NY Commish wants to hear from YOU….maybe….. | Round the Inkwell

NY Commish wants to hear from YOU….maybe….. | Round the Inkwell:

NY Commish wants to hear from YOU….maybe…..

Today Mary Ellen Elia, the New York Commissioner, sent out this letter.  She said she wants to hear from parents and educators about the Common Core.  I clicked on the link, but I cannot find the survey.  I searched the site.  Are we playing Hide the Bacon, or is there just a survey I can’t find?  Can you find it?



Colleagues,



The past five years have brought a lot of changes to your classrooms. I know the implementation of the Common Core Standards has been a challenging transition. I know changes need to be made, and I thank you for your patience. Any time you endeavor the size of the reforms we’re making in New York State, you must make adjustments large and small along the way in order to move forward.



It’s time for us to step back and assess where we are and where we should be going. You work with students every day. You know what’s working and what’s not. Your classrooms are the front line in our struggle to help our students aim higher.



The New York State Education Department tomorrow will launch an online survey that will allow New Yorkers to provide detailed feedback on the State’s English Language Arts (ELA)/Literacy and Math Common Core Learning Standards for prekindergarten through grade 12. Teachers, administrators, school board members, parents, the business community, and anyone with an interest in the future of our schools should participate in the review.



The survey, which can be found at www.NYSED.gov, allows respondents to review and comment on any ELA and math standard for any grade level. The survey will be open untilNovember 30, 2015, and the results will help inform changes made to the standards. An advisory group – made up of stakeholders, particularly teachers, school administrators, and parents – will review the survey results and recommendations and present suggested changes to the standards.



As educators who work with students every day, your comments NY Commish wants to hear from YOU….maybe….. | Round the Inkwell:

BAT Fall Fundraising Drive – Please Support Our Mission and Message - BATS

BATS:

BAT Fall Fundraising Drive – Please Support Our Mission and Message

Be a BAT Supporter—Donate today as we kick off our fall fundraising drive.  Based on the last 2 days of events (Duncan Resignation & NEA Recommendation of Hillary), we hope to do a fall campaign that will see us buying either newspaper ads, billboards, or radio ads to get our message out about the attempt by billionaires to destroy public education!  We can’t do that without your help! 

Why should you be a BAT Supporter?  Here is why!

1.  Successful rally outside the USDOE in Summer of 2014 that led to a meeting with Secretary Duncan.  We were able to be brutally honest with him regarding the USDOE’s education agenda. 

 

2.  Summer of 2015 BATs headed back to DC for the BATs Teacher Congress.  The highlight of the event was that BATs from over 25 states convened on Capitol Hill with over 61 appointments to discuss education, children, and funding equity.   6 brave BATs occupied Bernie Sanders office which led to a lengthy phone call with one of his education advisors.  BATs meet and escorted Jesse Turner into DC after he walked 400 miles from Connecticut to DC to bring to light the attack on our public schools.  BATs also partnered with United Opt Out and Save Our Schools in a Mock Trial of Eli Broad, Rahm Emanuel, Campbell Brown, and Arne Duncan that was broadcast by Education Town Hall Radio. 

 

3.  Also, at the BAT Congress our Quality of Life Workplace Team met with the USDOE about teacher working conditions in this country.  This meeting happened due to the partnership between the BATs Quality of Workplace Team and AFT on a study in which  over 90,000 teachers filled out (30,000 completing) on the quality/working conditions of the teaching workplace.  See here for the full report

http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/worklifesurveyresults2015.pdf

 

4.  As a result of our Quality of  Workplace Team, an amendment was written into the ESEA Reauthorization bill to study and assess school conditions for children and teachers. 

 

4.  BATs have presented at some of the biggest education conferences in the nation.  Roots Camp, Netroots, AFT TEACH, and Network for Public Education.

 

5.  BATs have a strong and vocal caucus in the NEA (NEA BAT Caucus) which now has over 200 members and who dropped  17 NBIs this year with  10 were approved.    BATs will be applying for an AFT Caucus this year, so we will have caucuses in both major unions.

 

6.  BATs continues to be a strong presence on social media, specifically twitter, where many of their campaigns highlights the attack on our public school children, our communities, and our teachers.  See #evaluatethat  #whatif  and the hijacking of the #EmployeeFreedom hashtag that Right to Work groups were going to use to tout the fact that educators could not join unions. 

 

7.  BATs appears on radio frequently.  Education Town Hall, The Rick Smith Show, The Jeff Santos Show, and Just Let Me Teach allow rank and file educators from BATs extend their voice over the airwaves to the general public and the nation.  

 

8.  BATs continues to support and partner with other organizations around the country in the fight for equity and public education.  We have proudly partnered with Network for Public Education, United Opt Out, and Save our Schools.

 

9.  Our state BATs groups have mobilized for on the ground action to bring to light the attacks on public education children, schools, and teachers.  Our WA BATs have protested the Gates Foundation, our Oregon BATs protested Pearson, our Nevada BATs held a large rally in Las Vegas about the attacks on the teaching profession, our Florida BATs protested the Jeb Bush education summit, our NY BATs continue to work with NYSAPE and other parent coalitions to demonstrate regularly – the latest was a protest against Gov. Cuomo at the NY State Fair, our Ohio BATs were a strong force in a protest when Gov. Kasich announced his presidential bid.  BATs are everywhere!

 

10.  BATs will be filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the case of Friedrichs vs. CTA.  This is the case that could essentially make us a Right to Work NATION!

 

11.  BATs have been featured in over 200 news articles from the Washington Post, to the New York Times, Time Magazine,  and the Huffington Post.   Google us!

 

What is this letter asking of you today?  We are asking you to be a supporter of our work.  We do not take money from large foundations but we rely on our friends in this fight and on people like you to support our work.  Much of what we do costs money.  We need funds to continue to operate our website, buy supplies, push out mailings, conduct robo calls, hold our yearly event, apply to conferences so that we can spread the BAT message, register BAT panels at education conferences around the nation, and to continue to get our message out in a variety of venues.   We look to the future of BATs as unlimited possibilities.  We look to being able to buy ads in major papers to counter the rhetoric of corporate education reform, we look to the possibility of buying moving ads to get our message out about the attacks on public education, we look to the possibility of buying billboards so that the general public can see in full view that their public schools are under attack by the 1% for profit.  Our future has no limits if we have the revenue to do it.  So, won’t you please be a supporter of our work?

Do you believe in our message?  If so, please support it.   We are now a 501(c ) 4 and have a structure built for success.  See here  http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2015/10/big-bat-surprise-month-bats-became-501c4.html   (*donations ARE NOT tax deductible)

What will you get?  We will be listing all of our supporters on our website for all to see at the end of this fundraising drive!

We hope that you will consider being a BAT supporter because that will tell us  you believe in our work.  At the end of our Fall Fundraising Drive (October 31) we will be putting all our supporter names on our BATs Wall of Supporters.  We hope you will consider placing your name and/or your organization on that wall.  You can donate on our website by clicking the PayPal donate button at the top left of this page. You can also send a check made out to The Badass Teachers Association, Inc,  P.O. Box 1390, Bellmore, NY 11710.   Thanks for being a supporter, you will NOT regret it. 

 

In Solidarity BATS:

Marla Kilfoyle, Executive Director

Melissa Tomlinson, Asst. Executive Director BATS:

September 2015

Dudley aka Origin
"September 2015" by Dudley aka Origin. Released: 2015.

00:00 / 01:38

• 1. September 201501:37

WordPress Audio Player Free Version

BATS:

Charters: Illusion of Change? feat. @PedroANoguera et al. | Cloaking Inequity

Charters: Illusion of Change? feat. @PedroANoguera et al. | Cloaking Inequity:

Charters: Illusion of Change? feat. @PedroANoguera et al. 

What is typically different about charter schools and traditional schools both on a national level and to some extent locally? Teachers’ Democracy Project filmmakers answer this question in the new short documentary film “Charters: The Illusion of Change”

A few months ago, I visited Washington DC to attend a Latino Leadership Weekend conference that was held at the University of Maryland Business School. During one of the breaks at the conference, I had the chance to sit down with Teachers’ Democracy Project filmmakers from the Baltimore area and discuss charter schools for their short documentary film.

Here is what the Teachers’ Democracy Project filmmakers had to say about “Charters: The Illusion of Change”:

It explores issues of school autonomy, community control, accountability, choice, funding formulas, and equity issues.  The goal of the film is to help teachers, communities and education advocates understand the issues at stake as we face new legislation that could change the landscape for charter schools and create a favorable environment for corporate charter chains to come to our state.  The video is not intended as a critique of small, mom and pop charters—many of which were started by teachers and local education activists.  Rather it makes the case that we should be protecting teacher rights and making sure that all schools have equitable funding, and working for curricular autonomy for all schools.

I am honored to appear alongside @PedroANoguera et al. in “Charters: The Illusion of Change” available now for free on @Vimeo

COMING SOON: A new geo-spatial analysis of charter segregation of ELLs and other special populations in the Stanford Law and Policy Review.

For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on charters click here.

Please Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog to share this discussion with others.

Want to know about Cloaking Inequity’s freshly pressed conversations about educational policy? Click the “Follow blog by email” button on the home page.

Twitter: @ProfessorJVH

Click here for Vitae.Charters: Illusion of Change? feat. @PedroANoguera et al. | Cloaking Inequity:

Choosing Democracy: Charter Schools Fuel Inequality and Hinder School Reform

Choosing Democracy: Charter Schools Fuel Inequality and Hinder School Reform:

Charter Schools Fuel Inequality and Hinder School Reform

Charter school interests led by the Broad Foundation have recently unveiled an expansion plan called “The Great Public Schools Now”. This plan is proposing a huge increase of privately operated schools within the Los Angeles School District with the creation of 260 new charters during the next eight years at a cost of 490 million-dollars. The approval and implementation of such a plan would eventually double the number of LAUSD students attending privately operated charter schools and this would comprise almost half of the LAUSD’s students. According to this plan such a massive expansion of charters would also require the services of about 5000 teachers to staff these new schools, however, the

Real estate billionaire Eli Broad and his charter foundation want to privatize half of the public schools within the LAUSD.

proposal makes no mention of recruiting any teachers presently employed by LA Unified who are unionized and generally more experienced. Instead, this Broad Foundation plan proposes to hire recent college graduates as its instructors who will be trained by ‘Teach for America’and other private groups. These young college graduates and prospective charter teachers are generally inexperienced, paid less and non-union, all of which keep business costs down for the privately operated charters. If the Broad plan is approved and implemented, this loss of tens of thousands of students to these new charter schools could possibly result in the elimination of  thousands of jobs for LA District’s teachers, administrators and non-teaching employees. The reaction of the present school board to this proposal has been mixed. Charters are businesses that privately operate public schools and use public school sites and tax monies to fund their for-profit operations. The first privately operated LAUSD charters were created and approved during the 1990’s by the school board which was under heavy pressure to reform the District’s schools. The Board’s rationale for this action was that the charters could provide a choice for parents and students to attend a school with a better educational program or a safer campus instead of their traditional home school. Rather than comprehensively reform and fix the regular schools at that time, this critical Board decision to approve Choosing Democracy: Charter Schools Fuel Inequality and Hinder School Reform:

solidaridad: Looking back to OccupyLAUSD as the way forward

solidaridad: Looking back to OccupyLAUSD as the way forward:

Looking back to OccupyLAUSD as the way forward

"This is a call out to the 99% who live, work, play and learn in the Los Angeles Unified School District. It is time we Reclaim Our Schools from the 1% wealthy Billionaires (like Eli Board, Gates, and Walton) and Corporate Management Companies who continue to set educational policies of school giveaways, increases in corporate charter schools, and constant school lay-offs." — OccupyLAUSD



Four years ago today activists stood up to neoliberal bagman John Deasy, his ‪#‎NPIC‬ backers including the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, and his corporate charter ‪#‎LAUSD‬ BOE enablers Monica Garcia and Tamar Galatzan. We demanded they rescind their draconian budget that eliminated Adult Education, SRLDP, EECs, and K-12 Arts. In conjunction with the OccupyLA movement, OccupyLAUSD camped in front of Beaudry for weeks. Surviving the elements and constant ‪#‎LAPD‬ harassment, we were able to counterpose a solidaridad: Looking back to OccupyLAUSD as the way forward:

The Secretary of Education Deform moves on | SocialistWorker.org

The Secretary of Education Deform moves on | SocialistWorker.org:

The Secretary of Education Deform moves on

Mark Friedman reports on the destructive legacy of Education Secretary Arne Duncan--and the equally awful resume of the man Barack Obama named to replace him.

WHEN ARNE Duncan announced that he would be stepping down as U.S. Secretary of Education this December, two words crossed the minds of thousands of supporters of public schools across the country: "good" and "riddance."

For the past seven years, Duncan has made the Obama White House the national headquarters for the movement promoting what critics refer to as "corporate school reform": a neoliberal agenda of austerity, privatization and union busting via charter schools, merit pay and tying teacher evaluations and school closures to standardized testing.

Unfortunately for the many parents, teachers and community organizations that would have liked to celebrate Arne's exit, Barack Obama quickly announced that Duncan would be replaced by John King, a former charter school director who is most famous for provoking the largest test boycott U.S. history during his time as New York state education commissioner--with his ham-fisted imposition of the Common Core curriculum and high-stakes standardized tests that go with it.

When Duncan was first appointed Secretary of Education in 2008, the national media referred to him as a "compromise choice" who could bring together teachers' unions with anti-union corporate reformers. But public education advocates in Chicago were already familiar with Duncan's record as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

"Duncan is being portrayed in the national media as a school administrator who had a 'good' relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union," wrote Jesse Sharkey, then a Chicago school teacher and now vice president of the CTU, in Socialist Worker. Sharkey continued:

The truth is quite different. Duncan pursued anti-labor policies by pushing nonunion charter and contract schools. He also imposed test-oriented, competitive schemes that force schools to close if they can't raise test scores above a certain level.

Yet he failed to implement the kinds of changes that really would improve student performance--such as smaller class sizes and expanded facilities to end overcrowding. Instead, special education teachers were laid off and budgets squeezed.

As Education Secretary, Duncan took his Chicago plan to the national stage with Race to the Top, a $4.35 billion dollar federal initiative consisting of federal grants designed to make states compete with each other to push privatization efforts, wrapped up in the rhetoric of "innovation and reform."

Under Duncan's watch, the Department of Education became a "hub of a network of policy advocates," as Sherman Dorn and Amanda U. Potterton put it in a recent Huffington Post article:

These reformers have largely consisted of private actors, including leaders of education nonprofits, charter school founders and other nontraditional school leaders whose essential resources for reform come from the private wealth of major foundations, an approach that Berkeley education professor Janelle Scott has termed "venture philanthropy."

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UNDER DUNCAN'S leadership, the Obama administration has led a bipartisan push to The Secretary of Education Deform moves on | SocialistWorker.org:

Voucher costs hit Wisconsin public school districts state-wide | Educate All Students: Larry Miller's Blog

Voucher costs hit Wisconsin public school districts state-wide | Educate All Students: Larry Miller's Blog:

Voucher costs hit Wisconsin public school districts state-wide

Jen Zettel, Post-Crescent Media October 17, 2015
MADISON — Public school districts and taxpayers across the state could feel the impact of vouchers this year, as more than $16 million is transferred from public schools to pay for new entrants into the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program.
State law now requires public school districts to pay for vouchers. The money will be deducted from state aid.
A total of 142 public school districts have students who use taxpayer-funded subsidies to attend private schools. The state deducted $16.1 million in aid to cover the cost of new voucher students, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
To cover the loss, the state gives public schools the ability to increase their revenue limits. The revenue limit is made up of two things: state aid and property taxes.
Public schools will have to raise their property tax levies in the first year to make up for the reduction, said Don Hietpas, chief financial officer in the Appleton Area School District. Appleton, the state’s sixth-largest school district, is expected to lose $664,000 in aid this year. The school district could raise the property tax levy by as much as $883,496 to make up for the deduction.
School districts could levy $21.4 million more in property taxes for 2015-16 to fund new students entering the statewide parental choice program, DPI figures show.
Jim Bender, president of School Choice Wisconsin, said the tax impact will vary.
“It’s going to be different for every school district around the state as to their ability to levy, because now they’re counting all these kids in their head counts. If they so choose, they can levy property taxes for them, where in the past they couldn’t do that,” Bender said.
How it works
The baseline year for the funding process is 2015-16. The DPI takes the number of new students using vouchers per district this year and counts them toward the district’s state aid in 2016-17.
That means if the number of students using vouchers doesn’t change from one year to the next, the result is a wash for the school district.
“State aid would kick in for next year,” said John Johnson, a DPI spokesman. “If you have the same number of students next year, then you’d have state aid next year for that amount.”
The first year is what Bender called “a lag year” because there are no students from the previous year for districts to count toward aid — there’s only the reduction.
If the number of students using vouchers increases, aid would be deducted — and those students would count toward aid for the following school year, Johnson said.
The revenue limit exemption is calculated by taking the aid reduction and multiplying it by the total number of students who use vouchers.
Bender said the funding mechanism is similar to open enrollment, but it’s hard to judge the system until the DPI releases more data.
“The districts have been given their general school aid deduction and their new revenue limit authority … I haven’t seen anything with regard to total enrollment in the voucher program and how many students switched from public schools or were entering school or private school,” he said. “That all kind of plays into how the funding mechanism works.”
Enrollment caps
During the first two years of the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, the number of students who could participate was limited. Those caps no longer exist.
State law now limits voucher participation to 1 percent of a school district’s student membership, or the total number of school-age children who live in the district.
The cap can increase by 1 percent each year, starting in the 2018 fiscal year. If the number of students using vouchers reaches 10 percent of a school district’s membership, the cap would disappear the following school year, Johnson said.
First-year tax impact
The tax impact varies from school district to school district, Johnson said.
Outside of Milwaukee Public Schools, which has its own voucher-funding process, Racine will see the greatest reduction in state aid at nearly $4.2

million, according to the DPI. Racine can add an additional $5.6 million to its property tax levy as a result.
Green Bay Area Public Schools are the next highest with a $1.1 million reduction in aid, followed by Kenosha at Voucher costs hit Wisconsin public school districts state-wide | Educate All Students: Larry Miller's Blog:

President Obama Needs to Cut Ties with This Grifter

President Obama Needs to Cut Ties with This Grifter:

President Obama Needs to Cut Ties with This Alleged Grifter

There is nothing redeeming about Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, and the president should cut him loose.

As I think we've mentioned several dozen times in this shebeen, the president's inexplicable sweet-tooth for the grifters, rounders, and mountebanks of the school "reform" movement is one of the most puzzling aspects of his years in office. One of the most egregious examples of this is the president's willingness to associate with Kevin Johnson, former NBA point guard, mayor of Sacramento, and husband of queen-bee grifter Michelle Rhee. On many levels, Johnson is a truly awful human being.

Thanks to Deadspin's invaluable Dave McKenna, the onetime bane of evil-dwarf owner Dan Snyder in Washington, we are spelunking pretty regularly into the dark, dank depths of the muck that composes Kevin Johnson's political soul. What we find there is best left to the folks in the HazMat suits to handle. McKenna's most recent expedition has brought back the usual bagful of pure, foul awfulness.

Is there sexual misconduct? Judge for yourself.​

This revelation comes as Johnson is in the worst spot of his three-decade run in the public eye.ESPN canceled the debut of Down in the Valley, a documentary that deified Johnson for having finagled $255 million in public money to keep the local NBA franchise in his hometown but totally ignored his well-documented dark side. The seamiest portions of Johnson's back story involve the many allegations of sexual abuse and harassment that have come his way his way since the mid-1990s. Johnson has never been charged with a sex crime, but ESPN's shelving the movie comes amid growing suspicions that a key reason none of the abuse claims made against him derailed his rise to power is that he made legal settlements that forced alleged victims to hush up.

MORE FROM ESQUIRE

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JEREMY LIN'S NEW HAIRCUT IS HILARIOUSLY '90S SCHOO…

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VINCE CARTER'S DUNK FAIL IS SAD ON SO MANY LEVELS

​Is there political ratfcking? Is there financial malfeasance? I don't know. What do you think?​

The biggest of the demands is that Williams must stop contesting Johnson's petition to dissolve the NCBM through the bankruptcy courts. That would mean Johnson's goal of doing away with the group would be complete. (Johnson started a competing organization, called the African American Mayors Association, the day after he filed a Chapter 7 petition for the NCBM that board members of the group now say was illegitimate. Ballard Spahr is now serving as legal counsel for Johnson's new group—pro bono, of course.) The strangest demand? "Mrs. Williams would retract all of her statements to Deadspin pursuant to the settlement agreement," reads Pittinsky's settlement offer. "She would not have to say her statements were false. All she would have to do is retract them and agree not to talk to Deadspin again." Since late last year, Williams has spoken with Deadspin about Johnson, accusing him of various professional and personal malfeasances related to the NCBM coup. Williams says she is personally broke as a result of Johnson freezing NCBM's bank accounts in 2013 and taking sponsors away from the group.

​Is there the deliberate destruction of political opponents? Opinions vary.​

Whether there was an actual concerted effort to bankrupt Williams is an open question; either way, the discovery phase of her civil case against Johnson has produced bizarre evidence. In one 

President Obama Needs to Cut Ties with This Grifter:

Vultures of ESEA | Save Maine Schools

Vultures of ESEA | Save Maine Schools:

Vultures of ESEA

As it becomes increasingly apparent that our public education system is reaching a breaking point of sorts (see: teacher shortages, fed-up students and parents, andprincipals who have apparently lost their minds), a potential reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act sits on the desks of our elected officials in Washington.

“The purpose of this act is to restore freedom to parents, teachers, principals and other school leaders, States, Governors, and local communities so that they can improve their local public schools,” the Senate version states.

How kind of them to finally think of us.

Too bad it’s a bunch of baloney.

Read what Morna McDermott of United Opt Out (and creator of this incredible flowchart showing Common Core’s countless corporate connections) has to say about the Trojan horse inherent in the rewrites in this blog post that has made its way to the National Education Policy Center.

Now check out the playbook corporate consultants have developed for a behind-the-scenes looks at the way state power afforded by the new ESEA will be manipulated to the liking of corporate profiteers.

No really – there’s an actual playbook, developed by a consultant group called Bellwether Education, whose client list includes… well, everyone you’d expect it to include.

If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts, you know that I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the real purposes of the Common Core Standards is to unleash a multi-billion dollar market by joining forces with a “competency” (proficiency, mastery, customized) based model of learning that is meant to bring about a massive expansion of “personalized” (digital and online) learning. Savvy investors have been counting on this unbundling for at least a decade.  See below:

To that end, Bellwether has provided its clients with a set of policy strategies to be enacted on the state and local level that will ensure that their products make Vultures of ESEA | Save Maine Schools:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Spinning his own legacy while feathering his own nest. Get ready for another Duncan 'miracle'.

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Spinning his own legacy while feathering his own nest. Get ready for another Duncan 'miracle'.:

Spinning his own legacy while feathering his own nest. Get ready for another Duncan 'miracle'.

Just as Arne Duncan was announcing his retirement and his plans to return to Chicago to "spend more time with his family", he dropped another $8M in fed dollars on pal Mike Milke's Noble charter school chain. This on top of another $42.2M coming to IL with the lion's share going to Noble and Lawndale Educational and Regional Network.

Milke says Noble (which I lovingly call the Billionaire's Charter Network) needs the money in order to open 8 new schools to meet the growing demand and shorten it's "waitlist". But the Raise Your Hand parents group just made a few phone calls and found out that at last 5 Noble schools can't fill the seats they have. They wonder, "Where's the waitlist"?

RYH asks some great questions:

Why is the charter community rallying for more schools when there are plenty of openings in existing charter schools across Chicago, including Noble, and CPS’ enrollment has been declining for years, down roughly 14,000 students just since 2012? RYH found last year Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Spinning his own legacy while feathering his own nest. Get ready for another Duncan 'miracle'.: