Big Education Ape

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Thursday Book Report Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

Thursday Book Report Diane Ravitch's blog

A site to discuss better education for all

Bill Moyers’ Website: The Trump-Russia Timeline

by dianeravitch / 7min

Bill Moyers’ website very usefully assembled a timeline of Donald Trump’s relations with Russia and Russian individuals.

New York City: Mayor de Blasio’s Capitulation to the Powerful Charter Lobby

5by dianeravitch / 16min

There used to be a well-known saying: “You can’t fight City Hall.” Change that to: “You can’t fight the charter lobby.” Mayor Bill de Blasio ran for mayor with the promise that he would fight the charter lobby. He was a public school parent and

Los Angeles: New School Board President, a Charter School Operator, Calls for Unity

2by dianeravitch / 45min

Two newsworthy items from Los Angeles: First, the new school board elected charter chain operator Ref Rodriguez as its president. Rodriguez leads the PUC (Partnership Uplifting Communities) charter chain of 16 schools. Rodriguez called for unity after the just-concluded dirty election, the most expensive in U.S. history. Politico reports: “LA SCHOOL BOARD PRESIDENT SEEKS UNITY AFTER UGLY ELECTION

Former Charter Teacher: Why Teacher Attrition is High in Charter Schools

6by dianeravitch / 1h

Alternet posted an informative article that explains why charter schools churn through teachers. It was written by Rann Miller, who taught for six years in a charter school in Camden, New Jersey. He writes: “John was fresh-out-of-college

Speak Out for the Teaching Profession!

5by dianeravitch / 21min

Many states are planning to lower standards for new teachers, because charter schools can’t recruit enough teachers to fill their staff. Speak out against lowered standards! Don’t let them destroy the teaching profession! Click here and stand

Daniel Katz: Charter Schools Should Not Be Allowed to “Certify” Unqualified Teachers

4by dianeravitch / 39min

Daniel Katz prepares secondary school teachers at Seton Hall University. He knows the importance of having highly qualified professionals in every classroom, especially in urban districts where many students need extra support and individual attention. In this post , he expresses his bafflement that the SUNY Charter School Committee is considering a plan to permit charter schools to “certify” the

Jersey Jazzman: Do Charter Teachers Need to be Certified or Pass State Exams?

14by dianeravitch / 1h

Jersey Jazzman explores the flap in New York about certification –or lack thereof–for charter school teachers. The charter industry says, if we get the test scores, we don’t need teachers with masters’ degrees or certification… JJ says: Yes, “better results” are all that matters, no matter how practically small they may be. And no matter how you got them: if your gains are from student attrition,

Carol Burris Will Receive Well-Deserved Honor for Her Tireless Work on Behalf of Public Schools!

14by dianeravitch / 2h

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, has been selected by the board of the Horace Mann League as its 2018 Outstanding Friend of Public Education. The presentation will be made at the HML Annual Meeting in February in Nashville (AASA Convention). The HML made an excellent choice. Carol has been a peerless leader in the fight against privatization and high-stakes te

YESTERDAY

DeVos’s New Cause: The Rights of Those Accused of Raping Women on Campus

100+by dianeravitch / 18h

DeVos’ world gets stranger by the day. After hearing from rape victims, DeVos and her top civil rights official have decided to champion the rights of those accused of raping the women. The New York Times calls this “a new look” at the issue of campus rape. Indeed. The letters have come in to her office by the hundreds, heartfelt missives from college students, mostly men, who had been accused of

Trump Knew

7by dianeravitch / 19h

Look at this tweet. https://mobile.twitter.com/yashar/status/884900796957171712

A Teacher Who Often Criticizes His Union Says It Is Time to Stand Strong Together

14by dianeravitch / 20h

Arthur Goldstein, a high school teacher in Queens, New York, has often criticized the UFT for not taking the militant stands that Arthur prefers. But now, he says, it is time to stand together and fight. Unions are facing an existential threat to their existence. The Rightwing billionaire Robert Mercer is behind an effort to call a state constitutional convention. Arthur knows what Mercer has in

A Sign Once Sold in Gift Shop of the Holocaust Musem

200+by dianeravitch / 21h

Sound familiar? Read it again. Think about it. Which side are you on? Snopes says the poster was once available in the gift shop of the Holocaust Museum. Snopes says: The list was originally created by Laurence Britt in 2003, for an article published by Free Inquiry magazine (a publication for secular humanist commentary and analysis). While subsequent postings of the list often attribute it to “

Texas: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to Public Schools: Starve

16by dianeravitch / 22h

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is the most powerful figure in state government. He is also the most loathsome person in the government. He had a talk show before he was elected to the State Senate. He was the Rush Limbaugh of Texas. His views are far right. He hates public schools. He has a passion for charter schools and vouchers. He doesn’t care about charter school corruption. He will not allow a

Detroit: New Superintendent Says District May Stop Authorizing Charters, Focus Instead on Public Schools

20by dianeravitch / 23h

Good news from Detroit, the lowest performing urban district in the nation. After years of outsourcing students to privately managed charter schools, the new superintendent says he is considering no longer authorizing charters but focusing instead on improving traditional public schools. Imagine asking a business to jumpstart competitors and you can see how wacky the current policy is. I am very

Mark Naison: How Charter Schools Stifle Innovation

33by dianeravitch / 1d

Mark Naison is a professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in New York. He writes: How Charter Schools Have Stifled Educational Innovation and Fought the Opt Out Movement Although charter schools were originally promoted as a vehicle to encourage educational experimentation, their meteoric growth in influence has actually coincided with a REDUCTION in innovation in schools becau

DeVos Invested in Military Technology in May

15by dianeravitch / 1d

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos invested in a military technology company owned by her son-in-law. Her brother Erik Prince is advising the Trump administration on military strategy. I naively assumed that once appointed to the Cabinet, all outside business dealings were suspended.

Oklahoma: Teacher Karen Gaddis Wins Surprise Victory for Legislature

67by dianeravitch / 1d

Retired teacher Karen Gaddis won a surprise victory last night for the Oklahoma legislature, flipping a seat that has been held by a Republican since the early 1990s. Congratulations, Karen! Oklahoma will have a Teacher in the House! We

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

On Healthcare and Poverty: The Ill-informed and Heartless U.S.A. | radical eyes for equity

On Healthcare and Poverty: The Ill-informed and Heartless U.S.A. | radical eyes for equity:

On Healthcare and Poverty: The Ill-informed and Heartless U.S.A.

The healthcare debate spurred by the election of Trump has overlapped with my own adventures with the healthcare system due to my accident at the end of 2016 and my parents’ serious and fatal health events throughout the summer of 2017.

As a result, I have witnessed vividly how ill-informed most people are—from the general public to healthcare providers of all types—along with how that overlaps with massive and heartless misconceptions about poverty in the U.S.

While the U.S. has a long and disgusting history of racism and demonizing people in poverty, the current failure to provide social safety nets for the struggling has roots in Ronald Reagan’s politics of hatred anchored by the false but effective “welfare queen” narrative.

However, even more significant, the erosion of social programs became standard policy under Bill Clinton’s tone-deaf and self-serving “get tough on welfare” policies in the 1990s.

A robust welfare system and universal healthcare driven by a single-payer system are not only morally imperative in the U.S., but also fiscally essential to provide the stability that would enhance the market and everyone’s ability to prosper.

Answering honestly key questions about the intersection of poverty and On Healthcare and Poverty: The Ill-informed and Heartless U.S.A. | radical eyes for equity:

Momentum Against Charter Schools Grows as NEA Joins NAACP in Demanding a Moratorium | janresseger

Momentum Against Charter Schools Grows as NEA Joins NAACP in Demanding a Moratorium | janresseger:

Momentum Against Charter Schools Grows as NEA Joins NAACP in Demanding a Moratorium

Image result for charter schools Moratorium

Last week that nation’s largest labor union, the National Education Association (NEA), passed an important new policy statement on charter schools. In the test-driven climate created by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, annual standardized tests came to be seen as the yardstick by which all schools should be judged—and that included the privatized alternatives including charters and the private and parochial schools that accept publicly funded tuition vouchers. It has become clearer over the years that charters and vouchers have created serious problems for children, for public school districts, and for the communities where the charters are situated and privatization is occurring, except that until quite recently we’ve continued to look only at the test scores and conclude that schools that produce high scores are worth funding and low scoring schools ought to be punished. We have just looked right past the other problems.

Now people are having to pay attention to the injustices caused by school privatization, what economists call the negative externalities—what the rest of us are likely to call collateral damage. NEA names some of these problems in the introduction to the new policy statement: “The explosive growth of charters has been driven, in part, by deliberate and well-funded efforts to ensure that charters are exempt from the basic safeguards and standards that apply to public schools.” These efforts, according to NEA, “mirror efforts to privatize other public institutions for profit.”

And, efforts to privatize have particularly targeted the most vulnerable communities: “Charters have grown the most in school districts that were already struggling to meet students’ needs due to longstanding systemic and ingrained patterns of institutional neglect, racial and ethnic segregation, inequitable school funding, and disparities in staff, programs and services. The result has been the creation of separate, largely unaccountable, privately managed charter school systems in those districts that undermine support and funding of local public schools. Such separate and unequal education systems are disproportionately located in, and harm, students and communities of color by depriving both of the high quality public education system that should be their right… The growth of separate and unequal systems of charter schools that are not subject to the same basic safeguards and standards that apply to public schools threatens our students and our public education system.”

NEA proposes a moratorium on the authorization of new charter schools unless two criteria Momentum Against Charter Schools Grows as NEA Joins NAACP in Demanding a Moratorium | janresseger:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The Grifters

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The Grifters:

The Grifters

With school out and Trump and his grifter family sucking up all the media energy, it's been hard for this blogger to stay focused on education politics. Talking (on Hitting Left) and writing about even the hot ed issues, like charter schools, vouchers and testing madness, while the country is facing its worst constitutional crisis in half-a-century, sounds to many of my readers (rightfully so) like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It brings me little satisfaction or relief.

Like most of us, I've increasingly been turned into a spectator on RussiaGate, staring at times in disbelief, with eyes glazed over at CNN or MSNBC, spitting out invectives at the TV screen while the grifter family saga plays out with never-ending cast of talking heads. It's a parade of Trump and anti-Trump lawyers, former and current CIA operatives, Republican pols abandoning ship, Democrats with little to offer except "we not Trump in 2018", and so forth -- dredged out to normalize political criminality and the greatest redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top, in history.

Where is this going? How do we as a nation, extricate ourselves from the rule of the most corrupt, anti-democratic regime since the Nixon era. Trump won't resign like Nixon. If he did, Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The Grifters:

La. BESE Member Kira Orange Jones and NM Acting Chancellor Chris Ruszkowski Are Married. | deutsch29

La. BESE Member Kira Orange Jones and NM Acting Chancellor Chris Ruszkowski Are Married. | deutsch29:

La. BESE Member Kira Orange Jones and NM Acting Chancellor Chris Ruszkowski Are Married.

In September 2016, Teach for America (TFA) Executive Director of the Greater New Orleans-Delta Region and Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) member, Kira Orange Jones, announced that she would be leaving her specific TFA post only to move into a higher post overseeing 15 TFA executive directors.

Orange Jones, who has been a solid corporate ed reform ally on Louisiana’s mostly corporate-ed-reform-bent BESE, assures the public that her new post will not alter her residency in New Orleans and will therefore allow her to retain her BESE seat. As Jessica Williams reports in the September 06, 2016, New Orleans Advocate:

Kira Orange Jones, the head of the local branch of the national teacher recruitment organization Teach For America and one of New Orleans’ representatives on the state’s top education board, said Friday she will leave her current job with TFA after nearly a decade.
“After nine and a half incredible years leading Teach For America Greater New Orleans-Louisiana Delta, I am launching the search for my successor,” Jones said in a Friday email to her colleagues.
She isn’t leaving the organization entirely, however. In her new role, she will manage and support the national organization’s executive directors across 15 regions, a job that will not require her to leave New Orleans, she said.
That means she’ll be able to keep the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education seat to which she was elected in 2011.

Orange Jones is one of several BESE members who garnered substantial out-of-state billionaire support for her campaign, both in 2011 and 2015. In 2011 as The Nationreports:

Last fall, a coterie of extremely wealthy billionaires, among them New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, turned the races for unpaid positions on the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) into some of the most expensive in the state’s history. Seven pro-education “reform” candidates for the BESE outraised eight candidates endorsed by the teacher’s unions by $2,386,768 to $199,878, a ratio of nearly twelve to one. In just one of these races, the executive director of Teach for America Greater New Orleans-Louisiana Delta, Kira Orange Jones, outspent attorney Louella Givens, who was endorsed by the state’s main teacher’s unions, by more than thirty-four to one: $472,382 to $13,815.
To support Orange Jones’s campaign against Givens, Eli Broad, billionaire head of the education reform organization the Broad Foundation and a major trainer and placer of school superintendents, chipped in $5,000. Reed Hastings of Netflix kicked in the same. Houston energy hedge fund billionaire John Arnold and his wife Laura gave a total of $10,000, as did Walmart heiress Carrie Walton Penner and her husband Greg. New York City’s second-wealthiest man, Michael Bloomberg, contributed $10,000 as well.

And the out-of-state billionaire money into the 2015 BESE race outdid that of 2011, with Orange Jones again scoring big. An excerpt from the 2015 Times-Picayune:

Major education activist groups are again spending big on Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education races. More than $3.5 million has already come in to political action committees that support the Common Core standards and innovations such as charter schools and publicly funded vouchers.
It’s an astounding amount of money for a relatively obscure board. And the
La. BESE Member Kira Orange Jones and NM Acting Chancellor Chris Ruszkowski Are Married. | deutsch29:

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