Monday, December 28, 2020

THE TOP BANANA: TODAY'S EDUCATION HEADLINES #REDFORED #tbats #COVIDVACCINE #BIDEN #edsecMiguelCardona

THE TOP BANANA
TODAY'S EDUCATION HEADLINES

Martin Henry Freeman, First Black College President in the US, Honored With Sculpture in Vermont https://www.theroot.com/martin-henry-freeman-first-black-college-president-in-1845953447?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=theroot_twitter via @TheRoot

Connecticut: A Teacher Remembers Cardona | Diane Ravitch's blog - https://wp.me/p2odLa-sUP via @dianeravitch

As hospitals swell, nursing students are tapped to join the front lines for the second time https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/coronavirus-nursing-students/2020/12/27/a9551142-4481-11eb-975c-d17b8815a66d_story.html?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=wp_local-education

PROOF POINTS: 10 of the most popular stories about education research in 2020 - The Hechinger Report https://hechingerreport.org/10-popular-stories-education-research-2020/

A Cheerleader’s Vulgar Message Prompts a First Amendment Showdown https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/us/supreme-court-schools-free-speech.html

How the Pandemic Is Imperiling a Working-Class College https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/us/college-coronavirus-tuition.html

College Student Who Thought He Recovered Dies From Coronavirus https://patch.com/us/across-america/college-student-who-thought-he-recovered-dies-coronavirus?google_editors_picks=true

Secretary DeVos Releases Statement on Signing of COVID Relief Package https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/secretary-devos-releases-statement-signing-covid-relief-package

Useful New Video From NPR: “Is It Time To Say R.I.P. to P.O.C.?” | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... - https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/?p=114411 on @Larryferlazzo

Survey Estimates Nearly 2500 Youth Homeless in CT in 2020 https://blog.ctnews.com/kantrowitz/2020/12/28/survey-estimates-nearly-2500-youth-homeless-in-ct-in-2020/

Mike Klonsky's Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES - http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2020/12/weekend-quotables.html

US citizen spouses and children of undocumented immigrants will finally get stimulus checks https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/12/28/22202728/mixed-status-immigrant-eligible-stimulus-checks-covid-19-relief

CURMUDGUCATION: Democrats Need A New Theory Of Action

by Mike Simpson / 10min

Democrats Need A New Theory Of Action For four years, Democrats have had a fairly simple theory of action when it came to education. Something along the lines of "Good lord, a crazy lady just came into our china shop riding a bull, waving around a flamethrower, and dragging a shark with a head-mounted laser beam; we have to stop her from destroying the place (while pretending that we have a bull

The Cons of Learning Pods - The New York Times

by Mike Simpson / 40min

Learning Pods Show Their Cracks It turns out that organizing and operating an independent one-room schoolhouse from your backyard is … a lot of work . This past summer, Emily Brady thought she had solved the puzzle of remote learning. Rather than send her 5-year-old to virtual kindergarten, she would set up a Spanish immersion forest school for a few children, hire a teacher and run the idyllic

Connecticut: A Teacher Remembers Cardona | Diane Ravitch's blog

by Mike Simpson / 1h

Connecticut: A Teacher Remembers Cardona A music teacher in Meriden, Connecticut, wrote this comment about Miguel Cardona on Facebook. The teacher is a BAT. Jake Jacobs, executive director of the BATS, circulated this post. I can tell you this much–he was my principal and evaluator for one year, during a low point in my career. Of the nine principals (and couple dozen assistants) I have worked u

Miguel Cardona Accepts Biden Nomination | Diane Ravitch's blog

by Mike Simpson / 1h

Miguel Cardona Accepts Biden Nomination On December 23, Connecticut Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona spoke, accepting President-Elect Joe Biden’s nomination to serve as Secretary of Education: He said: Mr. President-elect, Madam Vice President-elect — thank you for this opportunity to serve. I know just how challenging this year has been for students, for educators, and for parents. I’ve

Here’s How Much Your School District Will Receive From The New Stimulus Package | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

by Mike Simpson / 1h

HERE’S HOW MUCH YOUR SCHOOL DISTRICT WILL RECEIVE FROM THE NEW STIMULUS PACKAGE You may be wondering how much your district will be receiving from the $900 billion stimulus package that was finally signed by President Trump yesterday. In very rough and general terms, it will be $1,000 per student. However, if you want to get a more specific amount – again, such a slightly less rough total, accor

Teacher Tom: Life Itself

by Mike Simpson / 2h

Life Itself They tell us that our schools will fully re-open sometime during the coming year. This is good news for some of the kids and bad for others. For most, it will be a mixed bag. Most will be thrilled to be back again amongst their peers, to play together, to touch one another, to wrestle and pretend and bicker and create together. Likewise, most, in the strange, unexpected freedom the p

Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

by Mike Simpson / 2h

Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults As the time approached for the 2020-21 school year to begin, I remember reading about parents of means turning to “learning pods” as an option for creating a sort of one-room schoolhouse experience for a small group of children. Also referred to as “pandemic pods,” the idea is to provide a means for social interaction and face-to-face instruction to sup

Who is Miguel Cardona? [Why was he nominated for Secretary of Education?] | Ed In The Apple

by Mike Simpson / 2h

Who is Miguel Cardona? [Why was he nominated for Secretary of Education?] For sports fans a highly anticipated event is the draft: the commissioner walks to the podium and announces, “In the 2020 draft the Biden Team selects, [hesitates] Miguel Cardona” – who? For weeks speculation circulated among the self-styled educational intelligentsia, would Biden nominate Linda Darling-Hammond, the leader

YESTERDAY

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION + ICYMI: Christmas Recovery Edition (12/27)

by Mike Simpson / 17h

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Christmas Recovery Edition (12/27) Christmas Recovery Edition We're getting there, and by "there" I mean into whatever future we're about to build in the new year. In the meantime, here's this week's reading list. The Attack on Dr. Jill Biden Is Cloaked Hatred of Teachers and Public Ed While folks have been compiling lists if bad Wall Street Journal takes in 2020, the Epste

Why Joe Biden's stutter is a gift to America | Salon.com

by Mike Simpson / 17h

Why Joe Biden's stutter is a gift to America A president who thinks before he talks? Bring it on In the clip, Donald Trump is standing before a throng of his worshippers, musing about character and how it is shaped by circumstances. "Can you imagine if that happened to me?" he asks, throwing out a hypothetical. "Man, would I be a bad guy . I would be the meanest man in history ." It is February

Wendy Lecker: Two Books That Demonstrate Why Public Education Matters | Diane Ravitch's blog

by Mike Simpson / 17h

Wendy Lecker: Two Books That Demonstrate Why Public Education Matters Wendy Lecker is a civil rights attorney who writes frequently for the Stamford Advocate. In this column, she reviews two important books: One shows how deeply embedded public schools are in our democratic ideology, the other describes that coordinated assault on the very concept of public schooling. The first is low professor

Outrunning the Pandemic – Racing Through Gadfly’s Top 10 Stories of 2020 | gadflyonthewallblog

by Mike Simpson / 17h

Racing Through Gadfly’s Top 10 Stories of 2020 On most weekends back in the 1980s, you’d probably find me at TILT, the mall’s crowded video game arcade. When I was about 12 – around ’86 or so – one of my favorite games was “Outrun” by Sega. Ever play it? In a cherry red Ferrari convertible with the wind blowing through my virtual hair, I’d race through various summer style environments from beac

Peter Greene: Phooey to Resuming the Big Standardized Tests | Diane Ravitch's blog

by Mike Simpson / 1d

Peter Greene: Phooey to Resuming the Big Standardized Tests The “reform” lobby, never content without testing and data, has argued in a host of opinion pieces that children really need to be tested this spring. The reformers believe that school is unthinkable and teachers won’t know what to do without annual standardized testing. They have completely imbibed the Texas Miracle That Wasn’t, the “m

My Goals For 2021 | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

by Mike Simpson / 1d

MY GOALS FOR 2021 Yesterday, I shared Eight Teaching Concerns I Have Going Into 2021 . I thought it would be a good reflective exercise for me to follow that post with one sharing my goals for the next year, and thought that at least a few readers might find them interesting. 1. Of course, one major goal is that the eight concerns I listed yesterday get prevented, or at least are substantially a

DEC 26

TOP POSTS THIS WEEK 12/26/20 #REDFORED #tbats #COVID-19 #REOPENSCHOOLSSAFELY #COVIDOUTBREAK #BIDENWINS #TOPBANANAHEADLINES #edsec

by Mike Simpson / 1d

Big Education Ape TOP POSTS THIS WEEK 12/26/20 ‘Slaying Goliath’: Diane Ravitch argues in new book that public education advocates have beat back efforts to privatize schools - The Washington Post The real story of New

Big Education Ape

CURMUDGUCATION: Democrats Need A New Theory Of Action

Democrats Need A New Theory Of Action

For four years, Democrats have had a fairly simple theory of action when it came to education. Something along the lines of "Good lord, a crazy lady just came into our china shop riding a bull, waving around a flamethrower, and dragging a shark with a head-mounted laser beam; we have to stop her from destroying the place (while pretending that we have a bull and a shark in the back just like hers)."

Now, of course, that will, thank heavens, no longer fit the circumstances. The Democrats will need a new plan.

Trouble is, the old plan, the one spanning both the Clinton and Obama years, is not a winner. It went, roughly, like this:

The way to fix poverty, racism, injustice, inequity and economic strife is to get a bunch of children to make higher scores on a single narrow standardized test; the best shot at getting this done is to give education amateurs the opportunity to make money doing it.

This was never, ever a good plan. Ever. Let me count the ways.

For one thing, education's ability to fix social injustice is limited. Having a better education will not raise the minimum wage. It will not eradicate poverty. And as we've just spent four years having hammered into us, it will not even be sure to make people better thinkers or cleanse them of racism. It will help some people escape the tar pit, but it will not cleanse the pit itself.

And that, of course, is simply talking about education, and that's not what the Dems theory was about anyway--it was about a mediocre computer-scorable once-a-year test of math and reading. And that was never going to fix a thing. Nobody was going to get a better job because she got a high score on the PARCC. Nobody was ever going to achieve a happier, healthier life just because they'd raised their Big Standardized Test scores by CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Democrats Need A New Theory Of Action

The Cons of Learning Pods - The New York Times

Learning Pods Show Their Cracks

It turns out that organizing and operating an independent one-room schoolhouse from your backyard is … a lot of work.

This past summer, Emily Brady thought she had solved the puzzle of remote learning. Rather than send her 5-year-old to virtual kindergarten, she would set up a Spanish immersion forest school for a few children, hire a teacher and run the idyllic program from the cottage behind her house in Oakland, Calif.

“The parents needed to work, and we figured the easiest thing would be to pay and hire somebody to be the teacher,” said Ms. Brady, a writer who set the plan in motion with a cousin who also had school-aged children. “Oh my God, it all just sounds so naïve now.”

It turns out that organizing and operating an independent one-room schoolhouse from your backyard is a lot of work. To get the program running, Ms. Brady drafted Covid-19 guidelines and interviewed potential teachers, settling on a woman with a warm personality, but no teaching experience.

Ms. Brady recruited other families. One mother had so many questions before the school year started that Ms. Brady suggested she find a different pod. Her cousin dropped out after the first week, leaving the remaining two families scrambling to find two replacements to cover the cost of a teacher’s salary. The school year had barely started when an extreme wildfire season exposed one crucial shortcoming of a curriculum centered around outdoor learning: It’s hard to run a forest school when you can’t go to the forest.

“This whole experience, the whole year, has been like driving in the dark with your fog lights on,” Ms. Brady said.

If the summer was the season to fawn over learning pods as a pandemic panacea, the fall and winter have brought rude reminders that they are not so simple.

Learning pods, a newly popular term for families who band together and hire teachers to either replace or augment virtual CONTINUE READING: The Cons of Learning Pods - The New York Times

Collective Work and Responsibility–7 Gifts For Wellness On The Third Night Of Kwanzaa

Collective Work and Responsibility–7 Gifts For Wellness On The Third Night Of Kwanzaa

Ujima, the celebration of the third night of Kwanzaa, we look towards how we can incorporate collective work and responsibility into our lives. It is imperative that we continue to take care of ourselves and others as this year comes to a close and find a way to do it as an individual and as a group. Wellness can include making changes for the sake of your better health, finding ways to create change within your small community and the idea of dismantling ideas that suppress Blackness.

Collective Work and Responsibility–7 Gifts For Wellness On The Third Night Of Kwanzaa

Connecticut: A Teacher Remembers Cardona | Diane Ravitch's blog

Connecticut: A Teacher Remembers Cardona

A music teacher in Meriden, Connecticut, wrote this comment about Miguel Cardona on Facebook. The teacher is a BAT. Jake Jacobs, executive director of the BATS, circulated this post.

I can tell you this much–he was my principal and evaluator for one year, during a low point in my career. Of the nine principals (and couple dozen assistants) I have worked under, he is the only one who has ever had a conversation with me about my teaching. His is the only formal observation I have ever had that was conducted in a way where the goal was to help me be a better teacher. When I needed something, he did his best to provide it. When he had to say no, he explained why honestly and respectfully. When he moved to central office, he focused on teacher evaluation and had frank and honest discussions with teachers about the state of teacher eval and the different issues and potential pitfalls of different systems. He is thoughtful, open, and kind, and treats everyone with respect and compassion. Most important, while he is ambitious–he made no secret as principal that he got his Ed. D. with an eye toward being a CONTINUE READING: Connecticut: A Teacher Remembers Cardona | Diane Ravitch's blog

Miguel Cardona Accepts Biden Nomination | Diane Ravitch's blog

Miguel Cardona Accepts Biden Nomination

On December 23, Connecticut Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona spoke, accepting President-Elect Joe Biden’s nomination to serve as Secretary of Education:

He said:

Mr. President-elect, Madam Vice President-elect — thank you for this opportunity to serve.

I know just how challenging this year has been for students, for educators, and for parents.

I’ve lived those challenges alongside millions of American families — not only in my role as a state education commissioner, but as a public school parent and as a former public school classroom teacher.

For so many of our schools and far too many of our students, this unprecedented year has piled on crisis after crisis.

It has taken some of our most painful, longstanding disparities and wrenched them open even wider.

It has taxed our teachers, our leaders, our school CONTINUE READING: Miguel Cardona Accepts Biden Nomination | Diane Ravitch's blog

Here’s How Much Your School District Will Receive From The New Stimulus Package | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

HERE’S HOW MUCH YOUR SCHOOL DISTRICT WILL RECEIVE FROM THE NEW STIMULUS PACKAGE

You may be wondering how much your district will be receiving from the $900 billion stimulus package that was finally signed by President Trump yesterday.

In very rough and general terms, it will be $1,000 per student.

However, if you want to get a more specific amount – again, such a slightly less rough total, according to Chalkbeat:

districts can expect to receive four times whatever they got from the CARES Act.

If you don’t know how much your district received from the CARES act, which was the name of the previous stimulus package, you can calculate it here.

If you live in California, though, Ed Source has published a list of each district in our state and exactly how much money each one will receive.

Our Sacramento district will get over $66 million.

How much you wanna’ bet that teachers won’t be asked at our district, or at most other ones in the country, how to use it?

Here’s How Much Your School District Will Receive From The New Stimulus Package | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

Teacher Tom: Life Itself

Life Itself

They tell us that our schools will fully re-open sometime during the coming year. This is good news for some of the kids and bad for others. For most, it will be a mixed bag.

Most will be thrilled to be back again amongst their peers, to play together, to touch one another, to wrestle and pretend and bicker and create together. Likewise, most, in the strange, unexpected freedom the pandemic gave them, will have forgotten the cruelties of classroom management, the sitting quietly, the arbitrary rules, the adults in charge of everything from when they are to urinate to what they are to think. It's never pretty to train living things in captivity and they return to us having tasted life itself in all it's savor and bitterness.

One thing I can tell you about all the children is that after what they will have survived they are beyond our curriculum and assessment tools. They have seen, done, and felt things we don't understand; that they don't understand and need to explore. They will have become new humans, shaped by historic events in ways that we can't imagine. They will have vital and important stories to tell, art to create, dances to CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: Life Itself

Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults

As the time approached for the 2020-21 school year to begin, I remember reading about parents of means turning to “learning pods” as an option for creating a sort of one-room schoolhouse experience for a small group of children. Also referred to as “pandemic pods,” the idea is to provide a means for social interaction and face-to-face instruction to supplement the less-desirable online instruction that these children might otherwise be facing during the pandemic.

There are even freshly-created entities such as this one, Learning Pods (a New York- and San Francisco-school “collaboration” that can apparently somehow process contributions from foundations), willing to facilitate a learning pod experience for preschool or K-5 children. Interested in pricing? Use this handy pricing calculator to learn that the estimated cost for a K-5 student who is involved five days a week (where a “day” is 9AM – 2PM for K-5) in a pod of 4 students is $3,320 a month. The cheapest appears to be $893 a month for a preschool pod of 6 kids meeting 3 days a week for under three house a day (9AM – 11:45AM). (Financial aid is available; one can apply for private school financial aid using this application that costs $51 to submit.)

If you have the means and live in SF or NY and have the pod membership all lined up but have no teacher, and Learning Pods has no teacher for your pod, you can fill out this “teacher not found form pod” form, and we’ll see what happens. The form includes the question of who is pod captain, whether the pod is indeed complete (minimum of 3 kids), whether pod has a location, whether pod includes children with “learning differences or CONTINUE READING: Learning Pods: Quite the Lesson for Adults | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Who is Miguel Cardona? [Why was he nominated for Secretary of Education?] | Ed In The Apple

Who is Miguel Cardona? [Why was he nominated for Secretary of Education?]

For sports fans a highly anticipated event is the draft: the commissioner walks to the podium and announces, “In the 2020 draft the Biden Team selects, [hesitates] Miguel Cardona” – who?

For weeks speculation circulated among the self-styled educational intelligentsia, would Biden nominate Linda Darling-Hammond, the leader of the education transition team, how about one of the teacher union leaders, Lilly Eckelson Garcia or Randi Weingarten, an urban superintendent, and on and on.

On the evening of December 22nd the Wall Street Journal wrote,

WASHINGTON—President-elect Joe Biden said he would nominate Connecticut Education Commissioner Miguel Cardona as education secretary, tapping a third Latino for a role in his cabinet.

If confirmed, Dr. Cardona would be tasked with implementing Mr. Biden’s pledge to expand resources for public schools, make public college tuition-free for families making less than $125,000 annually and restore CONTINUE READING: Who is Miguel Cardona? [Why was he nominated for Secretary of Education?] | Ed In The Apple

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Monday, December 28, 2020