VALERIE JABLOW: Seeing Stars | educationdc

Seeing Stars | educationdc

Seeing Stars

Last week, on a broadcast of the local (and live!) radio show Education Town Hall, educators from Anacostia High School talked about the Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools and connected it to the school’s history and future. As Anacostia HS has only 1 star in our new STAR rating of DC’s publicly funded schools, part of that future includes working with DCPS on a plan of action.

Anacostia HS psychologist Dr. Byron McClure noted that the STAR rating is particularly difficult for his school, as some students read at a 5th grade level when they enter. Thus, no matter how well Anacostia educators work with those students over the course of four years, with no growth measure for high schools in the rating, student growth simply doesn’t exist unless and until those students score well on PARCC.

Despite public outcry, our STAR rating is mainly (70%) based on test scores. Like other public schools in DC, Anacostia HS also struggles with the other measures in that rating, mainly attendance, suspensions, and re-enrollment rates.

For instance, during a January 31 council hearing on attendance, council member CONTINUE READING: Seeing Stars | educationdc

FINALLY DESEGREGATED PUBLIC EDUCATION- THE BEST REPARATION - Perdaily.com

FINALLY DESEGREGATED PUBLIC EDUCATION- THE BEST REPARATION - Perdaily.com

FINALLY DESEGREGATED PUBLIC EDUCATION- THE BEST REPARATION

The Civil War ended in 1865 with the occupation of the South by Northern troops, which established a Reconstruction plan to try and dismantle the South's several centuries old culture founded on slavery and the institutionalized legal inferiority of African Americans. One of the proposed mechanisms to supposedly try and integrate Blacks into a reinvented Southern society was the proposal to give all ex-slaves 40 acres of land and a mule to make them econmically self sufficient. Regrettably, it never came to pass or things might be very different today.

In the presidential election of 1876, although Samuel J. Tilden, a Democrat from New York, beat Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican from Ohio in the popular vote (50.9% to 47.9%), Hayes was nonetheless declared president in a shady deal memorialized by the Compromise of 1877, where Hayes was elected president by the electoral college through the key support of 4 Southern states. This Southern electoral college support was garnered by Hayes agreeing to support the Compromise of 1877, that called for the removal of all federal troops from the South. And with the removal of these troops came the re-institutionalization of Black second-class citizenship, which was given an anchronistic reprieve that even the civil rights movement of the much later 1960s and beyond has yet to dislodge from the South and elsewhere in the United States. Black Americans are still waiting to be given the equal opportunity that even immigrants, who came to this country hundreds of years after them, have been CONTINUE READING: FINALLY DESEGREGATED PUBLIC EDUCATION- THE BEST REPARATION - Perdaily.com

Charter School Advocates Try to Downplay Growing Opposition to Charter Schools | Dissident Voice

Charter School Advocates Try to Downplay Growing Opposition to Charter Schools | Dissident Voice

Charter School Advocates Try to Downplay Growing Opposition to Charter Schools

Prominent charter school advocates are understandably shaken and worried about the growing tide of opposition to privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools that have been wreaking havoc across the country for nearly 30 years. Charter school supporters are speaking out more in hopes of saving these deregulated and segregated schools that often perform poorly and foster corruption.

“We’ve seen this kind of resistance before, it’s no big deal” is the general refrain issued by worried charter school advocates. “Yes, we are experiencing some troubled times and blowback right now, but it is not unusual and it will eventually pass” is another variation of this revealing refrain.

Charter school promoters know that the charter school sector, which has never been grass-roots in any way, shape, or form, is in trouble. But advocates of pay-the-rich schemes like privately-operated charter schools are too dogmatic and profit-focused to see the wood for the trees. Objectively, they are unable and unwilling to come to terms with the fact that people do not want education privatized and turned into a consumer good subject to the chaos, anarchy, and violence of the “free market.” People want fully-funded public schools under public control, completely free of the destructive influence of wealthy private interests.

Opposition to privately-operated charter schools is real, strong, growing, and irreversible. Individuals, organizations, and states across the country are taking real steps to rein them in. Worn-out platitudes, one-liners, lies, and absurd statements about these “innovative” schools that treat education as a business increasingly hold less sway.

Shawgi Tell is author of the book Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.. Read other articles by Shawgi.

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019 at 5:39am and is filed under Charter Schools, Education.

Charter School Advocates Try to Downplay Growing Opposition to Charter Schools | Dissident Voice

We asked every Democratic candidate for president about desegregating schools. Here’s what they told us.

We asked every Democratic candidate for president about desegregating schools. Here’s what they told us.

We asked every Democratic candidate for president about desegregating schools. Here’s what they told us.

When California Senator Kamala Harris challenged Joe Biden on his past opposition to school integration programs during a Democratic primary debate, she started a conversation few candidates seemed interested in having.

Although many of the 2020 field’s 25 Democratic candidates have put out some education policy ideas, few of them have emphasized integration. Harris, for her part, has focused on boosting teacher salaries and adding billions for teacher training.

The lack of emphasis on integration is not surprising, says Brett Gadsden, a Northwestern history professor who has written about three decades of school desegregation efforts in Delaware, including the role of former Vice President Biden.

“I think too often we are constructing him as a kind of anomaly in Democratic party politics in the 1970s forward, when I think there is a consensus among Democrats and liberals that school segregation is kind of a social fact,” he said. “No one has picked up the ball and attempted to advance a concerted challenge to that problem in American education today.”

So Chalkbeat asked the candidates where they stand on school desegregation and on the debate about busing. We compiled what they’ve said or done on the issue in the past, too.

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet told us that he believes busing for desegregation can be helpful, but isn’t sufficient. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s campaign said “we should consider every tool at our disposal” to desegregate schools. And a spokesperson for former Representative Beto O’Rourke said that he “absolutely believes that the federal government has a responsibility and a role to play” in desegregation efforts.

Few offered details, though. We’ve listed the candidates in the order of their recent CONTINUE READING: We asked every Democratic candidate for president about desegregating schools. Here’s what they told us.

Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel”

Last March, the Network for Public Education released a report written and researched by Carol Burris and Jeff Bryant, titled Asleep At the Wheel. It reviewed grants awarded by the federal Charter Schools Program and found that about a third of the grants went to charters that either never opened or closed soon after opening. It also reported that the CSP administrators did not conduct due diligence reviews and were basically handing out money without careful review. The report was cited by members of Congress when questioning Betsy DeVos. Burris has continued to release state reports on federal CSP awards, and she has found several states where the failure rate was 40%.

As you can imagine, the rightwing charter supporters were not happy. They responded not by calling for greater accountability and transparency by the charters, but by attacking the report! The critique was written by an employee of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. This is the organization that just honored Fernando Zulueta, who runs a highly political for-Profit Charter empire in Florida and amassed a real estate portfolio of more than $100 million.

Carol Burris responds here. 

All the links are included.

Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Neoliberalism Undermines the Common Good by Promoting Vouchers and Charter Schools | janresseger

Neoliberalism Undermines the Common Good by Promoting Vouchers and Charter Schools | janresseger

Neoliberalism Undermines the Common Good by Promoting Vouchers and Charter Schools

When you read about “neoliberalism,” do you clearly understand the term and what people mean when they talk about neoliberal education reform?  It is confusing because “neoliberal” is used to describe policies we typically think of as politically conservative, while political liberals are the people we think of as supporting programs typified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.  How is it that we call the people who support school privatization through vouchers and charter schools “neoliberals?”

For those of us who are not political theorists, Robert Kuttner simply and clearly defines“neoliberalism.” Kuttner is the  co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect and a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. Kuttner hardly touches on the specific area of neoliberalism as it applies to public education, but his precise definition is invaluable for clarifying our thinking. “It’s worth taking a moment to unpack the term ‘neoliberalism.’ The coinage can be confusing to American ears because the ‘liberal’ part refers not to the word’s ordinary American usage, meaning moderately left-of-center, but to classical economic liberalism otherwise known as free-market economics. The ‘neo’ part refers to the reassertion of the claim that the laissez-faire model of the economy was basically correct after all. Few proponents of these views embraced the term neoliberal. Mostly, they called themselves free-market conservatives. ‘Neoliberal’ was a coinage used mainly by their critics, sometimes as a neutral descriptive term, sometimes as an epithet. The use became widespread in the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.”

Kuttner traces the history of neoliberalism: “Since the late 1970s. we’ve had a grand experiment to test the claim that free markets really do work best… (I)n the 1970s, libertarian economic theory got another turn at bat…  Neoliberalism’s premise is that free markets can regulate themselves; that government is inherently incompetent, captive to special interests, and an intrusion on the efficiency of the market; that in distributive terms, market outcomes CONTINUE READING: Neoliberalism Undermines the Common Good by Promoting Vouchers and Charter Schools | janresseger

Hostile Takeover 2.0 – redqueeninla

Hostile Takeover 2.0 – redqueeninla

Hostile Takeover 2.0

Charter schools in California band together as an embattled group, agitating for hostile takeover of the Public Commons. They serially convene, dissolve and reform a plethora of working groups to bombard public schools with “messaging” and disinformation.  The groups as well as charters themselves of course, drain resources from schools, necessitating capital (monetary and human) defending what should be protected by the people, for the people.

One of these itinerant ideologues is Ben Austin, founder of the “Parent Trigger”, who in 2014 resigned from his astroturf group to foment a new one, Kids Coalition. A collection of emails made public by the municipal-transparency site michaelkolhaas.org uncovered a set of strategies developed among this cabal, reported by Howard Blume at the LATimes here and here.

The collusion, as one of them explains elsewhere, is “all about the messaging”. And the message revealed in aggregate over 5000+ emails, lays out a very stark code-shift. The catchy phrase, “kids first”, is a logical fallacy. Iterated unceasingly by charter advocates, it simultaneously casts aspersions on a presumed alternative (‘a time or place when kids were not first’) even while kids in schools have always been “first”. But consistent with the ideology of long-standing and now charter-mega-funders Koch and Walton (among others), that term “kids first” effectively codes for “anti-union”. Because if formerly it were true that kids were not first, it would be the fault of the system that transposed their status, their teacher’s union. ‘If the proper order of kids is not upheld, it must be the fault of their teachers’ is the sly message.

Likewise there is a constant drum-beat against “bureaucracy” and “adult issues” CONTINUE READING: Hostile Takeover 2.0 – redqueeninla

Parent Sues over New Orleans Charter High School Grade-fixing Fiasco | deutsch29

Parent Sues over New Orleans Charter High School Grade-fixing Fiasco | deutsch29

Parent Sues over New Orleans Charter High School Grade-fixing Fiasco

A New Orleans charter high school operated by New Beginnings Schools, John F. Kennedy High School at Lake Area, is in the throes of a grade-fixing scandal that has resulted in at least 92 out of 177 (that’s 52 percent) of its Class of 2019 deemed ineligible to graduate after all.

One of the consequences of this collosal display of the ineptitude in overseeing New Orleans charter schools is that the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) superintendent Henderson Lewis has made the post-scandal decision to audit the student records of all New Orleans high schools.

Lewis has also asked the Louisiana’s inpector general to conduct a criminal investigation into Kennedy’s grade-fixing mess.

I wondered how long it would take for parents of Kennedy seniors to sue. Well, I need not wonder any more.

According to nola.com, on Monday, July 01, 2019, Darnette Daniels, the parent of a Kennedy senior who participated in Kennedy’s graduation ceremony then discovered she was not eligible to graduate, Tayler McClendon, did just that. On behalf of her daughter, Daniels is suing the State of Louisiana, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), OPSB, New Beginnings Schools Foundation, and TenSquare, LLC, a charter school support organization involved in the management of Kennedy.

One can view the 14-page lawsuit here: Daniels-v-New-Beginnings;

Daniels’ lawsuit details the chaos at Kennedy, including its impact on her CONTINUE READING: Parent Sues over New Orleans Charter High School Grade-fixing Fiasco | deutsch29

Success Academy (Again) Takes — And Bombs — The Algebra II Regents | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Success Academy (Again) Takes — And Bombs — The Algebra II Regents | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Success Academy (Again) Takes — And Bombs — The Algebra II Regents

Last year I wrote about how the top charter chain in New York City, Success Academy, only managed to have three students get between 52% and 72% of the questions correct on the Algebra II Regents.

In New York State, the standardized end of the year exams for high school are called ‘The Regents.’  In math there are three Regents:  Algebra I is for 9th graders (or advanced 8th graders), Geometry is for 10th graders (or advanced 9th graders), and Algebra II is for 11th graders (or advanced 10th graders).  To get a diploma you only have to pass Algebra I, but to be ‘college ready’ you generally take the other two courses and, depending on what year you complete Algebra II, you take precalculus and possibly AP Calculus.

Success Academy is known for their Grades 3-8 ELA and Math test scores, but up until recently they weren’t taking the Regents at all, for unknown reasons.

In today’s New York Post there was an article about how 100% of the eighth graders from Success Academy Bronx 2 scored a level 5 on the recent Algebra I regents.  As this has been celebrated by various charter cheerleaders on Twitter, I wanted to give my analysis of this event.

First of all, there is a generous curve on the Algebra I Regents where 31% correct curves up to a 65.  For the higher scores, it is less generous, but still to get an 85 which is a level 5, CONTINUE READING: Success Academy (Again) Takes — And Bombs — The Algebra II Regents | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Bernie Sanders Takes a Sledgehammer to Student Debt

Bernie Sanders Takes a Sledgehammer to Student Debt

Bernie Sanders Takes a Sledgehammer to Student Debt

Bottom line is we should not be punishing people for getting a higher education. It is time to hit the reset button.”
– Bernie Sanders

Americans currently have about $1.6 Trillion in outstanding student loan debt. This has crushing consequences for our economy as some debtors struggle to pay off these loans in a job market where income growth barely keeps up with inflation. Unlike Trump’s businesses that were able to take advantage of bankruptcy six times, those with student loan debt cannot have their loans discharged. They tried to finance the American Dream and are now stuck in a nightmare that they cannot escape.

Bernie Sanders has become the latest Democratic presidential candidate to propose a plan to help those who are struggling with their student loan debt. Unfortunately, this plan overshoots the target by eliminating all debt. The relief is not subject to an income test so that everyone will be helped, regardless of need. It also makes no differentiation between debt incurred at a community college or at an overpriced private university. Without narrowing the focus, this plan is the financial equivalent of using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.

The other flaw in the plan is that it does not take into account those who made sacrifices to avoid the debt in the first place. Parents who CONTINUE READING: Bernie Sanders Takes a Sledgehammer to Student Debt

Who is Choosing Who? A Charter School Places Barriers to Entry

Who is Choosing Who? A Charter School Places Barriers to Entry

Who is Choosing Who? A Charter School Places Barriers to Entry

“This is a conditional admission practice contrary to the law requiring charter schools to admit all who wish to attend.”

- LAUSD Charter School Division

When the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) Charter School Division recommended that the school board deny the North Valley Military Institute’s (NVMI) charter renewal in 2017, they cited the school’s requirement that “[a]ll students enrolling in NVMI must successfully complete an Entrance Camp” as one of the reasons. The district bureaucrats found that this requirement amounted to “a conditional admission practice” and, therefore, violated the provisions of “the law requiring charter schools to admit all who wish to attend.”

Since 2011, Granada Hills Charter High School has included a requirement that all students attend a “Summer Transition Academy (STA) as a graduation requirement for all students.” The school’s enrollment documents state that “New students programmed into the 2019 STA session who do not report to or complete the STA will receive a grade of F”. Unlike NVMI, this requirement did not prevent the Charter School Division from recommending to the school board that they should approve the renewal of Granada’s charter when it came before them last year.

When asked why NVMI’s requirement was seen as a violation while Granada’s was not, the Charter School Division replied that Granada’s program “is not a CONTINUE READING: Who is Choosing Who? A Charter School Places Barriers to Entry

CURMUDGUCATION: Big Brother Is Listening (More Ed Tech From The Surveillance State)

CURMUDGUCATION: Big Brother Is Listening (More Ed Tech From The Surveillance State)

Big Brother Is Listening (More Ed Tech From The Surveillance State)

We have repeatedly seen examples of ed tech innovations that hinge on surveillance, and not just surveillance, but software to interpret what the surveilled data means.

This results in some huge promises. Here's software that says it will read student facial expressions and eye movements to determine if anyone is learning. Companies are lining up to tell you all about the social and emotional well-being of students. And in one of the finest examples of building mountainous conclusions out of data molehills, NWEA will now tell you how hard students are working and how well they're engaged, based on how long it takes them to bubble in a multiple-choice answer.

ProPublica and Wired decided to take a look at yet another piece of software that claims to be able to read hearts and minds both in schools and in a few other places as well. You will be shocked--shocked!-- to discover that this is yet another piece of tech that has big dreams but little to back them up with.

Sound Intelligence, a Dutch company that hopes to set up shop in Chicago, has some audio analytics it wants to sell you.

Sound Intelligence's patented sound classification solutions make security monitoring systems proactive, enabling early detection of potential incidents, swift intervention, and in many cases, prevention of further escalation.

Yes, in addition to more standard fare like gunshot detection and breaking glass detection, Sound CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Big Brother Is Listening (More Ed Tech From The Surveillance State)

NOT TO MENTION WATCHING

L.A. Charter $chool Backers Plan to ‘BUY BACK’ Mayor’s Office, Battle Teachers Union, Internal Email Shows | KTLA

L.A. Charter School Backers Plan to ‘Take Back’ Mayor’s Office, Battle Teachers Union, Internal Email Shows | KTLA

L.A. Charter School Backers Plan to ‘Take Back’ Mayor’s Office, Battle Teachers Union, Internal Email Shows

Memo to charter leaders: ‘It’s better to be feared than loved. Right now we are neither’ - Los Angeles Times - https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-edu-charter-leaders-confidential-planning-20190702-story.html via @latimes

Read the Complete memo sent to charter school leaders »

The email was originally disclosed through a public records request submitted to a charter school group by michaelkohlhaas.org, a site that seeks to “collect and publish as many documents as possible about municipal politics in Los Angeles, with somewhat of a focus on Business Improvement Districts in Los Angeles.”

Annotations from The Times are in italics:

Subject: Important background for Wednesday’s Kids First Strategy Group meeting

From: Ben Austin+

+[Austin is the executive director of Kids Coalition, which describes itself as advocating “to translate ‘kids-first’ from a political slogan into a civil right and an educational reality for all LAUSD students.”]

Date: 3/3/19, 7:52 PM

To: [email addresses removed]

Hi all, below is material for Wednesday’s Kids First Strategy Group meeting: revised and refined goals, a proposed agenda, and a list of initiatives we could collectively adopt to begin backwards planning from our short and long term goals.

I want to acknowledge a tension in the work ahead of us: I think we all agree that we need to figure out how to work better and differently together so that over time we can make the whole greater than the sum of our parts. As Katie+ said at the last meeting, in many ways the work of this group could be considered a 10-year project. And as Ana and others mentioned: Alex Caputo Pearl has been working for far more than ten years to achieve the victories that are just now bearing fruit for UTLA. But we are also managing short term threats, challenges, and opportunities we cannot ignore.

+[Katie refers to Katie Braude, co-founder of the advocacy group Speak Up, which recruits and organizes parents and also publishes an online news site.]

While it may seem contradictory to work on both tracts simultaneously, hopefully we can walk and chew gum and even forge strategic synergy. In the short term we can learn to work better together, build collective power, and win short and medium term victories; while simultaneously reflecting, learning, and evolving as a community so that 5 and 10 years from now we aren’t in this same position.

Based on feedback I’ve gotten from many of you since the first meeting, I’ve attempted to translate our agreed upon collective goals into a format which we can use to measure progress in the short and long term. As you can see, I’ve broken them into a specific long term "moon shot" goal, and short-term goals that lay the foundation to achieve our long term goal:

* By 2030: A quality public education for every student in the LAUSD, agnostic to school model, measured by child outcomes. This is the goal we agreed upon in the last meeting, adding a deadline. The 2030 date is obviously random. But it feels far enough away that it forces us to think long-term (it’s more time than it took for America to figure out how to land on the moon), but soon enough that it’s urgent, non-theoretical, and will directly impact the children in the system today.

* By November 2020: Retake board majority, change public narrative/shift Overton Window,+ defend quality charters, establish legal rights for parents and students to translate asymmetrical organizing into legal rights and political power to advocate for kids. We had agreed to each of the above goals at the last meeting but not the specific 2020 deadline.

+[The Overton window is a term for the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. Austin is suggesting in the memo that the teachers union has effectively defined the debate over education issues and that his side needs to recapture that space.]

This is a proposed agenda:Read the Complete memo sent to charter school leaders »

In the wake of the Los Angeles teachers strike, a group of key charter school supporters, concerned about political backlash, worked on a plan to stem anti-charter sentiment and regain control of local education reforms.

Their strategy was to “take back” the Board of Education and the mayor’s office, develop a lawsuit against the school district and attack the local teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles.

These strategies are laid out in a March email from education activist Ben Austin to an inner circle of charter backers. The email attempts to summarize their joint discussions to date and their agenda going forward.

Contacted early Tuesday morning, Austin declined to comment.

Read the full story on LATimes.com.

L.A. Charter School Backers Plan to ‘Take Back’ Mayor’s Office, Battle Teachers Union, Internal Email Shows | KTLA

Agenda - 2019 NEA Representative Assembly #REDFORED #CTA #StrongPublicSchools #ra19 #nea #neara19 #houston

Agenda - 2019 NEA Annual Meeting

NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
2019 ANNUAL MEETING SUMMARY OF EVENTS
Houston, Texas

TENTATIVE MEETING AND EVENT SCHEDULE
Dates and Times are Subject to Change
Last Updated 7/01/2019

Advance Virtual Policy Hearing Schedule

NEA RA Mobile App

The official NEA RA Mobile App brings all of the myRA features directly to your iPhone, iPad, or Android phone or tablet, so you can access your personal myRA account and keep up to date with what’s happening at the RA no matter where you roam, as long as you have an active internet connection. Download the NEA RA Mobile App to your device through one of the links below:

Thursday, June 27

Friday, June 28

Saturday, June 29

Sunday, June 30

Monday, July 1

Tuesday, July 2

Wednesday, July 3

Thursday, July 4

Friday, July 5

Saturday, July 6

Sunday, July 7

TENTATIVE MEETING AND EVENT SCHEDULE

Dates and Times are Subject to Change

 Agenda - 2019 NEA Annual Meeting

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• Education Votes
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TENTATIVE MEETING AND EVENT SCHEDULE

Dates and Times are Subject to Change