for canceling $10,000 in debt for all borrowers as an immediate coronavirus pandemic relief measure and has a more targeted plan to forgive certain types of student loan debt for borrowers earning less than CONTINUE READING: For his tuition-free college plans and more money for poor school districts, Biden needs Congress on board - POLITICO

Is former Utah teachers leader slated for Education post for Biden? - Deseret News

Is former Utah teachers leader slated for Education secretary in Biden administration?

Politico speculates the former NEA and UEA president is a contender for Secretary of Education

SALT LAKE CITY — Former Utahn Lily Eskelsen Garcia, who recently concluded six years as president of the nation’s largest teachers union, is considered a contender for Education secretary in the administration of President-elect Joe Biden, according to Politico.

The Washington-based website and newspaper that focuses on American politics says Eskelsen Garcia, Utah Education Association president in the 1990s, is “an early favorite for the position.”

“Biden has committed to putting a public school teacher atop the Department of Education, a pledge that has encouraged unions and public education advocates alike, and is seen as a hard rule within the transition team. Given Biden’s close ties to organized labor, there is also a widespread expectation that he wants to put a union official or someone with union ties in his cabinet,” according to Politico.

Eskelsen Garcia, a former elementary school teacher in Utah and former president of the NEA, which claims 3 million members, checks off both boxes.

“Having a secretary of Education who has been a boots-on-the-ground classroom teacher who knows how policies make their way to the classrooms and into the lives of our students and into the working conditions of our teachers, that is just so exciting to me and CONTINUE READING: Is former Utah teachers leader slated for Education post for Biden? - Deseret News

Illinois: Feds Slap Gulen Charters with Big Fine | Diane Ravitch's blog

Illinois: Feds Slap Gulen Charters with Big Fine

A federal investigation of Gulen charters in Illinois concluded with a large fine. Gulen charters are associated with the Turkish Imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania. Gulen charter schools can be recognized by the dominant presence of Turkish people in the board and the staff. In the past, they have been criticized for steering contracts to Turkish-owned firms, regardless of whether they are the low bidder.

The article, written by veteran reporters Dan Mihapoulos and Sarah Karp, describes the conclusion of a lengthy federal investigation.

A politically connected charter school chain based in the Chicago area has agreed to pay $4.5 million to end a long-running federal corruption investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Concept Schools Inc. — which has four publicly-financed campuses in Chicago and dozens of other charter schools in the Midwest — allegedly engaged in a bid-rigging scheme to steer federally funded technology CONTINUE READING: Illinois: Feds Slap Gulen Charters with Big Fine | Diane Ravitch's blog

Pres-Elect Biden: It’s Time for a Career K12 Teacher as US Ed Sec. | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Pres-Elect Biden: It’s Time for a Career K12 Teacher as US Ed Sec.

It’s November 07, 2020, and Joe Biden is president-elect.

Joe Biden

That means extreme right-wing, pro-private-school-voucher, anti-public school billionaire, US ed sec Betsy DeVos will hit the US Department of Ed exit doors by January 2021.

Betsy DeVos

In September 2020, DeVos told state education chiefs not to bother about requesting federally-required testing waivers during a 2020-21 school year steeped in pandemic chaos.

And now, she will be out before 2021 spring testing, and that is fabulous news.

But who will replace her?

It is about time for someone with seasoned K12 classroom experience to hold that position. Not someone with ladder-climbing, token K12 classroom experience. Not someone who is a basketball playing pal of his buddy, the president (aka Arne Duncan). And not someone who is an activist for private schools and who admitted publicly to “not intentionally visiting schools that are underperforming” (that, of course, would be DeVos).

I am tired of being tossed to and fro by ill-conceived education platforms that chain CONTINUE READING: Pres-Elect Biden: It’s Time for a Career K12 Teacher as US Ed Sec. | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Andre M. Perry: Win or lose, Trump was the mirror America needed

Win or lose, Trump was the mirror America needed

Win or lose, Trump was the mirror America needed

A day after Election Day 2020, the presidential race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is still too close to call. As states continue to count ballots, the potential for recounts and

litigation to affect the final outcome remains. Viable routes to victory remain for both candidates, even in the midst of several colossal failures that should have resulted in a trouncing of the incumbent Trump.

At various points during the campaign, both Trump and Biden referred to this election as a fight for the “soul” of America. If that is the case, Trump’s better-than-expected performance should hold a mirror up for Americans to see what that soul truly looks like.

After downplaying the COVID-19 pandemic that has taken more than 200,000 American lives, Trump still has rock solid support, even after contracting the illness himself. In the past four years, he has openly fawned vicious dictators such as Russian president Vladimir Putin, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un. He inappropriately deployed the military on American citizens during a moment of social unrest. He has failed to denounce white supremacy, separated immigrant parents from their children, consistently deployed racist rhetoric, and banned residents of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. None of this seems to have eroded his base, even voters of color—exit polls show that Trump support from Black and Latino or Hispanic voters is up from 2016.

Meanwhile, California’s raging wildfires highlight Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. His lack of transparency and demonization of the press can only be considered acceptable under an authoritarian regime. He regularly flaunts undemocratic values, and his narcissism seemingly knows no bounds. He has converted press briefings into a stage for his personal political reality CONTINUE READING: Win or lose, Trump was the mirror America needed

Weathering the storm: School funding in the COVID-19 era - kappanonline.org

Weathering the storm: School funding in the COVID-19 era

Bruce D. Baker, Mark Weber, and Drew Atchison

As COVID-19 takes a toll on education budgets, federal and state leaders should take specific steps to minimize the damage done to high-poverty schools.

Recent research into the economics of education leads to the inescapable conclusion that if we want our public schools to serve all children well, then we must provide them with equitable and adequate funding. Viewed across several decades, school and district spending data from across the United States reveal a clear pattern: When budgets have increased, students have seen significant gains in achievement and a range of other desirable outcomes (Jackson, 2018). Conversely, when school funding has been cut, student performance has suffered; and the deeper those cuts have been — consider, for example, the sharp budgetary declines during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 — the worse the student outcomes (Jackson, Wigger, & Xiong, 2018; Shores & Steinberg, 2017). Simply put, money matters.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, public schools will likely experience even greater revenue losses in the coming years than they did during the Great Recession. Further, it appears that safely reopening schools in the fall of 2020 will itself be costly. In districts where school buildings are open, much smaller class sizes will be required to meet social distancing guidelines and contain the spread of the coronavirus; this, in turn, will require hiring additional personnel, finding new classroom space, and perhaps creating staggered schedules. It will mean more instructional hours for teachers, more staff hours spent cleaning and sanitizing facilities, and more complicated bus routes. Schools will have to budget for additional time and effort from maintenance and operations staff, food service workers, and other support positions. Nursing and other medical services — already inadequate in many schools (Willgerodt, Brock, & Maughan, 2018) — will need to be improved. And, to ensure equitable internet access when distance learning is required, districts will have to redouble their investments in broadband and portable computers. Finally, since learning losses due to this spring’s school closures CONTINUE READING: Weathering the storm: School funding in the COVID-19 era - kappanonline.org

Education in a Biden Presidency in a Deeply Divided Nation: What Can We Expect? | Ed In The Apple

Education in a Biden Presidency in a Deeply Divided Nation: What Can We Expect?

On November 2nd, the day before Election Day pollsters and talking heads were predicting a blue wave, a Biden presidency, a Democratic Senate and House and a long list of “progressive” initiatives.

Five days later the networks are predicting a thin, an incredibly thin Biden victory, although it might be weeks until states certify election results. Ask I peck away on Saturday at noon CNN and MSNBC are calling Pennsylvania putting Biden over the top.

Horns blowing, dancing in the streets, Joe Biden will be the 46th President of the United States.

President Trump has been tweeting all day charging fraud and filing law suits.

On December 14th electors will cast virtual ballots and on January 6th the Congress will open the ballots and certify the election of the next president.

The Constitution states the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections …. shall be proscribed in each State by the Legislature thereof …” it is highly CONTINUE READING: Education in a Biden Presidency in a Deeply Divided Nation: What Can We Expect? | Ed In The Apple

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Sunday, November 8, 2020