The Colors of Summer Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

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

The Colors of Summer Diane Ravitch's blog

A site to discuss better education for all

The New Republic: We Are Veering Closer to a Constitutional Crisis

2by dianeravitch / 44min

Brian Beutler, an editor at The New Republic, warns that we are approaching “an authoritarian crisis.” I call it a constitutional crisis because there is nothing in our Constitution that deals with the actions of a Trump. https://newrepublic.com/article/143984/were-brink-authoritarian-crisis What if the president and his immediate family have colluded with a foreign power to influence the preside

Los Angeles: Court Rules that Rafe Esquith May Sue LAUSD for Discriminating Against Him

1by dianeravitch / 1h

Rafe Esquith, a teacher of fifth-grade students at the Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles who gained national attention for his Hobart Shakespeareans, won the right to sue the Los Angeles Unified School District for firing him in 2015. Esquith was accused of sexual improprieties, which he denied. A state appellate court panel Thursday upheld a trial judge’s ruling that a former Los Angeles U

Billionaire Elon Musk Knows What Schools Need to Do–and They Are Already Doing It

4by dianeravitch / 1h

Elon Musk, tech billionaire, says he has the solution for schools: teach children to ask why. Engage them in constructing things to learn how they work. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/20/elon-musk-this-question-can-help-fix-the-u-

How to Follow the Creeping Privatization of Public Services

4by dianeravitch / 15min

There is an organization that tracks the privatization of public services–in cities, states, nationally and internationally. It is called “ In the Public Interest.” I urge you to sign up for its online newsletter and reports. You can stay informed about 

New York City: Most Teachers Evaluated Using Test Scores of Students They Don’t Teach

6by dianeravitch / 49min

This practice of evaluating teachers by the scores of students they never taught in subjects they don’t teach is absurd. In New York City, more than half of all teachers are judged based on work they didn’t do. Teachers in Florida went to 

Rachel M. Cohen: Is VAM Dying? A Review of the Evidence

by dianeravitch / 7min

It is called VAM. Value-added-measurement, or value-added-modeling. It means measuring the effectiveness of teachers by the rise or fall of the test scores of their students. Rachel M. Cohen, writing in The American Prospect, documents 

Randi Weingarten: The Fight Before Us Against DeVos and Privatization

5by dianeravitch / 46min

Randi Weingarten gave a major address to the AFT Teach Conference yesterday, in which she explained why she took Betsy DeVos to Van Wert, Ohio, and she called out the forces of destruction now targeting public schools in America. It is time, she says, to resist. To resist privatization by charters and vouchers; to resist the attacks on the teaching profession; to fight racial segregation; to resi

School Choice: Grounded in Racism, Reinvented by the Radical Right

7by dianeravitch / 1h

Rick Hess makes a valiant but unsuccessful effort to provide a new origin story to the idea of school choice, attributing it to Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. That’s quite a stretch, because Thomas Paine lived before there were any public schools in the United States, and Mill, of course, never had any contact with the American idea of free, universal, democratic public schooling. In my exper

Jennifer Berkshire: The Public Rejects DeVos-ALEC Agenda

10by dianeravitch / 2h

Jennifer Berkshire asks a crucial question: Just how far right can Betsy DeVos go before the public rises up to quash her extremist agenda? Never in modern history has there been a more unpopular, more polarizing Cabinet member. She is unpopular because her goal of defunding public education and showering public funds on religious and private schools is unpopular. To understand what DeVos wants,

YESTERDAY

Valerie Strauss: Betsy DeVos Allies Herself with Margaret Thatcher

7by dianeravitch / 12h

Betsy DeVos: our very own Iron Lady! Valerie Strauss parses DeVos’s speech to ALEC. She is the only Secretary of Education who has made it her mission to promote charters, vouchers, and any other alternative to public schools. She is the first Secretary to tell the public that our public schools are filled with self-serving teachers and administrators who care about themselves, not about children

Jack Covey Analyzes Betsy DeVos’s Speech to ALEC

25by dianeravitch / 14h

Jack Covey (pseudonym) teaches in Los Angeles and frequently comments on this blog: x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x BETSY DEVOS: “Through (ALEC’s) leadership, your respective states have truly become the laboratories of democracy our Founders intended. Thank you for putting their vision into practice.” x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x Yeah let’s go back to the late 1700’s …

Betsy DeVos’s Speech to the Far-Right ALEC Organization

37by dianeravitch / 16h

Delve into the mind of Betsy DeVos. She is the first Secretary of Education ever to address the American Legislative Exchange Council, the secretive far-right organization funded by the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and major corporations, with the intent of getting rid of unions, standards for teachers, environmental regulations, and anything that gets in the way of corporations. Here is the

Jeannie Kaplan: Denver Activists Mobilized to Say a Loud NO to DeVos, Corporate Greed, and Privatization

5by dianeravitch / 17h

Jeannie Kaplan, who served on the Denver school board for two terms, has been a sharp critic of the district’s devotion to charters and high-stakes testing. She has documented time and again that ten years of “reform” has produced nothing positive for students. Presently, the school board’s seven members are all corporate reformers. She hopes that this will change as parents and educators join to

Denver: Protestors Slam DeVos Before Her ALEC Speech

18by dianeravitch / 19h

NPR wrote about the protest awaiting Betsy DeVos in Denver. Apparently she is speaking today, although that fact is on neither the ALEC agenda nor the Department of Education website. She is the first Secretary of Education to address this extremist group. The Koch brothers and Dezvos family foundations are among the funders of this anti-government group. Curiously, NPR described the protestors a

Bill Moyers’ Website on Trump’s Nutty Interview

3by dianeravitch / 19h

Other news outlets focused on Trump’s regret about appointing Jeff Sessions. Or his slap at Rod Rosenstein, Comey and others. But this is what Moyers’ website loved: “If you’ve been away from the news for the past 18 hours or so, the New York Times interview in which Trump rages against Jeff Sessions, Jim Comey, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and maybe the White House

Arthur Goldstein Refutes Attack on Teachers by Campbell Brown and WSJ

60by dianeravitch / 20h

Arthur Goldstein teaches English language learners at Frabis Lewis High School in New York City. In this post, he refutes attacks on teachers by Campbell Brown and the Wall Street Journal. New York City has something called the Absent Teacher Reserve pool, consisting mostly of teachers whose jobs disappeared when their school was closed, through no fault of theirs. The ATR pool was created during

Kansas: Court Hammers State Lawyers Over Latest School Funding Plan

2by dianeravitch / 21h

The great puzzle in Kansas is how the State got such a thoughtful Supreme Court, one that actually cares about education. Kansas is in a deep budget hole because Governor Sam Brownback cut taxes repeatedly, in the belief that low taxes would produce economic growth. Only it didn’t, and the schools are in big trouble. The court has repeatedly ordered the state legislature to produce a school fundi

Indiana Legislators Don’t Care About Negative Results of Vouchers

100+by dianeravitch / 22h

Indiana finally got a research study of its voucher program, and the results were lackluster at best. The study showed that students who used vouchers saw their scores go down; after a few years, those who persisted caught up with their public school peers, but the lowest-scoring students dropped out and returned to public schools. Indiana has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on vouchers. Le

Florida: Palm Beach Post Urges School Board to Join the Lawsuit Against Horrendous HB 7069

3by dianeravitch / 23h

Florida parents and educators opposed HB 7069, a bill which hurts public schools and enriches charter schools (private contractor schools), but the legislature didn’t listen. (Key legislators have financial ties to the charter industry.) They urged Governor Rick Scott to veto it but he didn’t listen. Now school boards, led by the one in Broward County, are suing to block the law and have it decla

Afghan Girls at Robotics Competition: “This Is the Way the World Should Be”

11by dianeravitch / 1d

The Afghan girls’ robotics team had difficulties entering the United State (ya know, they might be terrorists) but when they finally arrived at the international competition in Washington , they stole the show. Their robot was named “Better Idea of Afghan Girls.” ““I am so happy and so tired,” Alireza Mehraban, an Afghan software engineer who is the team’s mentor, said after the competition concl

Gary Sasso: Why Don’t the Billionaires Help the Schools That Most Children Attend?

53by dianeravitch / 1d

Gary Sasso, dean of education at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, asks a simple question : if billionaires like Bill Gates and Eli Broad care about our nation’s future, why don’t they help the public schools, which enroll 85% of America’s children? Sasso wrote in Salon: “Obscured by the rancor of the school reform debate is this fact: Socio-economic status is the most relevant determinant of st

A Wonderful Story to Add to Our Knowledge of African-American History

12by dianeravitch / 1d

S. Allen Counter led an eventful life. He was a pathbreaking neurologist at Harvard Medical School. His life’s passion, however, was to bring deserved recognition to the life and achievements of Matthew Henson, the explorer who 

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

Bringing the Education Conversation Back to What Society Has Forgotten: Poverty and Inequity | janresseger

Bringing the Education Conversation Back to What Society Has Forgotten: Poverty and Inequity | janresseger:

Bringing the Education Conversation Back to What Society Has Forgotten: Poverty and Inequity

In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein castigated conservative reformers who construct a narrative of government failure as the justification for privatization. Over the years, education writers have documented that the narrative of the overwhelming failure of American public schools is fake news—a distorted story to justify the expansion of charters and vouchers and to trash teachers and their unions.

Twenty years ago, in The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle documented that school “reformers” were constructing a specious narrative of public school failure: “(O)n the whole, the American school system is in far better shape than the critics would have us believe; where American schools fail, those failures are largely caused by problems that are imposed on those schools, problems that the critics have been only too happy to ignore. American education can be restructured, improved, and strengthened—but to build realistic programs for achieving these goals, we must explode the myths of the Manufactured Crisis and confront the real problems of American education.” (The Manufactured Crisis, p. 12)

Then in 2012, tracing a trend of modest but consistent improvement over the decades in scores from the National Assessment of Education Progress, Diane Ravitch reached the same conclusion: “In the early years of the twenty-first century, a bipartisan consensus arose about education policy in the United States. Right and left, Democrats and Republicans, the leading members of our political class and our media seemed to agree: Public education is broken… Furthermore, according to this logic… blame must fall on the shoulders of teachers and principals… Since teachers are the problem, their job protections must be eliminated and teachers must be fired. Teachers’ unions must be opposed at every turn… (W)hat is happening now is an astonishing development. It is not meant to reform public education but is a Bringing the Education Conversation Back to What Society Has Forgotten: Poverty and Inequity | janresseger:

CPS choose to ignore or follow federal and state statutes funding and staffing levels at will? Bev Johns responds. – Fred Klonsky

If federal and state statutes drive funding and staffing levels, how is it that CPS can choose to ignore or follow them at will? And why can’t other Illinois districts do the same under SB1? Bev Johns responds. – Fred Klonsky:

If federal and state statutes drive funding and staffing levels, how is it that CPS can choose to ignore or follow them at will? And why can’t other Illinois districts do the same under SB1? Bev Johns responds.

The first thing to remember is that in all things education there is Chicago and then there is the rest of Illinois.

The same rules rarely apply.

Most of the state’s poor and students of color live in Chicago and Cook County. When bad things happen they usually happen here first and then travel down state.

For years, special education funding to CPS has been in the form of a block grant, with no guarantees of how it will be spent. In recent years the money has been co-mingled with general education funding. There were no guarantees that special education funds would result in direct and dedicated funding for Special Education teachers or at what ratio of teacher to student.

CPS has now told parents it will no longer co-mingle the general education and special education dollars in their block grants. If true, this is a win.

Meanwhile the legislature has sent to the governor a school funding formula, Senate Bill 1, which will send special education dollars to districts as block grants as they have always done to CPS, allowing for If federal and state statutes drive funding and staffing levels, how is it that CPS can choose to ignore or follow them at will? And why can’t other Illinois districts do the same under SB1? Bev Johns responds. – Fred Klonsky:

US Ed Sec Betsy DeVos Endorses the ALEC System | deutsch29

US Ed Sec Betsy DeVos Endorses the ALEC System | deutsch29:

US Ed Sec Betsy DeVos Endorses the ALEC System

On July 20, 2017, US ed sec Betsy DeVos addressed the lunch crowd at the Denver, Colorado, meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Her presence was withheld from ALEC’s online conference speaker listing as well as its online conference agenda.

Here are excerpts from DeVos’ opening of her speech:

It’s good to be here at ALEC, with so many friends and quality leaders shaping policy across all 50 states. …

I’m no stranger to state-based advocacy….

You have led the way in helping states across the nation craft innovative solutions to today’s problems: in healthcare, taxes, regulations, entitlements, and importantly, education.

What DeVos refers to as “state-based advocacy” is actually advocacy for model legislation approved by ALEC.

DeVos does not want states to do what individual states want. She wants states to pass ALEC-endorsed, model legislation– which includes vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts.

ALEC is the DeVos-preferred system. Sure, she plays it off as being interested in the individual child and as promoting parents-know-best-for-their-children.

But there is no parent membership to ALEC.

ALEC is DeVos’ system of choice.

ALEC has been around since 1973, but it was not until 2012 that the group’s activities became public knowledge. And ALEC liked it that way.

ALEC is a sophisticated system, one that purports to promote “states’ rights” and shuns “federal overreach,” but what ALEC really wants is to supplant any federal role with its own corporate-friendly agenda and to entice legislators to promote that US Ed Sec Betsy DeVos Endorses the ALEC System | deutsch29:

Teachers union leader bashes Betsy DeVos — and DeVos strikes back - The Washington Post

Teachers union leader bashes Betsy DeVos — and DeVos strikes back - The Washington Post:

Teachers union leader bashes Betsy DeVos — and DeVos strikes back 

There’s no more pretending to play nice between Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

In April, the two visited a traditional public school in Ohio together in what was a short-lived experiment in “getting to know you,” and they were supposed to visit a charter school together, too. But on Thursday, Weingarten gave a blistering speech at her union’s convention in Washington, calling DeVos an “ideologue who wants to destabilize and privatize the public schools that millions of Americans value and rely upon.”

A few hours later, DeVos went after the teachers unions — and the AFT, in particular — in a speech she gave in Denver to the American Legislative Executive Council, a powerful conservative organization of lobbyists and state legislators.

DeVos accused the unions of being  “defenders of the status quo” who care only about “school systems” and not about individual children. She mentioned — and had displayed — an AFT tweet criticizing her for saying that public money should be invested in individual students and arguing instead that “we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids.”Teachers union leader bashes Betsy DeVos — and DeVos strikes back - The Washington Post:

The One Reform We Never Try: Increase Teacher Salary | gadflyonthewallblog

The One Reform We Never Try: Increase Teacher Salary | gadflyonthewallblog:

The One Reform We Never Try: Increase Teacher Salary

There are many suggestions for improving America’s public schools:

More standardized tests.

New academic standards.

Increase charter schools and/or allow kids to attend private schools with public money.

But one reform you hardly ever hear about is this: pay teachers more.

Isn’t that funny?

We’re willing to try almost everything else but that.

Sure, some folks want to tie teachers’ salaries to test scores, but that’s not increasing pay. That’s just doubling down on standardized testing.

Isn’t it shocking that no one is willing to invest more money into the actual act of educating children?

Consider this: full-time employees making minimum wage earn between $15,000-$20,000 a year. (Some states have voluntarily raised the minimum wage above the federally mandated $7.25 to as much as $10 an hour.)

Compare that to a teacher’s starting salary.

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the low end The One Reform We Never Try: Increase Teacher Salary | gadflyonthewallblog:

Teacher Tom: Is ADHD A Fraud?

Teacher Tom: Is ADHD A Fraud?:

Is ADHD A Fraud?

According to the American Psychiatric Association, 11 percent of American kids (over 6 million of them) have ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder). I'm not a psychiatrist, but I know the symptoms (inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity) and I can honestly say that of the hundreds of children that have passed my way over the past couple decades, I've never met one upon whom I would hang that label.

Now, I admit to be completely unqualified to make that diagnosis, but you would think that by now I would have run across at least one child who set off my alarm bells. Or perhaps there is something about our school that attracts non-ADHD kids, or maybe I'm looking right at the symptoms and just see normal behavior, or it could be that the folks performing the diagnoses are wrong more often than they are right.

Well-regarded Harvard psychologist Jerome Kegan tends to think that ADHD is largely a fraud foisted upon us by pharmaceutical companies seeking to move their Teacher Tom: Is ADHD A Fraud?: