10-28-13 Ed Notes Online

Ed Notes Online:

Ravitch on MSNBC

I haven't seen this yet but am reposting from the Ravitch blog for the Ed Notes archives. The discussion about charter schools has been changing - just see this: Top 16 NYC charter school executives earn more than Chancellor Dennis Walcott - Daily Newshttp://m.nydailynews.com/1.1497717The interview and panel discussion were broken into three segments which do not follow one another sequentially on

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10-26-13 Ed Notes Online

Ed Notes Online: Ed Notes OnlineUFT Used $250K COPE Money to Support GamblingThe United Federation of Teachers deposited $250,000 in the account from two of its political action funds.... Capital NYThanks to Jeff Kaufman for this.Oh what fun. Having COPE money spent not on fighting ed deform but promoting gambling. I didn't know Paul Egan liked the dice so much. I took a shot in a recent Wave colu

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House Republican Research Committee, Ideas for Tomorrow, Choices for Today (1985) | Federal Education Policy History

House Republican Research Committee, Ideas for Tomorrow, Choices for Today (1985) | Federal Education Policy History:

House Republican Research Committee, Ideas for Tomorrow, Choices for Today (1985)

The full title of this document is Ideas for Tomorrow, Choices for Today: Policy of the Committee on the First One Hundred Days.

This document is posted here on the Federal Education Policy History website because it includes an entry on education that expresses the perspective of many Republicans of the time. Page 20 speaks of education as “an investment in a healthy democracy and a growing economy.” It also makes a case for “tuition tax credits” to help families choose “independent” (i.e., private) schools, which provide “diversity and competition” (for public schools).

As the address on the rear of the booklet indicates, this is no private sector, think tank document. The House Republican Research Committee published this document, which was authored by the Committee on the First Hundred Days. These aforementioned groups are what as known as “congressional member organizations.”  This document is, as page 63 notes, what House Republican leaders were presenting as “a set of policy alternatives for the 99th Congress and beyond.”

You can read the entire document in the window below. To view it a larger window, click here.

View this document on Scribd

How can we desegregate re-segregated public schools? (again) | Cloaking Inequity

How can we desegregate re-segregated public schools? (again) | Cloaking Inequity:

How can we desegregate re-segregated public schools? (again)

Richards, M., Stroub, K., Vasquez Heilig, J. & Volonnino, M. (2012). Achieving diversity in the Parents Involved era: Evidence for geographic integration plans in metropolitan school districts. Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy, 14(1), 65-94.

Landmark legal victories over de jure segregation in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka[1] helped to secure dramatic decreases in the racial and ethnic segregation of schools in subsequent decades, especially in the formerly segregated American South[2].  The promise of the post-Brown era proved ephemeral, however; nearly sixty years after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was inherently unequal, American schools remain remarkably segregated by race and ethnicity.[3] Since the 1980s, the de facto segregation of schools has rapidly intensified, especially in the South and for Hispanic/Latino populations.[4] Indeed, during the 1990s the proportion of Black students in majority-White schools decreased 13 percentage points, to a level not seen since 1970.[5] This re-segregation of schools has been facilitated by weak executive enforcement of civil rights provisions and continued judicial retrenchment on school integration, exemplified by Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell[6] and Freeman v. Pitts,[7] which diminished desegregation standards and resulted in the release of hundreds of districts from their court-imposed desegregation orders.

In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1[8] dealt another blow to integration efforts, rendering unconstitutional school assignment plans that use individual student race or ethnicity as the sole factor in school assignment, punctuating the steady decline in support for school 

Banks screwing students the way they screwed homeowners |Teamster Nation

Banks screwing students the way they screwed homeowners |Teamster Nation:

Banks screwing students the way they screwed homeowners

Once again, family finances are in danger from big banks.  Thousands of students with loans are complaining their student loan companies are breaking laws in the same way mortgage servicers did during the foreclosure crisis. That's according to a newly released Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) report that warns of increased fees and financial trouble to come:

Many of the private student loan complaints mirror the problems heard from consumers in the mortgage market following the wake of the financial crisis.

In the past year, CFPB received 3,800 complaints from student loan borrowers. Eight servicing companies received 87 percent of the complaints, including Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo, Citi and JPMorgan Chase.

Lenders pay other companies, called servicers, to process loans.  These subcontractors make the least money when people pay back the loan on time -- and the most when people are struggling, since the subcontractors keep all of the late fees for themselves.

CFPB's report suggests a pattern of lawbreaking by student loan servicers. And why not? Wall Street saw how profitable foreclosing 

Peg with Pen: A Quick Guide to Resisting from Within for Educators

Peg with Pen: A Quick Guide to Resisting from Within for Educators:

A Quick Guide to Resisting from Within for Educators

I get asked a lot about what it’s like to teach in the public schools while knowing the truths about corporate education reform. Obviously, the two worlds collide. And I have spent many a night trying to figure out how to describe it – and how to write about it - so that you might also know what it feels like.  This is my attempt for those of you who do not teach in the public schools today.

It is surreal. It is so strange to watch the world crumbling down around you with such harshness and such coldness, while inside the walls of the school we continue to carry on, care for the children and fight to give them what every child deserves.  As teachers, we fight to support one another - as human beings and as professionals. We fight to keep it together as we watch the corporate snakes slither in through the cracks and the crevices in our building.  We shudder and hold the children close to us when others open the door wide and let the corporate snakes glide across the floor and make our building their own.

Yet, we must carry on because the children are always watching.

Have you ever had a bad day – a day in which you wanted to cry, or scream, or throw things; yet, you refrained from doing so because the children were watching. That is how it is every day for teachers who know the big picture - within the public schools. Every day we are protecting the children as best we can, without sharing - through our actions, our words, our teaching, our emotions - the horrors of the destruction making its way into our schools. Based 

NYC Public School Parents: Press conference tomorrow & District Superintendents rebel against inBloom & state's data sharing!

NYC Public School Parents: Press conference tomorrow & District Superintendents rebel against inBloom & state's data sharing!:

Press conference tomorrow & District Superintendents rebel against inBloom & state's data sharing!

Please join us tomorrow, Tuesday morning, Oct. 29 at 9:15 AM outside of 250 Broadway near City Hall (map here), where we will be holding a press conference about the Common Core, excessive testing and privacy violations by the NY State Education Department.  
 
Elected officials, parents, education professionals, and members of the group Change the Stakes will be there as well.  Immediately afterward, at 10:00 AM the NYS Senate Education Committee will hold hearings on these critical issues at 250 Broadway, 19^th floor, chaired by State Senator John Flanagan.  Stay, if you can, to hear testimony about how the state is actively undermining our children’s education and privacy.  

Meanwhile, District Superintendents and elected school boards throughout  the state are pushing back against NYSED’s plan to share highly confidential student data with inBloom, Inc. and other vendors.  The last few days there have been several articles, here, here and here, about how districts are even  returning Race to the Top funds, in hope that this will persuade the State Education Department  from sharing this highly sensitive information 

K-12 News Network | Speak Up and Be Heard! Attend the LAUSD School Board Meeting and Reassert the Will of the Voters

K-12 News Network | Speak Up and Be Heard! Attend the LAUSD School Board Meeting and Reassert the Will of the Voters:

Speak Up and Be Heard! Attend the LAUSD School Board Meeting and Reassert the Will of the Voters

admin October 28, 2013 Educators, Los Angeles, Parents, School Boards, School Districts 0

Guest op-ed by Ellen Lubic, educator and longtime Los Angeles resident. She is founder of Joining Forces for Education.

We Must Stop This!
Join me and other Los Angeles residents, Tuesday, October 29, 2013, at 9 AM at 333 South Beaudry St. in downtown LA — and I would hope to see hundreds of parents, teachers, and others in line.

It is not only disheartening, but it is downright alarming when our Mayor joins forces with elite and powerful law firms, with PR firms, with major businesses who profit off us all, with the billionaires who are fighting to take over public schools and public education for investment opportunities, in order to retain a mediocre Superintendent of Schools, John Deasy, who has made so many egregious mistakes even beyond the Billion Dollar iPad fiasco.  Anyone with a track record such as Deasy’s would never have lasted this long in the private sector.

After a recent huge vote of 91% NO CONFIDENCE by LAUSD teachers it is only reasonable to think the Board of Education, whom We the People elected, would represent the outrage and direction of the greater community which elected them, to NOT SIGN another contract to keep this man on and to give him even more time to run the District into the ground, into bankruptcy, as he is doing. His salary, and all the budget line items he suggests and approves, are paid for by the People, not by Broad, nor Gates, nor any of the self-appointed billionaire movers and shakers who are attempting to destroy LAUSD and turn it into LA Charter District.

Garcetti was not elected to run the public schools, but he is now following in the footsteps of his predecessor Villaraigosa who brought in billionaire donations to our local elections to try to get their Charter supporter candidates placed in what they then saw as a position of power and support for their boy, Deasy. That would have been the coup they needed and they would have backed a strong Board.

But since that failed them and Ratliff and Zimmer beat the big money choices, now they and their PR experts spin the tale to excoriate the School Board 

I'm Shocked: Corporate Media and Corporate Mayor Speaks Out for Corporate Reform Superintendents

Union-District Teams Agree Collaboration is Key to Student Success | NEA Today

Union-District Teams Agree Collaboration is Key to Student Success | NEA Today:

Union-District Teams Agree Collaboration is Key to Student Success

October 28, 2013 by egraham  
Filed under Featured News, Top Stories

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By Edward Graham

Collaboration between teachers and school administrators, as well as the surrounding community, is essential in insuring the best education possible for students. That’s why on October 24^th and 25^th, the NEA Foundation welcomed 19 union-district leadership teams comprised of over 200 eager educators for a two-day conference at the NEA headquarters in Washington, DC.

Photo: NEA Foundation/Lauren Fish

The annual meeting, now in its 7^th year, brought together union-district leadership teams from the NEA Foundation’s Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative and the Institute for Innovation in Teaching and Learning to develop successful school-wide approaches to improving student success, learning conditions, and teacher-district collaboration.

“It’s exciting to me that, at this time in our history, these kinds of things are happening through collaboration,” NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said during his opening remarks at the 2013 union-district convening. “I just absolutely believe that when administrators and school board members and unions come together and are able to reach out to parents and the community, it’s the only way to build really sustainable change. That’s the power of collaboration, of bringing minds together for the common goal of focusing on the student and 

 

We Need a National Teacher Monument

“Teachers deserve a monument of remembrance and thanks for sowing the seeds and cultivating the intellectual landscape of our nation,” writes Anthony J. Mullen, 2009 National Teacher of the Year. “Why are there no monuments to America’s educator ranks when, as President Barack Obama correctly proclaimed in his 2011 State of the Union address, “If you want to make a difference in the life of a chil

by twalker / 4h 

OCT 26

Better News in New Study That Assesses U.S. Students

Amid growing alarm over the slipping international competitiveness of American students, a report comparing math and science test scores of eighth graders in individual states to those in other countries has found that a majority outperformed the international average. Source: The New York Times Related posts: Guess What? Many of the World’s Top Students Are American Study Finds Charter Schools Av

1 by twalker / 1d 

Corporal Punishment Persists in U.S. Schools

Numbers collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights and released in March 2008 showed that 223,190 students were physically punished in American schools in 2006, the most recent year available. No federal policy exists on corporal punishment in schools. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it’s an issue left to the states.  The data also revealed that the punishment wa

by twalker / 1d 

OCT 25

As Student Homelessness Worsens, Educators Work to Keep Them in School

By Edward Graham Last year, the National Center for Homeless Education (NCHE), funded by the Department of Education,  issued a report showing that the number of homeless students who attended public schools during the 2010-2011 school year had topped one million. The crisis has continued to worsen. According to the new NCHE report released this week, during the 2011-2012 school year, 1,168,354 ho

200+ by twalker / 3d 

Homicides Remain Rare in Schools

Absorbing the horrific details and media coverage of these events, parents could get the impression that homicides in schools are a common occurrence. But studies show that publicity about school violence inflates the public’s fears of these rare occurrences. An average of 23 youths per year were the victims of homicides at elementary or secondary schools or on the way to a school event, over the

by twalker / 3d 

Putting Single-Sex Classrooms to the Test

A school in Mississippi is experimenting with a different program this year: Single-sex classrooms. Gaston Point Elementary is the only school right now to separate the boys and girls. The change only affects classes for first and fifth graders.The principal decided to put the boys and girls in separate classrooms to test the program. She started with the first grade, because there are enough teac

by twalker / 3d 

OCT 24

What I’ve Learned: The Public Needs to Know More About ESPs

By Cindy Long Educators may spend their careers preparing lessons, but often the most memorable are those they learn themselves.  With that in mind, NEA Today asked school staff –  everyone from classroom teachers and bus drivers to guidance counselors and school nurses – to share the everyday lessons they’ve picked up along the way in a series called “What I’ve Learned.” Audrey Haskell: Administr

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Two Teachers Killed this Week: How Safe Are US Schools?

Residents of Boston’s North Shore suburbs were struggling to absorb the news Wednesday that Danvers High School math teacher Colleen Ritzer was murdered, and that a 14-year-old male student has been charged. The tragedy occurred one day after the Sparks Middle School shooting in Nevada, in which police say math teacher Michael Landsberry was killed by a 12-year-old male student who then killed him

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American Education Week 2013, November 18-22

American Education Week—November 18-22, 2013—presents all Americans with a wonderful opportunity to celebrate public education and honor individuals who are making a difference in ensuring that every child receives a quality education. The weeklong celebration features a special observance each day of the week. Check out NEA’s American Education Week page for more information. Related posts: Ameri

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