What Debate? - The Crucial VoiceThe Crucial Voice

What Debate? - The Crucial VoiceThe Crucial Voice:

What Debate? 

The marketing campaign to FIX No Child Left Behind began back in January withannouncements that there would be debate.

A draft of the Every Child Ready for College or Career Act of 2015 was released and many newspapers and education associations picked up the story including the American Educational Research Association.

“The draft bill contains several provisions related to research. If enacted, the bill would task the Institute of Education Sciences with evaluating Title I activities. In addition, state plans submitted to the Department of Education would be approved unless the department presented“substantial high-quality education research” that demonstrated that a plan would be ineffective or inappropriate. The bill does not define high-quality education research.

Alexander has made it clear that he hopes to have a substantial discussion about ESEA.”

Discussion? Debate? Both are important and citizens should have been included to help shape and direct the debate about “fixing” the law. After-all, we were the ones who were subjected to the consequences of bad ideas being passed by congress and signed into law, in this case, by then President Bush. And there was never an official parental complaint process!

But instead of the anticipated discussion, Senator Alexander immediately directed “the debate” to the topic of Testing and Accountability while avoiding the topic of national What Debate? - The Crucial VoiceThe Crucial Voice:

NPE Announces Location for 2016 Conference – The Network For Public Education

NPE Announces Location for 2016 Conference – The Network For Public Education:

NPE Announces Location for 2016 Conference

The Network for Public Education is thrilled to announce the location for our 3rd Annual National Conference. On April 16 and 17, 2016 public education advocates from across the country will gather in Raleigh, North Carolina.

We chose Raleigh to highlight the tremendous activist movement that is flourishing in North Carolina. No one exemplifies that movement better than the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, who will be the conference keynote speaker. Rev. Barber is the current president of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the National NAACP chair of the Legislative Political Action Committee, and the founder of Moral Mondays.

You can read about the history of Moral Mondays in this great piece in the Nation.

The Moral Monday protests transformed North Carolina politics in 2013, building a multiracial, multi-issue movement centered around social justice such as the South hadn’t seen since the 1960s. “We have come to say to the extremists, who ignore the common good and have chosen the low road, your actions have worked in reverse,” said Reverend William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and the leader of the Moral Monday movement, in his boisterous keynote speech. “You may have thought you were going to discourage us, but instead you have encouraged us. The more you push us back, the more we will fight to go forward. The more you try to oppress us, the more you will inspire us.”

Rev. Barber’s activism is not limited to North Carolina, either. He is fast becoming a powerful national advocate for public education. This is readily apparent in his recent blog post for The Hill, where he calls on Congress to “fix the high stakes testing regime that has failed.” Make sure to read his post and share it widely. Here is an excerpt:

When Congress enacted the ESEA in 1965, everyone knew education opportunities for black children were radically unequal to the opportunities for white students. Now, 50 years later, these gaps persist and are widening–despite the law’s promise to level the playing field for the nation’s most vulnerable students.

The last time Congress reauthorized ESEA, they and President George W. Bush established high-stakes testing, labeling, and policies that punish schools if kids flunked the tests. Tests don’t teach. Nurturing creative adults who know how to draw out individual children are what education is about. We don’t send our kids to school to become skilled test takers. We pay our taxes and send our kids to public schools because we need future corporate CEOs, cardiologists and aerodynamic engineers, university presidents and school principals, urban planners and architects. Our sons and daughters can’t reach these heights when accountability in our education system hinges on standardized test scores, not cultivating intellectual opportunity—the real measure of education.  Standardized tests can tell us only so much. Educators know that annual multi-dimensional assessments that tell us whether a child is falling behind, whether she or he needs intervention and support the school can’t provide, or if a youngster is on track to graduate are the tools they need—not a single number.

Congress has a chance to fix the high stakes testing regime that has failed. Congress has the chance to deliver on its promise of educational opportunities for all students, especially the nation’s most vulnerable ones, which is the purpose of ESEA. Congress has the chance to repair the breach caused by sins and systems of slavery and segregation.

NPE President Diane Ravitch recently called Rev. Barber “a major national figure in the civil rights movement.” She implored readers of her blog to come to Raleigh and “hear his eloquent plea for justice and decency in our time.”               

Please mark your calendar now to join us in Raleigh to share in Rev. Barber’s poignant message. #NPE16NC promises to be yet another inspiring event.NPE Announces Location for 2016 Conference – The Network For Public Education:

'These Kids Are Just Pawns': The Rising Toll of Inequitable School Funding - NEA Today

'These Kids Are Just Pawns': The Rising Toll of Inequitable School Funding - NEA Today:

'These Kids Are Just Pawns': The Rising Toll of Inequitable School Funding

This article is the first in a NEA Today series that explores obstacles to education that create an opportunity gap for disadvantaged students. With the number of children living in low-income families reaching record highs, these issues are affecting more communities across America and the public schools that serve them.

_____________________________________________

In a kindergarten classroom at Riverside Elementary School in Reading, Pa., one of the 5-year-olds seated cross-legged on the rug is so eager to be called on it looks as if his arm is being pulled from above. His teacher, Lori Sherman, has just read them a book about the rainforest and asked if anyone remembers the word for the characteristic that allows animals to blend into their surroundings.

Finally, his name is called.

“Mosiah?” “Camouflage!” he says through a smile.

In a trailer at nearby 12th and Marion Elementary School, a fourth grader who knows the difference between prime and composite numbers nearly topples her chair backwards in her enthusiastic bid to give the answer.

Happy moments like these occur every day in U.S. public schools. But they are even more heartening when witnessed against the bleak backdrop of Reading, where students and educators confront barriers to learning every day—some exacerbated by the gross underfunding of their schools, others the result of it.

Reading is one of the nation’s poorest cities. It’s also one of the most poorly funded school districts in America. Like students in disadvantaged communities across the nation—who are disproportionately students of color—kids in Reading suffer from a school finance policy that does not come close to providing them with education resources on par with those of their wealthier peers.

Tour Reading’s 19 schools and you’ll see mostly aging buildings with broken floor tiles, leaky ceilings sprouting patches of mold, students crammed into too-small classrooms, and feral cats squatting under classroom trailers. One high school has a room full of broken microscopes, and no money to repair them. One large-group instruction room is completely off limits after a broken pipe left it spattered with sewage. The drama teacher now conducts class in the hallway.

But even more detrimental is what you don’t see.

Reading School District lost 200 educators, including 120 education support professionals in 2011 – 2012 when statewide education funding plummeted by $1.1 billion under then-Gov. Tom Corbett. Incredibly, the cuts were four times greater in Pennsylvania’s 50 poorest districts ($532 per student) than in the state’s wealthiest districts ($113 per student).

In practical terms, those cuts left Riverside Elementary’s Ms. Sherman with a class of more than 30 kinder- garteners and no aide. Many of her colleagues also saw their class sizes balloon, reducing precious one-on-one time that is essential for disadvantaged children.

Mosiah doesn’t have art, gym, or music and there is only one 15-minute recess that is largely spent getting outside and lining up to go back in. There’s no longer a separate kindergarten class focused on meeting special needs among his 'These Kids Are Just Pawns': The Rising Toll of Inequitable School Funding - NEA Today:

Education Lessons From A Sparkly District: Yet More Influence of Money

Education Lessons From A Sparkly District: Yet More Influence of Money:

Yet More Influence of Money

The Leadership Conference on Human and Civil Rights just keeps on pushing standardized testing. Two articles in particular are troubling. This one from Vox, and this one fromInternational Business Times (IBT). Both highlight the lobbying by big civil and disability rights groups for Congress to maintain high stakes testing in an effort to close achievement gaps of poor, minority, and disabled students. 

It's a noble thought that, in practice, is a disaster for those groups. I know I sound like a broken record, but please, someone, anyone, show me the data that demonstrates the closing of those gaps. Show me how tests given to students who have NEVER seen the material on the tests demonstrate anything worthwhile. Anything! Please. 

I recognize the place from which these civil and disability rights groups argue. That pre-ESEA, or IDEA, the people they represent were left out. Districts we not obliged to educate them. I'd like to think that in 2015 the thought of not educating someone in this country is utterly abhorrent. There are better ways to demonstrate growth, progress, achievement, rather than issuing poorly designed standardized tests and narrowing curriculum for the sole purpose of taking those tests. I don't care where you live in the US, that's exactly what's happened -- all in the name of "college and career ready," a term that no one has bothered to define, but, heck, it sure sounds good. 

The other day, Steven Singer noted on his blog that many of the civil rights groups had been asking for relief from standardized testing as late as last October. Now they want it. Politics and money are tricky, I guess. 

Once again, I've been obliged to go poking through the Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations' websites and 990's looking for grants provided to the groups that signed on to not one, but two, press releases from The Leadership Conference in the last week. There were a couple of new faces on these two lists. 

I have written about the money here, here, and here. The money from just these three foundations is staggering.  

Here is the list from the 14th July 2105 Leadership Conference advocacy letter to the US Senate.

	Gates	Walton	Broad
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights	$2,930,868	----	----
Alliance for Education Excellence	$17,740,140	----	-----
American Association of University Women	----	----	-

Education Lessons From A Sparkly District: Yet More Influence of Money:

Hunches Gone Wrong: Time for the Gates Foundation to Reconsider Approach to Education - Living in Dialogue

Hunches Gone Wrong: Time for the Gates Foundation to Reconsider Approach to Education - Living in Dialogue:

Hunches Gone Wrong: Time for the Gates Foundation to Reconsider Approach to Education

By John Thompson.

The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, in “Bill and Melinda Gates’s Pillow Talk,” writes: “It has been 15 years since Bill and Melinda Gates created what is now the largest foundation in the world. This milestone seemed the right moment to ask them what they have learned from giving away $34 billion, what mistakes they have made, and what they disagree about.” Although the Gates Foundation shouldn’t get all of the credit, according to Kristof’s “conservative back-of-envelope calculations,” more than 33 million children’s lives have been saved since the foundation was established.

Of course, mistakes were made in their philanthropy as they “started out too tech-focused.” Now, says Kristof, some of their most effective measures, like promoting breast-feeding, are “distinctly low-tech.”

The Gates’s acknowledge that the foundation’s investments in education in the United States haven’t “paid off as well.” But, Kristof is hopeful regarding “one giant leap” in policy. The foundation plans to “also invest nationwide in early childhood programs.”

I’m not qualified to assess the effectiveness of international aid projects. But, to understand why the Gates Foundation’s efforts at home are not working, we should read the foundation’s (and Kristof’s) descriptions of their programs and ask about the two watch dogs who didn’t bark. The first clue is found in Kristof’s seemingly innocuous statement that the foundation “didn’t appreciate how hard it was to translate scientific breakthroughs into actual progress in remote villages.”

When it first committed to international philanthropy, the foundation may have not grasped the full complexity of the problems it tackled, but at least it built on a foundation of scientific research. In our Hunches Gone Wrong: Time for the Gates Foundation to Reconsider Approach to Education - Living in Dialogue:

Amid an Arizona Ban on Mexican American Studies, Teachers Across the U.S. Are Campaigning for Culturally Relevant Education - The Atlantic

Amid an Arizona Ban on Mexican American Studies, Teachers Across the U.S. Are Campaigning for Culturally Relevant Education - The Atlantic:

How One Law Banning Ethnic Studies Led to Its Rise

Legislators in Arizona decided to prohibit a culturally relevant course, so teachers pushed back and started a nationwide movement.

Ethnic Studies Now Coalition

The irony is that if Arizona lawmakers had never squashed one Mexican American studies class—in a single district in one city—Curtis Acosta would have no interest in duplicating that same class across the country. Certainly, California and Texas public schools would not be considering to offer the course in all its high schools. And Tony Diaz would never have become the book smuggler.

In fact, today Mexican American studies has spread to high schools at a rate that no one could have imagined before Arizona banned the class in 2010.

“It sped up the evolution by about 25 years,” says Diaz, the self-dubbed “librotraficante,” or book smuggler. “It’s clear to me that our intellectual advancement is a threat to some people, because they tried to make it illegal.”

The story of how Mexican American studies flourished begins in 2010, with Arizona House Bill 2281. A group of Republican legislators in the state designed the legislation specifically to ban the course—or more specifically, to ban the Mexican American studies class taught in the Tucson Unified School District, which attracted mostly Latino students. The legislators sought to implement the ban while leaving similar classes geared around Asian, black, and Native American cultures untouched.

The housing crisis had crippled Arizona's economy. Legislators had just passed the most controversial anti-immigration law in the country, Senate Bill 1070, which allowed local officers to question people’s citizenship. And the governor, Jan Brewer, had declared (incorrectly) that cartel members were beheading people in the desert. There seemed to be a lot more to worry about than a high-school course.

The focus (or some might say vendetta) on Mexican Americans started when Dolores Huerta, an influential activist with United Farm Workers (of Cesar Chavez fame), told students at a Tucson High Magnet School assembly that “Republicans hate Latinos.” The then-state superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, dispatched an aide to tell students at the majority-Latino school otherwise. As the aide spoke, students raised their fists and turned their backs.

From there on, Horne and his replacement, John Huppenthal, tried with puzzling ferocity to squelch Mexican American studies. The bill designed to eradicate the course said the program taught Latino students to hate other races and that they’d been historically subjugated and mistreated by the government, and that it even encouraged sedition. “When I came into a classroom, they were portraying Ben Franklin as a racist,“ said Huppenthal. “They got a poster of Che Guevara.”

In the spring of 2010, the majority-Republican legislature signed HB 2281 into law.

* * *

Acosta had taught Mexican American studies for several years, and led the development for its design and curriculum. Each day at Tucson High Magnet School, Acosta started his class with a poem by Luis Valdez: “If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself.” Next, students might read passages from a Chicano author, analyze rap lyrics to tie in pop culture, write an essay about poverty or Amid an Arizona Ban on Mexican American Studies, Teachers Across the U.S. Are Campaigning for Culturally Relevant Education - The Atlantic:

Poverty is about not having enough money. So don’t blame schools for it | Education | The Guardian

Poverty is about not having enough money. So don’t blame schools for it | Education | The Guardian:

Poverty is about not having enough money. So don’t blame schools for it

If the government is going to start using education data to hide child poverty, schools must find a way to highlight it

here is a joke in the film Brassed Off that goes like this: God’s assistant is creating people. He turns to God and says, “We’ve got all these bodies left, but we’re right out of brains, right out of hearts and right out of vocal cords”. And so God says “Sew ’em up anyway, make them talk out their arse, and call them the Tory party.”

It’s a harsh joke. But every now and then the Conservatives do something so egregiously stupid that the joke springs back into my head. The announcement that the government wants to change the child poverty definition has done it again.

Forget income as the main child poverty measure, says Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary. Income is inconvenient. If we measure poverty by how much money you have compared with other people, then when we make those other people wealthier (like, pensioners – or our wealthy donors), then children are inconveniently poorer.

Hence, he has proposed that instead of focusing on money – the dictionary definition of poverty – a plethora of measures will tell us how poor children are. One will be school achievement. That’s right. For the first time in history, schools will be helping to save children from poverty – but also causing it.

The policy is stupid for two reasons. First, it makes no sense. Poverty is about money. It is one thing to fail at school, it is another to be hungry because you cannot afford food. Both are a problem but they are not the same thing.

Right now, thousands of families are being made homeless because of benefits capping. Each week, close to 500 homeless mothers and children are beingpushed out of London to some far-flung place. The trauma of moving home mixed with that of being yanked mid-year from school will affect these children’s education.

Elsewhere, one in four schools is washing children’s clothes, a recent survey by headteachers’ union NAHT found. NHS statistics show malnutrition is rising among 16- and 17-year-olds.

This indignation and trauma is not being caused by schools – and if Duncan Smith thinks he can divert eyes towards school achievement as a cover-up, he has Poverty is about not having enough money. So don’t blame schools for it | Education | The Guardian:

Solving the Cheating Problem | Taking Note

Solving the Cheating Problem | Taking Note:

Solving the Cheating Problem

Because America is committed to testing every child in every subject in order to make sure teachers are doing a good job, the number of high-stakes tests is increasing, and that means that we have to act boldly to eliminate cheating, which, coincidentally, also has been increasing.

Some background is in order: We have a cheating problem in our schools[1]. While a handful of students cheat because they are competing to get into top colleges, many more principals, teachers, and administrators either cheat or encourage cheating. After all, their jobs are on the line because we now judge, reward and fire them based on student test scores..

The situation has gotten out of hand. In Atlanta, Washington, DC, Austin, Texas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Dayton, Ohio and many other places, adults have worked together, even holding ‘erasure parties,’ to change student answers from wrong to right.

So what can we do to punish cheaters? Unfortunately, we cannot just fire the cheating teachers and administrators. After all, who would replace [2] them? Education is fast becoming an undesirable occupation, largely because of the pressure to demonstrate academic achievement (I.E., high test scores), and that is making it extremely difficult to recruit new people into education.

No, we have to work with what we’ve got, just as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had to fight the war with the army he had. There are two obvious steps: 1) increase surveillance to catch the cheaters and 2) make the punishments more obvious to the outside world.

Increased surveillance will cost more, of course, but we can trim other expenditures, perhaps in the subjects that aren’t being tested and therefore not occasions for cheating. I’m thinking of art, music and physical education, but, if schools have already cut those, then electives like journalism, minor sports, and theatre are places to look for savings.

Publicly shaming the cheaters is essential. Making the punishments more public should curtail cheating. For younger students, the shaming should be temporary. Perhaps cheaters should have to wear bright yellow shirts Solving the Cheating Problem | Taking Note:

Ohio Regulator Favors Politically Connected Charter School Sponsors, Resigns When Exposed | janresseger

Ohio Regulator Favors Politically Connected Charter School Sponsors, Resigns When Exposed | janresseger:

Ohio Regulator Favors Politically Connected Charter School Sponsors, Resigns When Exposed

Things unraveled pretty quickly last week for David Hansen, the director of school choice at the Ohio Department of Education.  On Tuesday, the State Board of Education, dominated by appointees of Republican Governor John Kasich, met and discussed why, as Ohio began to evaluate the sponsor-authorizers of Ohio’s charter schools, the test scores of students at on-line charters were quietly omitted—a violation of state law as Republican chair of the state senate’s education committee, Peggy Lehner, and Republican state auditor, Dave Yost, have both confirmed.  When underlings of Hansen could not adequately answer the questions of Senator Peggy Lehner, who had come to the meeting of the State Board to ask questions, she demanded their boss come downstairs to the meeting room to address her concerns.

On Saturday, David Hansen resigned from his post overseeing charter schools for the Ohio Department of Education.

This is all a huge embarrassment for Governor John Kasich.  David Hansen’s wife, Beth, has been Kasich’s chief of staff for some time, but she recently resigned that position to chair his campaign staff, as he plans to announce soon as a Republican candidate for President.

Before he came to the Ohio Department of Education in 2013, David Hansen led the extremely conservative Buckeye Policy Institute, which is part of the far-right State Policy Network.  (You can learn about the State Policy Network that coordinates the work of far-right think tanks across the states here.)

The Plain Dealer noted in its editorial yesterday: “A 2012 state law on evaluating charter schools clearly mandated ODE (Ohio Department of Education) to include the grades of all online charter schools when grading their sponsors—agencies with oversight over the charter schools.  Lawmakers hoped the pressure on sponsors would force them to provide better oversight of their schools… However, Plain Dealer education reporter Patrick O’Donnell recently revealed that ODE quietly ignored that law, a revelation that shocked the state Board of Education among others.”  Because Hansen excluded the performance of online schools from his rating of sponsors, one sponsor, “the Ohio Council of Community Schools… earned the highest grade—exemplary—even though its online schools including OHDELA, which is run by the politically connected White Hat Management, earned the lowest–Fs.”

In his story yesterday, O’Donnell reported: “The evaluations of charter school sponsors, also called authorizers—the agencies that help create and oversee charter schools—are the cornerstone of Gov. John Kasich and the state’s roundabout plan to improve Ohio’s charter schools… The key beneficiary of the exclusion—so far—was the Ohio Council of Community Schools, a non-profit agency which collects about $1.5 million in sponsor fees a year Ohio Regulator Favors Politically Connected Charter School Sponsors, Resigns When Exposed | janresseger:

CURMUDGUCATION: The Terrible Choice

CURMUDGUCATION: The Terrible Choice:

The Terrible Choice

For much of our history, Americans have operated under a simple premise-- we will educate other people's children.

Educating your own offspring is an old idea; human beings have done it for most of history. This has had many implications. You can't teach your own children things you don't know. If you're not wealthy (or even wealthy-ish), you can't hire people smarter than yourself to teach your offspring; if you are well-to-do, you can hire those smarter people-- and since they're your personal employees, you can tell them what sorts of things you want your children to be taught.

But from the beginning, some American communities provided schools for all their children. The system was not remotely perfect from Day One (for one thing, it was only for children with white penises). But the idea was established-- as members of the community, we join to educate all children. We join to educate other people's children.

This commitment was part of a long, slow-motion argument. Only educated folks should be full citizens. No, every person should be a full citizen. Therefor all folks should be educated. It's a simple progression, but it took us a couple of centuries to work our way through it. 

It is a point of American pride that we have set that task for ourselves. It is a point of American shame that we have tried to weasel out of it.

Our commitment to educating other people's children has collided with the class divide and the racial divide, like an Evel Education Knevel who can't quite clear the row of school buses, stacked too high and wrapped in a big sign that says, "I've got mine, Jack."

If I've got to spend money educating other people's children, can't I just buy them the absolute minimum? I don't really want to spend the money to educate Those Peoples' Children. What-- you want to take my tax dollars to educate Black Peoples' Children?!

Over the past several decades, our unwillingness to educate other peoples' children has stretched and trained the system. Well, parts of the system. Just as the rich have made sure they have good security and fine infrastructure in their isolated communities, they have also made sure that their own children are well-educated. But as the public system  (you know-- the one for educating other CURMUDGUCATION: The Terrible Choice:

What Barbic Learned

Last week brought the announcement that Chris Barbic, head of Tennessee's Achievement School District, is headed out the door at the end of the year. The announcement came complete with a letter that ran on the ASD website. There are certainly many lessons to be learned from the ASD in TN. Did Barbic learn any of them? Let's see...

Sustaining Effort

Barbic opens with the one-two punch of why he's leaving. First, because ASD is all launched and "sustainable," now is a good time to pass the baton. Second, because the job was killing him.


The pace and stress of a superintendent role...does not lend itself to decades of work.

That is perhaps a rough way to recruit a successor. But it also underlines one of those things that reformsters don't get-- education is a marathon, not a sprint. Maybe the job doesn't lend itself to decades of work, but a school district does, in fact, have to keep working for decades.

Reformsters often look at teachers and other professional educators as if they're just not trying hard enough. But the most read piece I have ever written is this one; on Huffington Post it has pulled 560K facebook likes. That's not because I wrote it so darn good, but because I touched a nerve, and the nerve I touched is the one that says that there is never enough-- never enough time, energy, you, to do everything, and so everybody who works a full career in education makes compromises. Otherwise you have to leave after four years because you drove yourself to a heart attack and your family misses you.

Schools require sustainable efforts. Otherwise it's constant chaos as teachers and administrators have to be constantly replaced. So Barbic has learned a True Thing here, maybe.

Pretty words

Barbic follows with some very pretty words about how ASD has changed stuff and made things better. Nothing about how Barbic's promise to move the bottom 5% of schools into the top 25% hasn't 

What Barbic Learned  

CURMUDGUCATION: What Barbic Learned http://bit.ly/1GwmZnM

With A Brooklyn Accent: Color Blind = Tone Deaf. A Message to Bernie Sanders from Jane DeNeefe

With A Brooklyn Accent: Color Blind = Tone Deaf. A Message to Bernie Sanders from Jane DeNeefe:

Color Blind = Tone Deaf. A Message to Bernie Sanders from Jane DeNeefe

I am on the ground in Alabama, an author of two books about the civil rights movement and co-director of an African American history project--  and I can attest, Bernie is losing black support that was already flimsy--I'd give him a C for Netroots Nation, which is generous, and better than O'Malley's F but still not good enough--he sounds like an old white man  who was current on race fifty years ago but who is now "colorblind" which equals tone deaf on the state of race relations  in this historical moment. This letter is a follow-up to one I wrote the campaign in early June about Bernie’s approach to race relations.

There are things he can do to improve his thinking about race that will also improve his responses.  If no one is stepping up to educate him on this, I can do it, but I would need his attention--I've had enough of pissing in the wind.  I want to know the message will land before I go to the trouble to craft it. I could publish about this but I would rather educate Bernie directly than call him out in public.

I can't believe he isn't getting better advice about race.  The answer to "say her name" this week is “Sandra Bland." http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/07/18/sandra-bland-die-police-custody/30342377/

Bernie needs to catch up and stay current, because he is sounding too much like the *recipients* of MLK's letter from the Birmingham Jail--out of touch with the fact that black people in this country are in a With A Brooklyn Accent: Color Blind = Tone Deaf. A Message to Bernie Sanders from Jane DeNeefe:

Some Unsolicited Advice to Sen Sanders Regarding Black Lives Matter Protests

When you have been a justice fighter all your life, it is sometimes very hard to be confronted and challenged by people much younger than you are as if your experience and history means little. This has happened to me on numerous occasions when commenting on race issues. And the temptation is to respond in anger. But I have learned, through experience, that sometimes these critics are right, that I have said or written something which is insensitive or arrogant or takes the discussion to a place which smothers voices which need to be heard. And so I force myself to listen to the attacks, try not to take them personally, and change my approach to the issues when such a change is called for.

Do I always do this smoothly and tactfully? Hell no! Sometimes I have administered a smack down to the people calling me out, only to then do, over time, exactly what they suggest.

But insofar as I have remained relevant in discussions of race 

Some Unsolicited Advice to Sen Sanders Regarding Black Lives Matter Protests

Welcome new PAA Board member Khem Irby! | Parents Across America

Welcome new PAA Board member Khem Irby! | Parents Across America:

Welcome new PAA Board member Khem Irby! 

The results are in and Khem Irby, Pamela Grundy and Julie Woestehoff have been elected to the PAA Board for 2-year terms.

Pam and Julie are returning Board members but Khem is new to the Board, though not to parent advocacy.

Khem Irby is a leading parent activist/advocate in her NYC hometown, and current residence of Greensboro, NC. Khem was a legal secretary working in NYC for many international corporate law firms. She is married with six children ranging in academic levels from elementary school through recent college graduation. Deeply committed to education, she has given decades of work as a parent advocate and community liaison with Brooklyn Perinatal in partnership with the Administration of Children’s Services. She was the President of the NYC Community Education Council, School District 13, serving over 35 schools covering several neighborhoods in Brooklyn with one of the largest Black communities in the U.S. Khem is a former member of the Independent Commission On Public Education (iCOPE), the Coalition for Public Education (CPE), the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), a Community Liaison for the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) and a Class Size Matters board member.Khem is co-founder & President Emerita of The Mothers’ Agenda NY (The MANY) and an early supporter and member of Parents Across America.

 Khem appeared in the film, “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman,” a documentary produced by the Grassroots Education Movement. She is presently assistant teaching in the Greensboro Public School System while still organizing and keeping up with NYC. Khem also conducts parent and teacher support workshops. She is presently pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Christian Ministry Leadership with Barclay College.

Welcome, Khem, and congratulations to you, Pam and Julie!

- See more at: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/paa-board-member-khem-irby/#sthash.yzM9wa3d.dpuf