Big Education Ape

Friday, April 12, 2019

A Day On The Picket Line | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

A Day On The Picket Line | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

A DAY ON THE PICKET LINE

CBS News Video Segment: “Sacramento teachers on strike” | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... - http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/?p=96830 on @Larryferlazzo

As you have read here (see A BEGINNING LIST OF THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING ABOUT OUR SACRAMENTO DISTRICT’S FINANCIAL FIASCO) or heard elsewhere, our school district is not doing well, and is likely to be taken over by the state soon.

We had a one-day strike today (you can get lots of background by looking at that “Best” list), and here are some photos and article about it I shared on social media. By the way, that’s my friend, colleague, and co-author Katie Hull and I in the photo at the top of this blog post.

DeVos’s Staff Blocked Researchers Trying to Investigate Federal Charter Schools Program | janresseger

DeVos’s Staff Blocked Researchers Trying to Investigate Federal Charter Schools Program | janresseger

DeVos’s Staff Blocked Researchers Trying to Investigate Federal Charter Schools Program

Writing this week for The Washingtonian, Rachel M. Cohen describes the responses of eighteen federal workers when she interviewed them about what it’s really like to work for the Trump administration.

Cohen quotes an anonymous staff person in Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education, someone who reflects on Departmental priorities these days and her own particular concern: “I definitely get the sense that the appointees don’t feel many functions of our agency are necessary anymore. Words like ‘regulatory overreach’ and ‘burdensome regulations’ come up a lot, and while it’s true sometimes oversight is burdensome, and ensuring efficacy and quality can feel like overreach, we give out a lot of money—and if we don’t maintain some standard for those funds, then we’re not doing our job.”

Apparently the politically appointed leadership at the U.S. Department of Education wasn’t happy when, on March 8, 2019, the Network for Public Education (NPE) tried to investigate federal oversight over one area of departmental funding by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request for documentation of routine regulation of the federal Charter Schools Program. Jeff Bryant is one of the researchers and writers of NPE’s new report, Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride. In an article published this week at AlterNet, Bryant shares some simple research questions he submitted to the Department of Education and the outrageous response he received: “On March 15, I received a voicemail from an official in the public affairs division of the department asking me to call her back. The message started out nice enough but then veered toward criticism. ‘Apparently you have sent this request to multiple people,’ she said (emphasis original), ‘and that just creates havoc for everyone.’ When I immediately called her back, I explained I had merely sent my inquiry to the contacts provided on the relevant sections of the department’s website. ‘That’s understandable,’ she replied, but for ‘future reference’ I was told to send inquiries to ‘a director’—though I’m not sure who that is. And I was told again my questions had ‘created havoc’ in the office but that department staff CONTINUE READING: DeVos’s Staff Blocked Researchers Trying to Investigate Federal Charter Schools Program | janresseger

Ron DeSantis Has ‘Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals’ for Florida Education and That’s Bad | The Edvocate Blog

Ron DeSantis Has ‘Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals’ for Florida Education and That’s Bad | The Edvocate Blog

Ron DeSantis Has ‘Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals’ for Florida Education and That’s Bad

The new governor wants to arm teachers, undermine local school boards, and generally double down on decades of education reform efforts that have gutted the state’s public schools.

by Kathleen Oropeza | April 9, 2019 | The Progressive/Public School Shakedown

For years, policy makers and pundits hyped Florida as a model for “education reform” that other states should follow. The claim was never true, but now with a green-light from new Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida lawmakers have been cut loose to prove that bad education policy can always be made substantially worse.

Since 1998, when Florida state government became a GOP trifecta controlling the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature, politicians have passed dense layers of public school “accountability” policies that former Governor Jeb Bush referred to as BHAGs or “Big Hairy Audacious Goals.”

These BHAGs include using high-stakes tests, assigning schools A-F grades(labeling impoverished kids and their public schools as “failing”), retainingthird-graders who flunk the state reading test, spending billions in public funds on CONTINUE READING: Ron DeSantis Has ‘Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals’ for Florida Education and That’s Bad | The Edvocate Blog

Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers on Ken Davis’ Chicago Newsroom: Lori Lightfoot, Lincoln Yards, TIFs, pensions, the Left and our Dad fought in Spain. – Fred Klonsky

Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers on Ken Davis’ Chicago Newsroom: Lori Lightfoot, Lincoln Yards, TIFs, pensions, the Left and our Dad fought in Spain. – Fred Klonsky

HITTING LEFT WITH THE KLONSKY BROTHERS ON KEN DAVIS’ CHICAGO NEWSROOM: LORI LIGHTFOOT, LINCOLN YARDS, TIFS, PENSIONS, THE LEFT AND OUR DAD FOUGHT IN SPAIN.

Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers on Ken Davis’ Chicago Newsroom: Lori Lightfoot, Lincoln Yards, TIFs, pensions, the Left and our Dad fought in Spain. – Fred Klonsky

‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ Has Never Been More Important Than It is Today | gadflyonthewallblog

‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ Has Never Been More Important Than It is Today | gadflyonthewallblog

‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ Has Never Been More Important Than It is Today

The biggest mistake people make about “The Diary of Anne Frank” is to assume it’s about a little dead girl.

It’s not.

Anne Frank is not dead.

Not in 1945. Not in 2019.

Anne was a Dutch Jew hiding from the Nazis with her family and four others in a loft above her father’s former factory in Amsterdam.

The teenager is the most famous victim of the Holocaust, but her story doesn’t end when she succumbed to typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the closing days of WWII.

Because it’s a story that never ends.

Her physical self may be gone, but her spirit remains.

In the 1990s, she was a Muslim Bosniak child killed by Christian Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

In the 2000s, she was a Christian Darfuri in Western Sudan killed by Arab militias.

A decade ago, she was CONTINUE READING: ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ Has Never Been More Important Than It is Today | gadflyonthewallblog

NYC Public School Parents: The Chancellor says no final decision has yet been made on the issue of providing student information to charters for marketing purposes

NYC Public School Parents: The Chancellor says no final decision has yet been made on the issue of providing student information to charters for marketing purposes

The Chancellor says no final decision has yet been made on the issue of providing student information to charters for marketing purposes

More on this fast-developing if infuriating story in the Daily News here.

This morning at Tweed, Chancellor Carranza spoke about his opposition to the long-standing DOE practice of allowing charter schools to use the DOE mailing lists. He said no final decision has yet been made to change this practice– contrary to what reporters had already been told about this as late as last night and parents this morning. He asked for parents to make their voices heard about whether they wanted this practice to continue or not.

For more on this issue, see our press release here, with quotes from parent leaders, which among other things points out that DOE is the ONLY school district in the country that provides this info to charters voluntarily, helping them recruit their students, take their space and their funding, which is now costing our schools more than $2.1 billion per year. See also Diane Ravitch's blog, which hypothesizes that the Mayor chickened out when the news leaked out prematurely and he got blowback from the wealthy and powerful charter lobby.

Grace Lovaglio streamed Carranza's remarks to CPAC on Facebook live. He addressed the student privacy and charter school recruitment issue for about ten minutes at 36.25 minutes in. A rough transcript of his remarks follows:

Carranza says that he has not gone to any parent meetings where he has not heard about the “predatory nature” of charters and all the mailings. He tells the story of one parent who told him that only one of her children not to get the mailings is the one who tested gifted and not the ones w/ IEPs. The Mayor has spoken that this is not okay. …now somehow this has become that the district is going to cut this off. I cannot speak to whether or not this is going to happen.

The charter organizations are going to the media saying that this is unfair….I want parents to have all the info they need to make an informed decision. I do not believe that it is CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: The Chancellor says no final decision has yet been made on the issue of providing student information to charters for marketing purposes

NYC: Faced with Charter Pressure, DeBlasio Backs Down | Diane Ravitch's blog

NYC: Faced with Charter Pressure, DeBlasio Backs Down | Diane Ravitch's blog

NYC: Faced with Charter Pressure, DeBlasio Backs Down

When Joel Klein was chancellor of the NYC schools in 2006, he agreed to give the charter industry access to the names and addresses of public school students at the urging of his good friend Eva Moskowitz, who wanted to give the appearance of high demand for her schools. To this day, NYC is the only city that voluntarily turns over the names and addresses of its students to charters, which are the competition. In what other realm does one competitor give his “customer” list to his competitor, who will try to poach them and their funding too? Thanks to Arthur Camins, who made this point earlier in the comments.

After years of complaints by public school parents whose mailboxes were stuffed with charter propaganda and who objected to the breach of their children’s privacy, DeBlasio told several parent leaders that he would stop this practice.

The charter association got word of what was about to happen, and it held a press conference this morning, claiming it was “unfair” to stop the practice of turning over this information to them. Apparently, DeBlasio wimped out to placate the charter industry. Shameful.

Activist Leonie Haimson wrote about this confrontation before the news broke that the mayor had been intimidated by the charter industry.

It is unacceptable that this practice has gone on as long CONTINUE READING: NYC: Faced with Charter Pressure, DeBlasio Backs Down | Diane Ravitch's blog

Indiana: Still hating public education after all these years | Live Long and Prosper

Indiana: Still hating public education after all these years | Live Long and Prosper

Indiana: Still hating public education after all these years

For the last two decades, the Indiana General Assembly has done its best to hurt Indiana’s public schools and public school teachers. This year is no different. But before we look at this year, let’s take a quick trip back to the past to see what the General Assembly has done to hurt public education in general, and public school teachers in particular.

2011 was the watershed mark for public education in Indiana. We had all been suffering through No Child Left Behind with all its onerous requirements. Then Governor Mitch Daniels (now President of Purdue University) with his sidekick, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett, worked diligently with the Republican supermajority in the legislature and the Republican-leaning State Board of Education, to make things as difficult for public education and public educators as they could. Subsequent Governors Pence and Holcomb have continued down the same path. Governor Pence, especially, was blatant in his support for private schools over public (see For Further Reading at the end of this post).

Here are a few things that the Daniels-, Pence-, and Holcomb-led supermajority has done to public schools and public school teachers in Indiana

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

The collective bargaining process has been gutted. Just like other anti-union Republicans, the legislature has passed legislation to restrict collective bargaining to only money and benefits. No longer is it required that school CONTINUE READING: Indiana: Still hating public education after all these years | Live Long and Prosper

CURMUDGUCATION: AZ: Kelly Townsend Wants To Shut Teachers Up

CURMUDGUCATION: AZ: Kelly Townsend Wants To Shut Teachers Up

AZ: Kelly Townsend Wants To Shut Teachers Up

Arizona's #RedForEd movement was long overdue. The state has been one of the nation's top playgrounds for charter profiteers, but at the same time, they have starved public schools for resources, with low and stagnant teacher pay along with the worst level of per pupil spending in the country.

The state was lucky that its teachers walked out en masse last year, because they were already walking out one at a time and not coming back. In 2017, 74% of Arizona's superintendents reported unfilled teaching positions. Arizona's leaders seem determined to destroy their public education system; the state's teachers were doing the families of the state a favor by pushing the state to take even the tiniest steps toward saving its public education system.

Two out of three isn't bad.

Of course, not all the members of the legislature saw it that way. There's this dipstick-- GOP House Leader John Allen who theorized that teachers were working two jobs because they wanted boats and bigger houses.

But perhaps no legislator has been more angry with teachers than Kelly Townsend. After a stint as in the Navy, Townsend became a small business operator and a doula. Townsend landed in the House in 2013 and has now risen to position of majority whip.

Right on the front page of her election website, she weighs in on #RedForEd:

Since elected in 2012, I have been advocating for more dollars in the classroom, and have been consistently supportive of teachers. was not able to vote for the CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: AZ: Kelly Townsend Wants To Shut Teachers Up

Latest News and Comment from Education

Friday, April 12, 2019

A Day On The Picket Line | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

A union show of force: Teachers from around California rally with Sacramento educators

Movies, McDonald’s – but no classes at McClatchy High during teachers strike, students say

Hundreds of teachers at Sacramento City Unified walk out on one-day strike

DeVos’s Staff Blocked Researchers Trying to Investigate Federal Charter Schools Program | janresseger

Ron DeSantis Has ‘Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals’ for Florida Education and That’s Bad | The Edvocate Blog

Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers on Ken Davis’ Chicago Newsroom: Lori Lightfoot, Lincoln Yards, TIFs, pensions, the Left and our Dad fought in Spain. – Fred Klonsky

‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ Has Never Been More Important Than It is Today | gadflyonthewallblog

NYC Public School Parents: The Chancellor says no final decision has yet been made on the issue of providing student information to charters for marketing purposes

NYC: Faced with Charter Pressure, DeBlasio Backs Down | Diane Ravitch's blog

Indiana: Still hating public education after all these years | Live Long and Prosper

CURMUDGUCATION: AZ: Kelly Townsend Wants To Shut Teachers Up

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Friday, April 12, 2019

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