Seattle Schools Community Forum: Why I Have Little Respect for Bill Gates on Education

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Why I Have Little Respect for Bill Gates on Education:

Why I Have Little Respect for Bill Gates on Education

If this statement doesn't convince you, then I give up.  From The Hill:

Bill Gates said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump’s potential to bring innovation to the U.S. resembles that of President John F. Kennedy’s. 

Gates, the billionaire Microsoft founder and philanthropist, told CNBC that Trump can lead the U.S. “through innovation” and compared Trump’s ideas to Kennedy’s expansion of the U.S. space program in the early 1960s. 

“But in the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that, I think whether it’s education or stopping epidemics … [or] in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that [Trump’s] administration [is] going to organizing things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and have American leadership through innovation,” Gates said.

There are no words for the words of Gates except that, well, it's business on parade.Seattle Schools Community Forum: Why I Have Little Respect for Bill Gates on Education:

Nashville needs a moratorium on new charter schools

Nashville needs a moratorium on new charter schools:

Nashville needs a moratorium on new charter schools
School Board Member Will Pinkston: "The charter sector’s steroid-like growth is troubling."

On Tuesday the Nashville School Board will discuss whether to call for a moratorium on new charter schools. It’s a conversation that’s long overdue.

Nashville has, or soon will have, a total of 32 taxpayer-funded, privately-run charter schools – including 28 charters approved by the local school board, two charters overseen by the State of Tennessee’s failing Achievement School District, and two charters overseen by the appointed State Board of Education, which is wading into polluted policy waters by stripping elected school boards of local control.

All of these charter schools — even those overseen by the two state agencies — are majority-funded by local taxpayers under Tennessee’s unconstitutional charter law, which funnels public money to private organizations with little accountability.

Put differently: Governor Bill Haslam, House Speaker Beth Harwell, and the rural-controlled legislature are forcing new charter schools into existence in Nashville, at the behest of national charter special interests and on the backs of local taxpayers.

The reality is: Even if the local school board approves no new charter applications, the size of the charter sector in Nashville could increase by 74 percent by the 2021-22 school year, growing from 10,529 seats today to potentially 18,365 seats as a result of growth in existing charter schools and creation of new charter schools.

Reasonable people believe that’s enough.

Even if the charter sector somehow manages to fill all of those previously approved seats over the next five years, which is doubtful, then the charter sector will educate approximately one-fifth of students in Nashville. Again, that’s enough.

The charter sector’s steroid-like growth is troubling considering that demand for charters is minimal when compared with high-demand options in Metro Nashville Public Schools.

Waiting lists for Metro Nashville Public Schools pre-kindergarten programs, magnet schools, and other options are more than seven times longer than waiting lists for charter schools. Despite what charter advocates claim, student and family interest in charters is anemic.

Meanwhile, the growth of charter schools is hurting MNPS, financially, at a time when our school system is universally considered to be underfunded by the State of Tennessee.Nashville needs a moratorium on new charter schools:

How Trump’s Education Nominee Bent Detroit to Her Will on Charter Schools - The New York Times

How Trump’s Education Nominee Bent Detroit to Her Will on Charter Schools - The New York Times:

How Trump’s Education Nominee Bent Detroit to Her Will on Charter Schools

Few disagreed that schools in Detroit were a mess: a chaotic mix of charters and traditional public schools, the worst-performing in the nation.

So city leaders across the political spectrum agreed on a fix, with legislation to provide oversight and set standards on how to open schools and close bad ones.

But the bill died without even getting a final vote. And the person most influential in killing it is now President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee to oversee the nation’s public schools, Betsy DeVos.

Her resistance to the legislation last spring is a window into Ms. DeVos’s philosophy and what she might bring to the fierce and often partisan debate about public education across the country, and in particular, the roles of choice and charter schools.

The bill’s proposals are common in many states and accepted by many supporters of school choice, like a provision to stop failing charter operators from creating new schools. But Ms. DeVos argued that this kind of oversight would create too much bureaucracy and limit choice. A believer in a freer market than even some free market economists would endorse, Ms. DeVos pushed back on any regulation as too much regulation. Charter schools should be allowed to operate as they wish; parents would judge with their feet.

Detroit Public Schools, she argued, should simply be shut down and the system turned over to charters, or the tax dollars given to parents in the form of vouchers to attend private schools.

“She is committed to an ideological stance that is solely about the free market, at the expense of practicality and the basic needs of students in the most destabilized environment in the country,” said Tonya Allen, the president of the Skillman Foundation, a nonprofit that works with Detroit children, and a co-chairwoman of the coalition that produced the report that became the basis for the legislation last spring.

“If she was showing herself present in places and learning from the practitioners, that’s a fine combination,” Ms. Allen said. “But Betsy never showed up in Detroit. She was very eager to impose experimentation on students that she has not spent time with and children that she does not have consequence for.”

Ms. DeVos has a long career as an education philanthropist and lobbyist, but not as an educator. She and her husband, Dick, an heir to the Amway fortune, are considered the most powerful Republicans in Michigan. In the How Trump’s Education Nominee Bent Detroit to Her Will on Charter Schools - The New York Times:

SKrashen: Don't trust Ed Trust when they talk about overoming povery

SKrashen: Don't trust Ed Trust when they talk about overoming povery:

Don't trust Ed Trust when they talk about overoming povery

Don't trust Ed Trust. Substance 27 (6): 3. 2002. 

Stephen Krashen 
The powerful impact of poverty on literacy development has been well documented. Children of poverty, in addition to the obvious problems they face, have very little access to reading material ; they have fewer books in the home, inferior public libraries, inferior school libraries,and inferior classroom libraries, (e.g. Duke, 2000; Neuman and Celano, 2001). This means, of course, that they have fewer opportunities to read, and therefore make less progress in developing literacy. 
The recent report from Educational Trust West (Ali and Jerald, 2001) appears, at first glance, to show that a significant number of children in poverty have overcome this problem. The report claimed to find 3,592 schools in the US that were "high- performing-high poverty" schools. In California alone, there were 355 high- performing-high poverty school. This result was considered sufficient to "dispel the myth" about the relationship between poverty and educational achievement, and was followed by newspaper articles proclaiming that these high-scoring schools can "offer a lesson" (New York Times, December 17, 2001; Los Angeles Daily News, December 16, 2001). 
The Ed Trust Report deserves another look. It has serious flaws, and, in fact, shows exactly the opposite of what it says it shows. 
Very few schools qualify. The number of schools classified as high-poverty high- scoring represents about 4% of the nation and state school population. Moreover, a closer look shrinks even this number to considerably. In fact, it shrinks it to nearly zero. 
It is easy to qualify as high-scoring. A high-performing school was defined as one in which students in ANY grade scored in the upper third of the schools in its own state in EITHER math or reading. Thus, a good performance by one grade level (in some schools only one classroom) on one test can qualify a school as "high performing." 
Consider the case of California. Of the 355 "high-scoring" schools in SKrashen: Don't trust Ed Trust when they talk about overoming povery:

The Bill of Rights. Now more than ever - Lily's Blackboard

The Bill of Rights. Now more than ever - Lily's Blackboard:

The Bill of Rights. Now more than ever

We teach our students that America is a land of opportunity, where we do our best to treat each other fairly and ensure that the laws on the books apply equally to all. (Those ideals are sometimes tested, but that’s the goal.) On December 15, one of the bedrock documents that protects those values is turning 225: the Bill of Rights. It’s a good time to reacquaint ourselves with these first amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and to rededicate ourselves to upholding our nation’s fundamental governing charter.  

The Bill of Rights protects individual liberties. Some of our nation’s Founding Fathers thought that, given our constitution, it was unnecessary; others, including James Madison, believed safeguards were important. Madison took matters into his own hands and went through the constitution himself, making the changes he thought appropriate. But others objected and Madison’s changes instead were offered as amendments that would have to be ratified.

An exhibit at the National Archives Museum, “Amending America,” explores the fascinating and complicated journey of amending the constitution. The exhibit is open until early September 2017, and if you can’t get to Washington, D.C., many resources, including a free Ebook, are available online. (Did you know that one proposed amendment would have had us elect the president by pulling a ball representing a candidate out of a bowl?)

President Roosevelt first designated Bill of Rights Day in 1941. December 15 was chosen because that is the date, in 1791, when Virginia’s legislature became the last to ratify the amendments.

Roosevelt wrote:

“It is especially fitting that this anniversary should be remembered and observed by those institutions of a democratic people which owe their very existence to the guarantees of the Bill of Rights: the free schools, the free churches, the labor unions, the religious and educational and civic organizations of all kinds which, without the guarantee of the Bill of Rights, could never have existed; which sicken and disappear whenever, in any country, these rights are curtailed or withdrawn.” (It’s worth reading his proclamation in its entirety—and it’s also rather chilling to note that the president issued it just days before Pearl Harbor.)

When President Obama issued a proclamation for Bill of Rights Day last year, he wrote: “Let us recommit to continuing our legacy as a nation that rejects complacency, empowers its citizens to recognize and redress its imperfections, and embraces the struggle of improving our democracy so that all our people are able to make of their lives what they will.”

In today’s acrimonious political environment, it’s instructive to keep in mind that for the Bill of Rights to exist at all, both houses of Congress had to approve it, and then three-fourths of the states had to give their approval. True, there were only 14 states at the time—but you get my point. Through understanding and compromise, we have the capacity to hold our leaders accountable and accomplish great things.

As we end 2016 and look ahead to both the challenges and the possibilities of 2017, I am comforted by the thought that our nation’s values have helped us weather many storms, and as educators, we can share this view with our students. Great documents such as the Bill of Rights do not just protect our individual liberties; they also inspire us to work even harder to achieve more fairness and more opportunity. I am willing. How about you?The Bill of Rights. Now more than ever - Lily's Blackboard:

Protecting Or policing? - The Hechinger Report

Protecting Or policing? - The Hechinger Report:

Protecting Or policing?

School-based police officers are paid to protect our kids. But sometimes they do more harm than good

Protecting Or Policing?” is the third in a series of stories about police in schools.

ANAHEIM, Calif. – In the sweltering days of July, tensions between police and civilians were running high. A cop fatally shot Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, setting off a week of protests. Another police officer fatally shot Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, while his fiance and her 4-year-old daughter watched. A sniper shot and killed five police officers in Dallas.

But inside a Disneyland convention center in Anaheim, California, almost 700 law enforcement officers and security personnel were learning how to be role models in schools across the country. While families rode rollercoasters and met characters outside, school cops at the National Association of School Resource Officers’ annual conference spent a week attending panels about topics like active-shooter situations and potential terrorist threats. At night they sang karaoke, explored the amusement park and bonded over keeping our nation’s children safe.

These law enforcement agents, most commonly known as school resource officers, belong to a sector of law enforcement that has grown considerably since the 1990s. They often take on the role of mentoring and counseling — not just protecting — students, many told The Huffington Post during the conference.

Mo Canady, the executive director of NASRO, said this is important because kids who grow up having positive experiences with cops will hopefully maintain these impressions as adults.

Any school that doesn’t have a police officer trained by NASRO, “doesn’t yet know what they’re missing,” he said, while sitting in a Disneyland conference center lobby. “What we’re doing in schools should hopefully transition out into the community.”

But critics wonder if police officers make schools safer, or just Protecting Or policing? - The Hechinger Report:

Betsy DeVos and God’s Plan for Schools - The New York Times

Betsy DeVos and God’s Plan for Schools - The New York Times:

Betsy DeVos and God’s Plan for Schools

BOSTON — At the rightmost edge of the Christian conservative movement, there are those who dream of turning the United States into a Christian republic subject to “biblical laws.” In the unlikely figure of Donald J. Trump, they hope to have found their greatest champion yet. He wasn’t “our preferred candidate,” the Christian nationalist David Barton said in June, but he could be “God’s candidate.”

Consider the president-elect’s first move on public education. Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, the largest Christian university in the nation, says that he was Mr. Trump’s first pick for secretary of education. Liberty University teaches creationism alongside evolution.

When Mr. Falwell declined, President-elect Trump offered the cabinet position to Betsy DeVos. In most news coverage, Ms. DeVos is depicted as a member of the Republican donor class and a leading advocate of school vouchers programs.

That is true enough, but it doesn’t begin to describe the broader conservative agenda she’s been associated with.

Betsy DeVos stands at the intersection of two family fortunes that helped to build the Christian right. In 1983, her father, Edgar Prince, who made his money in the auto parts business, contributed to the creation of the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as extremist because of its anti-L.G.B.T. language.

Her father-in-law, Richard DeVos Sr., the co-founder of Amway, a company built on “multilevel marketing” or what critics call pyramid selling, has been funding groups and causes on the economic and religious right since the 1970s.

Ms. DeVos is a chip off the old block. At a 2001 gathering of conservative Christian philanthropists, she singled out education reform as a way to “advance God’s kingdom.” In an interview, she and her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., said that school choice would lead to “greater kingdom gain.”

And so the family tradition continues, funding the religious right through a network of family foundations — among others, the couple’s own, as well as the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, on whose board Ms. DeVos has served along with her brother, Erik Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater. According to Conservative Transparency, a liberal watchdog that tracks donor funding through tax filings, these organizations have funded conservative groups including: the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal juggernaut of the religious right; the Colorado-based Betsy DeVos and God’s Plan for Schools - The New York Times:

Fresno Unified Superintendent Mike Hanson resigns | EdSource

Fresno Unified Superintendent Mike Hanson resigns | EdSource:

Fresno Unified Superintendent Mike Hanson resigns

Fresno Unified Superintendent Michael Hanson, the second-longest-serving superintendent of the state’s 30 largest districts, resigned Monday, effective in August. Hanson, 51, has led Fresno, the state’s fourth-largest district – and one of its poorest – for nearly 12 years.

Hanson brought financial stability and change to the district in the heart of the economically struggling Central Valley. During his tenure, the percentage of students meeting admissions requirements to the state’s public universities doubled to 50 percent and the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses also doubled, while the student dropout rate fell by nearly half, to 11.7 percent.

Hired to rescue the district from near bankruptcy, he helped the district weather the economic recession without layoffs. He then used revenue from the Local Control Funding Formula, which provides additional funding to low-income districts like Fresno, to significantly expand preschool and career technical partnerships in high schools, and to provide arts and after-school opportunities in all of the schools.

“The foundation has been laid, and I urge you to stay the course,” he wrote in a letter to district staff. “Continue to move forward, each of you, in the same diligent manner that has garnered our district improved academic achievement and national recognition.”Fresno Unified Superintendent Mike Hanson resigns | EdSource:

Big Education Ape: From bond measure to federal probe: How Fresno Unified caught the eye of investigators | Fresno Bee - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2015/10/from-bond-measure-to-federal-probe-how.html

Big Education Ape: Amid teacher shortage, Fresno Unified recruits educators from Starbucks to Mexico | Fresno Bee - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/08/amid-teacher-shortage-fresno-unified.html

Big Education Ape: From the archive: The Bee’s 2012 report on Fresno Unified’s lease/leaseback contracts | Fresno Bee - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/03/from-archive-bees-2012-report-on-fresno.html

Big Education Ape: CORE: The Movement to Privatize California's Public Schools - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/03/core-movement-to-privatize-californias.html

Big Education Ape: InBloom Reborn: Districts join new data sharing partnership | EdSource - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/09/districts-join-new-data-sharing.html

Reuters: David Coleman’s Redesign of the SAT to Align with Common Core=Chaos | Diane Ravitch's blog

Reuters: David Coleman’s Redesign of the SAT to Align with Common Core=Chaos | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Reuters: David Coleman’s Redesign of the SAT to Align with Common Core=Chaos

Renee Dudley of Reuters has dug deep into a story that seldom reaches public view: the internal battle inside  the College Board–sponsor of the SAT–that followed the arrival of David Coleman.

Or, how the architect of the Common Core imposed his “beautiful vision” on the SAT and created massive disruption inside the organization.

“NEW YORK – Shortly after taking over the College Board in 2012, new CEO David Coleman circulated an internal memo laying out what he called a “beautiful vision.”

“It was his 7,800-word plan for transforming the organization’s signature product, the SAT college entrance exam. The path Coleman laid out was detailed, bold and idealistic – a reflection of his personality, say those who know him.

“Literary passages for the new SAT should be “memorable and often beautiful,” he wrote, and students should be able to take the test by computer.

“Finishing the redesign quickly was essential. If the overhaul were ready by March 2015, he wrote in a later email to senior employees, then the New York-based College Board could win new business and counter the most popular college entrance exam in America, the ACT.

“Perhaps the biggest change was the new test’s focus on the Common Core, the controversial set of learning standards that Coleman himself helped create. The new SAT, he wrote, would “show a striking alignment” to the standards, which set expectations for what American students from kindergarten through high school should learn to prepare for college or a career. The standards have been fully adopted by 42 states and the District of Columbia – and are changing how and what millions of children are taught.
“Redesigning the SAT to reflect the Common Core has solidified Coleman’s influence as one of the most powerful figures in education. He has emerged as “the arbiter of what America’s children should know and be able to do,” Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education for President George H.W. Bush, wrote in her blog.

“But Coleman’s “beautiful vision” for remaking the exam soon met some harsh realities.

“”Internal documents reviewed by Reuters show pitched battles over his timeline to create the new test and whether the push to meet the deadline could backfire.

“The documents, which include memos, emails and presentations, reveal persistent concerns that aligning the redesigned SAT with the Reuters: David Coleman’s Redesign of the SAT to Align with Common Core=Chaos | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Records: Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts

Records: Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts:

Records: Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts

Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News.

Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday.

DETROIT NEWS

Detroit’s voting irregularities spur state audit

The Detroit precincts are among those that couldn’t be counted during a statewide presidential recount that began last week and ended Friday following a decision by the Michigan Supreme Court.

Democrat Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly prevailed in Detroit and Wayne County. But Republican President-elect Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes or 47.5 percent to 47.3 percent.

Overall, state records show 10.6 percent of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the retabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals.

The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.

“There’s always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn’t normal,” said Krista Haroutunian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.

State officials are planning to examine about 20 Detroit precincts where ballot boxes opened during the recount had fewer ballots than poll workers had recorded on Election Day.

“We’re assuming there were (human) errors, and we will have discussions with Detroit election officials and staff in addition to reviewing the ballots,” Thomas said.

The Detroit News last week was first to report that more than half of Detroit would be ineligible for the recount because of the irregularities. The results were based on county reports obtained by The News.

The new report, compiled by Wayne County elections officials, sheds light on the extent of the problems and shows a systematic tendency toward counting more votes Records: Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts:

Arthur Camins Warns: Don’t Let the Government Take Away Your Public School! | janresseger

Arthur Camins Warns: Don’t Let the Government Take Away Your Public School! | janresseger:

Arthur Camins Warns: Don’t Let the Government Take Away Your Public School!

It seemed to me that Emma Brown’s huge article in yesterday’s Washington Post on Betsy DeVos and the kind of marketplace she says she’ll promote as Secretary of Education was a lavishly wrapped holiday gift for promoters of school choice.

Traditional public schools are never mentioned in this story that traces the disagreements among supporters of vouchers and charters. Brown begins by setting up the story as though teachers unions are the singular opponents of school choice. Of course, disagreement within the movement for school privatization is Brown’s topic, but she neglects even to remind us that charter schools today serve only 6.6 percent of America’s publicly funded schools.

Brown describes all the worrying by proponents of vouchers and charters. How will the Trump-DeVos approach affect the movement for marketplace school choice in general? Will Trump and DeVos ruin the movement by splitting apart the proponents of vouchers and charters? We hear from Robin Lake, who leads the Center on Reinventing Public Education which has created a network of districts practicing “portfolio school reform”: “Will the new administration love school choice to death?” We are informed by Greg Forster, a senior fellow at EdChoice that, “Two sides have now become this fragmented landscape.” And Howard Fuller, an early and long proponent of vouchers, worries that Betsy DeVos will wake up supporters of public schools: “(C)learly there’s going to be a lot of antagonism. People who oppose parent choice will seek everything they can find to say that that this is not a policy that can be pursued.”

Brown describes the reactions of promoters of publicly funded charter schools and vouchers to the idea that such schools ought to be regulated to protect the public investment and the academic needs of the children enrolled. Brown neglects the huge question of whether it is possible to impose oversight over a sector supported by powerful philanthropic political contributors like Betsy DeVos and those who are earning huge profits in the charter sector. Ironically Brown looks closely at Michigan, where Betsy DeVos, a Michigan philanthropist, has been personally involved in this question, and Brown interviews Gary Naeyaert, the executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), a pro-privatization lobbying Arthur Camins Warns: Don’t Let the Government Take Away Your Public School! | janresseger:

The Key to Blocking the New Administration's Education Policies Moving Forward - Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog:

The Key to Blocking the New Administration's Education Policies Moving Forward

Two big challenges will face advocates in dealing with the Department of Education in the coming years: 1) insisting that it enforces civil rights law and 2) stopping it from excesses of power.  Advocates will have relatively few tools in their bag to force the Department to do its civil rights job, but they will have clear statutory language and powerful precedent on its side to stop the Department from going beyond its job.  On this second point, one need look back no further than the recent controversies surrounding the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

In the process of writing Federalizing Education by Waiver?, I spent a good deal of time worrying about whether I was being fair in my assessment that Secretary Duncan had exceeded his power in imposing various conditions on the statutory waivers he began granted under NCLB.  To be honest, when he initially rolled the waiver process out in 2012, I paid almost no attention.  The process was bureaucratic, something had to be done to avoid the sanctions that NCLB would have required, and almost anything seemed better than the decade of high stakes testing our schools had endured.  I saw little need to crack open the statute and seriously consider the matter.

Common Core, as a matter of substance, did not pique my interest either.  Lesson plans and what is actually taught in K-12 curriculum goes beyond my expertise.  I found the new teacher evaluation systems curious primarily because they relied so heavily on the standardized tests everyone had railed against for years, but the systems were so complex that, again, I did not dig deeper.  It was really only the growing power of the Secretary between 2012 and 2014 and the sense that he might just do anything he wanted in elementary and secondary education that finally gave me pause.  And it was because I was generally neutral as to the substance of his policies that I reassured myself that my conclusions were sound and I was not simply crying foul because I disliked his policies.

My conclusions in Federalizing Education by Waiver? and proscriptions for the future seem all the more valid and Education Law Prof Blog:

Becoming a National Board Certified Teacher is Now More Affordable

Becoming a National Board Certified Teacher is Now More Affordable:

Becoming a National Board Certified Teacher is Now More Affordable

When Anna Baldwin, an English teacher at Arlee High School in Arlee, Montana, and the 2014 Montana Teacher of the Year, wanted to up her teaching game she looked no further than National Board Certification. For the past 25 years, the National Board has advanced the teaching profession by establishing and maintaining the definitive standards of accomplished teaching and certifying more than 100,000 teachers across the country against those rigorous standards.

“I knew National Board certification made sense. I knew it would be a gift to myself  – a way to address my own needs as a teacher and reignite the passion for reaching every student,” says Baldwin.

But she didn’t want to go through the process alone. She wanted colleagues to share the experience with her so they could support each other and learn from each other. With the help of new changes that allow educators to complete the rigorous certification process over a longer period of time at a lower cost, Baldwin was able to recruit more educators to join her on the journey to National Board Certification.

Getting more certified teachers was the goal of the National Board’s changes to the certification process. The hope is to make the process more flexible and efficient while maintaining the integrity and transformative nature of National Board Certification.

But before Baldwin could show her colleagues that the process had become less cumbersome, she first had to introduce them to it.

“In a tiny rural district, some of the steps required by the National Board process can present barriers, and only a few of my colleagues were on board with National Board because they simply didn’t know what it could offer them or had not even heard of it,” she says.

She sent an email to all the district teachers with short-form information, including the purpose of National Board certification and the benefits, scheduled an informational session after school, and arranged for some local National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) to come and give an overview.

Less Barriers to Certification

For educators unfamiliar with it, the mission of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is to advance the quality of teaching and learning by maintaining high and rigorous standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do; provide a national voluntary system certifying teachers who meet these standards; and to advocate for related education reforms that integrate National Board Certification in American education and to capitalize on the expertise of National Board Certified Teachers.

some of the steps required by the National Board process can present barriers, and only a few of my colleagues were on board with National Board because they simply didn’t know what it could offer them or had not even heard of it” – Anna Baldwin, teacher

Recognized as the “gold standard” in teacher certification, the National Board believes higher standards for teachers means better learning for students.

With increasing pressure on educators to prove themselves in a constantly changing education landscape, board certification allows teachers to hone their practice, showcase their talent in the classroom, and demonstrate their dedication to their students and their profession. It’s available in 25 certificate areas represent a consensus among educators about what accomplished, effective teachers should know and be able to do to improve student learning and achievement.

But as Baldwin noted, the process presented barriers for some educators. Candidates used to have to complete the rigorous, comprehensive certification Becoming a National Board Certified Teacher is Now More Affordable:

DeVos at Trump’s “Tour” Stop in Grand Rapids: She Forgot She Ever Doubted Him. No, Really. | deutsch29

DeVos at Trump’s “Tour” Stop in Grand Rapids: She Forgot She Ever Doubted Him. No, Really. | deutsch29:

DeVos at Trump’s “Tour” Stop in Grand Rapids: She Forgot She Ever Doubted Him. No, Really.

On December 09, 2016, Michigan school choice advocate and Trump’s nominee for US secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, spoke in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as part of Trump’s “Thank You Tour.”

The video of the entire event can be viewed here:

DeVos spoke for approximately five minutes, during which time she directly contradicted her former position on Trump as a Republican candidate. Here is what she had to say about Trump in her March 2016 interview with the Washington Examiner:

DeVos: I don’t think Donald Trump represents the Republican Party. I continue to be very optimistic that as we get further along into the process, the more voters know about him, and the more informed they are, the more they’re going to continue to break away. That’s even held true in the primaries held to date. I think he has underperformed compared to public polls just days before the Super Tuesday contests. I think more and more people are going to realize that they really don’t trust him. The more they learn about his record, they’re going to break away and go to an alternate. I continue to think that Rubio is a very strong and viable candidate that will represent our party and the future for our country very, very well.

Examiner: Is it safe to say you think that Trump’s reputation and rhetoric are damaging the party?

DeVos: Again, I don’t think he represents the Republican Party. I think he is an interloper. In the contests where it is clearly Republicans voting versus an open primary, it’s very clear that he is not winning the support of traditional Republicans.

Examiner: What if he does end up as the eventual nominee? Will you commit to support him in the general election, or have you not decided yet?

DeVos: I’m still confident that he is not going to be the nominee. We have a long way to go. As you noted, he has a quarter of the necessary delegates, 

DeVos at Trump’s “Tour” Stop in Grand Rapids: She Forgot She Ever Doubted Him. No, Really. | deutsch29: