With A Brooklyn Accent: Why Do Current School Policies Neglect What Works Best in High Needs Schools?

With A Brooklyn Accent: Why Do Current School Policies Neglect What Works Best in High Needs Schools?:

Why Do Current School Policies Neglect What Works Best in High Needs Schools?

In the course of the more than 300 oral history interviews we did for the Bronx African American History Project, we found that the greatest in school contributors to educational success, separate from family, church and neighborhood influences, were personal relationships developed with teachers, coaches, arts instructors and school counselors. Such relationships were mentioned in literally scores of interviews we conducted with Bronx residents, most of them African American, who grew up in the borough from the 1930's through the 1960's. They developed during school hours, in practices and rehearsals that took place after school, and during night centers and after school programs. In some of the interviews we conducted, mentoring by teachers, coaches, music instructors, and advisors to students publications was described as "life changing."

If this evidence is at all persuasive, and I think it is, then we need to ask why virtually every dominant education policy makes relationship building and mentoring so difficult. Today, many Bronx schools lack sports teams and arts programs, have revolving door teaching staffs, and lack the counseling staffs to With A Brooklyn Accent: Why Do Current School Policies Neglect What Works Best in High Needs Schools?:

The Biggest Charter School Theft in Georgia History | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Biggest Charter School Theft in Georgia History | Diane Ravitch's blog:

The Biggest Charter School Theft in Georgia History

Molly Bloom of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes here about the biggest theft in the brief history of charter schools in Georgia. That state is in the process of expanding the number of charters and is considering creating an “Achievement School District,” modeled on the failed ASD in Tennessee, in which low performing schools are turned over to charter operators.

Here is the story of Atlanta’s Latin Academy Charter School.

A $12,000 charge at a strip club. Thousands of dollars spent at Mercedes-Benz of Buckhead. ATM withdrawals of hundreds of dollars at a time.

The charges to Atlanta’s Latin Academy Charter School should have raised eyebrows. For the top state education officials and corporate executives on the school’s board, they should have set off earsplitting sirens.

Instead, the charges continued for years, siphoning more than $600,000 in taxpayer dollars that should have been spent on students.

Christopher Clemons, the school’s founder, has been charged with fraud and theft in the largest such case in Georgia charter school history.

Clemons left Atlanta after the losses were discovered.

He left a rented townhome strewn with Hermes boxes, lease paperwork for a new BMW, used boarding passes and a Rolex receipt.

He left the school so financially troubled that board members closed it.

He left nearly 200 children with few options.

And he left a cautionary tale for Georgia’s growing charter school The Biggest Charter School Theft in Georgia History | Diane Ravitch's blog:

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: June Is Busting Out

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: June Is Busting Out:

ICYMI: June Is Busting Out

Here's edu-reading to kick off your June. 

How Five Lost Minutes Altered Our Class Culture

A look how even a small shift in how time is used can have a huge impact on the classroom.

Boston To Protesting Students: You're Not Worth It

Jennifer Berkshire takes a look at how Boston reacted, or didn't, to student protests about massive budget cuts.

The Assault on Public Education in North Carolina

Valerie Strauss runs a piece from Stuart Egan that provides a one-stop collection of all the ways North Carolina's citizen-hating legislature has worked to dismantle public education.

Failing the Test

Capital and Main runs a series of pieces looking at the charter industry. This will take you a while to work through, but it's worth it.

Chester Uplands: Exhibit A for Broken Charter Law 

The most effed-up funding mess in Pennsylvania, highlighting everything that is so deeply wrong with how we handle charter schools in this state. 

English Teacher Re-Titles Classic Poems as Clickbait

One more shot fired in the battle to make classic lit appealing in the internet era. Fun times.

The LA Times Editorial a Distraction

This week the LA Times was apparently hit on the head and ran an editorial critical of the charter industry. Nancy Bailey reminds us of all the reasons we shouldn't get too excited.

Trump University Shows Why For Profit Motives Don't Belong in Education

Probably the only useful thing there is to learn from Trump U-- just how bad naked marketeering looks in education.

Oklahoma's Teacher Shortage: Not Just Salaries

Oklahoma is 49th in teacher salaries, and working hard to drop that lost spot. They started the year with 1,000 unfilled teaching jobs and handed out 1,000 emergency certificates to, well, anybody with a pulse. This is the first of a three-part series considering some real ways to address their shortage. Lessons for everybody here.

Third Way or the Highway

Jennifer Berkshire went to the latest Massachusetts education profiteer confab. What she found there.

What I Hope To Tell My Kids about Muhammad Ali

Jose Vilson reflects on what to tell his students about the death of one of America's great-- and imperfect-- athletes.



 CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: June Is Busting Out:

Give the Democratic Party Your Two Cents

Yes, there's every reason to believe that the Democratic Party is pretty thoroughly run through with corporate shills, oligarchic toadies, and neoliberal tools. It is also true that a party platform is like the line-up for an all-star game-- hotly debated one day and completely forgotten a month later.However. Sometimes it takes a hundred hits of the hammer to crack open the stone. Sometimes it ta

39 by Peter Greene / 18h 

Does High GPA = Low Creativity?

In April, research was released that suggests that students with higher grades are actually less innovative than their lower-graded peers.The research comes from Matthew Mayhew, assoiciate professor of higher education at New York University, working with grad student Benjamin Selznick. The two surveyed over 10,000 undergrad and grad students at colleges and universities in four different counties

44 by Peter Greene / 20h 

Norms vs. Standards

I've found myself trying to explain the difference between norm and standards reference multiple times in the last few weeks, which means it's time to write about it. A lot of people get this distinction-- but a lot of people don't. I'm going to try to do this in plain(ish) English, so those of you who are testing experts, please forgive the lack of correct technical terminology.A standards-refere

200+ by Peter Greene / 1d 

JUN 03

Moskowitz Schadenfreude

Eva Moskowitz, the super-well-paid queen (almost a cool half million) of Success Academy, finally had more than just a lousy day. She flat out lost one. I know it's not nice, but let's share a little schadenfreude over the defeat of a woman whose defiant hubris has been a bamboo shoot under the fingernails of educators all across Ne York.The plan has been to expand the SA empire by adding Pre-K. B

62 by Peter Greene / 2d 

JUN 02

How To Blackmail a Teacher

This is not a post about some reformster program or educational policy. This is about just how low someone can go. This is about one of the worst websites I have ever come across.TeacherComplaint.com is a site that looks clunky, but makes an offer that seems appealing:TeacherComplaints.com - A Unique Web Site which allows Students & Parents to take control of what goes on in school!Do you feel

46 by Peter Greene / 3d 

JUN 01

Death Notice for Neoliberalism?

Neo what? You may not be paying enough attention to political labels and categories, particularly when they don't seem to fit any of the standard Dem-liberal vs. GOP-conservative model.Neoliberalism was born in the thirties in Europe (where it was also known as the "Middle Way" or the "Third Way"). Its central tenet is that private corporations ought to be free to do whatever t

65 by Peter Greene / 3d 

The New Teach for America-- Now With Less "Teach"

Teach For America likes to reinvent itself from time to time, searching for whatever is currently the sweet spot in the market. And as Emma Brown explains in yesterday's Washington Post, TFA has stepped into the transmogrifier once again, and has emerged with a bit of mission creep.The latest shift is prompted by a notable drop in TFA's recruiting juice. As Brown reports, applications are down 35%

100+ by Peter Greene / 4d hi

La. BESE Talks to Itself About John White’s Two Lawsuits | deutsch29

La. BESE Talks to Itself About John White’s Two Lawsuits | deutsch29:

La. BESE Talks to Itself About John White’s Two Lawsuits

This post features an email from Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary (BESE) president James Garvey to other BESE members concerning the lawsuits,White vs Finney, White vs. Deshotels et al.  and the December 15, 2015, judgment of Deshotels vs. White.

Garvey’s email also references this April 21, 2016, USDOE FERPA guidance letterwritten in response to John White.

(I must note the irony in White seeking FERPA guidance given that in 2013, White had sent student social security numbers to be stored with inBloom– along with ethnicity and race. Except he did not publicly admit to sending SS#s– inBloom clarified it. And White stated that the inBloom relationship was over. Except it wasn’t.)

Below is Garvey’s email, dated June 03, 2016, in which he does not stop to consider that individuals are seeking detailed data from LDOE because they don’t trust White– the same guy who tried to pass off a fabricated voucher report to the full BESE boardjust three months ago.

No trust, for good reason.

Note that Garvey focuses on the Deshotels vs. White judgment and resulting White vs. Deshotels et al. lawsuit. He doesn’t address details of White vs. Finney, though he could be alluding to parts of it.

From: “James_Garvey@hmhlp.com” <James_Garvey@hmhlp.com>
To: “Shan N. Davis” <Shan.Davis@LA.GOV>, “Kira Orange Jones” <Kira.OrangeJones@LA.GOV>, “Holly Boffy” <Holly.Boffy@LA.GOV>, “Kathy Edmonston” <Kathy.Edmonston@LA.GOV>, “Gary Jones” <Gary.Jones@LA.GOV>, “Sandy Holloway” <Sandy.Holloway@LA.GOV>, “Tony Davis” <Tony.Davis@LA.GOV>, “doris.voitier@sbpsb.org” <doris.voitier@sbpsb.org>, “Thomas Roque” <Thomas.Roque@LA.GOV>, “Lurie Thomason” <Lurie.Thomason@LA.GOV>
Subject: FOIA Suits

BESE Members,

I have received from several of you questions about the recent 2 suits that were filed by the Louisiana DOE regarding FOIA requests and about the 

La. BESE Talks to Itself About John White’s Two Lawsuits | deutsch29:

Whitewashing ‪Muhammad Ali‬: Our Racist Past, Present, and Future – the becoming radical

Whitewashing ‪Muhammad Ali‬: Our Racist Past, Present, and Future – the becoming radical:

Whitewashing ‪Muhammad Ali‬: Our Racist Past, Present, and Future

Throughout my ‪social media connections, in the wake of ‪Muhammad Ali‬’s death, a warning and a prediction were common: do not allow ‪Muhammad Ali‬ to be whitewashed and watch as people whitewash ‪Muhammad Ali‬.

On ESPN radio, during a show soliciting people to call in about ‪Muhammad Ali‬, I listened as George Foreman shared an anecdote about ‪Muhammad Ali‬ and Foreman discussing God, reaching the conclusion that ‪Muhammad Ali‬ transcended race.

Muhammad Ali‬ did not transcend race. A black man, he was race. He punched racism in its cowardly face.

This whitewashing of ‪Muhammad Ali‬ has a long history, in fact. It is what we do in the U.S. to mask our racist past, to deny our racist present, and to insure our racist future.

In 2012, Michael Ezra explained: “[Muhammad Ali’s] emergence as boxing’s eminence grise, one of the country’s most beloved figures, tells us much about how Americans construct the past to make sense of the present.”

After outlining Muhammad Ali’s tumultuous fame and infamy, Ezra concluded about the resurrected and recreated Muhammad Ali: “But Ali’s return to glory has come at a price; it is predicated on the whitewashing of his past and the silencing of his voice.”

Under the weight of disease and now shrouded in death, Muhammad Ali has been subsumed by the very demon of the U.S. that he chose to fight with dire consequences to himself and his career as a boxer.

Muhammad Ali has been reduced to a caricature to suit white America in the same way Martin Luther King Jr. has been trivialized as a passive radical.

“Transcending race,” “post-racial,” and “I don’t see race” are codes that blind of progressive racism, of what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “elegant racism.”

The most vile examples came when Muhammad Ali died and mostly, but not exclusively, right-wing political leaders—who are racists, who court racists, who are xenophobes, who court xenophobes, who are Islamophobic, and who court Islamophobes—offered effusive praise Whitewashing ‪Muhammad Ali‬: Our Racist Past, Present, and Future – the becoming radical:

CURMUDGUCATION: Pearson & Irony Overload

CURMUDGUCATION: Pearson & Irony Overload:
Pearson & Irony Overload

Here's an article about a familiar topic in education-- "Why Teachers Are Leaving the Classroom, and the Effort To Get More To Stay." True, the topic has been hit pretty thoroughly, but one more piece on the topic can't hurt and perhaps this particular website reaches a different audience than-- wait. What?

Yes, this article about the teacher shortage is on LearnED, the website covering News About Learning and operated by Pearson. Yes, that Pearson. The All Your Education Business Are Belong To Us Pearson.

So. What does Pearson know about the teacher shortage and how to fix it? Well, strap on your irony impact helmets, boys and girls. This ride is short, but it's designed for maximum psychic whiplash.

The unnamed writer opens with a close-up on Jahana Hayes, National Teacher of the Year, a woman with a story so inspiring that she could give John King a run for his money. Hayes reminds us that while students are the whole point, "recruiting, supporting and retaining culturally competent and diverse educators cannot be overlooked."

Next up-- Dr. Kathy McKnight, Principal Director of Research at Pearson, Center for Educator Learning and Effectiveness (not this one, but this one). She's a co-author of a December, 2014, report from Pearson entitled Creating Sustainable Teacher Career Pathways: A 21st Century Imperative which is seventy-some pages of history and proposals for some alternate universe. Here's one swell pull quote: 

One study concluded that the TFA and Teaching Fellows programs represent two examples of program models for recruiting, selecting, training and supporting teachers that can address teacher shortages in secondary math within high-need schools without decreasing student achievement.

The report also likes the idea of "neo-diffeentiated roles" and differentiated pay and new career ladders, as well as performance-based compensation (aka merit pay).

Here's what strikes me as weird(er) about this report-- by December of 2014, Pearson had already released, with honcho Michael Barber's personal seal of approval right on it, the big report on the CURMUDGUCATION: Pearson & Irony Overload:

Schools Matter: The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears

Schools Matter: The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears:

The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears

With some uncertainty as to how long it will take for North Carolina citizens to ride her out of the state on a rail, Margaret Spellings is wasting no time implanting Koch Brothers' stooges into what has been one of the best public university systems in the nation.  If Spellings is left to do what she was put in charge to do, we will witness the replacement of public servants with crony profiteers, privatizers, and fascist hacks who circulate among the power centers of the Old Confederacy.

As in Cecil Staton, who Spellings recently named as Chancellor of East Carolina University:

As a five-term Republican member of the Georgia Senate, Staton moved millions in taxpayer dollars to Mercer, the private university that employed him. He authored a voter ID bill that a federal judge likened to a "poll tax." He was also notorious for pushing police crackdowns on immigrants.

Most bizarrely, he was involved in an email scandal, in which the then-senator allegedly used afake account and name to spread attacks about a political rival.

"We know Ms. Spellings was a political appointee who has had nothing really to do with advancing academia," N.C. NAACP president William Barber told Ball. "Now it seems birds of a feather flock together."

And if there are no positions to fill, then she is intent to let her handlers create new positions, as with this newly created position:

So it begins: Yesterday, new UNC president Margaret Spellings announced the appointment of Andrew Kelly to a newly created position called "senior vice president for strategy and policy." The school will pay him $245,000 a year.

A UNC release notes that Kelly was a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute from 2002-2005, and returned to AEI in 2009 as a research fellow in education policy studies. He Schools Matter: The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears:

Avoid the Next Trump University: 6 Signs a School Is a Scam

Avoid the Next Trump University: 6 Signs a School Is a Scam:

Avoid the Next Trump University: 6 Signs a School Is a Scam

The reviews are damning. Students who enrolled at Trump University, a for-profit profit real estate training program that went out of business in 2010, called the program “an absolute, utter waste,” “extremely deceptive,” and “useless,” according to complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission and published by Gizmodo.

Former Trump University employees — which wasn’t a true university, as it didn’t award degrees — were even more pointed in their criticism. Ronald Schnackenberg, who worked as a sales manager for the school, called it a “fraudulent scheme” that “preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money,” in court testimony related to a lawsuit filed by former students.

Fees for the training program, which promised to teach people how to flip properties and become successful real estate investors, started at $1,495 and ran as high as $34,995. Employees claim they were told to target vulnerable people and encourage students to max out credit cards to pay the tuition. Some instructors apparently had no experience in real estate.

Disgruntled students in California, Florida, and New York are now seeking damages from Trump University. Whether they’ll eventually get some of their money back remains to be seen, but in the meantime, there are some valuable lessons for the rest of us in their story. The people who signed up for classes with Trump University really believed they were going to get something valuable out of the experience, as do most people who decide to pursue some education or training, whether it’s a one-day seminar or a four-year degree. Unfortunately, there are people who are willing to take advantage of your desire to make a better life for yourself. Here are some warning signs that the school or training program you’re considering is actually a scam.

1. The school isn’t accredited

A student on a college campus | Source: iStock

If you’re hoping to earn a degree, make sure the school you’re attending is accredited by an organization recognized by the U.S. Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, (CHEA), Tim Willard, a spokesman for CHEA, told U.S. News and World Report. Accreditation ensures the school meets basic standards. If you earn credits from an unaccredited school they may not transfer to other colleges, while employers may view degrees from these schools with skepticism.

2. You don’t have to do any work

According to John Bear, an expert on diploma mills, there are more than 500 schools selling fake degrees online. These schools let you “earn” a degree by forking over cash in exchange for an impressive-sounding piece of paper. They might offer credit for life experience and not require you to take any classes. (While some legitimate schools do offer some credit in exchange for your work experience, you won’t be able to earn your entire degree that way.)  “If you’re getting a degree without doing any work, chances are you’re dealing with a diploma mill,” the FTC warned.

3. Pushy sales tactics

Testimony in the Trump University lawsuit revealed that employees were encourage to use high-pressure sales Avoid the Next Trump University: 6 Signs a School Is a Scam: