Did your CT legislators support students, parents and teachers or Malloy and the Common Core testing mania? - Wait What?

Did your CT legislators support students, parents and teachers or Malloy and the Common Core testing mania? - Wait What?:

Did your CT legislators support students, parents and teachers or Malloy and the Common Core testing mania?

Earlier this month, the Connecticut General Assembly adjourned without even voting on one of the most important pieces of legislation being considered.  It was called Senate Bill 380 – AN ACT CONCERNING THE EXCLUSION OF STUDENT PERFORMANCE RESULTS ON THE MASTERY EXAMINATION FROM TEACHER EVALUATIONS.

Opposed by Governor Dannel Malloy, charter school advocates and the corporate education reform industry, the bill would have required the state to fix its flawed teacher evaluation law and reduce the state’s obsession with Malloy’s massive standardized testing scheme.

Instead of keeping the unfair, inappropriate and discriminatory Common Core Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) as part of the state’s flawed teacher evaluation program, the proposed law would have required Connecticut to adopt a system that is based on the real factors that determine whether a teacher is successfully doing their job in the classroom.

But Malloy and his allies, including the two major charter school lobby groups, ConnCAN and CCER, demanded that legislators defeat the bill and keep the existing shameful system in place.

Doing Malloy’s bidding, rather than what was right for Connecticut’s children, parents, Did your CT legislators support students, parents and teachers or Malloy and the Common Core testing mania? - Wait What?:

Colorado and Relay: Continued Blank Space. Guest Post by Peggy Robertson | BustED Pencils

Colorado and Relay: Continued Blank Space. Guest Post by Peggy Robertson | BustED Pencils:

Colorado and Relay: Continued Blank Space. Guest Post by Peggy Robertson

In case you didn’t know it, Colorado tax payer dollars are being spent this weekend for educational leaders in Colorado to fly to New York for another session with non-educators at Relay fake graduate school.

They will learn more scripted material to bring back to Colorado to inflict upon teachers and children – further diminishing any democratic thinking. A compliance, racist and militant model of discipline and teaching to the test is the model of public education for our black and brown communities via Relay. And no pushback. None.

They are rolling it out without any parent knowledge. As I have watched various leaders and districts embrace Relay I wonder why these leaders don’t sport a Relay t-shirt or speak of Relay by name? I find that fascinating. The name “Relay” remains very much hush hush. Why so quiet? Why not loud and proud? Reminds me of other times in history when horrific events occurred and no one believed it could be truly happening. Is the silence – refusal to use the name “Relay” – due to the personal shame of inflicting such educational malpractice on our children – malpractice these leaders would NEVER allow their own child to endure? I wonder. Please – let us know who you are. Which schools? How many are silently implementing Relay? I’d like to be clear about what I’m dealing with as we move forward in CO to expose and shame.

And don’t talk to me about people needing paychecks and simply doing what they’ve got to do to hold down a job – they also took these jobs along with a commitment to do right by Colorado and Relay: Continued Blank Space. Guest Post by Peggy Robertson | BustED Pencils:

New report is ‘huge warning sign’ that desegregation has failed in US schools

New report is ‘huge warning sign’ that desegregation has failed in US schools:

New report is ‘huge warning sign’ that desegregation has failed in US schools

Report illuminates extent to which US schools are becoming more segregated, with more than 60% of schools with high levels of poor students racially divided

When Terrance Green was a student at Detroit public schools starting in the 1980s, he celebrated his experience in the overwhelmingly black district.

“The teachers were outstanding … there was a very strong ethos around racial identity, around civil rights, around celebrating who we were,” he said.

It wasn’t lost on Green, however, that just north of 8 Mile Road – the demarcation line of Detroit and its suburbs – students had access to a significantly higher amount of resources.

“I do remember … 8 Mile being like the psychological barrier, even in the early 80s it was,” said Green, 33. “I knew there were these suburbs [that] had more amenities, but I don’t think I could articulate that as an elementary school child.”

A fourth-generation Detroiter, Green’s entry into the city’s public school system was only several years removed from a seminal 1974 US supreme court ruling on school desegregation, Milliken v Bradley, which ended a plan to integrate mostly white suburban schools into Detroit’s public school system. The city’s population continued to swiftly decline in the years that followed, eroding the school system’s resources in tandem until the state declared a financial emergency.

How do you have meaningful desegregation when you have white flight occurring at rapid rates?

Terrance Green

Green, a professor of educational policy and planning at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed to the Milliken decision as a “death knell” to implementing the supreme court’s 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education to desegregate school systems.

“How do you have meaningful desegregation when you have white flight occurring at rapid rates, but we can’t involve suburban school districts where this was occurring?” Green said. “It stopped mandatory desegregation efforts metropolitan-wide.”

A report released this week by the Government Accountability Office illuminated the extent to which school systems across the US are, once again, becoming more segregated. The report found that more than 60% of schools with high levels of poor students were racially segregated, which the report defined as being at least 75% black or Latino.

The study reviewed federal data from 2001 to 2014 and found 16% of all US schools were both racially segregated and poor, increasing from about 7,000 schools in 2001 to 15,089 by 2013 to 2014. Observers and advocates for school desegregation said the report should be a “huge warning sign” that needs to be addressed.

“There are many who believe in this country that we are operating on an even playing field,” said Jadine Johnson, staff attorney at the Massachusetts-based Opportunity to Learn Campaign.

“I think what this report revealed … is that the legacies of slavery in this country, the legacies of Jim Crow, are alive and active,” she said. “That did not go away with Brown v Board of Education.”

Compared to other schools, the GAO report found, segregated schools offered fewer college prep, science, and math classes to take, and a disproportionate number of students were either held back in ninth grade, suspended, or expelled.

Michigan congressman John Conyers was among several lawmakers who requested the report, which was released on the 62nd anniversary of Brown v Board of Education. Conyers and Virginia congressman Bobby Scott are pushing legislation that would amend Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and restore the rights of parents to file lawsuits against segregated school districts under claims of disparate impacts, which are based on ascertaining the discriminatory effect of a policy rather than ascertaining New report is ‘huge warning sign’ that desegregation has failed in US schools:

K-12 EDUCATION:

Better Use of Information Could Help Agencies Identify Disparities and Address Racial Discrimination

GAO-16-345: Published: Apr 21, 2016. Publicly Released: May 17, 2016.

If PARCC, Inc., Is the Owner of PARCC Items, Produce the Document Proving It | deutsch29

If PARCC, Inc., Is the Owner of PARCC Items, Produce the Document Proving It | deutsch29:

If PARCC, Inc., Is the Owner of PARCC Items, Produce the Document Proving It

In a letter issued around May 12, 2016, to professor Celia Oyler regarding Oyler’s publishing three “live” PARCC items on her blog on May 07, 2016, PARCC, Inc., CEO Laura Slover wrote the following as part of a warning email to Oyler:

Parcc, Inc. is the owner of all intellectual property contained in the various PARCC assessments (other than third party literary excerpts, for which we have reprint permission), including the essay prompts you have posted.

According to Slover, her nonprofit, PARCC, Inc., owns the rights to the PARCC test items.

In the DMCA takedown notice sent to bloggers and others who shared Oyler’s post on Twitter, Slover is identified as the copyright owner of the items:

DMCA Takedown Notice

== Copyright owner: Laura Slover
== Name: Kevin Michael Days
== Company: PARCC Inc.
== Job title: Associate Director, Operations
== Email address: kdays@parcconline.org

== Address: 1747 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, 6th Floor
== City: Washington
== State/Province: District of Columbia
== Postal code: 20006
== Country: United States
== Phone (optional): 2027488077
== Fax (optional): n/a

Here is why I challenge the idea that Slover’s PARCC, Inc., is “the owner of all intellectual property contained in various PARCC assessments”:

PARCC, Inc., is not synonymous with the PARCC consortium. PARCC, Inc., is only the “project manager” for the consortium. Moreover, PARCC, Inc.’s position as project manager is not permanent; it is set to expire in 2017. So, how is it that the PARCC consortium would surrender ownership of its intellectual property to an entity with which it has a temporary relationship?

As project management partner for the PARCC consortium, PARCC, Inc., could surely handle PARCC test promotion and licensing, and it could even police social media on behalf of the PARCC consortium. (See more regarding PARCC, Inc., role in this Linkedin ad for a director of contracts management.) But there is a freedom that comes with ownership (“the” owner, at that)– an ability to exercise free rein over what is owned.

In a May 17, 2016, press release regarding Oyler’s post, Heather Reams, Director of Communications and Public Relations, at PARCC, Inc., alludes to copyrighted materials. However, Reams does not go so far as to tell the public that PARCC, Inc., owns the items:

Students are given an unfair test environment when anyone posts active test questions on the internet – whether the test is PARCC, the SAT, or any other exam. Because of this, states rely on Parcc Inc., a non-profit organization, to help ensure that every student who takes a test does so on an even playing field without any unfair advantages or disadvantages, and this requires that copyrighted materials be closely guarded.

Guarding copyrighted material is not the same as owning the material. Thus, Reams’ If PARCC, Inc., Is the Owner of PARCC Items, Produce the Document Proving It | deutsch29:

New Legislation Uses “Cyber Attack Threat” To Shield Delaware’s Student Data Mining Tactics – Exceptional Delaware

New Legislation Uses “Cyber Attack Threat” To Shield Delaware’s Student Data Mining Tactics – Exceptional Delaware:

New Legislation Uses “Cyber Attack Threat” To Shield Delaware’s Student Data Mining Tactics

Delaware Governor Jack Markell sure is going out with a bang.  New legislation introduced a week ago in the Delaware Senate all but ensures any citizen requesting information on student data mining in Delaware will be met with a resounding no.  While the legislation mentions nothing about student data, it talks about the Delaware information technology system.  This bill would prevent a citizen from filing a FOIA request for the following:

Information technology (IT) infrastructure details, including but not limited to file layouts, data dictionaries, source code, logical and physical design of IT systems and interfaces, detailed hardware and software inventories, network architecture and schematics, vulnerability reports, and any other information that, if disclosed, could jeopardize the security or integrity of an information and technology system owned, operated or maintained by the State or any public body subject to the requirements of this Chapter.

On the surface, it looks like a great bill.  But the key words in this legislation are in the data dictionaries.  This defines how a system operates and what is included in it.  You can see one from the Delaware DOE below, from 2012:

The below are recommendations made to the Delaware DOE from Education Insight.  Some of the key words in this document pertain to exactly what is happening now, in current talk and pending legislation.  But the parties who come up with these ideas are trying to make it seem like this is brand new.  The jig is up.  This was planned a long time ago.

The four-year plan for DOE data systems as outlined in Race to the Top will result in a significant expansion in the amount of data available for use within the Departmentand for sharing with outside organizations. This 

New Legislation Uses “Cyber Attack Threat” To Shield Delaware’s Student Data Mining Tactics – Exceptional Delaware:

Another Brick From the Wall: When Education Reformers Fail Badass Teachers Association

Badass Teachers Association:

Another Brick From the Wall: When Education Reformers Fail

By Dr. Michael Flanagan, Co-Director BATs Action Team

I will be honest; I really enjoy stories where corrupt and greedy education reformers just epically fail. Now granted for the past ten years or so reformers have been cashing in big time on the backs of school children and their teachers. Continually racking up public tax dollars in one way or another. Money for charter schools. Money for Teach For America. Money for Pearson etc. etc.

These reformers have been successfully embezzling public school funding, attacking teacher rights, and disregarding collective bargaining agreements all while generating huge profits for test companies and vulture capitalists. As this has been happening countless numbers of parents, teachers, activists and students have organized to push back against the billionaires and their political shills through grassroots efforts, often to no avail. Our protests are met by reformer stonewalling.

The seemingly insurmountable money and power behind these education reformers brings to mind Pink Floyd’s: The Wall. Teachers and parents have faced the brick wall of Common Core, vouchers, charter schools, anti union lawsuits and high stakes testing from the likes of the Fordham Institute, the Broad Foundation, The Walton’s, the Koch’s, David Welch, Bill Gates, the mainstream media, governors, the Department of Education and the President of the United States.

However, lately I am seeing more “Karma” like stories. There are more articles like; Pearson's stock is dropping, or Pearson’s New York State contract is canceled. Common Core has been voted out in several states and Teach For America is laying off employees. A school board in San Francisco actually voted TFA out. I have especially enjoyed watching charter schools like Success Academy and Gulen Charters facing criticism, while some Ohio charter operators have actually been indicted. I applaud how hundreds of thousands of parents opted out of state tests in New York (myself included) while Friedrichs v. California and Vergara v. California both fail spectacularly. Just this past week Sheri Lederman won her case against value added measures of Badass Teachers Association:

Snapshot of the Teaching Profession: What's Changed in a Decade?

Snapshot of the Teaching Profession: What's Changed in a Decade?:

Snapshot of the Teaching Profession: What’s Changed Over a Decade?

There’s no doubt that the past decade or so has been hugely challenging for educators and for the public schools where they teach.  From the failure of No Child Left Behind to the devastating budget cuts following the Great Recession to the vilification of the teaching profession stirred up by the education reform movement, it’s clear why public education advocates hope the next ten years is more promising.

And yet, for many aspects of the teaching profession, the more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same, at least according to new federal data contained in the 2014 Digest of Education Statistics, released in May by the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES). A wide variety of subjects are covered, including funding, student enrollment, attitudes on education, demographic profiles, international comparisons. There’s also quite a bit of information on public school teachers – who they are, where they work, what they teach, and what they earn – and the trends that have shifted (or not) over the past decade or so. Here are just a few takeaways from the data:

1. If you are a classroom teacher, you are still probably a White female. In 2011-2012, there were approximately 3.2 million public school teachers in the United States, a marginal increase from just over 3 million in 2000 and slightly less than the 3.4 million in 2008 just before the country was slammed by the Great Recession.

The gender and racial disparities in the profession persist. In 2000, 84 percent of teachers were white, dipping slightly to 83 percent in 2012. During that time period, the percentage of Hispanic teachers increased the most to around 7 percent. The year 2014 marked the first time White students did not represent a majority in the nation’s public schools, calling more attention to the wide representation gap between educators and their students.

The teaching is still an overwhelmingly female profession. In 2012, 76 percent were women, a slight increase over 74 percent in 2000.

2. The profession is both grey and green…for now.  In the 2012-13 school year, 12 percent of teachers had only 1-3 years full-time teaching experience, an uptick from 9 percent the previous year. Over this one-year period, however, those educators with more than 20 years under their belt also increased by 4 percent to 21 percent. Between 2008 and 2013, the number of teachers age 60 and over declined marginally as many in that age group are retiring, a process that Prof. Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania says signals the end of what he calls the “greying of the profession.”

Teachers today are also more likely to have earned an advanced degree. In 2012, 56 percent hold at least a masters degree, compared to 47 percent in 2000.

3. U.S. teachers spend a lot of time in the classroom. The NCES data also looks at Snapshot of the Teaching Profession: What's Changed in a Decade?: 

Publisher's ultimatum in test leak riles educators

Publisher's ultimatum in test leak riles educators:

Publisher's ultimatum in test leak riles educators

A long-simmering dissatisfaction over standardized testing came to a head this month when an academic uploaded a handful of test items to the Internet and promptly got a note from the test’s creator, threatening legal action if she didn’t take down the items — and name her source.

The academic, Celia Oyler of Columbia University’s Teachers College, took down the items, which she said came to her anonymously. But the episode is irking educators and other observers who already believe that the powerful forces behind the tests are hijacking not just the educations of millions of children but, in this case, teachers’ rights to free speech. They note, for instance, that tweets about the episode have been taken down at the test publisher's request.

The controversy began nearly two weeks ago, when Oyler posted a lengthy essay by an anonymous teacher who set out to show that the fourth-grade reading test designed by the non-profit Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, is “developmentally inappropriate” for the children taking it this spring in a handful of states. The blog post included details from three test items.

Five days later, after other bloggers had shared the post, Oyler got an e-mail from PARCC CEO Laura Slover, who respectfully asked her to remove the items. They were protected by copyright, she said, and were “live” test questions, still being used in schools. The postings, Slover said, “threaten the utility of the assessments, both as their administration is completed over the next few weeks and in versions of the assessment to be administered in the future.”

She said the anonymous teacher, who’d admitted in the essay that he or she had “breached a written undertaking not to reveal any of the material,” was clearly avoiding personal responsibility by remaining anonymous. Slover said PARCC would waive any damage claims if Oyler would take down the items and “turn over to us any information you may have about the teacher.”

She had 24 hours to comply.

In an interview, Oyler said that if PARCC set out to threaten her, it worked: “It took me five minutes to take those items down,” she said. “Of course it took me another 10 minutes to start finding a lawyer.”

The First Rule of Test Club is We Don’t Talk About Test Club https://t.co/n89PokNGVf via @StevenSinger3

— Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) May 18, 2016

PARCC is one of two groups commissioned to create tests based on new Common Core standards in math and reading. The standards — and the tests — have come under fire from critics on both the left and right, with a few educators saying the tests are poorly written and force teachers to squeeze out more satisfying subjects that schools have traditionally taught.

“You’re no longer permitted in many places to engage in rich, project-based, authentic learning, which is how we know children learn,” Oyler said. “We know this from years and years of research.”

In a few cases, tests items simply didn’t make sense: in one incident in 2012, students piloting a Common Core reading test complained about a baffling question involving a talking pineapple who challenges a hare to a race, only to lose and be eaten by the other animals. One suburban New York principal noted that the question had been used before and “confused students in six or seven different states.”

Common Core complaints have even bubbled up to the presidential race, where most of the Republican candidates have advocated getting rid of the standards Publisher's ultimatum in test leak riles educators:

Big Education Ape: PARCC's ultimatim in test leak riles educators | KGW.com http://bit.ly/25cs8Ef

Big Education Ape: No secrecy for tests used on our children! | Parents Across America http://bit.ly/1To8Bbh

Big Education Ape: The First Rule of Test Club is We Don’t Talk About Test Club | gadflyonthewallblog http://bit.ly/1To7R5P

Big Education Ape: NYC Public School Parents: Should excerpts from the high-stakes PARCC exams be allowed under th... http://bit.ly/1rPwK12

Big Education Ape: An Open Letter to PARCC CEO Laura Slover | deutsch29 http://bit.ly/1R43CYu

Big Education Ape: NYC Public School Parents: Read the blog post that PARCC doesn't want you to see -- and then sh... http://bit.ly/1R43s3m

Big Education Ape: PARCC CEO to Prof Who Posts “Live” Test Items: Reveal Your Informant | deutsch29 http://bit.ly/1TbeUzQ

Mapping education research and judging influence | Brookings Institution

Mapping education research and judging influence | Brookings Institution:
Mapping education research and judging influence

 Executive Summary

Education research is a vast, multi-disciplinary field. In trying to understand it or make judgments about importance, influence, or where the action is, it can be helpful to see the big picture and not be swayed by where we happen to sit in the field. A map of education research derived from citation data can help us see the big picture. Responses to one of my recent Evidence Speaks postings and its relation to the annual Education Week Edu-Scholar Influence Rankings serve as an example of how a map might help. 

Introduction 

Education research is a large field involving, among others, psychologists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, working on diverse problems and issues. When we make judgments about the field, we might tend do so from the vantage point of our own research community. A map of education research can help us appreciate other perspectives, allowing us to moderate and refine our judgments.

Responses to one of my own Evidence Speaks postings and the recent Education WeekRHSU Edu-Scholar Influence Rankings provide examples of how a map showing the big picture can broaden our understanding.[i]

In my earlier posting, based on a bibliometric analysis of the education literature, I reported that the three largest research communities within the field were Instructional Design (called Cognitive Load Theory in that posting), Motivation, and Science Education. Among the most highly cited, influential, and currently active scholars in these communities were John Sweller, Richard Mayer, Albert Bandura, Herbert Marsh, and Michelene Chi. This made perfect sense to me because for the past 35 years, I have been viewing education research from my own perspective grounded in psychology and cognitive science.

Some readers pointed out that many education researchers might never have heard of cognitive load theory or how mental representations affect solving physics problems. This is a valid criticism.

My claims looked particularly dubious when compared to the RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. Each year Rick Hess ranks the 200 scholars (hereafter, the public influence scholars) who have most influenced the national discourse on education during the previous year. Instructional design and science education do not leap out from the names on that list. Heading the list for 2016 were Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Howard Gardner, and Gary Orfield. None of the scholars I mentioned even appear on it.

A map of education research can help us understand this divergence in view. It also generates some interesting questions about the Influence Rankings. The rankings tend to over-represent scholars working in some research communities and under-represent others. Interestingly, it under-represents scholars working on instruction and subject-matter learning. Why might this be the case?

Analysis

A document co-citation map represents the semantic and intellectual structure of a research field by depicting co-citation relations among cited documents. The map used in this analysis is based on 2,327 articles published during 2014 in the top quartile (by impact factor) of Web of Science Education and Education Research journals (52 journals). These articles cite 90,000 other articles, i.e., there are 90,000 nodes in the co-citation map. Note that thesecited articles are not necessarily published in education research journals. They are published in journals representing numerous disciplines other than education: psychology, sociology, anthropology, policy studies, economics, linguistics, and neuroscience. The map contains 2,775 citations authored by 195 of the 200 public influence authors. A community detection algorithm applied to the co-citation network identifies over 110 research communities within it.[ii] The largest communities contain around 5–6 percent of the citations.

One can compare the distribution of citations to the work of public influence authors across the research communities to the distribution of all citations across the communities. This reveals communities within which public influence authors are over, under, or comparably represented compared to the field as a whole. One research community contains over 16 percent of the 2,775 public influence author citations.

Note that the citation data is used to map the field, to identify research communities, and to determine which scholars appear in which community. The analysis does not assume that highly cited researchers are necessarily influential outside of the academic literature. The number of times a scholar is cited or co-cited is not important in generating the map. No citation threshold is employed. We want to see where scholars appear on the map, even those cited only once. Identifying scholars who influence public discourse is a different task than identifying highly cited or co-cited scholars within the education research community; although, one might hope, or expect, that many of the public influence scholars are also among the academically prominent.

Table 1 shows the results. Community labels are derived from inspection of the cited references, (including book titles and reports) and the journals in which they were published. The labels are intended to capture the main theme of each community. The research foci of the communities are obvious from the labels with possibly two exceptions. Instructional Design focuses on research that attempts to design instructional interventions sensitive to limitations on human working memory (cognitive load). Politics and Education contains work on the political implications and political commitments of education and education policies, i.e., Common Core or state involvement in early childcare and parenting.Mapping education research and judging influence | Brookings Institution:

Community Expresses Outrage Over California Charter Schools Association Expenditures In California 43rd Assembly Race | Asbarez.com

Community Expresses Outrage Over Special Interest Expenditures In California 43rd Assembly Race | Asbarez.com:

Community Expresses Outrage Over California Charter Schools Association  Expenditures In California 43rd Assembly Race

 GLENDALE—Education leaders gathered to jointly condemn the California Charter Schools Association and the Laura Friedman for Assembly campaign for disseminating misinformation to voters and trying to buy the 43rd California Assembly race. The press conference featured over a dozen community leaders including Los Angeles Unified School Board President Steve Zimmer and Glendale Board of Education Member Christine Walters.

“It’s very important that we’re here today in the 43rd Assembly District that has become the latest battle ground in the effort to privatize, corporatize, and takeover our public education system here in Los Angeles County,” stated LAUSD Board President Steve Zimmer in his remarks before concerned parents, local teachers, representatives of the California School Employees Association (CSEA) and United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA).

“I’m very proud to stand with colleagues today, to stand with Ardy Kassakhian, who has become the latest target in this effort. Let me be very, very clear: there are interest groups in the State of California – most especially the California Charter Schools Association – who are attempting to outright buy Assembly seats, Senate seats, local school board seats,” highlighted Zimmer.

Financial disclosures show that over $1,000,000 has been spent by the special interest group to influence the outcome of the election by smearing Ardy Kassakhian’s record as Glendale City Clerk contrary to the truth, including reporting by the Los Angeles Times that has noted that Ardy Kassakhian has “greatly improved the voting experience for Glendale’s citizens.”

“I chose to support Ardy a long time ago because Ardy has authentically supported public schools since long before he decided to run for this job,” stated Glendale Board of Education Member Christine Walters. “The reason I’m here today is less about Ardy and more about the ugliness and deception that I have seen over the last few weeks.”

Prominent community activist and President of the East Area Progressive Democrats Hans Johnson noted, “We are here out of a profound concern that outside interests are seeking to buy this election and unduly influence the outcome through spending from outside Glendale.”

Frank Higginbotham from the Glendale Teachers Association stated, “The Glendale Teachers Association endorses Ardy Kassakhian for the 43rd Assembly District.  He is the only candidate that fully supports public education and will give our children a voice in Sacramento.”  Higginbotham concluded by noting that Ardy “is the only candidate we trust to stand up for public schools and to fight the billionaires trying to privatize our public education system for their profit.”

The press conference was attended by a host of other local leaders including Glendale City Council Member Zareh Sinanyan, Glendale City Treasurer Rafi Manoukian, Glendale Community College Board President Tony Tartaglia, Glendale Community College Board Member Dr. Vahé Peroomian, Glendale Board of Education Member (ret.) Sandy Russell, Burbank Board of Education Member Dr. Armond Aghakhanian, and Former Burbank Teachers Association President Kim Allender.

About Ardy Kassakhian

Ardy Kassakhian grew up and attended public schools in Glendale. He was first elected Glendale City Clerk in 2005. As Clerk, he has reduced government waste by introducing environmentally sound practices, made election information easier to access and worked to increase voter participation. Ardy graduated from UCLA and the Executive Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He lives with his wife Courtney and their young son in Glendale.

Ardy Kassakhian is running to represent Assembly District 43, which includes the communities of Burbank, Glendale, La Cañada Flintridge, La Crescenta-Montrose and the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Atwater Village, East Hollywood, Franklin Hills, Hollywood Hills, Los Feliz and Silver Lake. The primary election will be held on June 7, 2016. To learn more about Ardy Kassakhian, visit his website at www.ArdyforAssembly.com or follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Community Expresses Outrage Over Special Interest Expenditures In California 43rd Assembly Race | Asbarez.com: