Shawgi Tell: Charter Schools: “Choice” Is Not An Argument | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools: “Choice” Is Not An Argument | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools: “Choice” Is Not An Argument

Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have long ignored serious criticisms of charter schools in a variety of ways. They have always believed, for example, that simply repeating worn-out phrases like “charter schools provide choice” will automatically cause everyone to dismiss the need for any discussion, investigation, and critical thinking about the well-documented negative effects of charter schools on education, society, the economy, and the national interest.

“Choice,” however, is not an argument for the existence or expansion of privately-operated charter schools.

When charter school promoters use the language of “choice,” they want people to:

1. Not recognize that education is an inalienable human right that must be guaranteed in practice by a public authority worthy of the name.
2. Believe that “free market” ideology is the best and most pro-social way to organize education in a modern society based on mass industrial production.
3. Ignore how “choice” leads to greater stratification and segregation in charter schools through their geographic location and selective student enrollment and attrition practices.
4. Disregard the fact that by “choice” charter school promoters really mean education is a commodity, not a social responsibility, and parents and students are consumers, not humans and citizens, who fend for themselves while shopping for a “good” school that hopefully does not close in under 10 years.
5. Think that there is no need to analyze how and why public schools have been set up to fail by privatizers so as to justify the rise of deregulated charter schools.
6. Get used to the disinformation that public schools are automatically bad and charter schools are inherently superior.
7. Ignore the fact that charter schools usually choose parents and students, not the other way around.
8. Overlook the fact that “choice” does not guarantee excellence, stability, or equity. Several thousand deregulated charter schools run by unelected individuals have closed in recent decades.
9. Believe that it does not matter who “delivers” education, but what kind of “results” are produced.
10. Dismiss the fact that “choice” means taking money away from under-funded public schools that educate thousands of students and that public schools in many instances are even compelled to provide some free services to charter schools.

It is not possible to conceal the fact that deregulated charter schools fail and CONTINUE READING: Charter Schools: “Choice” Is Not An Argument | Dissident Voice

Ed Notes Online: Take me home, West Virginia - How will Red for Ed respond as Extreme Voucher Law passed to decimate Public Ed?

Ed Notes Online: Take me home, West Virginia - How will Red for Ed respond as Extreme Voucher Law passed to decimate Public Ed?

Take me home, West Virginia - How will Red for Ed respond as Extreme Voucher Law passed to decimate Public Ed?

I see some of my colleagues salivating over the state teacher strike in West Virginia. Don't hold you breath here in NY. Maybe when the conditions of teachers ... Ed Notes, 2018 -

March 29, 2021

There was much hope here in Mudville about a trigger of militancy in NYC -  but I pointed out teachers in West Virginia were eating pet food - don't forget  - it's the economy, stupid, not the ideology.

One of my fave warriors against ed deform, Jennifer Berkshire with her writing

partner Jack Schneider, authors of Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door were interviewed today with one of my fave podcasters, Sam Seder, on Majority Report - listen to the wide ranging discussion of how ed deform got into the door and where it intends to take us to the end of public ed  - (https://youtu.be/ZX05_S17u9M). But let me focus on just one aspect of the interview.

Jennifer (also check out their podcast - Have you Heard) pointed out that West Virginia legislature passed the most oppressive voucher law you can imagine which fundamentally can kill the entire WV public school system and turn the state into what happened in New Orleans. I've been worried since the pandemic began that this will be an opportunity to tie a noose around public school systems - and watch all the people who are screaming about how important it is for kids to be in school jump ship to virtual learning when it becomes convenient. Jennifer pointed out how fundamentally this is all about saving money and since labor is the major cost of education, de-unionizing and de-skilling teachers is the goal. Since teacher unions are one of the major bulwarks of the Dem Party, I see the threat of killing our unions as greater than the voter suppression movements by Republicans.

The West Virginia story also got mentioned in the libertatian anti-union publication of Mike Antonucci - with maybe a bit of glee CONTINUE READING: Ed Notes Online: Take me home, West Virginia - How will Red for Ed respond as Extreme Voucher Law passed to decimate Public Ed?

Opting Out of TNReady – Tennessee Education Report

Opting Out of TNReady – Tennessee Education Report

OPTING OUT OF TNREADY

Yes, you can opt your child out of this year’s TNReady test. This is true in spite of misleading guidance offered to school districts by the Tennessee Department of Education.

Fortunately, the advocates over at Save our Schools PAC offer some key insight into just how to accomplish this. Here’s a quick rundown:

There are only eight states that allow you to opt your child out of testing. Tennessee is NOT one of those states. However, there are no state laws in TN that require your child to take any TNReady test, so you and your child can refuse the test.

To refuse the test, you’ll need to make your request in writing and explain to your child why they will not be taking the test and to not be pressured into taking the test.

About a week prior to the testing window, send a confirmation email to the school principal. In this email, ask what your child will be allowed or not allowed to do during testing. We found this differs with schools and even CONTINUE READING: Opting Out of TNReady – Tennessee Education Report 

MUST WATCH VIDEO: President of the American Federation of Teachers on schools reopening - CBS News

President of the American Federation of Teachers on schools reopening - CBS News

President of the American Federation of Teachers on schools reopening

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers union, joins Nikki Battiste on CBSN to discuss how school reopening efforts are going so far.

President of the American Federation of Teachers on schools reopening - CBS News

'Boogers down': Biden’s bid to reopen schools may hinge on ‘pooled’ testing - POLITICO

'Boogers down': Biden’s bid to reopen schools may hinge on ‘pooled’ testing - POLITICO

'Boogers down': Biden’s bid to reopen schools may hinge on ‘pooled’ testing

The process is meant to limit the spread of a potential outbreak while minimizing the costs of the frequent large-scale testing needed to keep the disease in check.

A growing number of the nation’s school districts are experimenting with a Covid-19 testing regime they hope will get millions of children back into their classroom — if they can keep up with the price tag.

The Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief law is steering $10 billion toward developing a national school coronavirus testing strategy as its latest bid to reopen schools. That plan is still in flux but some attention has turned to the practice of “pooled” testing that uses a collection of swabs from a fixed group of kids attending classes together. The process is meant to limit the spread of a potential outbreak while minimizing the costs of the frequent large-scale testing needed to keep the disease in check. Pooled testing can extend testing capacity by testing groups of samples at once rather than each person individually. If a pool sample comes back positive, each individual in the pool is then tested.

Massachusetts is the only state to deploy a broad pooled testing program made available to all of its students and staff — about 1 million K-12 children and educators — to reopen this spring. For the first six weeks, the Bay State expects to spend somewhere between $15 million and $30 million doing pooled testing for about half of its more than 1,800 public schools that have opted in. When the state-funded program ends April 30, school districts will be able to funnel money in from the latest round of federal relief. A Rockefeller Foundation-funded study by Mathematica and RAND Corporation of early pooled-testing results found weekly testing of all students, teachers and staff can reduce in-school infections by an estimated 50 percent.

Similarly, in Maryland, Baltimore City Public Schools has put $5.7 million dollars from the federal stimulus toward launching its own program. Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest district in the state, is spending $5 million to kickstart one. CONTINUE READING: 'Boogers down': Biden’s bid to reopen schools may hinge on ‘pooled’ testing - POLITICO

A QUESTIONABLE OFFENSE – Dad Gone Wild

A QUESTIONABLE OFFENSE – Dad Gone Wild

A QUESTIONABLE OFFENSE

“The human being must always be central, not the products and objects of his skill and energy.” 
― Bernard Wolfe, Limbo

It was about 8:30 last night, I was getting ready for the nightly family dog walk. The phone buzzed indicating an incoming text. Curious I picked up the phone to see who was texting.

Gini Walker. Interesting, I hadn’t communicated with her for over a year. What could this be about?

I open the text and read,

TC – you really crossed a line with that image of you and the commissioner. Please take it down.

Typical Gini, no hello. No how you doing. Just a demand. A demand in which I had no idea what she was talking about.

Those who know me, or have been long-term readers have probably gleaned that I don’t respond well to blind demands from people in power. Considering this demand was coming from someone that I’ve become quite disillusioned with. this convo was already off to a bad start.

After a request for clarification, Walker indicated that she was referring to a photo that accompanied a reposting of Friday’s blog post. The post itself referenced the classic season finale of Dallas where Pamala Ewing woke to discover that the entire season was a dream. The episode ended with a shot of Bobby, who’d been declared dead in the season opener, in the shower – very much alive.

In the piece, I attempted to draw parallels with how MNPS seemed to be treating the past school year. Towards the end of the piece, there is further information about the latest Schwinn-anigans, pointing out that Commissioner Schwinn’s husband was looking for a job at the same time as the Schwinn-led TNDOE was writing an application for a federal grant that featured TNTP prominently. Paul Schwinn currently works for TNTP.

The picture in question was not one chosen by me. I am fortunate enough to have some folks out CONTINUE READING: A QUESTIONABLE OFFENSE – Dad Gone Wild

Big Education Ape: Schools Matter: Scandal-Ridden TN DOE Lies to Parents about Opting Out of Tests - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2021/03/schools-matter-scandal-ridden-tn-doe.html

Big Education Ape: What Is Guerrilla Marketing? - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/05/what-is-guerrilla-marketing.html

Joel Westheimer: Three Essential Lessons That COVID Taught Us About Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Joel Westheimer: Three Essential Lessons That COVID Taught Us About Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Joel Westheimer: Three Essential Lessons That COVID Taught Us About Education

Joel Westheimer is a professor of education at the University of Ottawa. He wrote this article for The Ottawa Citizen and shared it with me. This is a good time for me to mention that I strongly believe in content. In the mid-1980s, I was involved with a large committee that wrote the California K-12 History-Social Studies Framework. We realized that whatever we wrote had to be feasible from the point of view of teaching and learning. We selected the key events and developments that teachers would focus on. When we finished our draft, we sent it to teachers across the state. We received more than 1,000 reviews and read each one carefully. We made many changes. We sought in-depth learning, not a swift canoe ride across the centuries. Depth matters more than breadth.

Westheimer wrote:

Three essential lessons COVID-19 has taught us about education

During the pandemic, we rediscovered what teachers and students have always known: that schooling is about relationships, learning is a social process, and a deep-dive into a topic of interest is worth more than a stress-filled endurance swim in the shallows.

When did the Assyrian empire’s reign over Mesopotamia begin and end?

If you don’t know, you have a lot of company and you’re CONTINUE READING: Joel Westheimer: Three Essential Lessons That COVID Taught Us About Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Teacher Tom: When Young Children Lie

Teacher Tom: When Young Children Lie

When Young Children Lie

The average person admits to telling 1.65 lies per day according to one study done on the subject, although even the researchers confess that since they, by necessity, had to rely on self-reporting, people were probably lying toward the low end. Of course, it could also be that we all define things differently: some may consider nothing but outright falsehoods to be lying, while others may be sensitive to even those small lies of omission or exaggeration we commit by way of burnishing our own reputations or saving the feelings of others. 

But however we look at it, we all, to some extent, lie. I try not to lie. You try not to lie. Most of us have internalized the maxim that honesty is the best policy, yet at the end of the day, if we're truthful with ourselves, we can always look back and find those moments when we at least did not tell the full truth. And this is not necessarily a bad thing: evolutionary biologists tell us that lying is an essential part of our evolution as a species, that the ability to tell and detect lies is an important aspect of developing our social intelligence. Of course, as adults, most of us have learned that an over-reliance upon lying is destructive to our social and emotional CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: When Young Children Lie

Unlearning to Write – radical eyes for equity

Unlearning to Write – radical eyes for equity

Unlearning to Write

In my foundations of education course, we discussed the role of evidence and research in education, highlighting the problem with experimental/quasi-experimental research and its use in the so-called real world of day-to-day teaching. I always use medicine as an analogy—such as the recently development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

What I hope to accomplish is to offer students a more nuanced understanding of evidence and research. I stress that based on my nearly 40 years of teaching, gold-standard research matters, but it rarely matters in teaching (versus medicine) the way that many people think.

Teaching and learning, I explain, are extremely complicated.

In the article we examined, Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence, one of the “popular” teaching practices Higgins and Coe claim there is “no evidence for” is discovery learning.

As someone who has spent four decades grounded in discovery learning and using workshop structures when teaching literacy, specifically writing, I find such claims to be condescending and off-base because they are overly simplistic.

In the listing of educational practices there is “no evidence for,” I ask students to consider how research in education often defines “works” or “doesn’t work” CONTINUE READING: Unlearning to Write – radical eyes for equity

A Bold Idea for Testing: Opt-In | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Bold Idea for Testing: Opt-In | Diane Ravitch's blog

A Bold Idea for Testing: Opt-In

The Ossining, New York, school district has a creative response to the federal mandate to administer tests at a time when children’s lives have been disrupted by the pandemic. The superintendent has asked parents to write a letter asking for their child to be tested, that is, to “opt in” to testing.

Gary Stern of the Lower Hudson news (Lohud) reports:

At a time when many school districts are peeved that they are being forced by Washington to administer standardized tests, the Ossining district is taking the provocative step of only giving the tests to students whose parents request it.

This “opting in” approach may mean that few students will take the state-run tests for grades 3-8, which are scheduled for April, May and June. But that’s fine with Ossining officials, who say the tests will be unacceptably disruptive during the pandemic and will yield little meaningful data.

“We’re in a pandemic, and there is a lot our students are going through right now, and our staff,” Ossining Superintendent Ray Sanchez said. “We’re fulfilling the requirements to administer the assessments, and we’re CONTINUE READING: A Bold Idea for Testing: Opt-In | Diane Ravitch's blog

Choosing Democracy: Cesar Chavez Day - Organize

Choosing Democracy: Cesar Chavez Day _ Organize

Cesar Chavez Day - Organize

Cesar Chavez Day 

         

  Cesar Chavez Day is a state holiday in California – one of eight states to recognize the  date, and one of the few holidays  in the nation  dedicated  to a labor leader.   Sacramento and dozens of cities, counties and labor federations will celebrate the life of Cesar Chavez on March 31.

On March 26, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis honored Cesar Chavez and the UFW founders by dedicating the auditorium at the Department of Labor in Chavez’s name. 

The Cesar Chavez celebrations focus on  the struggle for union rights and justice in the fields of California.  Along with Dolores Huerta, Philip Vera Cruz, and others, César created the United Farm Workers  (UFW) the first successful union of farm workers in  U.S. history.  There had been more than ten prior attempts to build a farm workers union.

            Each of the prior attempts to organize farm worker unions were destroyed by racism and corporate power. Chávez chose to build a union that incorporated the strategies of social movements and community organizing  and allied itself  with the churches, students,  and organized labor.  The successful creation of the UFW changed the nature of labor organizing  in the Southwest  and contributed significantly to the birth of Latino politics in the U.S.

            Today, under the leadership of UFW president Teresa Romero only about 8,000  farm workers enjoy benefits on the job. Wages and benefit in farm labor have again been reduced to the pre union levels.  Unionized workers   are incorporated into California's educational, health and civic communities.  The UFW has shown unions that immigrants can  and must be organized. Today the UFW is working to pass a new immigration law that would assist farm workers.    

             Chavez and the UFW are best known helping to create instrumental role in passing the  California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975 under then Governor Gerry Brown  which gives workers collective bargaining rights.  The law was made necessary by the assault on the UFW of the Teamsters Union.  While workers are often able to win elections under the ALRB, they seldom can win a contract.  Growers stall and delay until the workers leave the area. 

        César Chavez, Dolores Huerta,  Philip Vera Cruz, and others deliberately created a multiracial organization, Mexican,  Mexican American, Filipino, African- CONTINUE READING: Choosing Democracy: Cesar Chavez Day _ Organize

Major victory over a corporate charter school chain and their trade association – Los Angeles Education Examiner

Major victory over a corporate charter school chain and their trade association – Los Angeles Education Examiner

Major victory over a corporate charter school chain and their trade association

Original post at Robert’s page on Medium.

On Tuesday, March 23, 2021, I got my second big win in court against a charter school corporation. It was also a major victory over their California Charter Schools Association (“CCSA”) trade association, which tried to use the case to carve out immunity to the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”). I represented @DotKohlhaas in the action.

Here was my tweet from the day prior, after skimming through the tentative:

My first win against a corporate charter school was a year ago as third chair in a suit to overturn a wrongful expulsion of a student of color. The Partnerships to Uplift Communities (“PUC”) charter chain (of convicted felon Ref Rodriguez fame) had violated the student’s due process rights. Violated isn’t a strong enough word for what they did. PUC unilaterally changed the charges at the appeals hearing and then branded the child as a terrorist in his permanent record. Under the tutelage of the brilliant partners at the law firm I was a part-timer at the time (I am currently transitioning to full time there), plus sage advice from @DrPrestonGreen, we built a strong case.

It was my argument that the charter corporation never proved specific intent — a crucial element to Ed. Code § 48900.7, as well as PUC’s glaring lack of notice afforded to the student, that saw the court overturn the wrongful expulsion and give the student their life back.

This latest case was a charter trying to hide all its dirty secrets by not complying with the CPRA. The scandal-ridden The Accelerated Schools CONTINUE READING: Major victory over a corporate charter school chain and their trade association – Los Angeles Education Examiner

PLEASE READ AND SHARE THIS POST: Why I Support Public Education | tultican

Why I Support Public Education | tultican

Why I Support Public Education

By Thomas Ultican 3/29/2021

The original cause for my supporting public education was that my rancher father married a school teacher. Growing up in southern Idaho, I learned many philosophical and theoretical reasons for supporting the establishment and maintenance of public schools from my mother. However, it was from watching mom and her dedicated colleagues in action that I learned to truly respect and appreciate public school.

I remember stories of my father being warned that he better not treat that women wrong. For several years in a row she won the Elmore County sharp shooting contest. She didn’t like to chop a chicken’s head off so she would pull out her rifle and shoot it off.

Mom had some old school attitudes but maintained a mind of her own. There was a period in which she had to come home at lunch time and milk the cow. One Friday, after having to chase the cow across King Hill creek again, she had had enough; didn’t discuss it just loaded that cow into a trailer and took it to market.

In my home, there was no doubt about the value of education and also an abiding belief that the American public education system was unparalleled. My father was a high school basketball referee and an ardent supporter of music study.

As was common in the community, school events were family events. Helping CONTINUE READING: Why I Support Public Education | tultican

NewBlackMan (in Exile) TODAY #BLM #BLACKLIVESMATTER

 NewBlackMan (in Exile)

NewBlackMan (in Exile) TODAY

Big Education Ape: THIS WEEK WITH NEWBLACKMAN (IN EXILE) - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2021/03/this-week-with-newblackman-in-exile-blm_27.html

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