A Gadfly’s Dozen: Top 13 Education Articles of 2018 (By Me) | gadflyonthewallblog

A Gadfly’s Dozen: Top 13 Education Articles of 2018 (By Me) | gadflyonthewallblog

A Gadfly’s Dozen: Top 13 Education Articles of 2018 (By Me)

I’m not going to mince words.

This year, 2018, has been a monster.

We’ve been fighting the dumbest and most corrupt President of our lives – Donald Trump. And we’ve been making progress.

Thanks to the midterm election blue wave in the U.S. House, Trump will finally have a check on his power.

We have more black and brown representatives, more women, more nationalities, ethnicities and faiths in the halls of power than ever before.

Charter schools and vouchers are more unpopular today than at any other point in history. High stakes testing is on the decline. And everywhere you look educators and education activists are being heard and making a difference.

But it’s taken an incredible toll on the activist community.

We have had to be out there fighting this ridiculous crap day-in-day-out 365 days a year.

And even then, we’ve suffered devastating losses – family separations at the border, children dying in detention, an increase in hate crimes and gun deaths, all while climate change runs rapidly out of control.

I wish I felt more hopeful. But as I cast my eyes back on the year that was, I’m struck with a sense of bone-deep despair.

I am confident Trump will go down and he will take so many with him.

But the forces of regression, prejudice and stupidity that forced him upon us don’t appear to be going anywhere.

Behind Donald is another Trump waiting to take his place. And behind him another CONTINUE READING: A Gadfly’s Dozen: Top 13 Education Articles of 2018 (By Me) | gadflyonthewallblog

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CREAM AND CHERRIES: Certain Students Not Encouraged to Apply to Charter Schools | Education News | US News

Certain Students Not Encouraged to Apply to Charter Schools | Education News | US News

Tailoring the Charter School Population
Students with behavior problems, low achievement or special needs are sometimes not encouraged to apply to charter schools.

CHARTER SCHOOLS AND public schools of choice – those in school districts that allow students to choose from any number of schools instead of zoning them to just one – are less likely to encourage students with a history of poor behavior, low academic achievement or special needs to apply.

Charter schools, in particular, were less likely to encourage students with a potentially significant special need to apply.

That's the latest research published Thursday by Peter Bergman, an assistant professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, and Isaac McFarlin Jr., assistant professor at University of Florida's College of Education.

The researchers sent emails from fictitious parents to nearly 6,500 schools in 29 states and the District of Columbia, asking whether any student is eligible to apply to the school and how to do so. Each email signaled either a disability status, poor behavior, high or low prior academic achievement, or no characteristic at all. The researchers also varied students' implied race, household structure and gender.

"We find that schools respond less often to messages regarding students whom schools may perceive as more challenging to educate," the researchers concluded.

The baseline response rate was 53 percent. But emails signaling a student with a potentially restrictive special need were 5 percentage points less likely to receive a response; emails signaling a behavior problem were 7 percentage points less likely to receive a response; and emails signaling prior low academic achievement were 2 percentage points less likely to receive a response.

Notably, emails indicating good grades and attendance were neither more nor less likely to receive a response.

In one sub-analysis, the researchers compared the responses of charter schools directly to the nearby traditional public schools. Overall, they found the response rates similar with one major exception: If an email signaled a child had a significant special need, charter schools were 7 percentage points less likely to respond while traditional public schools were not more or less likely to respond. CONTINUE READING: Certain Students Not Encouraged to Apply to Charter Schools | Education News | US News

SPOTLIGHT BLOG OF THE WEEK: JAN RESSEGER BLOG (janresseger.wordpress.com)

SPOTLIGHT BLOG OF THE WEEK: JAN RESSEGER BLOG (janresseger.wordpress.com)

DEC 14

What If Policymakers Stopped Condemning Poor People and Considered their Real Needs and Circumstances?

by janresseger / 12d

Merry Christmas and Good Wishes for the Season! This blog will take a holiday break. Look for a new post early in the new year. In 2012, Mike Rose published Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education , a book about the potential of community colleges to help people discover their interests, widen their experiences, and perhaps change the direction of their lives. He begins

DEC 13

New Federal Case Launched in Rhode Island to Establish Educational Equity as a Federally Protected Right

by janresseger / 13d

If you think about it, you’ll remember that for more than forty years, school equity cases have been filed under the education clauses of the 50 state constitutions. That’s because, in a 1973 decision, San Antonio v. Rodriguez , the Warren Burger, U.S. Supreme Court decided that, because education is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, education is not protected as a fundamental right under t

DEC 12

Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools Tells New Congress: Fully Fund Title I and IDEA

by janresseger / 14d

In his new book, Educational Inequality and School Finance, the Rutgers University school finance expert Bruce Baker carefully refutes some long-running and persistent myths about the funding of public education—Eric Hanushek’s claim that money doesn’t really make any difference when it comes to raising student achievement, for example, and the contention that public schools’ expenditures have sk

DEC 11

New from the National Education Policy Center: “How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination”

by janresseger / 15d

Last week this blog explored some of the ways the expansion of school choice ends up creating injustice and inequality . The National Education Policy Center just published a new report, How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination , in which Julie Mead of the University of Wisconsin and Suzanne Eckes of Indiana University further investigate one particular aspect of the same topic:

DEC 07

More Education News from Chicago: WBEZ Publishes the Troubling History of Chicago’s Public School Closures

by janresseger / 19d

It is quite a week for education news from Chicago. Yesterday this blog covered the first teachers’ strike at a charter school network, UNO-Acero Charter Schools in Chicago. Today’s post considers nearly two decades of closures of traditional neighborhood schools in Chicago. Chicago’s closure of so-called “failing” schools began in 2002. Two years later, Chicago’s technocratic model of test-based

DEC 06

Chicago Teachers at 15-School Acero Charter Chain Strike: First Walkout at a Unionized Charter School Network

by janresseger / 20d

In the first walkout at a U.S. charter school network, 500 teachers at Chicago’s Acero (formerly UNO) charter school chain went on strike Tuesday. Acero Charter Schools’ teachers are represented by the Chicago Teachers Union. While teachers in a number of Chicago charter schools had formed their own ChiACTS union, at the end of last January, ChiACTS merged with the 28,000 member Chicago Teachers

DEC 05

Why School Choice Ends Up Creating Injustice and Inequality

by janresseger / 21d

In his new book, Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students , school funding expert, Bruce Baker critiques the rapid expansion of charter schools for siphoning off dollars from state and local public school budgets. Baker also addresses the philosophical contention frequently offered to justify the rapid expansion of school choice—that justice can be defin

DEC 04

Dogged Advocates for Justice Protest Ohio State School Takeovers of Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland

by janresseger / 22d

After January, John Kasich will no longer be governor of Ohio. House Bill 70, the law that paved the way for the Youngstown—and now Lorain and East Cleveland—school takeovers is the biggest stain on his legacy. In gerrymandered Ohio, with huge legislative Republican majorities after the November 2018 election—62 Republicans and 37 Democrats in the Ohio House and 24 Republicans and 9 Democrats in

NOV 30

DeVos Again Protects For-Profit Colleges and Federal Loan Servicing Contractor at Expense of Vulnerable Students

by janresseger / 26d

Betsy DeVos once announced: “Government really sucks.” She doesn’t like government regulation, and she prefers to free up the marketplace. One of the best places to observe her penchant for deregulation is in higher education, where she has regularly done everything she can to protect the investors in for-profit colleges and trade schools, where she has tried to step back from protecting students

NOV 29

Faith in High Stakes Testing Fades, Even Among the Corporate School Reformers

by janresseger / 27d

After a recent twenty-fifth anniversary conference at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, Bothell—a Gates funded education-reformer think tank, Chalkbeat ‘s Matt Barnum summarized presentations by a number of speakers who demonstrate growing skepticism about the high-stakes, standardized testing regime that has dominated American public education for over a

NOV 21

Truly Public Schools Must Form Engaged Citizens and Then Engage Those Citizens in Shaping School Policy

by janresseger / 35d

This blog will take a week long Thanksgiving break. Look for a new post on November 29. Good wishes for Thanksgiving! In its October 2018 issue, Phi Delta Kappan magazine features a pair of articles that, from two entirely different perspectives, trace declining civic engagement around public education to the philosophy at the heart of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. In Preparation for Capable

NOV 20

DeVos Proposes Controversial Rewrite of Rules for Investigating Campus Sexual Assault

by janresseger / 36d

Last Friday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released—for a 60-day public comment period—new rules for how schools that receive federal dollars must handle allegations of sexual assault. The Washington Post ‘s Laura Meckler explains : “The rules stem from a 1972 law known as Title IX that bars sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding. Most of the attention is on higher education

NOV 16

Northwestern University Economist Uses Data to Prove Students’ Test Scores Fail to Measure Quality Teaching

by janresseger / 40d

Mike Rose, a UCLA education professor, understands a lot about teaching. In his extensive writing about education, Rose explains good teaching with precision and insight. Rose culminated a four year visit to excellent classrooms across the United States with the publication of the story of those teachers in Possible Lives . He has also written widely about what good teachers do and what ought to

NOV 15

Bruce Baker’s New Book on School Finance Develops a Scathing Critique of Charter School Expansion

by janresseger / 41d

Rutgers University school finance professor, Bruce Baker’s new book, Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students , covers the basics—how school finance formulas are supposed to work to ensure that funding for schools is adequate, equitable, and stable. Baker also carefully refutes some persistent myths—Eric Hanushek’s claim that money doesn’t really make a

NOV 14

Is America’s Romance with Charter Schools Fading Despite Gobs of Political Money from Its Promoters?

by janresseger / 42d

Last week’s election produced a couple of significant indicators that the public may be growing weary of charter schools. At the same time the public seems increasingly aware that adequately funded public schools may be a better way