Malloy’s proposed state budget slashes aid to Connecticut’s public schools - Wait What?

Malloy’s proposed state budget slashes aid to Connecticut’s public schools - Wait What?:

Malloy’s proposed state budget slashes aid to Connecticut’s public schools

Call it devastating, draconian or simply a vicious attack on Connecticut’s children, parents, educators and public schools, the governor who has consistently worked to undermine and privatize public education, since taking office in 2011, has now proposed a new state budget that destroys Connecticut’s already failing constitutional requirement to adequately fund its public schools.

In an effort to avoid raising state taxpayers and maintain the state’s system of coddling the rich from paying their fair share income taxes, Governor Dannel Malloy has called for shifting $407 million in teacher retirement payments to cities and towns in the first year of his proposed budget, an amount that would increase to $420.9 million in the second year of the biannual budget plan.

In addition, rather than appropriately fund Connecticut’s education grants, Malloy’s budget plan seeks to redirect existing state aid for public schools to Connecticut’s poorer towns by slashing grants to wealthier and middle income communities.

Overall, 31 Connecticut communities would see an increase in aid while 138 towns would get less state funds, with many towns getting significantly less state education funding.

Making the situation far worse, Malloy’s budget plan allows most towns to redirect what education aid they will receive away from their public schools.  Rather than requiring towns to maintain their school budgets, Connecticut communities could use what aid they receive to pay for non-education expenditures.

Together these two developments will produce devastating cuts to education programs across Connecticut.

In his effort to pinpoint which communities win and which lose, Malloy is Malloy’s proposed state budget slashes aid to Connecticut’s public schools - Wait What?:

GREATER SACRAMENTO PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE: Defend the Immigrants Among Us- Our Revolution

GREATER SACRAMENTO PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE: Defend the Immigrants Among Us- Our Revolution:

Defend the Immigrants Among Us- Our Revolution

Donald Trump’s attack on immigrants has taken a frightening turn. I’m writing you from Phoenix, one of the dozens of cities under attack from Trump’s gestapo-style raids targeting immigrant families.

Since Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have detained and deported hundreds of undocumented Americans, including the parents of U.S. citizen children. There have even been reports of ICE agents following Latino children home from school in hopes of arresting undocumented parents and demanding documents from citizens and immigrants alike.

These raids targeting people based on where they live and the color of their skin have already happened at homes, stores and workplaces in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia. Will you help stop the attacks on immigrant families? Sign up now to let us know we can count on you to protect victims of ICE raids in your community.

Donald Trump claims that millions of "criminal" immigrants live among us -- but this is a lie, designed to give him cover for his racist plan. The immigrants Trump is targeting aren’t “rapists” or “bringing drugs” -- they are people like my friend Lupita, who was separated from her citizen children this week after living in Arizona for 20 years.

Families and communities across America are being torn apart by Trump’s xenophobic raids. This is not who we are. The raids must stop.

I am a proud and unafraid Dreamer, an undocumented immigrant who came here as a child. Through my years working with the immigrant rights’ community, I know first-hand that we build power through organizing. Through that power we have been able to reunite thousands of immigrant families. We have the power to stop these unjust deportations -- but we must act fast and take action locally.

If you marched for women’s rights in January and let Donald Trump know that “immigrants are welcome here,” your voice voice is needed once again. Demand decency and justice for the undocumented community. Sign up to if you’re willing to take action locally to protect immigrant families and stop the raids.

In solidarity,

Erika Andiola
Our Revolution

SIGN UP TO STAND WITH IMMIGRANT FAMILIES IN YOUR COMMUNITY

P.S.: Want to do more? Please download and share this critical “know your rights” infographics from our friends at United We Dream.

 GREATER SACRAMENTO PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE: Defend the Immigrants Among Us- Our Revolution:

Not Getting Enough Sleep? Tired Teachers Aren't Usually the Best Teachers

Not Getting Enough Sleep? Tired Teachers Aren't Usually the Best Teachers:

Not Getting Enough Sleep? Tired Teachers Aren’t Usually the Best Teachers

Sleep is extremely important to the well-being of teenagers – but they’re not getting enough. According to a 2016 study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 69 percent of high school students are getting less than eight hours of sleep on an average school night. Sub-optimal sleep for teenagers has been linked to academic inhibitors (e.g., attention and retention issues), mental health problems (e.g., increased risk of depression), and physical challenges (e.g., teens with less sleep are more likely to be overweight.)

Unfortunately, individual educators can’t do much to make sure their students sleep enough at night, although districts across the country have been devising new policies – including later start times, even nap clubs – to bring schools more in sync with teen sleep patterns.

What we can do is pay attention to our own sleep lives. This, it turns out, is something teachers tend to be bad at  – especially early career educators. Too often, in an effort to “get it all done,” teachers stay up late and wake up early, operating on increasingly worsening sleep deficits and calling it a strong work ethic.

I was in this camp myself, until recently when I began doing a bit of research into the importance of sleep to a long, successful, and fulfilling teaching career.

Here are a few important things I discovered about sleep – and a couple of suggestions on getting more of it.

Consistency is Sleep’s Friend

The key to higher-quality, REM-filled sleep is a consistent schedule. Regular exercise helps us sleep better, as does a regular meal time and a regular bed time. In fact, one study suggests that sleep variability (i.e., going to bed at inconsistent times) is one of the most important factors in how well people sleep. It’s better then to go to bed at the same time each night rather than going to bed early tonight to “catch up” from a last night’s paper-grading marathon. Regular sleep schedules even predict better moods.

To improve at this, we can look at what time we would have to go to bed if we were Not Getting Enough Sleep? Tired Teachers Aren't Usually the Best Teachers:

The man who said no to DeVos. | Fred Klonsky

The man who said no to DeVos. | Fred Klonsky:

The man who said no to DeVos.

On Friday newly appointed Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos attempted to enter a Washington D.C. public neighborhood elementary school. Protesters turned her away.

Some, like American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, accused protesters of using violence.

But that wasn’t so. It was a peaceful protest.

Weingarten went to Twitter.

 Follow

Randi Weingarten 

✔@rweingarten

Just heard a protester blocked & almost knocked Secy @BetsyDeVos down at Jefferson.We don't condone such acts.We want her to go to pub schls

8:02 AM - 10 Feb 2017

 
•  569569 Retweets
 
•  1,1091,109 likes

News video of the protest doesn’t provide support for Weingarten’s claim about what she “heard.”

Weingarten posted on my Facebook feed:

As a result of the accusation of violence, Bilal Ahmed Askaryar of Washington was arrested and faces charges of misdemeanor assault and failing to obey an officer.

 Askaryar came to the United States as a 5-year-old refugee from Afghanistan.

Who is Bilal Ahmed Askaryar?

NPR broadcast a story by Askaryar following Trump’s EO banning Muslims The man who said no to DeVos. | Fred Klonsky:

Why Laverne Cox told you to Google ‘Gavin Grimm’ - The Washington Post

Why Laverne Cox told you to Google ‘Gavin Grimm’ - The Washington Post:

Why Laverne Cox told you to Google ‘Gavin Grimm’

Gavin Grimm with his parents, David Grimm and Deirdre Grimm, at their home in Gloucester, Va., this past August. The transgender teen sued the Gloucester County School Board after it barred him from using the boys’ bathroom. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

A few years ago, Gavin Grimm was an unknown student at a high school in Gloucester, Va., pleading with school officials to be able to use the boys’ bathroom. The teen, who came out as transgender his sophomore year, had begun using the boys’ bathroom when the school board decided to pass a policy banning him from it, forcing him to use a unisex bathroom instead.

Sunday night, millions more people learned his name after Laverne Cox, an actress and transgender activist, gave him a shout-out while introducing Metallica and Lady Gaga at the Grammys.

“Everyone, please Google ‘Gavin Grimm.’ He’s going to the Supreme Court in March. Hashtag stand with Gavin,” Cox told the audience. Cox signed off her introduction by referring to “Ladies and gentlemen and all my gender non-binary peeps tonight…”

[Gavin Grimm just wanted to use the bathroom. He didn’t think the nation would debate it.]

Grimm sued the Gloucester County School Board in 2015 in federal court, arguing that the board’s policy barring him from the boys’ bathroom violated Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination in schools. The case is now headed for the Supreme Court, with oral arguments scheduled for late March, and the case could impact how public schools accommodate transgender students across the nation.

The case is partially based on a directive issued by the Education Department under the Obama administration in May, directing the nation’s public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. Should the Trump administration rescind that directive, some question whether the high court will hear the case at all, or if it will be Why Laverne Cox told you to Google ‘Gavin Grimm’ - The Washington Post:

Only Free Students Can Exercise School Choice - Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog:

Only Free Students Can Exercise School Choice

The President of South Africa offered Nelson Mandela his freedom if he would renounce violence and then remain silent upon his release.  Mandela rejected the offer, saying "Only free men can negotiate; prisoners can't enter in contracts.”  The concept of forced and unfair negotiation rings true in today’s education reform debates.  The new Secretary of Education promises to continue that trend. 

Over the past two decades, major education reforms have been forced upon disadvantaged students without the slightest recognition of the enormous power differential between the state and its disadvantaged students.  These students and their families have, time and again, been asked either to accept the deplorable state of their current education or try out some new reform—a reform that would not be aimed at deplorable school conditions. 

Public schools in the United States are demonstrably separate and unequal, and both measures are on the rise.  Take New York, for instance.  A recent report by the Civil Rights Project shows that two-thirds of African American students in New York attend a school that is ninety percent or more non-white.  Another recent study shows that in New York schools with higher levels of concentrated poverty, the state only spend 90 cents for every dollar it spends in other schools.  Nevada is even worse.  It only spends 60 cents on the dollar in schools with higher percentages of low-income students.  And the racial isolation of Latino and African American students in Nevada is among the worst in the nation. 

In the midst of segregation and inequality, education reform continues to demand that these disadvantaged communities make concessions, but state and federal government rarely, if ever, offer integrated or equal schools.  Instead, the state offers charters and vouchers.   New York has been a hotbed for charter school expansion.  Two years ago, Nevada adopted an aggressive voucher plan.   The hypocrisy of these responses is not new.  In the late 1990s, the Ohio Supreme Court declared the state’s funding system constitutionally inadequate.  A large portion of the state’s schools were so poor that the buildings were crumbling around the students.  The air in classrooms was not safe to breath and the floors not safe to walk on.  Elsewhere, schools simply did not offer parts of the curriculum because no one could teach it.  Rather than fix the problem, the state bought off its most segregated and unequal city—Cleveland.  It offered a select few in the city a way out in the form of vouchers.  Tellingly, the overwhelming majority of voucher students wound up in religious schools, but indicated they did not embrace the religion of their school.  They simply had to get out.

The rational choice of families forced to attend segregated and unequal schools is to take the charter school or voucher.  Even if that choice does not lead to better education, they cannot be blamed for trying to escape segregation and inequality.  We should, however, blame the state for putting them in this position.

In the weeks and months ahead, we need not debate the merits of vouchers or charters.  The response to the offer of vouchers and charters should be: give our disadvantage students integrated schools and equal funding and then we can talk about vouchers and charters.  Then we can talk about whether money matters.

The new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has shown no interest in fundamental education issues like this.  She Education Law Prof Blog:

In LA school board race, candidates try to move beyond the issue that pays: charter schools | 89.3 KPCC

In LA school board race, candidates try to move beyond the issue that pays: charter schools | 89.3 KPCC:

In LA school board race, candidates try to move beyond the issue that pays: charter schools

Twenty minutes into my interview with Los Angeles Unified School Board member Mónica García, as I paused to record the sound of the loud street where we were sipping coffee, she fired an unprompted question back at me.

"Who says that I'm a 'charter school advocate?'" asked García, who's running for her third full term on the board. I laughed — she meant the question partially in-jest. But García also didn't seem to mean it rhetorically – she really wanted to know how she acquired the label.

García's overriding goal during her 12 years representing central and East L.A.'s District 2 has been, she said, to shake up L.A. Unified. When first elected in 2006, that goal attached García to then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's bid to take more control over the school board.

Now, García said, "charters are one part of the solution" — but, she argued, her candidacy was about much more.

L.A. Unified faces titanic challenges: falling enrollment, rising benefits costs and persistent student achievement gaps — all issues that the winners of this spring's elections to the city's school board will be charged with tackling. Voters in three districts will cast primary votes for 13 candidates on March 7.

But the issue that motivates the biggest campaign spenders is charter schools.

More than two-thirds of the outside money pouring into the L.A. Unified race – money that pays for phone bankers, campaign mailers and consultants – has come from pro-charter school groups. Another quarter of those "independent expenditures" comes from charters' chief political rival: L.A.'s main teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA).

This outside money has flooded the race at a remarkable pace. With less than a month until election day, outside groups have spent more than $2.9 million on L.A. Unified races, nearly twice the amount that had been reported by this point in the 2015 school board campaign.

That financial dynamic means that school board candidates are often pigeonholed as the "pro-charter" or "pro-teachers union." Some candidates embrace these labels. Others chafe at them.

Like García. "It’s interesting," she said, "when you run for office… we have a society that comments. What I want to make sure they talk about is that our graduation [rate] is at 75 [percent]."

Imelda Padilla, one of six candidates running for the District 6 seat in the East San Fernando Valley, also dismissed the charter-versus-union framing.

"In this community," explained Padilla, who won UTLA's endorsement, charter school groups and teachers unions "have won together; and in this community, they've lost together."

But it's less relevant whether candidates embrace their labels as "pro-charter" or "pro-union" as it is whether one of those two sides embraces you, said Loyola Marymount University political science professor Fernando Guerra.

In District 6, UTLA and the Service Employees International Union have together In LA school board race, candidates try to move beyond the issue that pays: charter schools | 89.3 KPCC:

Lacking Experience, What Will Trump and DeVos Do to Rural and Small Town Public Schools? | janresseger

Lacking Experience, What Will Trump and DeVos Do to Rural and Small Town Public Schools? | janresseger:

Lacking Experience, What Will Trump and DeVos Do to Rural and Small Town Public Schools?

I am fascinated by an article that appeared the Washington Post over the weekend: Where School Choice Isn’t an Option, Rural Public Schools Worry They’ll be Left Behind.  The reporters take us to East Millinocket, Maine, where: “The small parking lot outside of Schenck High School was crammed with cars, all there for the basketball game, the town’s featured event that night…  This small, remote high school is perhaps East Millinocket’s last and most crucial community pillar. Even before the local paper mill shut down three years ago, the town had suffered a stark economic decline because of the mill’s dwindling profits and the widespread poverty that followed. With a shrinking tax base and an aging population, Schenck High faces an uncertain future. Washington has long designed education policy to deal with urban and suburban challenges, often overlooking the unique problems that face rural schools like this one.”

The reporters include a map of the 50 states that identifies six states where over 55 percent of the students attend rural schools: Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Maine. The article explores this question: How will the Trump administration—which has promised its priority will be to enhance competition and school choice by expanding vouchers students can carry to private and parochial schools and by expanding privately operated (but publicly funded) charter schools—do that in a town like East Millinocket, Maine?  That is, of course, the question that Maine Senator Susan Collins and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski kept asking during the Senate’s debate on the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as our U.S. Secretary of Education, and they both voted against the confirmation because they were not satisfied with the answers they received. Jose DelReal and Emma Brown, the Washington Post‘s reporters, add that almost 9 million of the 50 million public school students across the United States attend rural schools.

I am especially interested in this article because, while today I live in inner-suburban Cleveland, Ohio, I grew up in a small town in northern Montana, one of the largely rural states Lacking Experience, What Will Trump and DeVos Do to Rural and Small Town Public Schools? | janresseger:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES

A demonstrator wears handcuffs Saturday, as thousands rally in Washington Square Park to protest the immigration raids and New York City's policing policy. Photo Credit: Steven Sunshine

Chicago activist Ja'Mal Green tells Chris Hayes 

"Nobody has really said it, but his name is Rahm Emanuel. This mayor that we have in the city of Chicago does not care about black people. I want to put that on the record. ...We're walking past boarded up schools, boarded up houses, they're knocking down with red Xs with no plan to redevelop, mental health facilities shut down, the unemployment rate is the highest in Chicago than it is around the country. If you want to talk about violence, you've got to talk about the economics, not police." -- Washington Free Beacon

Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream

“This is clearly the first wave of attacks under the Trump administration, and we know this isn’t going to be the only one." -- Washington Post

 Gillian Christensen, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security

"ICE dislikes the term 'raids,' and prefers to say authorities are conducting 'targeted enforcement actions.'” -- Washington Post

Obamacare opponent, Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA)

Says he doesn’t want to hold town halls because “since Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill no matter where I go.” -- Think Progress

Donald Trump 

"Trust me, I’m like a smart person.” -- Answer Sheet

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES:

antiracismdsa: Immigrants and Allies Fight Back

antiracismdsa: Immigrants and Allies Fight Back:

Immigrants and Allies Fight Back

During his first weeks as President, Donald Trump has enacted some alarming and draconian executive orders. The most alarming has been his executive orders attacking immigrants.

This executive action, among other things, affects deportation policy and priorities. One of the main things that this executive order does is broaden its definition of ‘priority’ for deportation (a priority is the people that the Department of Homeland Security focuses its resources to deport). Priorities now include anyone that has been accused of a crime, regardless if they were convicted or not, as well as anyone who has previously had an encounter with the immigration system.

This broad definition of a ‘priority’ has put millions of people under the threat of deportation. Which is why now, more than ever, it is important for immigrants to know and exercise their rights in case they were to come into contact with an immigration agents and local law enforcement.

Here are the rights that immigrants must know during a Trump presidency:

1) DO NOT OPEN YOUR DOORS

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cannot come into your home without a warrant signed by an immigration court judge. With your door shut, ask them to slide the signed warrant under the door or push it up against a window. They cannot come in unless you let them.

2) EXERCISE YOUR RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT

I.C.E can and will use anything you say against you in court. It’s important for you to remain silent and ask to speak to your attorney.Simply tell the immigration officer: “I am exercising my fifth amendment right and choosing to remain silent until I speak to my attorney”.

3) DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING BEFORE SPEAKING TO AN ATTORNEY

Many times, I.C.E. and Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.) will attempt to trick and make you sign your own deportation. This is also known as a voluntary departure. Do NOT sign anything that they give you without first speaking to an attorney.

4) RECORD YOUR ENCOUNTER

It’s important to take photos and record video on your phone unless you are on federal government property. Take detailed notes of badge numbers, amount of agents, time, type of cars they used, and exactly what happened. Reporting this information will help us determine if any rights violation was made on behalf of the immigration agency and help us expose theirrouge, manipulative tactics that they use to round up and deport immigrants.

5) REPORT YOUR ENCOUNTER

United We Dream runs a hotline called the MigraWatch Hotline for people to report activity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E), Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P), or any other immigration agencies. Report the activity by calling this hotline at 1-844-363-1423.  

6) GET HELP

Get a trustworthy attorney and explore all options to fight your case. If detained, remember that you might be able to get bail – don’t lose hope. Visit our partners, IMMI, to find free or low-cost legal help near you.

7) FIGHT BACK

Another way to fight back, is to join a community that has your back. As the largest immigrant youth-led network in the country, United We Dream has helped stop hundreds of deportations. Text HereToStay to 877877 to fight back alongside us.

From United We Dream.   See also link on the left to DSA http://www.dsausa.org/we_can_resist_trump_s_immigration_orders

There are Sacramento area resources to assist you. 

antiracismdsa: Immigrants and Allies Fight Back:

Third Millennium Teacher by Cheryl Binkley - Badass Teachers Association

Badass Teachers Association: Third Millennium Teacher by Cheryl Binkley:

Third Millennium Teacher by Cheryl Binkley

How Mrs. DeVos Sees Innovation and Transformation And How Parents and Teachers See it



 With Mrs. Betsy DeVos’ taking office, Reformers are pleased and excited with the thought that at  last they may have the person in place to deliver quickly what they have long wanted. -- A New Market via their version of Innovation and Transformation. Until now no one has been able to deliver that in a way that the public would completely accept.

But, that is what Mrs. DeVos has promised in her first speech, “And I will promise you this: Together, we will find new ways in which we can positively transform education.”

It sounds wonderful, right? It’s going to be important in coming days and months to remember that when Mrs. DeVos uses these terms, she is not using them in the way we might think.

Just listening, we might think she was speaking of transformation as the process of becoming something new and better, like the way children grow and become.  And by saying she will deliver innovation, we might think she means she has new knowledge about how children learn and how we might help them.  Afterall, that’s what lots of us think of when we speak of transformation.

The unspoken problem though, is that when Reformers talk about Transformation, they are talking about transforming a commercial market, not learning that changes lives; and when they talk about Innovation, they are talking about Innovative Disruption, not a great new idea for lesson activities, or new in school programs for learning kids, or even a great new way to organize our schools or districts for better learning chances for all kids.

Mrs. DeVos is talking about markets, not children.

The concepts she is using are from Business and Public Policy theories.  Like Mrs. DeVos,  Education Reformers are most often MBA rather than M.Ed. holders, and Badass Teachers Association: Third Millennium Teacher by Cheryl Binkley:

Do public school advocates have the will to fight Trump? Open question. |

Do public school advocates have the will to fight Trump? Open question. |:

Do public school advocates have the will to fight Trump? Open question

A few days after the United States Senate confirmed the appointment of an avowed enemy of public education–Betsy DeVos–to be the nation’s education secretary, advocates of public education held a conference in New Brunswick to search for some reason for hope. The meeting’s organizers, including members and staff of such pro-public education groups as the Education Law Center and Save Our Schools, depicted the election later this year of a new governor to replace Chris Christie as an opportunity–as, indeed, it is.

Christie, after all, shares DeVos’s views of a privately operated but publicly funded system  of education and was one of  a handful of governors to endorse her appointment by President Donald Trump. He called her choice “inspired.”

What was not inspirational, however, was the response of the New Jersey advocates–good, right-thinking people all, with whom I have little argument. Except one–why can’t they be as aggressive in promoting a system of free, inclusive, integrated, fully-funded independent public schools as Trump is in destroying it?

The title of the conference was “New Jersey Education Policy Agenda for the Next Gubernatorial Administration.” I could not stay for afternoon sessions on testing and training, but I did listen to discussions of school funding, charters, governance, and accountability. I was disheartened by what I heard.

Part of the problem is that, among this group of advocates–and others, including the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), the state’s largest teachers’ union–Phil Murphy is the heir apparent for what passes for progressivism in New Jersey politics.  Yet Murphy–like Jon Corzine, a Goldman-Sachs alumnus–has said virtually nothing about public education and his message is as inspiring and thought-provoking as a lecture on lawn mowing.

Trump and DeVos want to turn public education upside down and shake out all the Do public school advocates have the will to fight Trump? Open question. |:

What To Make Of Bad News Betsy’s Letter About ESSA To Chief State School Officers – Exceptional Delaware 2017

What To Make Of Bad News Betsy’s Letter About ESSA To Chief State School Officers – Exceptional Delaware 2017:

What To Make Of Bad News Betsy’s Letter About ESSA To Chief State School Officers

On Friday, newly christened U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos sent a, how shall I call it, awkward letter to all the education leaders of each state.  Alarm bells went up immediately.  Many people are scratching their heads about the missive dealing with state Every Student Succeeds Act implementation plans.  The word “may” in relation to Title I, II, III, IV and V funding is the part that is confusing many.  Is this Betsy’s way of phasing from Title funding to her school voucher plan?  And how many enemies of modern-day accountability standards are equally confused about Betsy gutting the John King regulations from last fall?  This could be a Trojan Horse leading to more Competency-Based Education.  We all know CBE is a darling of the ed reformers these days.  Read the below letter and sit and wonder like the rest of us!  I have no doubt President Trump is clueless about any of this and is applying his next daily helping of orange glow.What To Make Of Bad News Betsy’s Letter About ESSA To Chief State School Officers – Exceptional Delaware 2017:

View this document on Scribd

 What To Make Of Bad News Betsy’s Letter About ESSA To Chief State School Officers – Exceptional Delaware 2017:

Stop Humiliating Teachers - The New Yorker

Stop Humiliating Teachers - The New Yorker:

STOP HUMILIATING TEACHERS

A necessary commonplace: Almost everyone we know has been turned around, or at least seriously shaken, by a teacher—in college, maybe, but often in high school, often by a man or a woman who drove home a point or two about physics, literature, or ethics, and looked at us sternly and said, in effect, You could be more than what you are. At their best, teachers are everyday gods, standing at the entryway to the world. If they are fair and good, they are possibly the most morally impressive adults that their students will ever know. For a while, they are the law, they are knowledge, they are justice.

Everyone celebrates his or her personal memory of individual teachers, yet, as a culture, we snap at the run-down heels of the profession. The education reporter Dana Goldstein, in her book “The Teacher Wars,” published in 2014, looks at American history and describes a recurring situation of what she calls “moral panic”—the tendency, when there’s an economic or social crisis, to lay blame on public-school teachers. They must have created the crisis, the logic goes, by failing to educate the young.

We have been in such a panic for more than a decade, during which time the attacks on public-school teachers have been particularly virulent. They are lazy, mediocre, tenaciously clinging to tenure in order to receive their lavish pay of thirty-six thousand dollars a year (that’s the national-average starting salary, according to the National Education Association). As Goldstein put it, “Today the ineffective tenured teacher has emerged as a feared character, a vampiric type who sucks tax dollars into her bloated pension and health care plans, without much regard for the children under her care.” Because of this person, we are failing to produce an effective workforce; just look at how badly we’re lagging behind other nations in international standardized tests. Our teachers are mediocre as a mass; we have to make a serious effort to toss out the bad ones before they do any more damage. And so on. It’s not just Republicans who talk this way. Democrats, too, are obsessed with ridding the system of bad teachers. From the President on down, leaders have been demanding “accountability.”

There’s an element of this rage at bad teachers that’s hard to talk about, and so it’s often avoided: the dismaying truth that we don’t know how to educate poor inner-city and rural kids in this country. In particular, we don’t know how to educate African-American boys, who, according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, graduate high school at rates no better than fifty-nine per cent. Yet if students from poor families persistently fail to score well, if they fail to finish high school in sufficient numbers, and if those who graduate are unable, in many cases, to finish college, teachers alone can hardly be at fault. Neither the schools nor the teachers created the children or the society around them: the schools and the teachers must do their best with the kids they are given.

By the time kids from poor families of all races enter kindergarten, they are often significantly behind wealthier children in vocabulary, knowledge, and cognitive skills. Of course, good teachers can help—particularly that single teacher who takes a kid in hand and turns him around. But, in recent years, teachers have been held responsible for things that may often be beyond their powers to change. They are being assaulted because they can be assaulted. The real problem is persistent poverty.

Our view of American public education in general has been warped by our Stop Humiliating Teachers - The New Yorker: