E’ry day this month, the Center for Black Educator Development, in partnership with Phillys7thWard.org, will highlight a Black Educator Hall of Famer.
But, don’t forget, e’ry month is Black History Month…February is just the Blackest.
Today, our featured Black Educator is Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett.
Ebenezer, born in 1833 in Connecticut, came from a long line of activists and freedom fighters. His grandfather secured his freedom as a participant in the Revolutionary War. His family was politically active; both Bassett’s father and grandfather were elected as Negro Governors.
Bassett was an exceptional scholar who excelled in mathematics and communicated with clarity and precision, making contributions to his local newspaper, The Derby Journal. He attended Wilbraham Academy in Massachusetts, followed by college and the Connecticut Teachers College CONTINUE READING: Ebenezer Bassett, Black Educator Hall of Fame - Philly's 7th Ward
“My first introduction to porn was in middle school watching the ‘scrambled channel’ to catch the few split seconds when the static morphed into a bare butt thrusting,” explains Tracy Clark-Flory, a journalist covering the sex industry, adding: “Officially, I thought of watching porn less as entertainment than instruction, an investigation into men’s desire more than my own.”
Clark-Flory notes that her experience is “typical” for young women, and her evolving lessons around pornography are powerfully framed as she further examines her earliest lessons:
It goes without saying: as I was growing up, no one had talked to me about the sexual politics of power, performance and perspective. No one – not my parents, not my sex ed classes, not the writers of glossy magazine sex advice – had bothered to go beyond basic mechanics and technique. A true sexual education has less to do with diagrams of the human reproductive system than with understanding another organ: the brain.
MY PORN LIFE: WHAT MY YEARS AS A SEX WRITER TAUGHT ME ABOUT MY DESIRES
Addressing a controversy around the backstory of an American Girl doll with lesbian aunts, James Finn confronts how children are the “big losers” in the CONTINUE READING:
There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children -- Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of the living of it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together.
A popular construct of the criticism of the Biden administration goes like this: Frustrated parents everywhere want their kids back in schools right now, but fearful (and sometimes lazy) teachers don’t want to go. Their unions are nothing but obstructionist. Researchers say there is little evidence that schools contribute to increased community transmission of the coronavirus. President Biden, a friend of labor, is siding with the unions by supporting the idea of instituting safety precautions before reopening.
There is a lot that is distorted with that thinking, which suggests that critics believe that there is a firm consensus on which safety measures are necessary and that all schools will or are implementing them.
Actually, there is a continued lack of governmental clarity over exactly what proper safety measures are necessary — and plenty of evidence that many school districts already open are not coming close to implementing some of the key measures. Researchers reporting on transmission in schools qualify their results by saying that safety measures matter, a point that sometimes gets left out of the reopening debate or gets added as an aside.
Encapsulating some of the pointed discussion was a conversation on Sunday between Jake Tapper, host of MSNBC’s “State of the Union” and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky. Tapper asked Walensky why more schools weren’t open when she and infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci and other experts have been saying for months that schools should open as long as there are certain safety measures in place.
“There are a lot of people out there watching who think, like, ‘I thought the science said we should open the schools as long as we are taking the safety steps,'" Tapper said. “We’re taking the safety steps, and we’re not opening the schools.” CONTINUE READING: The distorted debate about reopening schools - The Washington Post
Betsy DeVos is among the many education disruptors fond of imagining a world in which education is handled Uber-style; but we don't have to imagine what a gig-economy education system would look like. It already exists.
Outschool was founded in 2015 by Amir Nathoo (he cutely lists his title as "learner" in his LInkedIn profile), and while he looks like he's about twelve, he's been at work for a while. He got a Master's Degree from the University of Cambridge in 2002, worked in software development for IBM, founded a couple of companies, invested in a few other, and then launched Outschool. The company is based in San Francisco.
Nathoo was interviewed by Rick Hess back in 2019 in an interview that Education Next just dusted off because, as you might imagine, Nathoo's distance learning micro-credential marketplace is having a strong pandemic moment. In it, Nathoo describes Outschool this way:
Outschool offers live online education experiences that connect teachers with learners in small-group settings to explore everything from Minecraft, Pokemon, and cooking to chemistry, algebra, and literature.Nathoo also talks a lot about fun and passion, and his story always mentions how he got a computer when he was five and that sparked an interest in games and programming and his technology career, leading him to create this marketplace for "fun and social learning experiences." Others have characterized it with less sparkle, like the Techcrunch article that characterized it as "a platform for CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: What An Education Uber Actually Looks Like
Just because school opening isn’t causing higher levels of community transmission doesn’t mean that there isn’t individual risk to teachers and staff. If we had wanted schools to safely reopen, we should have worked hard as a society to keep transmission rates down and to invest resources in schools.
~Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and a visiting professor of health policy at George Washington University.
The CDC’s recommendations about school reopenings are better than previous guidelines and teacher union leaders seem to approve. They say they have a road map based on science, but teachers still have concerns. Here’s a description.
According to the new color-coded zones, the CDC identifies counties by Covid-19 risk, blue, yellow, orange, and red. Each zone is supposed to follow specific mitigation steps, with the red zone being the most concerning.
Dr. Walensky says: If we get to a point where we are beyond the red zone here, really high levels of community spread related to the variants or related to just more transmission, we may need to revisit this again.
CNN reports that most zones are red zones. CONTINUE READING: CDC Recommendations Are Clearer, But Teachers Face the Same Problems and New Ones
Fewer than 100,000 children in the US live in a county considered “low” or “moderate CONTINUE READING: CDC Recommendations Are Clearer, But Teachers Face the Same Problems and New Ones
Fact # 1: Since the 2012-2013 school year, the District has run a surplus every year except one: 2017-18 (2012-13 to 2018-19 Projections & 2012-13 to 2018-19 Actuals). The District was told by the Sacramento County Office of Education it needed to make budget cuts to offset the costs of our contract settlement. Instead Superintendent Aguilar went on a spending spree including $6 million to cash out the vacation of the District’s top administrators.
Fact #2: In March 2019, the Sacramento City Unified School Board passed resolution No. 3060 “On Fiscal Solvency Plan to Save Our Schools” which included the following:
“District Superintendent, Jorge Aguilar, has agreed to forgo any salary increase allowed under his Employment Agreement until the District receives either a qualified or positive certification as defined in Education Code section 42131, subdivision (a)(1).”
The District still has not had a budget that has received “either a qualified or positive certification as defined in Education Code section 42131, subdivision (a) (1)” and yet Superintendent Aguilar has taken a $34,126 increase in his total compensation.
Fact #3: The District has the largest reserve fund in its history: $93 million. That’s 8 times higher than the 2% reserve required by the state.
Fact #4: Since the District’s budget was rejected for the first time in August 2018, the first time an SCUSD budget was rejected in its entire history, the SCUSD reserve has INCREASED by than $23 million. (Ending Fund Balance 2018-19 vs Ending Fund Balance 2019-20).
Fact #5: At its current $89 million (down from the original budget of $101.3 million) the SCUSD budget currently includes $70 million in books and supplies, more than it traditionally spends in this category. Chief Business Officer Rose Ramos has acknowledged that these extra tens of millions of dollars are parked in books and supplies until the District figures out how to spend the dollars.
Fact #6: The District, in a transaction approved by the previous school board on the consent agenda on November 5, 2020 and by the Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE), went forward with the $6 million purchase of unproven portable air filtration units, even after SCTA recommended that the District seek advice from scientific experts. Since then, the units had to be taken out of classrooms when SCTA and SEIU raised health and safety concerns and demanded their removal.
Fact #7: The District is receiving $124 million in new revenue from the federal government as a result of two COVID relief packages (here and here). This does not include the millions more expected to come from the new Biden administration.
Fact #8: Governor Newsom’s California State Budget, which calls for the highest K-12 spending in California history, will result in $100 million or more in new revenue for SCUSD.
Fact #9: Even with Chief Business Officer Rose Ramos’ overly conservative calculations, based on the Governor’s January budget, the District should present a POSITIVELY CERTIFIED Second Interim Budget for board approval in March.
Fact #10: For the District to cut any services to students or to demand $20 million in shifting health care costs onto staff resulting in cuts to take-home pay by as much as 34.6%, or over $17,000 per year, is unconscionable.
Continuing my plan to try to help a bit in the real classrooms of the nation. Not excusing the local districts that ought to be funding these projects, but I prefer to light and candle and curse the darkness at the same time. Multitasking, you know.
This week I'm looking at some music asks, because music generally gets the short end of the too-small stick to begin with, and it's near and dear to my heart. As always, I invite you to donate to one of these , or to comb through the site for something near and dear to your heart, or to just reach out to a local teacher who can use something for her classroom.
Mr. Lewis is at the Ramon C Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts in Los Angeles (known unofficially as Grand Arts High School) and he would like to "take" his students to a virtual choir festival. The pandemic has been hard on performing groups everywhere, so this seems like a nice chance for his group.
Mr. Rodrigues at Homestead Senior High School in Homestead, Florida, would like a flugelhorn. If you're unfamiliar, a flugel is a mellower sibling of the trumpet (Chuck Mangione is the only guy I know of to ever popularize it), and very few high school musicians have one of their own--heck, not that many school programs have one. But it provides a little more richness and variety to the sound, and while I'd be just as happy if everyone had a trombone choir program, this is a worthy addition to any band program.
Ms. Blizzard is at Dearing Elementary School in Dearing, Georgia, (a rural town with no traffic light) and she would like a bass xylophone for their Orff ensemble (she is Orff trained), which is a great percussiony way to get students involved in music. So basically, this would take something cool and make it cooler.
“It’s not enough to conquer the opposition. In a nonviolent struggle, we are committed to fight on until we win our adversaries as friends.”
― The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement
A few weeks ago, in the comment section on one of my blog posts, an observation was made about my tendency towards tilting at windmills. It’s an observation I can’t really dispute. After all the first gift I ever bought my wife was a hardcover copy of Don Quixote. It’s a safe bet that I’m guilty as charged.
It’s with that spirit that I attempt this blog post this morning. One that common sense tells me I should leave unwritten, yet I remain compelled to write it. Probably against my better interests, but hopefully a few will benefit and maybe it will lead to a deeper dive into history. So please accept it in the spirit it’s delivered.
It’s not a post that is ostensibly about education, but it is. The purported importance of education is CONTINUE READING: THERE IS ALWAYS MORE TO CONSIDER – Dad Gone Wild
College Board’s AP Guide said the 2021 Digital AP Exams Require Computers with Cameras–but then changed their mind?
Last week the College Board announced they were making changes to this year’s Advanced Placement exam administration, offering both paper or digital versions. While reading about the online testing options, on the College Board website, I clicked on this 2021 AP® Exam Administration Planning Guide. (I downloaded and archived the AP Guide here on Feb 5, 2021.)
This guide said students would be required to use a computer that has a camera and would have to use their camera to take a picture of their photo ID prior to taking the digital AP exam. The guide also said that schools must “push” (install) exam application software on all devices to be used for digital testing, and the College Board also mentioned that the security application would do so.
The AP planning guide also said, “The exam application includes security features to detect impersonation, plagiarism, or other cheating attempts, and restricts students from returning to answered questions or moving back and forth between unanswered questions.” [emphasis added]
I asked the College Board (on twitter) if students would be required CONTINUE READING: Did College Board change its mind about requiring cameras on this year’s online AP exams? What security software will the online AP require? | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy
