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Saturday, October 20, 2018

Watch NPE Conference Live from Indianapolis! #NPE18INDY | Diane Ravitch's blog

Watch NPE Conference Live from Indianapolis! #NPE18INDY | Diane Ravitch's blog

Watch NPE Conference Live from Indianapolis! #NPE18INDY




The Network for Public Education is live-streaming events from Indianapolis. Watch here.

If you weren’t able to make it to Indianapolis to join us this year, don’t fret – we’ve got you covered! Just hop on to the NPE Action Facebook page to catch all of the keynote speeches and select workshops both Saturday and Sunday.
Here’s a schedule of everything that will be live-streamed. Click the “read more” links below for more information about workshops and speakers.
And make sure to use the hashtag #NPE18INDY on social media to interact with conference attendees all weekend!
Saturday:
8:00-9:20 – Diane Ravitch & Pasi Sahlberg (read more)
9:30-10:40 – The People of Arizona vs. The Koch Brothers: Fighting Privatization and Dark Money with Beth Lewis and Sharon Kirsch (read more)
10:50-12:00 – Outsourcing the Classroom to Ed Tech & Machine-learning: Why Parents & Teachers Should Resist with Peter Greene, Leonie Haimson and Audrey Watters (read more)
12:30-1:20 – Teachers in Action: A Conversation with Teacher Leaders with Michelle Gunderson, Petia Edison, Rebecca Garelli and Alex Orozco (read more)
2:40-3:50 – Fighting Privatization in Puerto Rico with Edwin Morales Laboy, Mercedes Martinez, Aixa Rodriguez and Kaliris Salas (read <a href="https://events.bizzabo.com/NPE18INDY/agenda/session/273315?link_id=5&can_id=012f354d90b87664b362dda6a4b2980d&source=email-npe18indy-livestream-starts-tomorrow-morning&email_referrer=email_439078&email_subject=npe18indy-livestream-starts-tomorrow-morning”>more)
4:00-5:10 – Grading the States: The NPE/Schott School Privatization Report Card with Derek Black, Carol Burris and Tanya Clay House (read more)
5:20-6:00 – Helen Gym: Victories for Public Education in Philadelphia (read more)
Sunday:
8:15-9:25 – #WeChoose Campaign; Building a Multi-Racial Visionary National Campaign Rooted in Racial Justice and Local Realities with Jitu Brown, Elzora Cleveland, Ronsha Dickerson, Angel Gober, Kamua Kepheru and Maulana Tolbert (read more)
10:00-10:45 – Jesse Hagopian: Black Lives Matter at School (read more)
10:55-12:05 – The Racist Origins of Standardized Testing and the Racist Idea of Black/Brown Inferiority with Erika Strauss Chavarria, Denisha Jones and Marla Kilfoyle (read more)
12:15-12:35 – Call to Action
12:45-2:00 – NAACP President, Derrick Johnson (read more)





NPE Action - Political Endorsements - https://npeaction.org/ on @NPEaction





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Focus on Pedagogy, Not Just Privacy – Wrench in the Gears

Focus on Pedagogy, Not Just Privacy – Wrench in the Gears

Focus on Pedagogy, Not Just Privacy
This is the fifth of ten questions presented as a Trans-Atlantic dialogue between myself and UK blogger Privatising Schools. A condensed version pulling together content of several responses for UK audiences can be read on the Local Schools Network website.

Privatising Schools: Question Five

Is fixing data security / privacy the answer?
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a reminder that the business model of the big tech firms is based on extracting and exploiting our personal data. Here in the UK, Ben Williamson has made the link between Cambridge Analytica and the tracking, profiling, and ‘data mining’ of children which education technology makes possible (see here). One of the strengths of your work, I think, is your very clear view that the problems with tech-driven schooling – what we might call the platform model of education – go beyond issues of privacy and data security. It seems that, in this model, human relationships – between teachers and students, or amongst students – are far less important than in more traditional kinds of education. In an interview last year, you warned about the possible ‘feedback loops’ created by tech-driven schooling. Could you say more?

My Response

Does the technology used in your child’s public school empower students to share their own insights and creativity with the larger world, or does it transform them into consumers of corporate content through algorithmic profiling? If a computer program requires a login from a child and cannot function without having access to their previous interactions with said program I have serious reservations about it, even if they promise the data is secure.
Some reformers envision a time within the next two decades when Artificial Intelligence (AI) learning assistants largely supplant human teachers. These futurists imagine AI “guides on the side” functioning as child minders delivering “just-in-time” content for in-demand workforce placements. This dystopian vision includes students outfitted with Continue reading: Focus on Pedagogy, Not Just Privacy – Wrench in the Gears





NPE Action - Political Endorsements - https://npeaction.org/ on @NPEaction
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Failing Public School Infrastructure Makes Way for Microenvironments

Failing Public School Infrastructure Makes Way for Microenvironments

Failing Public School Infrastructure Makes Way for Microenvironments


...the nation continues to underinvest in school facilities, leaving an estimated $38 billion annual gap.
~2017 Infrastructure Report on Schools by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Classrooms or microenvironments?
For years, the condition of public school facilities has received D ratings from the American Society of Civil Engineers. They claim the gap in funding school facilities is one of the worst infrastructure areas.
Schools require more funding than airports, dams, rail and levees combined to get back to “good” condition, the engineers estimated.
Perhaps as a parent you are currently watching your school district struggle to find funding for new school buildings, or remodeling. Maybe you’re a teacher struggling to teach your students in a classroom that is inadequate.
Why has this country not kept up with facility funding throughout the years?
A recent opinion piece published by Education Week about facilities promotes microenvironments, a new buzz word that means more technology.
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Bill Daley is Running for Chicago’s Next Mayor. School-Closure Supporter Peter Cunningham is Managing the Campaign. | deutsch29

Bill Daley is Running for Chicago’s Next Mayor. School-Closure Supporter Peter Cunningham is Managing the Campaign. | deutsch29

Bill Daley is Running for Chicago’s Next Mayor. School-Closure Supporter Peter Cunningham is Managing the Campaign.

Another Daley is running for political office in Chicago:
IMG_1289
Bill Daley
Both Daley’s father and brother took turns as Chicago’s mayor, and not without taint to the legacy, as the September 16, 2018, Chicago Tribune reports:
Whoever runs, Daley will have the most recognizable name. His father, Richard J. Daley, served as mayor for 21 years before dying in office in 1976 and is considered Chicago’s most powerful political boss. Richard M. Daley presided over City Hall for 22 years, declining to seek re-election in 2011.
Richard M. Daley’s era was punctuated by financial woes and included corruption scandals that took down top aides and allies. But his tenure also is remembered as a stabilizing time when racial chasms in the city’s politics were narrowed. The downtown boomed with development at a time when other Rust Belt cities struggled, and Chicago was beautified in many ways, most notably with the construction of Millennium Park.
Richard M. Daley was the first mayor to exercise mayoral control over Chicago Public Schools (CPS), appointing Chicago native Paul Vallas (also in the 2019 mayoral race) as CPS CEO in 1996, the same year that the state legislature passed the Illinois Charter School Law. Vallas also “balanced the budget” by underfunding Chicago teacher pensions.



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Bob Shepherd: The Six Hundred, a Riff on Tennyson | Diane Ravitch's blog

Bob Shepherd: The Six Hundred, a Riff on Tennyson | Diane Ravitch's blog

Bob Shepherd: The Six Hundred, a Riff on Tennyson
Our reader Bob Shepherd has his own blog. As you may have deduced, I’m just wild about Bob.
Here is a wonderful parody of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” who was writing about the British troops who blindly followed orders in the Battle of Balaclava in 1854 in the Crimean War and perished.
Bob calls it “The Coring of the Six Hundred.”
My generation memorized the Tennyson poem. Thanks to the Common Core, this generation will be lucky to encounter any poetry.
Here is the beginning. Open the link and read it all.
Row on row, row on row,
Row on row stationed
Sick at their monitors
Sat the six hundred.
“You may now type your Username”
Said the test proctor.
Set up for failure
Sat the six hundred.
“Enter your password key!
“Mercy upon you!
“During the testing
“No one can help you.”
Someone had blundered.
The unspoken truth. But
Theirs was not to make reply,
Theirs was not to reason why,
Theirs was but to do or die,
Theirs was but to try and cry.
Set up for failure
Sat the six hundred.
Text to the right of them
Complex, out of context,
Bubbles in front of them,
Plausible answers,
Tricky and tortured,
Boldly they bubbled and well
Though smack in the mouth of hell
Sat the six hundred.
This is what reading means,
Now that Gates/Pearson
Has reified testing
Far beyond reason.
Pearson not persons.
Plutocrats plundering
Taxpayer dollars
Spent to abuse.
The children are used.
They bubble and squirm
To reveal their stack ranking
And never again
Will know joy in learning
Never again
Humane joy in reading
And writing, no never again,


Not the six hundred.

The Coring of the Six Hundred (with apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson)


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Standardized Teaching? (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Standardized Teaching? (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Standardized Teaching? (Part 2)


In Part 1, I made the point that the structure of the age-graded school, introduced in the U.S. in mid-19th century, has become the taken-for-granted way for organizing schools ever since. One-room schoolhouses, the heretofore dominant way of structuring schools, went the way of the dodo bird. A century ago there were nearly 200,000 one-room schoolhouses, now less than 200 existin the U.S. today.
Originally, the age-graded school building contained classrooms for grades 1 through 8. Over the decades, 1-8 expanded to pre-K through grade 12. To accommodate larger number of schools and students, architects designed one- and two-story elementary school buildings spread out over nearly an acre and secondary school buildings with multiple floors and corridors on each floor off which classrooms and offices were located. This model became standard. And within the building resided the standardized classroom.
068restoredcouncilring.jpgCharlesDrewElementarySchool.jpg
ThinkstockPhotos-453449525-jpg.jpg
Each classroom contained an American flag, a wall clock, paintings or photos of U.S. Presidents, desks and seats–initially bolted to the floor but now movable–arranged in rows facing the teacher’s desk or, in elementary schools, round tables sitting pairs and trios of students. Going into current elementary and secondary school classrooms in Bangor (ME) Butte (MT) or Bakersfield (CA) becomes a deja vu experience for many who do not know of the many changes that have occurred in the design, furniture, and arrangements that teachers have  Continue reading: Standardized Teaching? (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice




NPE Action - Political Endorsements - https://npeaction.org/ on @NPEaction


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Friday, October 19, 2018

Ravitch pushes against charter schools in Louisville rally - Insider Louisville

Ravitch pushes against charter schools in Louisville rally - Insider Louisville

Ravitch pushes against charter schools in Louisville rally



The former assistant secretary of education, Diane Ravitch, doesn’t like traveling, Gay Adelmann, a local education advocate, learned while trying to persuade Ravitch to speak in Louisville.
This time, she got lucky: The organization Ravitch co-founded, the Network for Public Education, is hosting its conference in Indianapolis this weekend. And as long as someone promised to drive Ravitch from Louisville to the conference, “she was more than gracious enough to add this to her busy schedule,” Adelmann said.
Local organizations that support public education teamed up to invite Ravitch and other speakers to Central High School Thursday night to push against what they deem to be threats to public education, including charter schools.

“Diane is arguably the foremost national expert on what’s really driving the push to privatize our public schools,” Adelmann, the event organizer, said.
Ravitch studied the underlying problems impacting public schools and wrote “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education,” which won the Grawemeyer Education Award in 2014.
The event came after Jefferson County Public Schools, the state’s largest district, dodged a state takeover. Many of the hosting groups, including Save Our Schools Kentucky and the Jefferson County Teachers Association, fought against the proposed takeover in favor of maintaining local control.
In brief opening remarks, JCPS Superintendent Marty Pollio acknowledged this, thanking the crowd for Continue reading: Ravitch pushes against charter schools in Louisville rally - Insider Louisville



NPE Action - Political Endorsements - https://npeaction.org/ on @NPEaction

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The Network for Public Education is live-streaming events from Indianapolis. Watch here. #NPE18INDY | Diane Ravitch's blog

Watch NPE Conference Live from Indianapolis! #NPE18INDY | Diane Ravitch's blog

Watch NPE Conference Live from Indianapolis! #NPE18INDY



The Network for Public Education is live-streaming events from Indianapolis. Watch here.
If you weren’t able to make it to Indianapolis to join us this year, don’t fret – we’ve got you covered! Just hop on to the NPE Action Facebook page to catch all of the keynote speeches and select workshops both Saturday and Sunday.
Here’s a schedule of everything that will be live-streamed. Click the “read more” links below for more information about workshops and speakers.
And make sure to use the hashtag #NPE18INDY on social media to interact with conference attendees all weekend!
Saturday:
8:00-9:20 – Diane Ravitch & Pasi Sahlberg (read more)
9:30-10:40 – The People of Arizona vs. The Koch Brothers: Fighting Privatization and Dark Money with Beth Lewis and Sharon Kirsch (read more)
10:50-12:00 – Outsourcing the Classroom to Ed Tech & Machine-learning: Why Parents & Teachers Should Resist with Peter Greene, Leonie Haimson and Audrey Watters (read more)
12:30-1:20 – Teachers in Action: A Conversation with Teacher Leaders with Michelle Gunderson, Petia Edison, Rebecca Garelli and Alex Orozco (read more)
2:40-3:50 – Fighting Privatization in Puerto Rico with Edwin Morales Laboy, Mercedes Martinez, Aixa Rodriguez and Kaliris Salas (read <a href="https://events.bizzabo.com/NPE18INDY/agenda/session/273315?link_id=5&can_id=012f354d90b87664b362dda6a4b2980d&source=email-npe18indy-livestream-starts-tomorrow-morning&email_referrer=email_439078&email_subject=npe18indy-livestream-starts-tomorrow-morning”>more)
4:00-5:10 – Grading the States: The NPE/Schott School Privatization Report Card with Derek Black, Carol Burris and Tanya Clay House (read more)
5:20-6:00 – Helen Gym: Victories for Public Education in Philadelphia (read more)
Sunday:
8:15-9:25 – #WeChoose Campaign; Building a Multi-Racial Visionary National Campaign Rooted in Racial Justice and Local Realities with Jitu Brown, Elzora Cleveland, Ronsha Dickerson, Angel Gober, Kamua Kepheru and Maulana Tolbert (read more)
10:00-10:45 – Jesse Hagopian: Black Lives Matter at School (read more)
10:55-12:05 – The Racist Origins of Standardized Testing and the Racist Idea of Black/Brown Inferiority with Erika Strauss Chavarria, Denisha Jones and Marla Kilfoyle (read more)
12:15-12:35 – Call to Action
12:45-2:00 – NAACP President, Derrick Johnson (read more)



NPE Action - Political Endorsements - https://npeaction.org/ on @NPEaction

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