School Choice and Charter Proponents Target Public Education in Key States |

School Choice and Charter Proponents Target Public Education in Key States |

School Choice and Charter Proponents Target Public Education in Key States

But teachers and their allies are fighting back in Arizona, Kentucky and elsewhere.

Three years ago in West Virginia, roughly 20,000 educators went on strike and shut down public schools across the state, protesting low pay and high health care costs. Their historic nine-day labor stoppage led to a 5% pay increase for teachers and school service personnel. Inspired by the success in West Virginia, strikes in states including Oklahoma, Colorado and California soon followed.

The uprising sparked a wave of national attention, and the future of teacher organizing seemed more promising than it had in years. Their movement even had a name: “Red for Ed” — which referenced the red clothing educators and their allies wore each time they took to the streets for public schools. A year later, West Virginia educators walked off the job again in an effort to defeat a bill permitting charter schools to operate in their state. This time their success was more limited; teachers watered down the legislation, but lawmakers still rammed a version through in a special session, authorizing three charters to open by July 2023, with potential for more after that.

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Today, it’s school choice advocates who feel they have the momentum. Since the start of the year, two states that helped launch the national teacher uprising in 2018 — West Virginia and Kentucky — have passed some of the most expansive school choice policies in the country. And public education advocates in a third pivotal “Red for Ed” state, Arizona, have been fighting CONTINUE READING: School Choice and Charter Proponents Target Public Education in Key States |

Capital & Main: Eli Broad Wanted to Destroy Public Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Capital & Main: Eli Broad Wanted to Destroy Public Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Capital & Main: Eli Broad Wanted to Destroy Public Education

Upon his death recently, Eli Broad received many laudatory obituaries, describing his philanthropic contributions to the arts and medical research. He even built an art museum in Los Angeles, named for himself. Modesty was not one of his virtues.

Less noted was his determination to disrupt and destroy public education. Not only did he launch an ambitious plan to privatize 50% of the public schools in Los Angeles, but his Broad Superintendents Academy “trained” scores of aspiring superintendents in his philosophy, which meant top-down, tough management and a willingness to close schools with low test scores and replace them with charter schools, no matter how much the schools were loved by students, teachers, parents, and the local community. Anyone could apply to his Academy regardless of previous job experience or lack of education experience.

I was invited to meet Eli Broad at his penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York City about ten years ago. He explained to me that he didn’t know anything about education but knew management. Lack of management skills, he said, was the biggest problem in education.

I have yet to see any evidence that Broad leaders were CONTINUE READING: Capital & Main: Eli Broad Wanted to Destroy Public Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Black Student Struggle: 2021 Study Exposes the Gap - LA Progressive

Black Student Struggle: 2021 Study Exposes the Gap - LA Progressive

Black Student Struggle: 2021 Study Exposes the Gap

For more than a year health experts, researchers and sociologists have loudly proclaimed the obvious: The COVID-19 pandemic has unequally affected people and communities of color in the United States, causing disproportionately higher rates of infection and death. It’s a conclusion so clear that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dedicates part of its website to this reality.

“Racism is a serious public health threat that directly affects the well-being of millions of Americans,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement distributed by the agency last month. “As a result, it affects the health of our entire nation.”

Equally obvious, though, is that the pandemic’s ravages are illuminating problems of inequity that already were long in existence. It’s the urgency of the fight against disease that has given those problems a new currency. And long after COVID-19 is no longer a subject of daily conversation, the issues will remain.

A new report from the University of California, Los Angeles, brings this notion into close focus. Produced by UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools, the report makes it clear that the consistent underperformance of Black public school students in the L.A. area is directly tied to economics, environmental and living conditions, a lack of strategic planning by school districts and administrators, and the same structural inequities that beset other areas of life.

“Much of what we saw prior to the pandemic has only been exacerbated,” Dr. Stanley Johnson Jr., CONTINUE READING: Black Student Struggle: 2021 Study Exposes the Gap - LA Progressive

Why Parents and Students in Los Angeles Won't Go Back + What You Need to Know about Distance Learning in 2021 - LA Progressive

Why Parents and Students in Los Angeles Won't Go Back - LA Progressive

Why Parents and Students in Los Angeles Won’t Go Back

The exact figures may change slightly over the next few weeks, but for the most part, parents and students in the massive Los Angeles Unified School District have had their say. In overwhelming numbers, it appears, they’re not going back to the classroom this school year.

It’s not for a lack of effort on the part of the LAUSD, the nation’s second-largest school district with more than 600,000 students. Quite the opposite: After spending many months describing why it wasn’t safe for students to return to class, district administrators have launched a recent media blitz aimed at convincing parents and students it’s OK to send their children back to campus — an effort that includes detailed explanations of the mitigation and sanitizing measures in place at every school.

But the reluctance is real. It is borne out by LAUSD’s own survey data, which indicates that as of April 1, only about 38% of elementary school children will return to campuses when they reopen in mid-April. Among middle schoolers, the figure drops to 25%, and among high school students it plummets to 16%.

Because those survey figures assume that any nonresponding family is going to remain in distance learning, there’s some wiggle room in the CONTINUE READING: Why Parents and Students in Los Angeles Won't Go Back - LA Progressive

What You Need to Know about Distance Learning in 2021

Introduction

Distance learning has existed long before COVID-19 was unleashed on the world, beginning in 2020. In 2017 alone, an estimated 6.6 million students depended on online platforms to receive their education. Distance learning has always been advancing; the pandemic only boosted its growth as it forced the world to acclimatize to e-learning school education. 

Distance learning may be here to stay

Initially, everyone doubted that e-learning and education in classrooms could yield similar results to traditional methods of learning. In fact, most institutions gave no credence at all to the idea; however, in order to maintain continuity in learning, educators and institutions were left with little choice in the matter. As a result, as lockdowns took hold across the world, soon everyone became acquainted with the benefits of e-learning school education.

Although a quick retreat back to more conventional methods of learning could occur, the shift to an online education e-learning method was destined to become a reality.

Now, world leaders are beginning to speculate what education will look like in a post-COVID-19 era. Although a quick retreat back to more conventional methods of learning could occur, the shift to an online education e-learning method was destined to become a reality. It has become clear that e-learning will likely continue to be adopted as the go-to learning method for the foreseeable future. Throughout this article, we’ll give you some tips on how to benefit from online distance learning — dubbed “distance learning 2021.” Be sure to keep reading for more CONTINUE READING: What You Need to Know about Distance Learning in 2021

Why is California rushing to reopen its schools? Most simply aren't ready | Salon.com

Why is California rushing to reopen its schools? Most simply aren't ready | Salon.com

Why is California rushing to reopen its schools? Most simply aren't ready

Newsom says schools can reopen safely, but many campuses can’t meet the state’s recent guidelines for being open

It's sorely tempting to reduce California's ragged school reopening effort to a couple of central forces. On one side, Gov. Gavin Newsom has maintained that campuses can open safely before all teachers are vaccinated against COVID-19 and expressed frustration over the prospect of long delays. On the other, five teachers unions recently set conditions that make such a spring return seem wildly far-fetched. (Disclosure: Several of the unions are financial supporters of this website.)

Below the waterline, however, this is a story playing out on several complex levels. They involve basic safety practices, adherence to science, the question of what "risk" even means in this context and the looming concern that a return to school under lax protocols will further race and income driven inequities that already pockmark the timeline of COVID-19 cases and deaths across the state.

And there is one number that ultimately trumps all others: 1,037. That is the number of school districts in California – and each will act in its own best interests.

"Everything is at the order of the district and the county," said Chris Nixon, a teacher in the giant Elk Grove Unified School District near Sacramento. "What happens in one district isn't necessarily going to happen in another."

In Los Angeles Unified, by far the largest district in the state, officials have resolutely refused to consider broad reopening, given that the communities it serves remain in the state's highest tier (purple) of COVID infection rates and that the state's teachers and staffers have no apparent priority for vaccination. CONTINUE READING: Why is California rushing to reopen its schools? Most simply aren't ready | Salon.com

CAPITAL & MAIN: Why did the Schools and Communities First initiative lose when other progressive measures passed in California?

Proposition 15 Goes Down Swinging |

Proposition 15 Goes Down Swinging

Why did the Schools and Communities First initiative lose when other progressive measures passed in California?

The 2020 presidential election outcome was a nail-biter, but in California there was another drawn-out, high-stakes contest. On November 10, with more than 90% of the vote tabulated, the contest was called against Proposition 15, which was losing by 3.6 percentage points after a months-long campaign and a week-long ballot count.

The Schools and Communities First initiative, Prop. 15, was launched by a coalition of community organizations, the Service Employees International Union’s California State Council and the California Teachers Association to create more resources for schools and local amenities by changing the commercial and industrial properties tax structure. (Disclosure: The two unions are financial supporters of this website.)

“The anti-15 people did as the pro-13 people did—they hit the right buttons. Tax increases, housing supply—all of that resonates with the California electorate.”

— Sherry Bebitch Jeffe

Prop. 15 would have reset the assessment of California corporate property tax rates that were established by 1978’s landmark Proposition 13, assessing them at present market value. Today most annual corporate property bills are based on rates that have gone un-reassessed for decades. With Prop. 15, Disney Studios’ million-plus-square-foot lot in Burbank would no longer be assessed at $5 and change per foot while some local businesses pay around $200 for the same space.

The California Legislative Analyst estimated that the Prop. 15 reform measure could have raised between $6.5 billion and $11.5 billion a year for local governments and schools. Why then, with a $56-million-plus campaign war chest, did it lose—especially when other progressive measures passed?

“The anti-15 people did as the pro-13 people did—they hit the right buttons,” says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of CONTINUE READING: Proposition 15 Goes Down Swinging |