Seattle Schools Community Forum: At Yesterday's (Kind) Wild Executive Committee Meeting of the Whole

Seattle Schools Community Forum: At Yesterday's (Kind) Wild Executive Committee Meeting of the Whole:

At Yesterday's (Kind) Wild Executive Committee Meeting of the Whole

It was a hugely important meeting, if a bit wild.  Because there is SO much happening right now for our district and I'm trying to chase down so much information, I only have time for highlights:

The district has ended its relationship with the Alliance for Education (for the most part).  I will scan and post their letter but it is very damning.  Basically, the district says it has been trying, for years, to get on a better footing with the Alliance.  There are several allegations by the district.

The letter says:

• that the Alliance did some fundraising, using SPS' name, that didn't exactly find its way back to the district
•  that a superintendent (I'm assuming Banda) was bad-mouthed by the Alliance behind his back AND during an Alliance social event
• It says that the Alliance met with some principals without district permission or knowledge.  

As for the Seattle Teacher Residency program, it agrees to continue on with the Alliance but only if the district's payment share is $50,000 which is way below what the MOU says.  Basically, the district is saying, "take it or leave it" and will walk away from the MOU if the Alliance doesn't agree to these terms.  (I not that it seems likely the district will probably honor the current cohort of STR candidates but go no further.)  I agree with this action on the part of the district. 

The district will have to find another fiscal agent for those PTAs using the Alliance's (expensive) services.  I had heard at an A&F meeting that they did send out an RFP and only the Alliance submitted a proposal.  I find that hard to believe in a city of Seattle's size that no other firm was even interested.  (I Seattle Schools Community Forum: At Yesterday's (Kind) Wild Executive Committee Meeting of the Whole:


Unhappy with the District?

In addition to the perennial issues of the district - Special Education, Advanced Learning, ELL, building conditions, the debt on JSCEE and, of course, funding - we have more that have risen up.  To whit:

- staffing cuts at more than 25 schools this year
- bell times
- City's pre-K and their ever-increasing desire for space in the district
- capacity issues
- facilities' issues
- curriculum choices/use
- increased spending at district administration

(Please, add to the list.) 

The clamor is ever louder.  The frustration is growing - for teachers, parents, students, principals.  I'm sure district staff is frustrated but senior management is large and in charge and really, most of it is on them.  They HAVE to find better and more transparent ways to communicate.

It really is the communications that is killing them.  They refuse to treat parents as adults and give them full explanations of current situations.  They obfuscate, they deflect, they tell half the story and it is hurting this district.  

But what to do?  I would say - as I frequently do when senior staff don't appear to be listening - the district needs a shock to the system.  But maybe a gradual build-up might just do the trick.

• as has been previously suggested, start opting your child out of any non-required testing, starting with Amplify.  If you are asked, tell your teacher and your principal that this is your stand against how the district is being managed.  Politely state that yes, you know the blah, blah on how taking the test helps your kid but that you feel that, overall, the direction of the district and the treatment of parents in the district is being hurt much more and that you want the district to listen to parents.

• the Board WILL have three new members in just about two months (new members generally are installed in early December).  Maybe four new members.  I'm sure that some of the senior staff are already trying to figure out how to "manage" these new members (as I'm sure the Mayor and Tim Burgess are as well).  Those new members will need to find a way to become a team with the remaining members but also, to review the issues and find a new way.

         EVERY board has to do this and has done this in the past.  One thing the new Board should be   considering, right away, is the search for a new Unhappy with the District?

The NCRP Debate on Market Approaches to Education Reform | Nonprofit Quarterly

The NCRP Debate on Market Approaches to Education Reform | Nonprofit Quarterly:

The NCRP Debate on Market Approaches to Education Reform

A Debate About Whether the Walton Foundation and Markets Promote Equity for Students | Diane Ravitch's blog http://bit.ly/1G7UO5I

At first glance, it would have been reasonable to ask why the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy would want to host a debate between advocates and opponents of market-based approaches in education reform. What was the upside of picking that issue for a debate above any of a number of other issues in which the efficacy of market-based strategies in significant societal issues is, so to speak, “debatable?”

The “privatization” question in public policy, in which public programs are more or less ceded to the private sector (particularly the market-driven for-profit sector) to structure and implement, is at the heart of many initiatives. Examples include the proliferation of private sector builders and operators of prisons, proposals to turn over municipal water systems to private corporations, and even the turning over of child welfare services to for-profit companies.

In this instance, the roots of the debate were in an NCRP report published in May 2015, part of NCRP’s “Philamplify” series, on the Walton Family Foundation, subtitled, “How Can This Market-Oriented Grantmaker Advance Community-Led Solutions for Greater Equity?” Compared to earlier NCRP reports on the Walton Family Foundation, notably NCRP’s 2005 report, “The Waltons and Wal-Mart: Self-Interested Philanthropy,” and its 2007 follow-up, “Strategic Grantmaking: Foundations and the School Privatization Movement, it was distinctly less critical of the ideology and agenda of the Arkansas philanthropic behemoth. Both earlier reports indicated that the foundation’s promotion of school choice, charter schools, and school vouchers in education reform had led to a pernicious undermining of public school systems.

When it comes to market approaches, however, as Sherece West-Scantlebury, the president and CEO of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and chair of the NCRP board, noted at the beginning of the debate, NCRP is “agnostic.” In fact, for the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation itself, headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, West-Scantlebury described the Walton Family Foundation, headquartered in Bentonville 200 miles away, as a “great partner” for her foundation’s programs. Walton has a major programmatic emphasis in its “home region,” with grantmaking focused on Northwest Arkansas and Delta region of Arkansas and Mississippi totaling more than $40 million in 2014, whileWinthrop Rockefeller is totally dedicated to Arkansas’s advancement, both with overlapping commitments to education programs in Arkansas, including the two foundations’ joint sponsorship in 2014 of the “ForwARd Partnership for Arkansas Education” initiative.

The Philamplify report on the Waltons was actually complimentary of the Walton The NCRP Debate on Market Approaches to Education Reform | Nonprofit Quarterly:

10/15/2015 – Where Will John King Stand On Student Suspensions?

10/15/2015 – Where Will John King Stand On Student Suspensions?:

Where Will John King Stand On Student Suspensions?

 THIS WEEK: Arne Duncan Business Hero … Gentrification Stops At Schools … Charter School Real Estate Game … Spending For Prisons Not Colleges … Costs Of Child Care Exceed College

TOP STORY

Where Will John King Stand On Student Suspensions?

By Jeff Bryant

“With [US Education Secretary Arne] Duncan we have a leader who makes claims about doing ‘what’s right’ for kids, but who actually never directly oversaw children in an organized education setting … That’s not true for his replacement, [Acting Secretary John] King, who has a track record of teaching in schools and eventually founding and leading a school and overseeing a chain of charter schools. With King, there is ample evidence of how he treats children when he has direct control of them. And it’s not altogether a pretty sight to behold.”
Read more …

NEWS AND VIEWS

The Legacy Of Arne Duncan, ‘A Hero In The Education Business’

The Nation

Zoë Carpenter writes, “Outgoing US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proved himself a champion for those who saw a money-making opportunity in America’s beleaguered public school system … Pushing a market-based vision of reform, Duncan oversaw mass school closures and a deepening obsession with standardized tests … Test scores have risen nationally under Duncan’s tenure, but that data is only as strong as your faith in the ability of standardized tests to measure quality of education. It’s hardly surprising that scores have gone up, since schools are now spending considerably more hours and money… drilling students in preparation. But the obsession with data comes at the expense of types of learning … The gulf between what poor and rich school districts are able to offer their students has not closed under Duncan … Though Duncan leveraged federal funding to press states into adopting certain policies … he was far more reluctant to create incentives for state to address these resource inequities or resegregation.”
Read more …

When Neighborhoods Gentrify, Why Aren’t Their Public Schools Improving?

The Atlantic

“Gentrification … usually stops at the schoolhouse door. Because newcomers tend to send their kids outside of the local system, often to private or charter schools, gentrification tends to have a neutral or even negative effect on neighborhood schools … A report on underperforming San Francisco public schools … notes that many if not most urban institutions are ‘left to flounder,’ remaining segregated, low-quality ‘Apartheid schools’ … The exceptions … seem to be those that compete with charter and private schools by becoming magnet schools or starting gifted-and-talented programs … Economic and racial integration works: It is what has been shown to help higher-need students without hurting others … The best way to have gentrification help local schools may be to invest in more and larger magnet schools and bring more diverse students into gifted-and-talented programs.”
Read more …

Charter-School Movement Grows – For Real-Estate Investors

The Wall Street Journal

“Almost all charter schools are operated by nonprofit organizations. But these groups often rent and buy their buildings from private real-estate developers, and that is creating a new niche asset for some investors … Established players in the business are seeing volume increases on chart school developments … Some states are beginning to make financing tools available to charter schools that had been limited to traditional public schools … reducing their capital costs when acquiring facilities … Critics say charter schools are in danger of cutting costly deals with developers who are more concerned with investment return than educating children.”
Read more …

These States Spend More On Prisons Than Colleges

The Washington Post

“State spending on corrections has outpaced funding for public education over the last three decades, with 11 states pouring more money into their prison systems than into public universities … Public higher education is perceived as a flexible budget item and has suffered relative to other state priorities, including corrections. Funding for prisons has grown 141% between 1986 and 2013, but funding has only crept up 5.6% for public colleges and universities … Although states began dialing back their higher education spending a decade ago, the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 led to deeper cuts … Legislatures responded by slashing higher education funding by 23% per student.”
Read more …

Hard To Believe: In Most States, Child Care Is Now More Expensive Than College Tuition

Alternet

“The price of child care places it out of reach for millions of families … In 33 states including the District of Columbia, child care is now more expensive than four-year public university tuition … Families with particularly young children have it worst … Child care ranges from 19.3% to 28.7% of total family budgets … The situation is particularly rough for minimum wage workers, especially in the northeast and Washington, DC.’”
Read more …

10/15/2015 – Where Will John King Stand On Student Suspensions?:

CURMUDGUCATION: 21st Century PSAT

CURMUDGUCATION: 21st Century PSAT:

21st Century PSAT

Yesterday was National Support David Coleman's Cash Flow Day, otherwise known as the day that high school juniors across the nation give up a treasure trove of personal information in exchange for the opportunity to take a standardized test that is, if not actually meaningful or useful, at least a venerable tradition.

The P, as I repeatedly remind my highly stressed 11th grade students, stands for "practice." It is, for most of us, the ultimate no stakes test. If a student is perched at the very tippy top of Score Mountain, she will have a shot at a National Merit Scholarship, a scholarship program that functions much like the scholarships attached to beauty pageants-- as a sort of protective fig leaf of uplifting nobility for an otherwise mercenary enterprise. And if you have the misfortune to teach at a school that thinks there's something useful to learn from PSAT-ing every single student, then, well, it sucks to be you.

But for the rest of us, the PSAT means bupkus. Less than bupkus. Just bup.

The College Board (now helmed by Common Core auteur Davic Coleman) has been trying hard to reverse this trend by, among other things, creating more baby PSAT's-- PPPSATs-- to push the marketall the way down to eighth grade. Coleman has also worked to position the SAT as an engine for fixing inequality in America, a narrative that has, if nothing else, convinced the USED to shovel a bunch of money in the College Board's direction. Oh-- and because corporate synergy should always be leveraged to foster dynamic growth, the new PSAT is also a marketing tool for AP coursework.

Note too that the PSAT begins with a 45-minute session of having students volunteer their personal CURMUDGUCATION: 21st Century PSAT:

Not lovin’ McTeachers’ Night | Parents Across America

Not lovin’ McTeachers’ Night | Parents Across America:

Not lovin’ McTeachers’ Night

 Can you believe that McDonald’s enlists teachers to sell junk food to their students? On “McTeacher’s Nights” across the country, teachers “work” behind the counter selling burgers, fries, and soda to their students and their students’ families. It’s a marketing ploy disguised as a school fundraiser. McDonald’s is exploiting the hard-earned trust, respect, and popularity of teachers to sell junk food to kids and create brand loyalty.

It’s shameful that McDonald’s is using the tragic underfunding of our public schools as a marketing opportunity. Teachers should never have to sacrifice their students’ health in order to earn a few extra resources for their classrooms.

Recently, PAA joined with the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and many other groups and individuals across the U.S. to call for an end to this insulting and misguided program.

You can add your name and/or the name of your organization to the letter below, telling McDonald’s CEO Easterbrook: No More McTeacher’s Nights!

To learn more, please visit http://commercialfreechildhood.org/action/stop-mcteachers-nights.

Dear Mr. Easterbrook,

I urge you to end the exploitative practice of McTeacher’s Nights.

As you know, on McTeacher’s Nights, teachers “work” at a local McDonald’s in hopes of raising much-needed funds for their schools. Parents and children are encouraged to eat at McDonald’s so they can see

- See more at: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/lovin-mcteachers-night/#sthash.jVL5X5Qw.dpuf

Top 10s in 2016— Vote and Nominate Brightest Ed Policy Minds | Cloaking Inequity

Top 10s in 2016— Vote and Nominate Brightest Ed Policy Minds | Cloaking Inequity:

Top 10s in 2016— Vote and Nominate Brightest Ed Policy Minds

Nominate and vote in this new poll. Who will or should make the biggest impact on education policy priorities in the 2016 campaign? Encourage your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and others to vote and nominate too!

Teach For America probably has their list. The DFERs likely have a list again (Do you think Arne Duncan is at the top of their list?). So I thought I would crowd source a list of our nation’s brightest educational policy minds— the people who actually know who they are talking about. The individuals who will support community-based education policy and oppose top-down, privately controlled “education reform.” This list is to crowd source the brightest minds across generations in the United States that will or should have the most impact in the 2016 campaign.

Could the new Secretary of Education be on this list? The appointment of John King as acting Secretary of Education— at 40— means that Generation X could also now be eligible for that important position post-election.

After voting for existing name(s), feel free to add the names of person(s) you want to nominate, then a comma, then their current location and professional position. Yes, you can nominate yourself— if you believe you have the credentials to be impactful in the 2016 election.

Click Here to Vote: Top 10s in 2016— Vote and Nominate Brightest Ed Policy Minds | Cloaking Inequity:

NCTQ’s teacher-education ratings deserve an F - The Hechinger Report

NCTQ’s teacher-education ratings deserve an F - The Hechinger Report:

NCTQ’s teacher-education ratings deserve an F

Why does Teach For America come out on top in NCTQ’s teacher-education ratings?

 Hey Bill, have you seen this?” I turned to Bill Gaudelli, chair of Teachers College’s Department of Arts and Humanitiesand coordinator of the program preparing social studies educators.

“What’s that?” he asked. I showed him the screen of my iPad.

“It’s the latest version of the National Council on Teacher Quality’s ratings of teacher education programs. Look!” I said. “The College’s Graduate Secondary Education programs got a D+!”

Bill rolled his eyes. NCTQ has a history of getting things wrong, at Teachers College and elsewhere. Two years ago, NCTQ rated a non-existent undergraduate teacher preparation program at Teachers College, not understanding that Barnard College, Columbia University and Teachers College are independent but affiliated institutions. Things haven’t gotten much better; in its latest report,Path to Teach, NCTQ has a listing for Columbia University, and for Barnard, but not for Teachers College—even though Columbia has no graduate programs in teacher education.

“And look at your program, Bill!” I exclaimed.

Related: The trouble with NCTQ’s ratings of teacher-prep programs

One of the dimensions on which NCTQ rates undergraduate and NCTQ’s teacher-education ratings deserve an F - The Hechinger Report:

Feds ready new regs on teacher prep programs :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet

Feds ready new regs on teacher prep programs :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:

Feds ready new regs on teacher prep programs

(District of Columbia) Expectations are that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will release a controversial rewrite of regulations governing teacher preparation programs before leaving office in December.



The rules, under development since 2014, are in response to concerns of the Obama administration that too many teachers come into the classroom unprepared and end up leaving the profession after only a few years.



The draft regulations circulated for public comment last year drew criticism from teacher unions by putting too much emphasis on student test scores as an indicator of educator performance. Some state officials were also concerned that the changes called for in the new regulations would be expensive to carry out – probably far more than the $42 million that the Department of Education has estimated.



Duncan has called improving university and other training programs a “morale issue” as beginning teachers “too often struggle at the beginning of their career and have to figure out too much by themselves,” he said in a 2014 conference call with the press.



Among the requirements, states would need to grade training providers and survey graduates about their education. Contact would also be made with school districts hiring the new teachers to learn about how each has performed.



The rules come forward as the teaching profession is being challenged from a number of directions. With districts nationally mostly recovered from the recession, fewer college students are entering preparation programs – so much so that many districts are having trouble filling open positions.



Some experts believe the hangover from layoffs continues to plague the profession but others have said the status of the classroom educator has been damaged in recent years by criticism that teachers are to blame for poor student performance.



Although there appears little to stop the administration from issuing the new rules, opponents of the regulations have said they can do something about stopping enforcement. American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, for instance, is calling on its members to write their representatives Feds ready new regs on teacher prep programs :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:

CEQA ruling upends school closure plans :: SI&A Cabinet Report

CEQA ruling upends school closure plans :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:
CEQA ruling upends school closure plans

(Calif.) A recent court decision in a case aimed at overturning the closure of two schools based on exemptions from environmental impacts should serve as a warning to other districts contemplating similar moves, according to education lawyers.

The Barstow Unified School District Board of Education cited various exemptions from the California Environmental Quality Act when it decided to close down two elementary schools and transfer the students to different campuses within the district.

“There was nothing in the record indicating that the district would limit the number of students that would be allowed to transfer to a particular receptor school,” said attorneys Harold Freiman and Kelly Rem of educational law firm Lozano Smith.

“The lesson from this case is that, when relying on CEQA exemptions, school districts and other public agencies should ensure that their administrative records contain evidence supporting any criteria set forth in the exemption,” they said.

There are two types of exemptions from the CEQA: statutory and categorical.

The plaintiff, a citizens group called Save Our Schools, argued that the district did not meet the criteria to prove that the closures and transfers were exempt from the environmental quality law. If, however, the court found the district did provide sufficient evidence, the group also alleged that the "cumulative impacts" and the "unusual circumstance" exceptions to the categorical exemption used by the district still applied.

In Save Our Schools v. Barstow Unified School District Board of Education, the categorical exemption the district cited – Class 14 – states that when students are transferred to new schools within the district, the student capacity at those sites should not increase by more than 25 percent or 10 CEQA ruling upends school closure plans :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:

Louisiana Educator: How the Great PARCC/Common Core Scam Works

Louisiana Educator: How the Great PARCC/Common Core Scam Works:

How the Great PARCC/Common Core Scam Works

A Special Thank You!

I want to take this opportunity on behalf of thousands of dedicated educators in Louisiana to sincerely thank the four members of BESE who have courageously refused to fold to the pressure of our clueless business community to give John White a blank check to further commit educational malpractice with the futures of Louisiana school children. Thank you to:

Dr Lottie Beebe, BESE member, District 3

Mary Harris, BESE member, District 4

Carolyn Hill, BESE member District 8

Jane Smith, BESE member at large 

John White has convinced the business community and seven members of BESE that his phony PARCC scale score system really means something. But only he and his statisticians at the LDOE can interpret for us exactly what it tells us. Unfortunately for White and his Common Core/PARCC "raising the bar" scam, some of us have been using critical thinking skills long before Common Core came along.

I pointed out in this blog exactly what the scale scores for the level of "Basic" performance really means in terms of actual knowledge of the tested material in the previous post on this blog. Now lets talk a little about how the testing bosses of the PARCC consortium use these scores to muddy the water about the real performance of students on these poorly designed tests in all the PARCC states.

It is expected that all states in the PARCC Consortium and even Louisiana, which is no longer officially in the PARCC Consortium, are probably going to adopt the same cut scores using the 650-850 point scale for each of the 5 levels of achievement. But the real cut scores are to be found in the corresponding raw scores based on a set of secret conversion tables such as those we Louisiana Educator: How the Great PARCC/Common Core Scam Works:

 

Click Here to Follow Flip BESE on Facebook 

LEE P.BARRIOS FOR BESE 1 Web Site

JASON FRANCE FOR BESE 6 Web Site

MIKE KREAMER FOR BESE 7 Web Site

Plutocrats in NYC Wielding Power, Buying the Airwaves, and Trashing Public Schools Again | janresseger

Plutocrats in NYC Wielding Power, Buying the Airwaves, and Trashing Public Schools Again | janresseger:

Plutocrats in NYC Wielding Power, Buying the Airwaves, and Trashing Public Schools Again

Public schools are among the primary institutions that serve the families in the 99 Percent.  As primarily middle class institutions, they are coming under attack from the One Percent, the plutocrats—both Republican and Democrats—who control the levers of power.

In a piece earlier this week the NY Times profiled 158 families across the country who have provided nearly half of all the early money that has been underwriting the campaigns of the candidates currently vying for the 2016 Presidential nominations. The reporters quote the political analyst and demographic expert Ruy Teixeira: “The campaign finance system is now a countervailing force to the way the actual voters of the country are evolving and the policies they want.”

Last week, the NY Times op-ed page printed a commentary by Thomas Edsall on the same subject.  Edsall describes the conclusions of political scientist Martin Gilens on the impact of our increasingly plutocratic system: “The majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.  When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose… Gilens notes that policies popular with the middle class but not with the affluent rarely win enactment: The majority are redistributive policies including raising the minimum wage or indexing it to inflation, increasing income taxes on high earners or corporations, or cutting payroll taxes on lower income Americans.  Conversely, policies opposed by the middle-class but backed by the affluent include ‘tax cuts for upper income individuals, spending cuts in Medicare, and roll-backs of federal retirement programs’—policies that have been adopted.”

So what does all this mean for education?  One need only look at television in New York City Plutocrats in NYC Wielding Power, Buying the Airwaves, and Trashing Public Schools Again | janresseger:

Outside money turns Hartford Democratic Town Committee into a Luke Bronin slush fund - Wait What?

Outside money turns Hartford Democratic Town Committee into a Luke Bronin slush fund - Wait What?:

Outside money turns Hartford Democratic Town Committee into a Luke Bronin slush fund

Thanks to the behind-the-scenes involvement of Governor Dannel Malloy and some of Connecticut’s power elite, on Monday, July 27, 2015 the Hartford Democratic Town Committee endorsed Luke Bronin to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for Mayor rather than sticking with Democratic incumbent Mayor, Pedro Segarra.

That same day, Dorothy Bronin of Stamford and Andrew and Rita Bronin of Greenwich each wrote $2,000 checks made out to the Hartford Democratic Town Committee.

Over the following weeks, donors from Greenwich, Connecticut dropped another $15,500 into the Hartford Democratic Town Committee’s coffers.  An additional $13,000 arrived from New Yorkers, $8,000 from California donors and large donations from individuals in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Florida added at least $8,000 more.  Most of the checks were written for the maximum allowable contribution of $2,000 per person and many had already given the maximum legal amount to Luke Bronin’s campaign committee.

Although the Hartford Democratic Party reported no itemized contributions from January 1, 2015 through July 24, 2015, according to the Committee’s most recent campaign finance report that was filed earlier this week with the Connecticut State Elections Enforcement Commission, the Hartford Democrats have raised more than $84,000 raised since Party establishment refused to support the city’s incumbent Puerto Rican Mayor and replaced Outside money turns Hartford Democratic Town Committee into a Luke Bronin slush fund - Wait What?:

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Byrd-Bennett, 'a foot soldier in the march towards privatization'

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Byrd-Bennett, 'a foot soldier in the march towards privatization':

Byrd-Bennett, 'a foot soldier in the march towards privatization'

Ian Belknap is a writer and performer living in Chicago. He hits the nail on the head with this opinion piece in Crain's, "Framing education as a business attracts the wrong people".

While the leading candidates in both parties spend their valuable debate time extolling the virtues of capitalism (...what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world.” -- Hillary Clinton), Belknap points out what should be obvious by now. The push towards privatization of public education has been a disaster.

What got him going was the indictment of Chicago schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett.

Byrd-Bennett's woes are rooted in her greed, yes (and her tone deafness to irony—"tuition to pay and casinos to visit?"... But she has also acted as a foot soldier in the decades-long march toward privatization and misapplying the precepts of business to the complex (and in many cases generations-long) problems facing our schools.

Her downfall, writes Belknap,  "may be read as the logical extension, and, one hopes, Schooling in the Ownership Society: Byrd-Bennett, 'a foot soldier in the march towards privatization':

Teacher Judgment vs. Family Authority - Bridging Differences - Education Week

Teacher Judgment vs. Family Authority - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

Teacher Judgment vs. Family Authority

Deborah Meier continues her conversation with Harry Boyte. To read their full exchange, please visit here.

Dear Harry and friends,

I'm leaving my house for the airport at 3:30 am flying from Albany to California. So, quick thoughts on your story about your father-in-law's hospital experience.

I hate hospitals. I hope I can go to some less prestigious small hospital where I know they won't mistake me for someone else and ... cut off the wrong leg, etc. And I want a place where those I love can keep an eye out for me and whose views are taken seriously if I'm not in a position to explain myself forcefully. 

I think institutions should be "more like" families—but just the good ones. A dilemma right there.

I conducted a workshop on pre-kindergartens at the Progressive Education Network conference in Brooklyn yesterday. I was arguing that pre-kindergartens should be more like families and less like institutions; teachers should mimic the family as a learning place more than parents should mimic school classrooms. I think schools can't avoid institutional characteristics and many are potentially dangerous for young and old alike especially for those who can least explain or defend themselves, and do not have what we were calling effective "agency."

Dilemma two. How can we go about describing public institutions in ways that are sufficiently minimal but also in keeping with advancing democracy? For young children I think it essential that the school and the family be connected loosely, as equals. But what "equals" means is not always clear to me!  How do we decide when we can't all agree on everything? Who is the "we"? Isn't making compromises not part of democratic life?

I'm least inclined to compromise about my 4-year-old. We're one of the few nations that permits Teacher Judgment vs. Family Authority - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

Bill Gates: Too Many Schools Use Teacher Evaluation For Personnel Decisions, Not As Tool For Improvement : Columns : ISchoolGuide

Bill Gates: Too Many Schools Use Teacher Evaluation For Personnel Decisions, Not As Tool For Improvement : Columns : ISchoolGuide:

Bill Gates: Too Many Schools Use Teacher Evaluation For Personnel Decisions, Not As Tool For Improvement

Bill Gates defended the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations, arguing that schools can use it to help teachers improve. He said too many schools use teacher evaluations for personnel decisions, and not as a tool for teacher development.

Bill Gates said Thursday in a speech at his foundation's headquarters in Seattle that addressing education is more difficult than working on global health. He also defended the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations, explaining that it is among the several indicators that schools should use to help teachers get better

"Many systems today are about hiring and firing, not a tool for learning," Gates said.

"Test scores, of all the evaluation elements, is perhaps the most controversial," said Gates. He added that too many school systems use teacher evaluations for personnel decisions, and not for teacher development.

While the Microsoft founder said he believes that test scores are "a critical element of these systems," he said they do not tell which skills must be improved. "They are simply numbers," he added.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars into K-12 education. The foundation had also influenced federal and state policy to recognize teacher evaluation, charter schools, and the Common Core education standards.

When it comes to global health, Gates said Thursday that "every year is better than the last."

"When we come up with a new malaria vaccine, nobody votes to undo our malaria vaccine," he said. "So it's pretty steady progress."

However, Gates said K-12 education becomes less predictable when politics enters the scene.

"Because of its complexity, the relationship to management, how labor is one, you can introduce a system ... and people say, 'No, we'd rather have no system at all, completely leave us alone,'" he explained.

"That's a real possibility, if you don't nurture these systems and getBill Gates: Too Many Schools Use Teacher Evaluation For Personnel Decisions, Not As Tool For Improvement : Columns : ISchoolGuide: