FINAL SCHEDULE for #uoo16philly: Transcending Resistance, Igniting Revolution Feb. 26th - 28th, 2016 - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:

FINAL SCHEDULE for #uoo16philly: Transcending Resistance, Igniting Revolution Feb. 26th – 28th, 2016

United Opt Out National: Transcending Resistance, Igniting Revolution

The conference WILL BE LIVESTREAMED. 

If you are unable to be there in person, would you be willing to support our work and livestream coverage via a small donation to our gofundme account? Many thanks. We will post our livestream link on our website soon – stay tuned!  #uoo16philly

Thursday, February 25th (FREE – OPEN TO PUBLIC) Philadelphia Community Town Hall – Opting Out in the Urban Core

7:00 pm, at New Visions United Methodist Church, 3259 N Broad St, Philadelphia, PA (rsvp on Facebook here)

Friday, February 26th

4:00-8:00 p.m.                   Welcome Reception with Stephen Krashen: Testing Every Day (refreshments provided)

Saturday, February 27th

8:00 – 9:00 a.m.                  Registration/breakfast

9:00 – 10:00 a.m.               Meet and Greet with UOO Leaders

10:00 – 11:00 a.m.             Keynote – Chris Hedges:  The Wages of Rebellion 

11:00 – 12:00 p.m.             Breakout Sessions

• Ricardo Rosa and Joao J. Rosa: Capitalism’s Educational Catastrophe: And the Advancing Endgame Revolt! (Counterpoints)

Joao J. Rosa, Ricardo Rosa 

• Community Empowerment: Parents, Teachers, Students, and Citizens

Tamara Anderson, Kendra Brooks, Shakeda Gaines, Marla Kilfoyle, Alison McDowell 

• Higher Ed/Teacher Education

Jim Horn, Denisha Jones, Morna McDermott McNulty, Tim Slekar 

12:00 – 12:45 p.m.             Lunch on your own

1:00  –  2:00 p.m.               Panel #1   Global Privatization and “the Advancing Endgame Result!”

Bess Altwerger, Morna McDermott McNulty, Ricardo Rosa, Kevin Zeese 

2:00 –  3:00 p.m.                Breakout Groups

• Media & Messaging

Ruth Conniff, Dave Greene, Fran Huckabee, Jaisal Noor, Jonathan Pelto

• Opt Out 101 & CBE

Stefanie Fuhr, Ashley Jiminez, Alison McDowell, Emily Talmage          

•  Resisting Charter Takeover & School Closure

Anthony Cody, Elizabeth Lloyd Lynch, Gus Morales 

3:00 – 3:45 p.m.                 Panel #2   Civil Rights: Reclaiming the Narrative

Miriam Harris, Denisha Jones, Aixa Rodriguez, Ceresta Smith, Yohuru Williams

3:45 – 4:00 p.m.                 Break

4:00 – 5:00 p.m.                 Keynote – Antonia Darder: Paulo Freire and Our Continuing Struggle in Neoliberal Times 

Sunday, February 28th

8:00                                        Breakfast

9:00 – 10:00 a.m.               Keynote – Jill Stein: Opting Out of Corporate Control. Opting in to a World that Works for All of Us

10:00 – 10:15 a.m.             Break

10:15 – 11:15 a.m.             Breakout Groups

• Union caucus building

Francesca Bluher, Michelle Gunderson, Michael Pena 

• Special Needs/Exceptional Needs/ELL/Early Childhood

Rosemarie Jensen, Aixa Rodriguez, Ruth Rodriguez, Jean Schutt, Susan Schutt

• Our Demands: What’s Next?

UOO team (Denisha Jones, Morna McDermott McNulty,  Peg Robertson, Tim Slekar,  Ceresta

Smith) 

11:15 – 11:30 a.m.             Break

11:30 – 12:30 p.m.             Keynote – Bill Ayers: LESSON ONE: I Would Sing

12:45 – 1:15 p.m.               Closing Remarks from UOO leaders

 FINAL SCHEDULE for #uoo16philly: Transcending Resistance, Igniting Revolution Feb. 26th - 28th, 2016 - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:

Corporatizing Education & Teach For America’s Role In Elections | PopularResistance.Org

Corporatizing Education & Teach For America’s Role In Elections | PopularResistance.Org:

Corporatizing Education & Teach For America’s Role In Elections

Note: Popular Resistance takes no positions in electoral politics. We are publishing this article to highlight the role that the big business funded Teach For America is playing in US politics. They are a key group in the corporatizing of education and see one of their roles as developing future political leaders.

Why DeRay Mckesson’s Baltimore Campaign Looks Like It Comes Right Out of Teach for America’s Playbook

As Mckesson launches his outsider candidacy for mayor of Baltimore, many worry his roots in the education privatization movement put the city’s public schools in peril.

For those who’ve never paid much attention, Teach For America sounds like a benevolent and benign idea: recruit bright college grads, give them some teacher-training and place them in some of the nation’s neediest schools for a two-year commitment to teach kids.

The reality behind TFA’s sunny exterior is somewhat more sinister. Education policy experts today consider the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990 to be at the vanguard of the school privatization movement. TFA is also a media juggernaut in its own right, known for deploying a sophisticated public relations arsenal to advance an agenda focused on crushing teachers’ unions and privatizing public school systems. TFA’s funders, including the Waltons, Bill and Melinda Gates and top Fortune 500 corporations, all have plenty to gain from the commodification of public goods and the destruction of public service unions, and its 11,000 corps members provide a valuable service to that end.

Teach for America’s peculiar brand of social justice was on bold display at its 25th Anniversary Summit the weekend of February 5. The confab drew 15,000 corps members, alumni and supporters to Washington for three days of seminars on lofty issues like, “Allies, Co-Conspirators and Coalition Building: Showing Up for Justice Across Lines of Power.” But one of the biggest draws was the discussion on “The New Civil Rights Agenda and Corporatizing Education & Teach For America’s Role In Elections | PopularResistance.Org:

Connecticut Superintendents Association says children should get more instruction from computers - Wait What?

Connecticut Superintendents Association says children should get more instruction from computers - Wait What?:

Connecticut Superintendents Association says children should get more instruction from computers

No, it’s not a headline from the satirical Internet website known as “The Onion.”

It is an approach to public education that is being pushed by the Corporate Education Reform Industry and those that believe that one of the best ways to improve “educational achievement” is to have the nation’s public school children spend less time learning with teachers and more time receiving “personalized instruction” from computer programs.

Among the benefits, they claim, is that school districts could reduce the high cost of teachers.

Their proposal will also provide computer companies, software companies, testing companies and the educational consulting companies with an even greater share of the taxpayer funds being spent on public education.

Perhaps they call it a “win-win” scenario.

Rather than recognize that real teachers, with the appropriate support, have always been and will always be the best equipped to help and support each and every child in their classroom, the proponents of “personalized learning” claim that computers can complete the task of personalizing “learning” more efficiently and effectively than a teacher ever can.

Not satisfied with turning public schools into little more than Common Core testing factories, those who would profit from the so-called “personalized learning” approach, and Connecticut Superintendents Association says children should get more instruction from computers - Wait What?:

Gene V Glass: Education in Two Worlds: Whom Do Charter Schools Serve?

Gene V Glass: Education in Two Worlds: Whom Do Charter Schools Serve?:

Whom Do Charter Schools Serve?

 The great irony is that the charter school movement was launched decades ago as a solution to the "problem" that special needs students were not being adequately served by the traditional public schools. Charter schools would specialize in serving the needs of that neglected population — or so the story went. How ironic, then, that the modern charter school movement creams the top performing, largely white middle class, sector of the public school population and leaves the poor, the needy, and the minorities back in the traditional public schools. If you don't believe it, read here, and here.

An anonymous correspondent, responding to an earlier posting to this blog, relayed the following experiences:

When I worked at a charter school, the demographics and census of that charter school did not even line up with those of the surrounding Deer Valley Unified School District [a north Phoenix suburban school district].Arizona State law requires schools, district and charter, to provide transportation services. Many charter schools do not and will not provide this service. Let us see how long a charter school would survive if they were to accept all disabled students, low income students, all ELL students, and students that would require transportation to the school.

One other thing that bothers me about charter schools is their

Gene V Glass: Education in Two Worlds: Whom Do Charter Schools Serve?:

Ms. Katie's Ramblings: Shame on the Chicago School Consortium on School Research

Ms. Katie's Ramblings: Shame on the Chicago School Consortium on School Research:

Shame on the Chicago School Consortium on School Research



Shame. Shame on the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research for once again, allowing their school survey to be used to punish schools.

Every year, around this time, all CPS teachers, parents, and students are invited to take the CCSR's  "5 Essentials" survey. It's a survey that describes 5 different areas of school quality associated with positive school climates such as "effective leaders,' "collaborative teachers", "involved families", "supportive environments", and "ambitious instruction".

So what's wrong with that?

The Consortium, which already has a troubling "quid pro quo" relationship with the Chicago Public Schools in order to have access to district data, allows their survey to be used forten percent (TEN PERCENT!) of the CPS School Quality Rating Policy. This is a rating system that harms schools with low ratings, putting them at risk for school closure, turnaround, loss of autonomy and democracy, drops in enrollment, and loss of funding as bad PR siphons away students.

As any basic researcher knows, Campbell's Law shows that using this survey for high-stakes decisions when participants are aware of the stakes, invalidates the data. Yet the Consortium allows their research to be warped by CPS.

 

I'm going to tell right now....SCHOOLS ARE LYING!!! All around Chicago, you are forcing Ms. Katie's Ramblings: Shame on the Chicago School Consortium on School Research:

A better way in educaton | Seattle Education

A better way in educaton | Seattle Education:

A better way in educaton

My daughter is beginning to focus on the education of her future child and my first grandchild.

She wrote the following post on her personal blog and I want to share it with my readers today.

        Applying to homeschool what I loved from my childhood education

One of my old classrooms

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.” — The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I spent my elementary schooling, from nursery school through the sixth grade, at a brilliant place in Laguna Beach, California called Anneliese’s School. Founded by Anneliese Schimmelpfennig, one of the most kind and compassionate people I’ve ever met, the school operates on a system of values centralized around self-discipline and self-motivation, respect, curiosity, freedom, and love. This school was the best thing about my childhood! (Good choice, mom!) I credit the education I received there with my love for learning and my desire to learn as much about the world as I can, and to give that knowledge to the next generation.

Like a fairy tale, the school inhabits the beautiful, hand-painted architecture of an old A better way in educaton | Seattle Education:

DFER loves Hillary, ’nuff said | Seattle Education

DFER loves Hillary, ’nuff said | Seattle Education:

DFER loves Hillary, ’nuff said

If, as an education advocate, you were on the fence as a Democrat on who to vote for during this Presidential primary, look no further.

From the Gadfly on the Wall Blog:

Charter School Champion Hates Bernie Sanders, Prefers Hillary Clinton

Bernie Sanders doesn’t like charter schools enough.

To me that’s an endorsement.

But to Shavar Jeffries, it’s a condemnation.

Jeffries took to the pages of the New York Daily News to decry Sanders position and champion Hillary Clinton’s.

Jeffries is the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a hedge fund front promoting the privatization of public education.

Despite its name, the group doesn’t represent the views of most Democrats. It represents the neoliberal branch of the party that has heavily influenced the education policy of Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Cory Booker, Bill Gates and other prominent so-called liberals.

One can see why Jeffries isn’t Feeling The Bern. Sanders famously said THIS in January DFER loves Hillary, ’nuff said | Seattle Education: