Monday, August 26, 2019

Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement - Zinn Education Project

Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement - Zinn Education Project

Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
On March 8, 1971—while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold—a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.
Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:
I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.
Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracy—known as COINTELPRO—to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black Freedom Movement. The break-in, and the government treachery it revealed, is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school students—and all the rest of us—should learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.
1971(Film) | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History
The film “1971” documents the FBI office break-in by anti-war activists, and the discovery of the COINTELPRO papers.
In recent years, current events discussions in my high school history and government classes have been dominated by names that have piled up with sickening frequency: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. In looking at the Black Lives Matter movement as a response to these injustices, my class came across a 2015 Oregonian article, “Black Lives Matter: Oregon Justice Department Searched Social Media Hashtags.” The article detailed the department’s digital surveillance of people solely on the basis of their use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. My students debated whether tying #BlackLivesMatter to potential threats to police (the premise of the surveillance program) was justifiable. Most thought it was not. But what the Oregonian did not note in the article, and what my students had no way of knowing, was the history of this story—the ugly, often illegal, treatment of Black activists by the U.S. justice system during the COINTELPRO era.
My students had little way of knowing about this story behind the story because mainstream textbooks almost entirely ignore COINTELPRO. Though COINTELPRO offers teachers a trove of opportunities to illustrate key concepts, including the rule of law, civil liberties, social protest, and due process, it is completely absent from my school’s CONTINUE READING: Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement - Zinn Education Project
Image result for COINTELPRO

CURMUDGUCATION: CA: The Homeschool Charter Business Behind The Latest Scandal

CURMUDGUCATION: CA: The Homeschool Charter Business Behind The Latest Scandal

CA: The Homeschool Charter Business Behind The Latest Scandal

If you aren't in California, you may have missed this special little variation on the charter school business model-- homeschooling charters. It's a curious note in the recent big money charter scam in California, which we'll get back to in a moment.

This is what you get if vouchers and charters had a baby and it was raised by homeschooling wolves. Homeschoolers "enroll" their students in a "school," and that "school" gives the family a yearly "allowance" that the family directs the "school" to spend on their behalf. It's totally "legal" and not a profitable scam for circumventing California's tissue-like charter "laws" at all. Some folks love it; others, not so much.


Let me just get this out of your way.
Homeschoolers love it. Here's a homeschooling blog plugging the whole set-up as a way to "customize" their child's education to reflect "that reflects our family’s interests, priorities, learning styles, and values." They get $2600 to have spent on their behalf, and they've used that for music lessons, basketball clinics, gymnastics lessons, field trips, sailing lessons, and curriculum (Amazon and Rainbow Resources are two examples of vendors in that biz). There is no state-0mandated curriculum, so families can select whatever they want. This particular blogger notes that he prefers "to use our funds on experiences and activities." Students do have to take the Big Standardized Test, but for these families, it is a no stakes test. This blogger notes that some families don't even open then envelope when the results arrive.

The charter companies love it. You might ask-- what do they actually do? Well, they have to track CONTINUE READING: 
CURMUDGUCATION: CA: The Homeschool Charter Business Behind The Latest Scandal


Marin students disrupted by San Diego charter school scandal

Marin students disrupted by San Diego charter school scandal

Marin students disrupted by San Diego charter school scandal
Two online charter schools closed by court-appointed receiver

Just as the new school year is starting, dozens of Marin children could be in educational limbo because of recent indictments in Southern California involving online charter schools.
Richard Kipperman, the court-appointed receiver in a San Diego County case involving accusations of a multimillion-dollar online charter school scam, announced in an August 15 letter to California school districts that he was closing the online charter schools involved in the scandal. In Marin, the closures affect 143 students from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Of those students, 141 were enrolled in an independent study program called California STEAM Sonoma II. The others are 12th-graders enrolled in Uplift California North Charter.
“The Receiver intends to transfer each student’s records to the student’s school district of residence on or about Sept. 30, 2019,” Kipperman said in his letter. “Thereafter, parents, guardians, schools or school districts may request copies of the student’s records from each district.”
Mary Jane Burke, Marin County superintendent of schools, said she has sent the names of the children and their grade levels to each of the affected school districts in Marin. Those include Ross Valley, Novato Unified, San Rafael City Schools, Larkspur-Corte Madera, Tamalpais Union, Reed Union, Bolinas-Stinson Union, Sausalito Marin City, Miller Creek, Lagunitas, Mill Valley and Shoreline Unified.
District officials are planning to contact each of the families directly to make sure the students have found another option, she said.
“I’m going to make an assumption that if your child is signed up for a virtual school and it closes, that you’re signed up for another virtual school — but I don’t really know,” Burke said. “If there are children who, as a result of this, are not yet registered for school, we CONTINUE READING: Marin students disrupted by San Diego charter school scandal

Steve Van Zant, left, and Sean McManus are among 11 defendants indicted in a Southern California conspiracy case involving a network of charter schools. Van Zant is a former superintendent of the Sausalito Marin City School District. McManus had ties to Marin charter groups. (Photo via San Diego County District Attorney’s Office) 



School Facilities Matter! In so many ways (how could they not?) – School Finance 101

School Facilities Matter! In so many ways (how could they not?) – School Finance 101

School Facilities Matter! In so many ways (how could they not?)

This post contains a brief summary on the importance of equitable and adequate school facilities – a topic unfortunately missing from my 2018 book. So here it is:
I begin with a conceptual model of how investments in school facilities influence working conditions, employee (specifically teacher) attitudes and behaviors, student outcomes, including physical health and academic outcomes, and how investment in school facilities both directly and indirectly drives local housing and property values (Capitalization).  Figure 1 presents the conceptual model derived from the existing research on investment in school facilities. Investment in school facilities has both direct effects and indirect effects on student outcomes, and cyclical effects on local communities’ overall quality of life.
Figure 1


Source: Constructed by author based on review of relevant literature herein
Regarding direct effects reflected in Figure 1:
  • Higher quality and safer outdoor play spaces lead to improved student health, reducing absences and improving a wide array of short- and long-term student outcomes.
  • Improved air and water quality from new and updated systems contribute positively to student and employee health.
  • More consistent, higher quality lighting, heating and cooling systems contribute positively to student health (mental and physical) and academic outcomes.
Regarding indirect effects on student outcomes: CONTINUE READING: School Facilities Matter! In so many ways (how could they not?) – School Finance 101

How To Start An Anti-Racist Student Group In Your School | PopularResistance.Org

How To Start An Anti-Racist Student Group In Your School | PopularResistance.Org

HOW TO START AN ANTI-RACIST STUDENT GROUP IN YOUR SCHOOL

The painful truth about public education is that racism is as common as bored students and overworked teachers. While many in our home of Seattle take pride in the city’s “progressive” reputation, the students of Seattle Public Schools, especially students of Color, know reality starkly contrasts with this reputation.
In fact, Seattle Public Schools is home to some of the worst racial disparities in the entire country – and the district has known about them for decades and decades. Yet little has changed – exemplified recently by a white teacher calling 911 on a 10 to 11-year-old Black child. To make matters worse, district leaders rarely invite students, those most negatively impacted by this racist system, to the racial-equity problem-solving table.
In Seattle, we decided to stop waiting for an invitation. The NAACP Youth Coalition (N-YC), a coalition of antiracist youth representing 12 high schools and universities in the Seattle area, formed to put a stop to the above realities. In the past two years, we have hosted anti-racism workshops for youth, organized youth panels for educators, and led school board mobilizations. As a result of our efforts, the Seattle School Board endorsed the Black Lives Matter at School movement, one of the first school boards in the nation to do so.



Image of CeCe Chan by Sharon Chang
In these two years of activism, we have learned many lessons on organizing and making change, lessons we want to share with both the youth and educators so that the movement for racial justice can continue to spread.
Step 1: Find like-minded, passionate people in your school
Where there is racism, there are people committed to fighting it. Schools are no exception. It’s just a matter a finding them. And starting small is perfectly fine. As Marge Piercy writes in “The low road,” “Three people are a CONTINUE READING: How To Start An Anti-Racist Student Group In Your School | PopularResistance.Org




Larry Lee: What Charter Pushers Don’t Understand About Rural Communities Like Fruitdale | Diane Ravitch's blog

Larry Lee: What Charter Pushers Don’t Understand About Rural Communities Like Fruitdale | Diane Ravitch's blog

Larry Lee: What Charter Pushers Don’t Understand About Rural Communities Like Fruitdale

Larry Lee writes about a small town in Alabama called Fruitdale. He describes the central role of the public schools in that community. It is the anchor of the community.
The charter lobby doesn’t care about Fruitdale, its history, its people, its future. They have dollar signs in their eyes.
He begins:
Sweet Jesus. It was hot, like really, really hot. But what do you expect on an August afternoon in the middle of a football field just 90 miles from the Gulf of Mexico?
I was there to watch the 2019 version of the Fruitdale Pirates practice. Fruitdale is one of five high schools in Washington County. It’s a 1A school, the smallest classification in Alabama high school sports. There are dozens and dozens of such schools across the state, places where Dollar General coming to town is a big deal. (Fruitdale recently opened one.)
Places where community and school are joined at the hip. Take away the school and you’ve jerked the heart from the community.
This August afternoon coach Johnny Carpenter was getting his 32 players ready for their first game against A. L. Johnson of Marengo County. Carpenter grew up just CONTINUE READING: Larry Lee: What Charter Pushers Don’t Understand About Rural Communities Like Fruitdale | Diane Ravitch's blog

Report: Special Education Kids Missing from Charter Schools | Capital & Main

Report: Special Education Kids Missing from Charter Schools | Capital & Main

Report: Special Education Kids Missing from Charter Schools
Why do California charters enroll far fewer students with disabilities than traditional schools?

A new special ed study released on Wednesday by United Teachers Los Angeles and the California Teachers Association confirms what many California parents, school district officials and advocates for disabled kids have long contended: that Golden State charter schools disproportionately enroll far fewer students with disabilities than what privatizers generally acknowledge. (Disclosure: CTA is a financial supporter of this website.) Using 2016-17 data from three California districts (L.A., San Diego and Oakland unifieds), State of Denial: California Charter Schools and Special Education Students found that a statistically benign gap between the overall special ed enrollments of charters and district schools more than doubled when researchers broke out the numbers for students with the most disabling and expensive-to-support conditions (those classified as “moderate/severe”). Instead of the 11 percent charter and 14.27 percent district in overall special ed enrollments, disaggregation revealed that between 23.7 and 28.9 percent of that population at district schools were classified moderate/severe versus between 12.9 and 16.25 percent for charters. The price of those disparities to the three districts? Between $64.52 million and a staggering $97.19 million.

Learning Curves” is a weekly roundup of news items, profiles and dish about the intersection of education and inequality. Send tips, feedback and announcements of upcoming events to braden@capitalandmain.com, @BillRaden.

Some of the report’s bombshells caught even veteran ed researchers by surprise, co-author Grace Regullano told Learning Curves. “One was just how difficult it was to get the data. These are our most vulnerable students, and you would think that there would be more monitoring of this civil rights issue.” Another was the deep divide uncovered in Oakland, where overall district special ed enrollment was almost twice as much as in Oakland’s charters — 13.5 percent versus 7.6 percent. Which is why, of the seven recommendations offered in an accompanying policy brief, three are devoted to the proactive monitoring of access, accountability and transparency practices at the school-site, state and federal civil rights levels. “[The] enrollment differences raise serious questions about whether some charters are unlawfully either steering such children away, failing to identify students in need of special education, or pushing enrolled students with disabilities out, perhaps through harsh discipline,” observed Daniel J. Losen, the Center for Civil Rights Remedies director at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.
Authors of what was on track to be California’s first-in-the-nation, statewide ethnic studies curriculum framework say they now fear for the integrity of model in the wake of a CONTINUE READING: Report: Special Education Kids Missing from Charter Schools | Capital & Main

“Great” Superintendents? Context and Longevity Matter | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

“Great” Superintendents? Context and Longevity Matter | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

“Great” Superintendents? Context and Longevity Matter

Judging the greatness of superintendents has gone on for decades. Longevity is usually trotted out as the gold standard for being a “good,” “effective,” or “great” superintendent. How long did the superintendent serve? Superintendent-watchers usually dismiss school chiefs who served less than five years as wannabe “great” ones. Between five to ten years, well, perhaps, they can be considered. Serving more than a decade? Then, clearly a candidate.
Why is time such an important factor in judging “greatness?” Every district superintendent is hired to accomplish one or more key tasks defined by the school board or mayor that appoints the eager candidate. Those tasks may be to sustain a successful system, improve a middling one, or resuscitate a collapsed district. As most often happens in the latter case when a school board expects their school chief to turn around a failing district, the newly appointed superintendent even a veteran such as Rudy Crew in Miami-Dade County— disappoints supporters mostly through piling up enemies after tough decisions, budget retrenchment, and political slips with the school board, teachers, or community (or all three).
After serving in Chicago and Philadelphia before taking up the top post in New Orleans (and leaving that position after four years converting most public schools to charters), Paul Vallas put the saga of urban superintendents in stark, if not humorous, terms:
“What happens with turnaround superintendents is that the first two years CONTINUE READING: “Great” Superintendents? Context and Longevity Matter | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

LOOK NO FURTHER  THAN LOS ANGELES FOR THE DAMAGE THAT IS DONE BY "REFORM" SUPERENTENDENTS


Louisiana Educator: State Senator Reveals the Rotten Core of Education Reform

Louisiana Educator: State Senator Reveals the Rotten Core of Education Reform

State Senator Reveals the Rotten Core of Education Reform

One Senator on the Senate Education Committee Tells it Like it is
Please take just a few minutes to view this video of Senator John Milkovich pointing out the serious flaws in education reform instituted under Governor Jindal and Superintendent John White. Here are some of the points made by Senator Milkovich.


  • Lobbyists and bureaucrats have taken over public education
  • Louisiana's education ranking among the states has fallen to its lowest level ever in the 9 years since the appointment of State Superintendent John White.
  • The Common Core Standards are a complete failure, and the materials used to teach Common Core are almost totally ineffective and counter productive.
  • Because of Common Core requirements, important classical literature has been replaced with teaching dry instructional texts. Reading proficiency, as a result, is falling.
  • Discipline in our public schools is out of control in many schools, and teachers are often not backed up by administrators or allowed to use effective discipline in their classrooms.
  • Teachers and students are now being overwhelmed with excessive testing.
  • Superintendent John White may be illegally serving in his position.
Not one other Senator on the committee spoke up to address the problems brought up by Senator Milkovich.
The worthless diploma scandal gets worse
This blog has exposed some of the more serious abuses of our educational system, including the removal of almost all standards CONTINUE READING: 
Louisiana Educator: State Senator Reveals the Rotten Core of Education Reform


CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Courts Thwart Charter Theft

CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Courts Thwart Charter Theft

FL: Courts Thwart Charter Theft


Last fall, the Palm Beach County schools taxpayers voted to increase their taxes so that they could bring their public schools up to speed, specifically in terms of building security and teacher pay.

And they specifically earmarked the money from this four-year tax for public schools.

Some charter schools in Palm Beach County were upset, believing that the law entitles them to a cut of any tax dollars collected for education purposes. This is, after all, Florida, where the state government is working hard to gut the public system and replace it with a profitable privatized system.


So they sued. In January two (later three) charters took the PBC system to court, declaring that they were absolutely entitled to some of that money, regardless of what the voters said. (Because if there's one thing many charteristas agree on, it's that democracy is stupid.) Newspapers like the Palm Beach Post helped out by calling the money in question a "tax windfall", as if this was money that the public system just stumbled over in a brown paper sack stuffed in a principal's attic, and not "the money that voters  specifically voted to spend on public schools."

A judge issued a ruling this week, and it made the charters sad. As reported by Andrew Marra in the Palm Beach Post:

A judge has rejected an attempt by three charter schools to claim a piece of a new $200 million-a-year property tax that voters approved last year for Palm Beach County’s public schools.

Marra nicely incorporates some of the charter slight-of-language: CONTINUE READING: 
CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Courts Thwart Charter Theft


Louisiana: The Failure of Vouchers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Louisiana: The Failure of Vouchers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Louisiana: The Failure of Vouchers

When I first started writing this blog in 2012, Louisiana’s then Governor Bobby Jindal was crowing about his new voucher plan. He and his state commissioner John White insisted that vouchers were a wonderful innovation. They would save poor children from failing public schools. They would give poor children the same choices that rich children have. All the DeVos baloney was served up.
We now know that none of this was true. Most of the voucher money went to backwoods evangelical church schools that did not have certified teachers or a real curriculum. Some of the voucher schools relied on the state money to keep their doors open. The “opportunity” was not for the students, but for the schools, which were glad to have the money from the state.
Now an organization called The Center for Investigative Reporting reveals what we anticipated: most students who use vouchers attend schools that are rated D or F by the State Education Department that funds them. The state is subsidizing no-quality education.
The vouchers are an expensive hoax. They are not saving poor children from failing schools. Most of them ARE failing schools.
This story was produced by FOX8 WVUE, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and WWNO New Orleans Public Radio as part of Reveal’s Local Labs initiative, which supports lasting investigative reporting collaborations in CONTINUE READING: Louisiana: The Failure of Vouchers | Diane Ravitch's blog