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Tuesday, February 18, 2020

What it really means when Trump, DeVos and their allies refer to public schools as ‘government schools’ - The Washington Post

What it really means when Trump, DeVos and their allies refer to public schools as ‘government schools’ - The Washington Post

What it really means when Trump, DeVos and their allies refer to public schools as ‘government schools’


If you were listening to President Trump deliver his State of the Union address this month, you heard him refer to public schools as “government schools.” It was not the first time, and you can expect to hear it with increasing frequency from him, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and their allies as they push to increase programs that use public money for private and religious school education.

Trump and DeVos use the term most often with the adjective “failing” attached as a broad denunciation of the public school system, which advocates see as the nation’s most important civic institution. The president and education secretary say their goal is to provide families with the most education options even as they disparage the one that enrolls most of America’s schoolchildren and continues to get high marks from the public.
It isn’t entirely clear where “government schools” originated in this context. This term showed up in a 1929 encyclical from Pope Pius XI on Christian education in which he calls “unjust and unlawful” any “monopoly, educational or scholastic, which, physically or morally, forces families to make use of government schools, contrary to the dictates of their Christian conscience, or contrary even to their legitimate preferences.”
In 1954, a white Southern segregationist who opposed school desegregation used it, as did free-market economist Milton Friedman in 1955. In the mid-2010s, conservatives in Kansas invoked the term during a battle over public education funding. Now, Trump and DeVos use it as they push their No. 1 education priority: Getting Congress to pass a $5 billion tax credit program that would allow use of public money for children to attend private and religious school.
“Government schools” is invoked mostly by people who are suspicious of public institutions and see government as a problem rather than a solution. That sentiment was perhaps best encapsulated by President Ronald Reagan in an Aug. 12, 1986, speech in which he famously said, “'The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.'”
In this line of thinking, schools should be operated like businesses because the private sector and CONTINUE READING: What it really means when Trump, DeVos and their allies refer to public schools as ‘government schools’ - The Washington Post

CURMUDGUCATION: Choice, Parents, Power, Caveat Emptor, and Stupid

CURMUDGUCATION: Choice, Parents, Power, Caveat Emptor, and Stupid

Choice, Parents, Power, Caveat Emptor, and Stupid



Here's an opening sentence from a recent piece of charter advocacy from the74:

But charter schools and the new, more consumer-oriented public education landscape they represent are here to stay.

Well, no. I'm going to skip past the "here to stay" part, because what caught my attention was the "consumer-oriented pub lic education landscape" bit.

Because that's not what choicers have been pushing. What they have pushed, and established to a greater or lesser degree in many cities, is a business-oriented landscape for folks who want to sell an education-flavored product.



The rhetoric is relentlessly focused on the buyer. Let the money follow the child. Let the parents decide. They know the student's needs better than anyone. They should be empowered to make the educational decisions.

What this means is, "Give them the money and let them fend for themselves." Got a complaint, parents? Too bad-- we gave you your education voucher freedom savings scholarship account money. Everything after that was all on you. Caveat emptor.

Suggest that a choice system needs oversight and accountability, and you'll get the next round of CONTINUE READING: 
CURMUDGUCATION: Choice, Parents, Power, Caveat Emptor, and Stupid

Getting Rid of Gym Class | Teacher in a strange land

Getting Rid of Gym Class | Teacher in a strange land

Getting Rid of Gym Class




In 2006, Michigan established a ‘merit curriculum’—a set of HS graduation requirements for every student in MI. There was a lot of fanfare around this standardizing and toughening up, with everyone from the governor to local representatives crowing about rigor and high expectations. Here’s the official blurb:
A high school diploma in Michigan will soon say a lot more about the graduate whose name it bears. It will tell employers that our students have mastered the reading, writing, and math skills required for success in the workplace. It will tell college and university admissions officers and career and technical schools the student is ready for the rigors of post-secondary education. It will tell the world — Michigan is committed to having the best-educated workforce.
Many large, suburban high schools in Michigan already had similar graduation requirements—four math credits, four ELA credits, three science and three specific social studies credits, plus two credits in a foreign language and one apiece in the arts, physical education and health, plus an online or technology class. Other schools, especially smaller and rural schools, were compelled to re-jigger their master schedules, course sequences and staffing.
When state legislatures start tinkering with professional work that used to be the strict purview of school districts and their on-site leadership, weird things happen. One of the big shockwaves of the Merit Curriculum was: Everybody takes algebra! Not only CONTINUE READING: Getting Rid of Gym Class | Teacher in a strange land

Statement of Solidarity In Support of Wet’suwet’en First Nation: All The Darkness Shall Be Exposed To The Light – Wrench in the Gears

Statement of Solidarity In Support of Wet’suwet’en First Nation: All The Darkness Shall Be Exposed To The Light – Wrench in the Gears

Statement of Solidarity In Support of Wet’suwet’en First Nation: All The Darkness Shall Be Exposed To The Light



Today I had the luxury of enjoying time with my child who is home from college for a brief visit. As wonderful as it was to have a day off of work, it felt wrong to enjoy a “holiday” celebrating two colonizers. This feeling was particularly strong for me this year. You see my child is now pursuing their education on the un-ceded lands Canada calls British Columbia. It is a place where a significant struggle for Indigenous rights is unfolding. I feel a responsibility to encourage them to educate themselves, to be a good guest, and to support the self-determination efforts of Indigenous peoples who put their lives on the line to protect their territories and culture. I signed a pledge in support of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation and made a contribution towards their legal fees. Information about various ways you can support can be found on the supporter toolkit page here.
I write this statement of solidarity today, hoping my voice can in some small way honor ongoing Wet’suwet’en resistance to the colonial violence being carried on behalf of Coastal GasLink and other pipeline companies and their investors, many of which have ties to the United States. If you haven’t been following the Royal Mounted Canadian Police’s armed CONTINUE READING: Statement of Solidarity In Support of Wet’suwet’en First Nation: All The Darkness Shall Be Exposed To The Light – Wrench in the Gears

Shawgi Tell: Federal Charter Schools Program, a Lifeline for Owners of Capital, Under Threat | Dissident Voice

Federal Charter Schools Program, a Lifeline for Owners of Capital, Under Threat | Dissident Voice

Federal Charter Schools Program, a Lifeline for Owners of Capital, Under Threat




Neoliberals established the Federal Charter Schools Program in 1994, three years after the nation’s first charter school law was passed in Minnesota. Since then, billions of public dollars have been handed over to privately-owned-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools through the federal program. The money is usually used for charter school start-up costs.
Putting aside the persistently high failure rate among charter schools and the rampant corruption and waste in the segregated charter school sector, charter school advocates are now worried that President Trump’s latest budget (FY21), which is rarely approved as is by Congress, may disadvantage charter schools by potentially depriving them of public funds that belong to the public. President Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, want to lump more than two dozen education programs, including charter school funding, into one large grant ($19.4 billion) given to the states to do with as they wish, which would mean that public money for privately-owned-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools would not be so readily available. The stand-alone $440 million Federal Charter School Program would in effect disappear and it would become harder for privately-owned-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools to seize public funds under such an arrangement. This change is said to empower states and remove some of the “federal footprint” from education. But an alternative interpretation, one that only time will reveal to be true or false, is that such a governance shift will restrict access to the charter school sector by “smaller players” and privilege the main monopolies in this deregulated sector. The “big players” in CONTINUE READING: Federal Charter Schools Program, a Lifeline for Owners of Capital, Under Threat | Dissident Voice

It's Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... A VERY BUSY DAY | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007


It's Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... A VERY BUSY DAY 
 The latest news and resources in education since 2007




A Look Back: Students Remember More When They Tell Stories

I thought that new – and veteran – readers might find it interesting if I began sharing my best posts from over the years. You can see the entire collection here . In 2012, I wrote a short piece for ASCD In Service titled Students Remember More When They Tell Stories . Educators might still find it useful. I also include additional information on the topic among the many links in The Best Sources
New Resources On Race & Racism

I’m adding these new resources to various “Best” lists. You can find links to all of those many lists that relate to race and racism at “Best” Lists Of The Week: Resources For Teaching & Learning About Race & Racism: Slave Auction Sites is a NY Times interactive. I’m adding it to USEFUL RESOURCES FOR LEARNING ABOUT THE 400TH ANNIVERSARY OF BRINGING ENSLAVED AFRICANS TO AMERICA . Why School Integr


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SEL Weekly Update

I’ve recently begun this weekly post where I’ll be sharing resources I’m adding to The Best Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Resources or other related “Best” lists. You might also be interested in THE BEST SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING RESOURCES OF 2019 – PART TWO Finally, check out “Best” Lists Of The Week: Social Emotional Learning Resources . Here are this week’s picks: Trump’s words, bullied kids
Most Popular Posts Of The Week

I’m making a change in the content of the regular feature. In addition to sharing the top five posts that have received the most “hits” in the preceding seven days (though they may have originally been published on an earlier date), I will also include the top five posts that have actually appeared in the past week. Often, these are different posts. You might also be interested in IT’S THE THIRTE
Update About Videos On This Blog

ElisaRiva / Pixabay Edublogs is a great platform for blogging, and one of the reasons it’s so great is because it’s constantly upgrading itself. Unfortunately, its most recent upgrade has resulted in any videos that had been embedded in 
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

A surprise big spender funds attack campaign mailers in key L.A. school board races - Los Angeles Times

A surprise big spender funds attack campaign mailers in key L.A. school board races - Los Angeles Times

A surprise big spender funds attack campaign mailers in key L.A. school board races

The barrage of campaign mail flooding voters in a Los Angeles school board race includes images of a child holding what appears to be a gun, with the message that school board member Jackie Goldberg is responsible for putting children at risk from gun-related violence.
The multiple mailings that Goldberg calls “pieces of lies” also suggest that she is responsible for the notorious sexual misconduct at Miramonte Elementary that came to light in 2012, and that she doesn’t care about Latino children.
“I’ve never before in my life been attacked with vicious lies like this,” said Goldberg, 75, who first served on the school board in the 1980s before being elected to the L.A. City Council and state Assembly.
Goldberg, who is running for reelection in the March 3 primary, finds herself in the crosshairs of Bill Bloomfield, a wealthy, retired businessman from Manhattan Beach, who has spent close to $2 million so far in two L.A. school board campaigns.
In Goldberg’s District 5, which stretches from neighborhoods north and east of downtown to the cities of southeast L.A. County, he has spent more than $1 million through Monday’s reported totals. In District 7 — the South L.A.-Harbor seat held by termed-out Board President Richard Vladovic — Bloomfield has so far spent nearly CONTINUE READING: A surprise big spender funds attack campaign mailers in key L.A. school board races - Los Angeles Times




Support Scott for LAUSD 


Aaron Wright: The Unintended Consequences of IDEA - NANCY BAILEY'S EDUCATION WEBSITE

The Unintended Consequences of IDEA

The Unintended Consequences of IDEA




By Aaron Wright
It is undeniable that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has aided educational access for autistic children. Prior to the first iteration of the law, children with disabilities did not necessarily have the right to a public education.
However, an unforeseen side effect of the IDEA’s deficit-oriented focus upon disability has created a dilemma for parents of autistic children and has fostered a problem-oriented societal approach to autistic people in general.
My daughter and Max Benson (#ShineOnMax) entered the public school system in Davis, California, at the same time as schoolmates. For our families, and families like ours, kindergarten was the next step on an already-established path of parental advocacy.
Enrolling a child in special education is not the same as signing someone up for T‑ball or a recreational soccer team. And it is certainly not the same as approaching your pediatrician for help with your infant or toddler who is displaying developmental delays.
It is often a tall order to obtain educational services for your child from an entity solely CONTINUE READING: The Unintended Consequences of IDEA

CURMUDGUCATION: How To Improve The Quality Of Teaching With Tools Districts Already Have At Hand (And How To Mess It Up)

CURMUDGUCATION: How To Improve The Quality Of Teaching With Tools Districts Already Have At Hand (And How To Mess It Up)

How To Improve The Quality Of Teaching With Tools Districts Already Have At Hand (And How To Mess It Up)

There is never a shortage of ideas about how to improve the quality of teaching in U.S. classrooms. From the intrusive and convoluted (“Let’s give every student a test and then run the test through a complex mathematical formula and use it to identify the strongest and weakest teachers and then fire the weak ones and replace them with strong ones, somehow”) to the traditional and banal (“Time for a day of professional development sessions that most of you will find boring and useless”), tied to either threats (“We’ll fire you!”) or rewards (“Merit pay!”), school systems and policy makers have come up with a wide variety of approaches that don’t do a bit of good. 
And yet, there is a very effective method that not only improves the quality of teaching in classrooms, but increases the chances of retaining good teachers in a district. Best of all, every district in the country already has every resource it needs to implement the technique. Some are even required to do it, though many mess it up badly. What’s the magic technique?
Mentors. 
The only resource needed is a good, experienced teacher to mentor a new teacher for a year, or even two or three.
In the old days, new teachers found their mentors through happenstance. Like many beginning teachers, I found my first mentors in the staff room during lunch. If I had eaten a different shift, I might not have met them at all. I also had the good fortune to be in an unconventional education program; the same professor who supervised me during my student teaching also visited my classroom during my first year, and I CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: How To Improve The Quality Of Teaching With Tools Districts Already Have At Hand (And How To Mess It Up)

National Education Policy Center: Are Zillow and Real Estate Agents Promoting Segregation? | Diane Ravitch's blog

National Education Policy Center: Are Zillow and Real Estate Agents Promoting Segregation? | Diane Ravitch's blog

National Education Policy Center: Are Zillow and Real Estate Agents Promoting Segregation?



How do renters or buyers judge the quality of the schools zoned to their prospective homes?
Often it starts not with schools or teachers or students, but with the real estate industry.
Two recent pieces of investigative journalism call attention to a prominent flaw with this system: Realtors and real estate websites alike share assessments that downgrade schools that serve higher percentages of low-income and minority students, while also serving to maintain segregated housing patterns by steering Whites away from districts that serve students of color.
For a series of articles published earlier this month, the Newsday newspaper in Long Island paired testers of different ethnicities and races and had them seek similar homes from the same realtors.
The newspaper found that realtors repeatedly steered White buyers away from school districts enrolling higher percentages of minoritized residents, typically using veiled language. For example, they told White buyers that one community was an area to avoid “school district-wise” or “based on statistics.” Yet that district’s 90 percent Black and Hispanic high school boasted a 96 percent four-year graduation rate and above-average performance compared to the rest of the county.
In a study of the areas investigated by NewsdayNEPC Fellow Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University found that a one percent increase in Black/Hispanic enrollment corresponded with a 0.3 percent decrease in home values. In other words, a home worth $415,000 at the time of the study in 2010 would cost $50,000 more in a 30 percent Hispanic/Black district as compared to a 70 percent Hispanic/Black district.
Wells and her team compared two districts with similar housing stocks and socioeconomic backgrounds but different percentages of Black, Hispanic, and White residents. Although Wells said realtors discounted the quality of the schools of the majority Black/Hispanic area, her team found few differences when they actually visited and studied the district.
“There didn’t seem to be a huge difference at all in the curriculum and the quality of the teachers,” she told the newspaper. “So, they [real estate agents] do play an important role in steering people away from certain districts that are becoming more racially, ethnically diverse and less White, in particular.”
An internet-era wrinkle to these longstanding practices was documented and described last week in an article published in the education-focused news site Chalkbeat. The site’s analysis found that school ratings featured on popular real estate sites like Zillow and Realtor.com—ratings assigned by the non-profit corporation called GreatSchools—nudged buyers toward schools with higher percentages of White students by assigning lower ratings to schools with higher percentages of Black and Hispanic students. This happened even when GreatSchools’ own evidence showed that these schools were doing a good job growing the scores of their students.
Specifically, although student’s test score growth is also considered, it’s worth a much smaller share of a school’s “grade” than proficiency, a factor that greatly penalizes schools serving students with fewer opportunities to learn due to societal inequalities outside the realm of the school.
More than that, the GreatSchools algorithm is overwhelmingly about these test scores, largely ignoring other factors of school quality. Rather than assessing the degree to which all students are provided opportunities to learn, test results tabulate outcomes that are profoundly influenced by the unequal opportunities and resources offered to White students versus students of color.
Alternative approaches are available, but they require us to truly and deeply learn about the school. Superficial measures like those used by GreatSchools and its real estate customers must be set aside. One example of such an alternative approach is NEPC’s Schools of Opportunityrecognition program for high schools, which uses a holistic assessment of school quality. The application and evaluation processes consider how these schools are broadening and enriching learning opportunities, creating and maintaining a healthy school culture, and implementing a variety of research-based approaches that close opportunity gaps.
Yet it is the GreatSchools ratings that are viewed by 150 million users of real estate software per year. And there’s evidence that it’s having an effect: A recent study found that property values in areas with a high GreatSchools rating increased by nearly $7,000 over three years, furthering the discriminatory real estate cycle that has always existed in the United States.
CONTINUE READING: National Education Policy Center: Are Zillow and Real Estate Agents Promoting Segregation? | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems (second edition) | School Finance Indicators Database

The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems (second edition) | School Finance Indicators Database

The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems

Image result for The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems
When it comes to American education, few policy areas are as misunderstood — or as crucial — as school finance. Over the past several years, a political and empirical consensus has emerged about the importance of equitable and adequate school funding for high quality K-12 education. In other words, the evidence is clear that money does, indeed, matter.
Certainly, debates about how education funds should be spent are also important, and money should be spent wisely. But there are few options for improving America’s schools that don’t require adequate and sustained investment, particularly for disadvantaged students. And while maintaining efficiency is important, the fact is that districts cannot spend money wisely that they do not have.
In this report, we present key findings from the second release of our School Finance Indicators Database (SFID), a public database of sophisticated but user-friendly state school finance measures going back to 1993. This latest version of the SFID includes data up to 2017 (the 2016-17 school year).
The database includes approximately 130 variables, but in this report we focus on three key school finance measures: effortadequacy, and progressivity. As a whole, we feel that these three measures provide a succinct and informative overview of the adequacy and fairness of states’ school finance systems.
Our indicators are most appropriately interpreted on a state-by-state basis, but in this report we do attempt to present some calculations of national averages and trends in those averages. A summary of our key findings on our “core indicators” is as follows:


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Effort

Effort (or fiscal effort) measures how much of states’ total economic resources or capacity are spent directly on K-12 education. States with smaller economic capacity must exert greater effort than states with greater capacity to raise the same amount of revenue for their schools. Our measures allow us to determine whether states lag behind in spending because they don’t have the capacity to raise revenue (e.g., they have smaller economies from which to draw tax revenue), or because they refuse to devote sufficient resources to education. 
  • The typical state devotes about 3.5 percent of its capacity (i.e., Gross State Product) to K-12 education. Individual states’ effort levels range from about 2.4 percent in Nevada to over 5 percent in Vermont.
  • Other higher effort states include Wyoming (4.7), New Jersey (4.6), New York (4.5), and Alaska (4.5). Other lower effort states include Arizona (2.6), North Carolina (2.7), Delaware (2.8), and Tennessee (2.8). Most states, however, are within 0.5 percentage points of the national average (though even small differences can translate into large amounts of revenue, particularly in states with large economies).
  • The U.S. average effort increased from 3.7 percent in 2004 to a high of 4.1 percent in 2009. This was followed by a five year decline between 2009 and 2014, stabilizing at roughly 3.5 percent since then. In fact, between 2009 and 2017, fiscal effort decreased at least nominally in every single state except Wyoming. Overall, then, average effort has not rebounded since the Great Recession, and is slightly lower in 2017 than it was in 2004.

Adequacy

While effort measures how hard states and districts work to raise funds for their public schools, adequacy measures address whether the amount raised is enough. Our primary measure of adequacy compares current education spending, by district poverty quintile, to spending levels that would be required to achieve national average test scores. In other words, we define adequacy in terms of a common “benchmark” (national average scores) that is educationally meaningful, using estimates from complex models that take into account factors such as student characteristics, labor market costs, and district characteristics.
  • On average, spending on the highest poverty districts (80-100th percentile poverty) is approximately 70 percent of estimated adequate levels. That is, the typical state spends 30 percent less than it would need to for students in its highest poverty districts to achieve nationally average test scores.
  • There are only six states in which spending on the highest poverty districts exceeds estimated adequate levels: Wyoming; Delaware; New Hampshire; Nebraska; Connecticut; and New York. Conversely, current spending on these highest poverty districts is less than half of the adequate level in five states: Arizona; New Mexico; California; Texas; and Mississippi.
  • Nationally, the situation is not much better in the second highest poverty districts (60-80th percentile district poverty), where spending is, on average, about 78 percent of required amounts. In contrast, spending is above our estimated adequate levels for the lowest poverty (0-20th percentile) and slightly higher in the second lowest poverty (20-40th percentile) districts.
  • In general, states are spending enough on their lower poverty districts and not enough on their higher poverty districts (and their testing outcomes generally reflect this pattern).
  • There is a relationship between fiscal effort and adequacy — that is, states that spend more of their “economic pie” on education tend to exhibit more adequate spending levels. Of particular concern are states, such as Arizona, that spend inadequately and put forth low effort, as well as states, such as Mississippi, that fail to achieve adequate funding levels despite putting forth relatively high effort levels.

Progressivity

Put simply, progressive funding systems are those in which higher poverty districts, all else being equal, receive more revenue than lower poverty districts. Regressive funding systems, in contrast, allocate more revenue to wealthier districts than they do to poorer districts. Progressivity (sometimes called “fairness”) is important because it is generally acknowledged that students from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to require more resources than their more affluent peers to achieve the same level of educational outcomes. Our primary progressivity measure controls for factors — such as poverty, labor market costs, population density, and district size — that affect the value of the education dollar. These controls allow us to compare district and state school revenues in a way that accounts for differences that are largely outside the control of education policymakers. 
  • A handful of states, such as Wyoming, Alaska, and Utah, allocate revenue in a strongly progressive manner, whereas funding is highly regressive in Illinois and Nevada.
  • There are only ten states in which high poverty districts receive at least 10 percent more revenue than zero poverty districts. In 28 states, high poverty districts actually receive less revenue. In other words, the vast majority of states’ finance systems fund their high and low poverty districts either similarly or regressively.
  • Accordingly, on average, state and local education funding in the U.S. is neither progressive nor regressive. That is, the highest poverty districts in the typical state tend to receive similar amounts of revenue, all else being equal, as do the lowest poverty districts.
  • U.S. average progressivity has increased very modestly over the past two decades, going from minimally regressive in 1997 (revenue in the highest poverty districts was 3-4 percent lower than in the lowest poverty districts) to minimally progressive in 2017 (revenue was about two percent higher in the highest poverty districts compared with the lowest poverty districts). At the national level, education funding has been non-progressive for the past two decades.
Overall, then, our findings indicate that there are several states in which education funds are both adequate and distributed equitably. In general, however, resources in most states tend to be allocated regressively or non-progressively, and funding for higher poverty districts in the vast majority of states falls far short of estimated adequacy levels (in many cases reflecting a lack of effort). 
We do not provide state rankings or grades in this report, as the interplay between effort, adequacy and progressivity is far too complex to be boiled down to such simple measures. We do, however, include recommendations as to how researchers, policymakers, and the public can use our findings, as well as our database, to evaluate state systems and inform debates about improving school finance in the U.S.

Authors: Bruce D. Baker (Rutgers University); Matthew Di Carlo (Albert Shanker Institute); and Mark Weber (Rutgers University)

Download the full report
Download the press release
Download the full dataset or use data visualizations

Previous editions of the report: First edition (2019)
The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems (second edition) | School Finance Indicators Database