Hoboken, New Jersey: ACLU And Education Law Center Sue to Block Charter Expansion | Diane Ravitch's blog

Hoboken, New Jersey: ACLU And Education Law Center Sue to Block Charter Expansion | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Hoboken, New Jersey: ACLU And Education Law Center Sue to Block Charter Expansion

Hoboken is a town in New Jersey that is one-mile square. The charter industry is opening schools there, draining away white and middle-class students.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Education Law Center have filed a lawsuit to block the further expansion of charter schools.

To read the brief for the Plaintiffs, click here.

I received the following letter explaining the rationale for the lawsuit:

“Dear Ms. Ravitch,

As a cogent analyst of the national charter school movement and the insidious harm that that movement has caused our traditional schools, you often write about how communities deserve “strong, well-resourced, equitable public school systems” and that the national charter school movement “increases segregation and inequity”. (*Salon, Monday, Oct. 26, 2015, Our real charter school nightmare: The new war on public schools and teachers – Salon.com)

You have also included on your blog a post about the segregative affect the Hoboken charter schools are having on the district public schools. Now there is a new chapter to write. The Hoboken Board of Education (HBOE) is suing the New Jersey Department of Education for ignoring its own rules, New Jersey law and, most striking, New Jersey’s Constitution when reviewing a charter school renewal and expansion application. The HBOE, in petition and briefs, has detailed the segregative effect and the financial impact that Hoboken Dual Language Charter School‘s (HoLa) expansion has had and will continue to have on the Hoboken District. A District that serves a majority of the City’s neediest children because of their financial circumstances or special educational needs.

Now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Jersey Foundation and the Education Law Center (ELC) have filed an amici brief in support of Hoboken District. They state that “with both New Jersey’s commitment to eradicating segregation and its historical failure to do so in mind, the Commissioner cannot be permitted to ignore the realities that present themselves in Hoboken.” They rightfully fault New Jersey’s DOE for its blatant failure to perform its duties and to ensure our schools, and Hoboken specifically, do not allow school districts separated by socioeconomic and racial classes. Classes often linked in terms of their impact on success in education. The impact is stark when the districts in issue share the same mile square city.

The ACLU/ELC explain the harm segregation causes all children and the benefits to society of integrated schools. The DOE has that duty and the obligation to stop segregation and those harms so as to encourage quality education outcomes for as many students as possible regardless of race or affluence. That obligation extends to de facto segregation, even if unintentional, which must be struck from our educational landscape. The ACLU/ELC recount the history and current state of segregation in New Jersey’s schools based on economic and minority status and note, notwithstanding New Jersey’s long held policy against racial discrimination, discrimination continues in New Jersey to the point that New Jersey has some of the most economically and racially segregated schools in the country.

http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2013-press-releases/urban-suburban-divide-widens-in-new-jersey-schools-levels-of-racial-isolation-contradicts-state-constitution/?searchterm=new%20jersey

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/05/15/the-most-segregated-schools-may-not-be-in-the-states-youd-expect-2/

The ACLU/ELC state that: “consistent with not only the law, but also deeply held legal principles that undergird New Jersey’s system of Hoboken, New Jersey: ACLU And Education Law Center Sue to Block Charter Expansion | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Hoboken Lawsuit: The Brief for Plaintiffs | Diane Ravitch's blog http://bit.ly/1QdqPdR

The Myth of the Hero Teacher - The New York Times

The Myth of the Hero Teacher - The New York Times:

The Myth of the Hero Teacher

Ed Boland outside the Henry Street School for International Studies, where he taught ninth-grade history. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Maybe you have had the fantasy: Chuck your day job to teach in a public school in a blighted neighborhood. The money is lousy, of course, but that’s part of the fantasy — no one wants to turn around the lives of poor children just for a paycheck. Then you decide that maybe today is not the day, and go back to your life. Sound familiar?

Ed Boland went a step further. An executive at Prep for Prep, a nonprofit organization that places minority children in elite private schools, he quit to teach ninth-grade history at a low-performing public school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had seen movies like “Dangerous Minds” and “Stand and Deliver,” in which heroic teachers reach into the lives of at-risk adolescents and make a difference. Mr. Boland believed he could be one of them.

“I thought, I can do this,” he said the other day, at a coffee shop near theHenry Street School for International Studies, where he arrived as a first-year teacher in fall 2006. “I thought, I want to work on the front lines. I want to be one of those teachers that kids really like and listen to and learn from, and you can turn a kid around.”

Photo

Mr. Boland in his living room in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.CreditHilary Swift for The New York Times

On his fifth day, as he describes it in his new memoir, “The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School,” his students schooled him in just how wrong he was.

“On the other side of the room, someone had hurled a calculator at the blackboard,” he writes. “A group of boys were shoving one another near a new laptop. Two girls swayed in sweet unison and mouthed lyrics while sharing the earphones of a strictly forbidden iPod. Another girl was splayed over her desk, lazily reading ‘Thug Luv 2’ as if she were on a cruise.”

When he turned to the girl who had started the disruption, he found her now standing on top of her desk, “towering above me like a pro wrestler on the ropes about to pounce.” She moved her hand in an obscene gesture, then told him to perform an act that was anatomically impossible.

The class erupted in laughter.

“Man,” came the verdict that would follow Mr. Boland until year’s end, “he can’t even control the girls.”

“The Battle for Room 314” arrives in a charged atmosphere, where public education has somehow become a contentious topic. “Teachers are definitely talking about it,” said Christopher Emdin, 37, who teaches science education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the author of a forthcoming book, “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education.”

For Dr. Emdin, Mr. Boland’s book wrongly blames students for what is really a failure to train teachers, especially those working with students from backgrounds that are different from their own.

“Teaching in an urban school is a specialty, like surgery,” said Dr. Emdin, who urges teachers to see beyond the thuggish behavior of difficult students, which might be a performance that itself involves great strategy and talent.

Teaching minority students, especially from poor backgrounds, requires “a particular skill set that you can develop,” Dr. Emdin said, emphasizing that those skills take time to emerge. “But I would not have my internist performing heart surgery. And I would not have Ed Boland teach in an urban school. He’s not trained for it.”

Mr. Boland agreed with at least part of that assessment. “Of all the hours I was at graduate school, I don’t think there was all together an hour devoted to classroom management,” he said. “We were developing beautifully crafted lesson plans that no one could use. I was learning esoteric phrases about test design. I spent two semesters doing a research project. I just The Myth of the Hero Teacher - The New York Times:

Charter schools and corruption | Seattle Education

Charter schools and corruption | Seattle Education:
Charter schools and corruption

When there is privatization there is corruption.

We have seen it with charter schools around the country, with prisons, detention facilities, utilities and the war machine.

Here is yet another story.

Former Mountain Empire Unified School District Superintendent Steve Van Zant

Charter school king pleads guilty to felony

Steve Van Zant, a key figure in the expansion of charter schools in San Diego County and elsewhere in California, pleaded guilty Thursday to a felony violation of the Political Reform Act.

Van Zant’s financial interests in growing independent charters, and his efforts getting them into school districts without notification, have raised questions about widely perceived shortcomings in state law that now even advocates say allow for exploitation.

While superintendent of the rural Mountain Empire Unified School District, Van Zant received a stipend through his contract for each charter school the district authorized. The arrangement was in violation of conflict-of-interest laws, said Deputy District Attorney Leon Schorr, who heads the public integrity unit.

“This plea shows that they have to be cognizant of how government funds are spent,” Schorr said. “This felony has a huge impact on Mr. Van Zant — professionally, personally and financially.”

Under the terms of his plea agreement, Van Zant must reimburse Mountain Empire for the charter stipends that amounted to an estimated $50,000 to $60,000. The agreement also calls for him to serve 30 days of home confinement with an electronic monitor, five years probation, and 300 hours of community service.

Van Zant and his attorney Garland Peed declined to comment after a Superior Court hearing Thursday. However, Van Zant said “There will come a day” when he’s willing to discuss the matter.

Under Van Zant’s leadership, Mountain Empire authorized 13 charters that were located in other districts, in some cases without notifying those districts in advance. The Charter schools and corruption | Seattle Education:

NEPC slams Common Core-NAEP Report as “feeble” attempt to claim success – Missouri Education Watchdog

NEPC slams Common Core-NAEP Report as “feeble” attempt to claim success – Missouri Education Watchdog:

NEPC slams Common Core-NAEP Report as “feeble” attempt to claim success

In a title that is too good not to share, National Education Policy Center (NEPC)  slams a recent report by Center for American Progress (CAP) that attempted to say Common Core has been a huge success for low-income students, based on NAEP test results.  NEPC’s review is entitled:Center for American Progress Report Makes Feeble Effort to Claim Success for Standards-Based Reform,  and we have included an excerpt of their review below.  However, before you read the NEPC review, we feel you should know a little about Center for American Progress, and who funds them.

Center for American Progress Funders
Some open government groups, such as the Sunlight Foundation and the Campaign Legal Center, criticize the Center’s failure to disclose its contributors.

• In December 2013, the organization released a list of its corporate donors, which include Walmart, CitiGroup, Wells Fargo, defense contractor Northrup Grumman, America’s Health Insurance Plans, and Eli Lilly and Company.
• In 2015, CAP released a partial list of its donors, which included 28 anonymous donors accounting for at least $5 million in contributions. Named donors included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, which each gave between $500,000 and $999,999. CAP’s top donors include Walmart and Citigroup, each of which have given between $100,000 and $499,000.-Wiki

Excerpt from CAP Report

“…. some states do a far better job of educating low-income students than others.  The Center for American Progress wanted to better understand the role of standards-based reform in promoting student outcomes, and to that end, we studied the most recent  National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP data. Given previous research, we believed that we might find a strong connection NEPC slams Common Core-NAEP Report as “feeble” attempt to claim success – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Joe the Plumber takes on public education — PS connect

Joe the Plumber takes on public education — PS connect:

Joe the Plumber takes on public education

At Tuesday night’s CNN Town Hall in South Carolina, public education got a moment on the Democratic primary campaign stage. But what did it really tell us?

Audience member John Loveday was introduced as the principal of a charter school. He asked Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton whether she would support a longer school day or school year to keep up with India and China.

Given the limited attention K-12 schools have received in any of the presidential campaigns, education voters were glad for an opportunity to evaluate a candidate's position.

Public education advocates recognize this particular question as a talking point of Democrats for Education Reform, “Third Way” dems who seek to turn public education into a business. They're supported by disruptive innovators poised to receive massive amounts of public money to provide the services. It wasn’t surprising that this question would come from a charter administrator. You can think of it as you would if a fund manager wanting to privatize social security were to ask a candidate about collecting fees on retirement accounts.

But this guy was no banker. How much more authentic can you get than a school principal? Reminiscent of Joe the Plumber entering the public realm in 2008’s presidential race, the charter principal claimed that his school was doing something innovative--and he hoped to hear Secretary Clinton declare her support for it--and thereby her support for his enterprise.

“My charter school is unique because we are the only school in the state that offers more instructional days than required by law. We offer 230 instructional Joe the Plumber takes on public education — PS connect:

John Kuhn: Corporate Reformers Try to Take Back Social Media from Supporters of Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Kuhn: Corporate Reformers Try to Take Back Social Media from Supporters of Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog:
John Kuhn: Corporate Reformers Try to Take Back Social Media from Supporters of Public Schools

John Kuhn is superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt school district in Texas. He first emerged as a national figure in the fight for better education for all children when he spoke at the national Save Our Schools march in 2011 and gave a rousing speech.

Education reformers have worked tirelessly for years to advance their preferred education policy ideas using a panoply of tactics, with mixed results.
As an example, reformers have steeped future big-city superintendents in #edreformthink through the (*cough-unaccredited-cough*) Broad Academy and then deployed them to try out their ideas in the real-life laboratory of various unlucky school districts. (Update: a refreshingly large number of these superintendents have gone on to transform urban education upend large school systems with no tangible positive results before being run out of town on a rail.)

Another effort aimed at advancing pro-reform policy has been theembedding of Teach for America alumni in congressional offices as staffers. Then again, there is the tried-and-true tactic of having a corporation-funded organization coordinate the development and introduction of model ed reform legislation nationwide. Or, if you’re a fan of the straightforward approach, you will appreciate efforts to just expend a ton of money to force the implementation of anointed ideas, ala Gates and Zuckerberg.

Back in the early years of the Education Wars (when Diane Ravitch was on Twitter and her blog didn’t exist yet) it became apparent that reformers—despite enjoying the generous fiscal backing of wealthy individuals and organizations and the political backing of influential officeholders from both parties—were losing the public relations battle,particularly on social media. Scrappy teacher-bloggers and Twitter-ers were running them ragged with asymmetrical PR warfare, and they knew it. So began in earnest the development of a Marvel Universe of pro-reform social media personalities and collectives.

In this short article, I will highlight a few of these actors—this is a back-of-an-envelope map of one corner of the reform echo chamber, if you will—and I will let you know what they’ve been up to this week. I will also let you know where each of these voices stands on a recent high-profile story, the infamous Success Academy video.

THE 74

Apparently named for the average IQ of its contributors (just kidding guys; I’m sure you’re all Ivy League), the 74 is the brainchild of Campbell Brown and hosts pro-reform Twitterfolk like Dmitri Mehlhorn and Chris Stewart. The 74 mixes pro-reform op-eds with a dab of more newsy education pieces (like one about a campaign to prevent student suicide, for example), apparently in an attempt to come across as neutral-ish. This is window-dressing, of course, as demonstrated by the fact that the top four articles on the page as of this writing are: Nevada parents hoping vouchers survive a court challenge; Chris Stewart trumpeting a slew of news stories about non-Success-Academy teachers being mean to students; a pretty balanced story on the effect of good teachers on students’ happiness; and a story about Trump University that spends one paragraph rapping the scourge of for-profit college scams before getting to “the real story” by indulging in a ten-paragraph call for the next President to “hold all colleges accountable.”

Position on the SA video: “but other schools do it too” and “stop hating”.

EDUCATION POST

Another slick effort to appear neutral and above the fray by offering a “better conversation” (for discriminating education connoisseurs, one would imagine), Education Post actually peddles orthodox ed reform ideas and is, per Mercedes Schneider, funded by Broad, Walton, and Bloomberg—not exactly the Triumvirate of Educational Neutrality. Contributors include Chris Stewart (again!), Eric Lerum, and Chris Barbic. Top articles today are one about a teacher acknowledging her own biases, one arguing that what TFA haters really hate are charter schools, one telling teachers to stop using lack of parent involvement as an excuse not to teach kids well, and a thoughtful article about the tensions of being in the education politics fight and having to choose where to send your own kids to school.

Position on the SA video: the video’s a bummer, but Success Academy is a target because it is so much better and everyone is jealous

EDUCATION NEXT and EDEXCELLENCE.NET

These are Fordham Institute/Michael Petrilli/Chester Finn vehicles. Instead of pretending to publish objective journalism ala The 74 and Education Post, these sites pretend to publish objective research. The duo are a vehicle for motivated scholarship, of the faux variety. Like the above online journals, they are really just political devices.

Top stories today at Education Next are: a story about how family background influences achievement and what schools can do about it, a story about how schools of choice expand opportunity for urban students, an article contending that teacher quality is the most important in-school factor, a paean to the Common Core arguing that it forced states that rejected CCSS to adopt tougher standards, a story on desegregation and a story about academic competitions. This carousel of stories—most of them related to the 50th anniversary of James Coleman’s report “Equality of Educational Opportunity” in an apparent effort to re-cast his report as a validation of reform orthodoxies rather than a call for equity—is followed by a reformer response to film critic David Denby’s New Yorker article calling out reformers for bashing teachers. Then comes an article by Petrilli arguing that NCLB spawned a bunch of smarter school policies. (Thanks, NCLB!) Oh, then there’s a call to end required union contributions.

Position on the SA video: conspicuously hard to find. A search of the site reveals the last mention of “Eva Moskowitz” to be in 2014, when the site chirped, “Talk about a ‘Tough Liberal!” and said charters like hers shouldn’t be criticized for lacking diversity. A search for “Success Academy” finally takes us to a 2/15/2016 post that summarizes a Vox.com article by Libby Nelson (with the telling quote “The video is undeniably upsetting. But…”) and then goes on to point to Education Post’s limp defense of poor wittle Success Academy.

THIS WEEK IN EDUCATION

Alexander Russo’s blog also pretends to be above the fray but really isn’t. However, unlike the others, Russo does directly criticize reformers on a fairly regular basis, probably because he fancies himself a gadfly John Kuhn: Corporate Reformers Try to Take Back Social Media from Supporters of Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog:

The Wrong Way to Teach Math - The New York Times

The Wrong Way to Teach Math - The New York Times:

The Wrong Way to Teach Math

 HERE’S an apparent paradox: Most Americans have taken high school mathematics, including geometry and algebra, yet a national survey found that 82 percent of adults could not compute the cost of a carpet when told its dimensions and square-yard price. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently tested adults in 24 countries on basic “numeracy” skills. Typical questions involved odometer readings and produce sell-by tags. The United States ended an embarrassing 22nd, behind Estonia and Cyprus. We should be doing better. Is more mathematics the answer?

In fact, what’s needed is a different kind of proficiency, one that is hardly taught at all. The Mathematical Association of America calls it “quantitative literacy.” I prefer the O.E.C.D.’s “numeracy,” suggesting an affinity with reading and writing.

Calculus and higher math have a place, of course, but it’s not in most people’s everyday lives. What citizens do need is to be comfortable reading graphs and charts and adept at calculating simple figures in their heads. Ours has become a quantitative century, and we must master its language. Decimals and ratios are now as crucial as nouns and verbs.

It sounds simple but it’s not easy. I teach these skills in an undergraduate class I call Numeracy 101, for which the only prerequisite is middle school arithmetic. Even so, students tell me they find the assignments as demanding as rational exponents and linear inequalities.

I’m sometimes told that what I’m proposing is already being covered in statistics courses, which have growing enrollments both in high schools and colleges. In 2015, nearly 200,000 students were taking advanced placement classes in statistics, over three times the number a dozen years ago. This might suggest we are on the way to creating a statistically sophisticated citizenry.

So I sat in on several advanced placement classes, in Michigan and New York. I thought they would focus on what could be called “citizen statistics.” By this I mean coping with the numbers that suffuse our personal and public lives — like figures cited on income distribution, climate change or whether cellphones can damage your brain. What’s needed is a facility for sensing symptoms of bias, questionable samples and dubious sources of data.

My expectations were wholly misplaced. The A.P. syllabus is practically a research seminar for dissertation candidates. Some typical assignments: binomial random variables, least-square regression lines, pooled sample standard errors. Many students fall by the wayside. It’s not just the difficulty of the classes. They can’t see how such formulas connect with the lives they’ll be leading. Fewer than a third of those enrolled in 2015 got grades high enough to receive credit at selective colleges.

Something similar occurred when the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching created a statistics course for 19 community colleges in 2012. It was advertised as an alternative to remedial algebra, with its sadistic attrition rates. In Statways, as it was called, here is some of what students were asked to master: chi-square test for homogeneity in two-way tables, line multiple representation of exponential models. Even with small classes and extra support, almost half of the students got D’s or The Wrong Way to Teach Math - The New York Times:

Special education groups allege California alarmed parents about data transfer | The Sacramento Bee

Special education groups allege California alarmed parents about data transfer | The Sacramento Bee:

Special education groups allege California alarmed parents about data transfer

Sacramento City Unified School District made automated calls to families informing them of the legal case regarding the disclosure of student information and advising how parents could file an objection. The Sacramento Bee

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article62817077.html#storylink=cpy

Special education nonprofits allege that state officials inappropriately alarmed parents across California by using “incomplete or misleading messages” in telling them that sensitive records for 10 million current and former students will be disclosed.

Attorneys for the nonprofits and the California Department of Education are scheduled to appear in a Sacramento federal courtroom Monday to discuss the manner in which public school officials have informed parents of a pending, court-approved data transfer. U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller previously ordered the state to provide extensive student records to the nonprofits’ attorneys in a legal battle over whether schools are providing special education students with the instruction to which they are entitled.

A screenshot of a post on the Rocklin Police Department’s Nextdoor page that tells parents a statewide student data transfer could be an identity theft risk.Nextdoor

Mueller called for the hearing after a San Francisco law firm complained that school districts and the state Department of Education have been encouraging parents to object to the judge’s order to turn over student records to plaintiffs’ attorneys.

The Attorney General’s Office, in its own letter on behalf of the state agency, said that it “categorically denies” allegations that the state has misled the public. The letter said state Superintendent Tom Torlakson “simply reminded parents of their opportunity to object.”

“The public has expressed confusion and fear over the potential release of student data, and have naturally turned to CDE, among others, for guidance,” wrote Deputy Attorney General Julia R. Jackson. The Jackson letter, in turn, described misleading comments by plaintiffs’ representatives.

The data, once released, is to be tightly controlled by a special master who is an expert on cybersecurity and has suggested that the data be encrypted. Mueller’s order bars any public disclosure beyond the parties involved in the federal case, their attorneys, consultants, the special master and the court.

Parents have until April 1 to object by mail to the court about a student’s records sharing. So many objections have been filed that the court said Thursdayit has suspended efforts to provide a weekly count.

The case, Morgan Hill Concerned Parents Association vs. the California Department of Education, drew little attention when it was filed in 2011. But members of the public and some lawmakers were galvanized after Mueller ordered the Department of Education to turn over a broad swath of student records, including names, some Social Security numbers, home addresses, disciplinary records, medical information and progress reports for 6.2 current and 4 million former students who have attended California public school since Jan. 1, 2008.Special education groups allege California alarmed parents about data transfer | The Sacramento Bee:

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article62817077.html#storylink=cpy

Forces opposed to school reform efforts are attempting to turn back the clock - Opinion - The Buffalo News

Forces opposed to school reform efforts are attempting to turn back the clock - Opinion - The Buffalo News:

Forces opposed to school reform efforts are attempting to turn back the clock

In just over two months, Buffalo voters will be making a potentially historic decision. Will they continue to insist on reforms in the Buffalo School District, or will they turn away, and give power to candidates whose loyalty leans more toward the teachers union rather than students or taxpayers?

Unfortunately, in this city, that is the stark choice. It shouldn’t have to be that way – in other places, the union and school leadership have learned to cooperate – but the damaged DNA of this district all but precludes that possibility.

In the past two elections, voters have moved toward reform, first electing the powder keg personality of Carl Paladino, then supporting candidates he recruited to broaden the reform effort. That new majority has accomplished less than voters could have expected, though some of that has to do with state law and some with the board’s own wretched dysfunction.

Still, voters created a board majority that favored reform. But, as in football, where momentum matters at least as much – if not more – than who scores the first touchdown, the clue to the durability of Superintendent Kriner Cash’s efforts to improve the district will come on May 3. That’s when voters will decide whether to maintain, expand or diminish the board’s commitment to reform.

“I don’t want to overstate it,” said Samuel L. Radford III, president of the District Parent Coordinating Council, “but this is probably one of the most critical elections.” That’s not overstating it.

This year’s elections will be for the six district seats. The three at-large seats were filled in 2014 and are not up this year. Five of the six district incumbents are planning to seek re-election to three-year terms. Three of them are board reformers – Paladino, Board President James M. Sampson and Jason M. McCarthy. Given that the majority favoring reform has only a 5-4 edge in the district, it is critical that all of them receive support.

In truth, it might have been better for reformers had Paladino called it a day and supported a different reform candidate from the Park District he represents. His heart may be in the right Forces opposed to school reform efforts are attempting to turn back the clock - Opinion - The Buffalo News:

RIP, N.Y. school reform - NY Daily News

RIP, N.Y. school reform - NY Daily News:
RIP, N.Y. school reform

The era of fighting to improve education in New York, including for low-income kids, is over.

Welcome to the age of inertia. The only question: How much will the state Board of Regents water down standards and retreat from holding adults accountable for student performance?

Panel members, including a chancellor, set education policy. They are appointed not by the governor but by the state Assembly. But the Assembly is dominated by allies of the teachers’ unions — and those unions are verging on a takeover.

For many years, Chancellor Merryl Tisch was flanked by like-minded Regents who raised standards to prepare more boys and girls for college or the workplace.

With two-thirds of the state’s kids — and 85% of black and Latino kids — falling short, the Regents adopted the Common Core curriculum, as well as methods to measure how well teachers imparted knowledge. The Regents also backed charter schools.

Progress was steady until the unions, in alliance with misguided parents, fomented opposition to evaluating teachers and asking more of children.

Standardized test boycotts not only jeopardized the accountability system, they also threw an election-year scare into Gov. Cuomo.

After championing Common Core standards and the use of test scores as part of teacher evaluations, the governor last year called for a multi-year review that would eventually produce new standards and postpone accountability for state test results until 2019.

Amid the tumult, criminal charges deposed Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who had kept personal control over Regents appointments and, unbelievably, had limited union sway.

His successor, Speaker Carl Heastie, has surrendered the keys by letting individual members fill Regents seats that represent their regions. Those members march in lockstep with the unions.

Between retirements and force-outs, the 17-member board at present has 11RIP, N.Y. school reform - NY Daily News: 

Earnest: K-12 foreign language requirements — is coding a viable substitute? – Rocky Mountain Collegian

Earnest: K-12 foreign language requirements — is coding a viable substitute? – Rocky Mountain Collegian:

Earnest: K-12 foreign language requirements — is coding a viable substitute?

 Almost everyone that went through the K-12 school system took at least a couple of years of some type of foreign language. Be it Chinese, Spanish or French, public high schools and colleges want students to have an introductory understanding of different cultures and languages.

Although the particular high school that I attended didn’t require students to take foreign language courses directly, it was still considered an important thing to have on your transcript when applying to college. However, Florida Senator Jeremy Ring is proposing that K-12 institutions offer computer programming courses that would count as foreign language courses when being transferred to a higher institution.

Being a former Yahoo executive, Ring is no stranger to the tech industry and the growing demand for software engineers. One article included a statement by Caroline Joiner from Tech Net, who basically said that by 2020 there will be a million more jobs that require sufficient computing skills. So the demand is certainly there for individuals to enter the tech industry, but that isn’t the end goal to including programming courses in K-12 curriculum.  

So programming related jobs are expected to grow, however, what exactly justifies passing Jeremy Ring’s SB 468 and requiring schools to satisfy two foreign language credits for a student taking a programming course? Well to clear up any confusion about what this bill would do in the first place, foreign language courses would not be replaced by coding courses, but coding would rather be added onto the repertoire of what is classified as a foreign language course.

This begins to raise flags for those who believe that kids would flee from Spanish to taking a course on Bash Scripting or C++ over Spanish I or an equivalent. I’m compelled to agree with that argument myself, but programming languages are considered foreign to a considerable population of our planet, so any student who would like to take a programming course over a Spanish course would still be challenging themselves to think and learn differently. Of course there are those who consider foreign languages to be a fundamental part of any K-12 curriculum due to the cultural literacy that could be gained. I agree with this, and believe that Earnest: K-12 foreign language requirements — is coding a viable substitute? – Rocky Mountain Collegian:

MSNBC will cut ties with Melissa Harris-Perry. Whatever happened here, it’s too bad. - The Washington Post

MSNBC will cut ties with Melissa Harris-Perry. Whatever happened here, it’s too bad. - The Washington Post:

MSNBC will cut ties with Melissa Harris-Perry. Whatever happened here, it’s too bad.

"She had it," MSNBC president Phil Griffin once said about MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry.(Heidi Gutman/MSNBC via Episodic)

 Update 9:55 p.m. Saturday: The Post's Paul Farhi reports that MSNBC will part ways with Harris-Perry. The original post follows. 

Political reporters have spent a lot of time this campaign cycle crafting delicate ways to explain the voting behavior and candidate preferences of an electorate that seems angry, economically frustrated and convinced that the country’s changing demographics and social mores are somehow to blame.

Some of the reporters covering these voters share the same anxieties. The sense among some journalists that they too are living and working in an increasingly unstable, topsy-turvy, mystifyingly diverse world is not exactly a secret. Some media companies outperform others in efforts to to diversify their staffs. But, to allow that staff diversity — at whatever level it exists — to truly shift internal priorities, set agendas and shepherd resources? Well, that would be something else entirely. And, as such, it remains rare.

It could, until this week, generally be found on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show, an MSNBC news and public affairs program that has aired on the network since 2012 with its eponymous host. The show has generally brought to the cable network’s 10 a.m. to noon Saturday and Sunday time slots a diverse array of academics, journalists, activists and others who hail from, write about or live in our rapidly transforming country rarely included or represented on other weekend political shows. They often sit at points up and down the age register and across the race, ethnicity and gender spectrums. But they typically come to discuss a variety of events and developments in the news. Sometimes, this is the news that is everywhere; sometimes, it is the news largely ignored elsewhere.

And as of Friday, it seems there has been a bit of a problem. Harris-Perry, a political scientist at Wake Forest University, asked a former staffer to publish an email she sent to her current show team explaining why she would not be on the air this weekend. Then, she told the the New York Times that, at least for now, she will not appear on the show.

Here are some of the critical bits of Harris-Perry’s email. (And a note that “nerds” is a term Harris-Perry often uses affectionately on air in reference to her audience and staff.)

As you know by now, my name appears on the weekend schedule for MSNBC programming from South Carolina this Saturday and Sunday. I appreciate that many of you responded to this development with relief and enthusiasm. To know that you have missed working with me even a fraction of how much I’ve missed working with all of you is deeply moving. However, as of this morning, I do not have any intention of hosting this weekend. Because this is a decision that affects all of you, I wanted to take a moment to explain my reasoning.

Some unknown decision-maker, presumably Andy Lack or Phil Griffin, has added my name to this spreadsheet, but nothing has changed in the posture of the MSNBC leadership team toward me or toward our show. Putting me on air seems to be a decision being made solely to save face because there is a growing chorus of questions from our viewers about my notable absence from MSNBC coverage. Social media has noted the dramatic change in 

MSNBC will cut ties with Melissa Harris-Perry. Whatever happened here, it’s too bad. - The Washington Post: