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Tuesday, December 1, 2020

CDFA Seeking Public Comment on Farm to School RFA - USDA Proposed Rule on Meal Flexibilities - Nutrition (CA Dept of Education)

CDFA Seeking Public Comment on Farm to School RFA - Nutrition (CA Dept of Education)
CDFA Seeking Public Comment on Farm to School RFA




CPAG December 2020 Meeting Agenda - California Practitioners Advisory Group (CA Dept of Education) - https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/cc/cp/cpag2020agendadec11.asp


USDA Proposed Rule on Meal Flexibilities - Nutrition (CA Dept of Education) - https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/usdaproposedrulemealflex.asp

The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Office of Farm to Fork (F2F) is now seeking public comments regarding the 2021 Farm to School (F2S) Incubator Grant Program’s Request for Applications (RFA).

The funding for this grant program was made available by the Budget Act of 2020, which includes a $10 million one-time General Fund allocation for the 2020-21 fiscal year and $1.5 million annually thereafter for CDFA to establish a F2S Incubator Grant Program and provide ongoing support for the California Farm to School Network (CFSN).

The F2S Incubator Grant Program will award competitive grants to support innovative local and regional farm to school projects in nutrition education, sustainable food production and procurement, and high quality student engagement through experiential learning. Review the CDFA 2021 California Farm to School Incubator Grant Program web pageExternal link opens in new window or tab. (PDF).

Comments received will be considered before this F2S RFA is made final and when developing future F2S RFAs.

Written comments should be submitted by email to cafarmtofork@cdfa.ca.gov by December 4, 2020. Please include Farm to School Stakeholder Comments in the subject line of the email.

Contact Information

If you have any questions about providing public comment, contact Steve Lyle, Director of Public Affairs, CDFA, by phone at 916-654-0462 or by email at officeofpublicaffairs@cdfa.ca.gov.

Questions:   Nutrition Services Division | 800-952-5609

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Louisiana Educator: Why Distance Learning Will Always be Just a Supplement to Classroom Learning

Louisiana Educator: Why Distance Learning Will Always be Just a Supplement to Classroom Learning
Why Distance Learning Will Always be Just a Supplement to Classroom Learning


The Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns have destroyed a major myth upon which some of the recent attempted reforms to public education are based. The myth is that classroom teachers can be replaced with remote/distance learning. One of the leading promoters of this myth is former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Bush has proposed that computers and distance learning could somehow take the place of in-person classroom teaching by real live teachers. Many of our current education reformers have longed for a way to replace classroom teachers with much cheaper forms of instruction using technology and automated teaching. Jeb Bush and others have invested heavily in teacher replacement technology, even starting technology companies that supposedly could greatly cut education costs and possibly make a lot of money for the companies providing automated teaching systems. 

 These education entrepreneurs were convinced that children could get though K-12 schooling without the need to attend a physical school. These for-profit non-educator executives have welded much political power in convincing state legislatures to allow the creation of a type of charter schools that could supposedly provide a much more efficient means of educating children by piping in instruction directly to children in their homes using computers and various distance strategies. These charter management companies are now profiting greatly by being granted most of the per pupil tax support going to traditional brick and mortar schools for their much cheaper methods of teaching. 

 

The Federal Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, had been aggressively pushing for the replacement of traditional public schools with on-line distance learning private schools. School privatization advocates such as DeVos, without evidence, had proposed that such “choice” schools could CONTINUE READING: Louisiana Educator: Why Distance Learning Will Always be Just a Supplement to Classroom Learning

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IMPOSSIBLE ENDEAVORS – Dad Gone Wild

IMPOSSIBLE ENDEAVORS – Dad Gone Wild
IMPOSSIBLE ENDEAVORS


“God and the Soldier all men adore, In time of trouble and no more, For when war is over And all thing righted, God is neglected, And the Old Soldier slighted.”
― Jan Morris, Pax Britannica: Climax of an Empire

If you are a Metro Nashville Public Schools parent, this week presents quite the quandary – to spend next semester going virtual or send your child back into a school building, whenever they open. Parents are being forced to make the decision at a time when COVID-19 cases are rising at an alarming rate, so much so that those who chose in-person for the fall semester are being sent home for the remainder of the year. Further complicating matters, announcements arrive almost daily of a vaccine soon being available. Maybe as soon as mid-Spring. But you’ve got to decide about school by Friday.

As a parent, I’m supposed to take the very limited information available and make a decision that will having a lasting impact on my children, in a very short window of time. A decision that will be carved in stone and will be irreversible, no matter what changes between now and the end of the school year. The ironic part is that MNPS is asking me to make an irrevocable decision while still retaining for themselves the ability to modify it.

Just because I decide to send my children back to school in-person doesn’t mean that they will stay in-person throughout the duration of the school year. Schools may or may not open come January 7th. Schools may stay open all the way until the end of May, or they may close intermittently throughout the Spring based on data the district is closely monitoring. In other words, I’m supposed to make my decision based on a snapshot and intuition, while the district gets to rely on science and a constantly updated data stream. Seems fair, right?

I’ve racked my brain over the weekend trying to think of a single other decision I’m required to make that holds the same level of permanence. The only one I can find is enlisting in the military. If CONTINUE READING: IMPOSSIBLE ENDEAVORS – Dad Gone Wild

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JENNIFER BERKSHIRE - JACK SCHNEIDER | How Betsy DeVos Has Influenced Education Policy's Future - The New York Times

Opinion | How Betsy DeVos Has Influenced Education Policy's Future - The New York Times
Trump’s Longest-Serving Cabinet Official May Start a Revolution
Betsy DeVos’s assault on public education has provided a chance for major policy renewal.




Measured solely by policy accomplishments, Donald Trump’s longest-serving cabinet official, Betsy DeVos, was a flop in her four years as secretary of education.

Early on, her efforts to move a federal voucher program through a Republican-controlled Congress more concerned with taxes and deregulation repeatedly fell short. This year, she was forced to abandon a directive ordering states to redirect coronavirus funds to private schools after three federal judges ruled against her.

And significant pieces of Obama-era civil rights guidance that she rescinded — moves meant to protect transgender students, for instance, or address racially disproportionate school discipline — will be immediately restored by the incoming Biden administration.

Though Ms. DeVos has been mostly stymied, both by Trumpism’s policy indifference and progressive opposition, her legacy will still be far-reaching and long-lasting. This is not a result of what she made, but of what she broke: a bipartisan federal consensus around testing and charters that extended from the George H.W. Bush administration through the end of the Obama era.


For progressives, this shift hasn’t necessarily been bad news. In response to Ms. DeVos’s polarizing influence, moderate Democrats including President-elect Joe Biden recommitted to teachers unions and adopted more skeptical positions on school choice that were out of the question just a few years ago. Mr. Biden has pledged to exclude for-profit charter schools from federal funding, and he has proposed making larger investments in public education by using Title I statutes to double federal support for schools serving low-income students.

Yet Ms. DeVos has also elevated the education policy agenda of the far right, giving voice and legitimacy to a campaign to fundamentally dismantle public education. That campaign, pursued for the past few decades only in deep-red states, and often perceived as belonging to the libertarian fringe, has become the de CONTINUE READING: Opinion | How Betsy DeVos Has Influenced Education Policy's Future - The New York Times


Big Education Ape: 100th Episode: A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door – Have You Heard - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/10/100th-episode-wolf-at-schoolhouse-door.html


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Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

New Data Suggests That Most Students Weren’t Hurt Badly By Spring School Closures
by Larry Ferlazzo / 1h
The media is awash today with reports on test results from millions of students that suggest that so-called “learning loss” wasn’t that bad because of school closes last spring. The best article of the bunch to read about it is clearly from Chalkbeat: Did students fall behind this spring? Yes, but not as much as feared, new data shows. As annoying as I find people who say “I told you so,” I will
Rosa Parks Was Arrested On This Day 65 Years Ago – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources
by Larry Ferlazzo / 3h
Rosa Parks was arrested 65 years ago. You might be interested in Best Resources For Teaching About Rosa Parks & 60th Anniversary Of The Montgomery Bus Boycott . Police complaint against Rosa Parks 65 years ago today—“Did refuse to take a seat assigned to her race”—Montgomery, Alabama: pic.twitter.com/l3KQyaW0p9 — Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) December 1, 2020
Tuesday’s Must-Read Articles & Must-Watch Videos About School Reopenings
by Larry Ferlazzo / 5h
geralt / Pixabay Here are new additions to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL : Why School Districts Are Bringing Back Younger Children First is from The NY Times. On Pandemic Schooling, de Blasio Is Actually Leading is from The NY Times.
A Look Back: According To New Research, Rita Pierson Was More Right Than Not When She Said, “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.”
by Larry Ferlazzo / 11h
I thought that new – and veteran – readers might find it interesting if I began sharing my best posts from over the years. You can see the entire collection here . Many teachers have seen the late Rita Pierson’s great TED Talk and, if you haven’t, it’s embedded at the bottom of this post. Perhaps the most quoted line from the video is “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” Plenty of rese
Video: “The Power of Habit”
by Larry Ferlazzo / 11h
Homegrounds / Pixabay This is a good video synopsis of the book, The Power of Habit , by Charles Duhigg. It has lots of relevance for teachers. In fact, it has so much relevance that Mr. Duhigg wrote a guest post at my Education Week Teacher blog titled Several Ways We Can Help Students Develop Good Habits .
Schools Could Do Far Worse Than Making This New Research Paper A Focus Of Professional Development For Months To Come
by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h
The cognitive challenges of effective teaching by Stephen Chew and William Cerbin is one of the best and most practical research studies anyone in education is going to find. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall, but there are a variety of ways to still gain access to it (see The Best Tools For Academic Research ). They lay-out a list of key challenges facing teachers, and then offer a number of
“This Is Not Sustainable”: Important NY Times Article About Teachers’ Struggles
by Larry Ferlazzo / 1d
Teaching In The Pandemic: ‘This is Not Sustainable is an excellent article that teachers everywhere will say, “Yes, that’s how I’m feeling.” The question is, of course, “Will district and public officials listen?”
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