6-27-14 @ The Chalk Face

@ THE CHALK FACE:

Video: My Five Minutes on Louisiana Public Broadcasting

As a means of addressing issues from the recent legislative session, Louisiana Public Broadcasting (LPB) produced two shows involving three legislative issues: abortion clinic regulation, oil and gas companies/coastal preservation, and Common Core (CCSS). The first video aired weeks ago and featured individuals supporting one viewpoint (as concerns CCSS, that CCSS is good). On June […]

by deutsch29 / 29min

At the Chalk Face programming updates

First, we want to thank everyone out there for listening and supporting At the Chalk Face radio. Ever since we started broadcasting in the winter of 2010, we knew the show fulfilled an important niche in the overall education dialogue that was unavailable at the time. I don’t think anyone else delivers it like we […]

1 by Shaun Johnson / 22min 

Parent and Teacher Groups Stand Together in New Mexico

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the evening of June 25, Parents and Teachers Educating the Community (PTEC) hosted a viewing of the education documentary Standardized: Lies, Money, and Civil Rights. The group was diverse and included people from several different activist groups, elected officials, and even New Mexico’s gubernatorial challenger to Susana Martinez. The most important […]

7 by Kris Nielsen / 17min 

La. State Board Not “Bound by Law” to Either CCSS or PARCC

On June 18, 2014, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal made the executive decision to remove Louisiana from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated assessment, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). The way that Jindal approached the issue was to cancel both the PARCC MOU stating that Louisiana agreed to […]

1 by deutsch29 / 6min 

DUST OFF THOSE SHELVES: 200 LIBRARY AIDES HEAD BACK TO LA SCHOOLS + smf’s 2¢

  Annie Gilbertson | Pass / Fail | 89.3 KPCC http://bit.ly/1lwBFOc Maya Sugarman/KPCC | Sada Mozer, the children's librarian for the Junipero Serra Branch, reads "Oh!" by Josse Goffin to Trinity Street Elementary School fifth graders. June 27th, 2014, 5:00amThe Los Angeles Unified school district is spending $6 million next school year to bring back 192 libraries aides, opening shuttered

by smf / 53min

Anatomy of a hashtag and the @amprog report #forthecore

The Center for American Progress, often touted as a “liberal” think tank, released a set of recommendations to make Common Core implementation successful. The release was accompanied by a media event just the other day, shared on social media with the hashtag “forthecore.” Let us first dismiss any arguments that CAP is actually a “liberal” […]

1 by Shaun Johnson / 19min 

Who Are We? We Are the Resistance

Who Are We? We Are the Resistance. via Who Are We? We Are the Resistance.

1 by plthomasedd / 42min 

6-26-14 @ The Chalk Face

@ THE CHALK FACE: The Troubling Realities of School SegregationI read this story twice and also read this blog to learn more about the situation and it has left me with many unanswered questions. But first let me see if I have the facts right regarding this troubling story: Two years ago the Normandy school district that is 97% black and poor was merged […]11 by denishanjones / 1h hide  //  saveOb

by mike simpson / 7h 

6-27-14 With A Brooklyn Accent: The Challenges Facing the NEA and the AFT at Their National Conventions

With A Brooklyn Accent:

The Challenges Facing the NEA and the AFT at Their National Conventions

 As teachers unions prepare to meet this summer, they face three great challenges, which are also opportunities:The rapidly growing grass roots movement against the Common Core Standards, which has already led several states to withdraw from CCSS, and has probably doomed its creators vision of CCSS as a national curriculumA broad based legal challenge and public relations campaign against teacher

by Mark Naison / 4h 

6-25-14 With A Brooklyn Accent: The Staggering Amounts of Money Spent to Show Teachers and Teachers Unions are to Blame for Inequality

With A Brooklyn Accent: The Staggering Amounts of Money Spent to Show Teachers and Teachers Unions are to Blame for InequalityAs the wave of anti-tenure lawsuits are about to move from California to NY and other states where teachers unions are strong, it would be instructive to think about the staggering amounts of money very wealthy people have spent to demonize teachers unions, teachers and pub

by mike simpson / 3h 

Detroit For-Profit Charter School Spends Big On Ads | PopularResistance.Org

Detroit For-Profit Charter School Spends Big On Ads | PopularResistance.Org:

For-profit charter school corporation’s Detroit media ad buy now has a price tag: several hundred thousand dollars

It’s Day Four of the explosive Detroit Free Press exposé of Michigan charter schools and also Day Four of the National Heritage Academies complete takover of the websites of Detroit’s two biggest newspapers with a monstrous ad buy. NHA is Michigan’s largest for-profit charter corporation. Like yesterday, when you open the webpages of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News today, you’re greeted with an overwhelmingly large NHA banner ad:

Click for a larger version

If you have your browser set for normal view (I zoomed out to grab this screen shot), the ad takes up well over three-quarters of the window. It’s a big damn ad.

My friends at Progress Michigan did some research and found that the typical price for just one day of this type of advertising is $37,500. Multiply that by four days at two newspapers and NHA has spent roughly $300,00, over a quarter million dollars, on this ad campaign.

And it’s only Wednesday.

And the Free Press charter school series runs through Sunday.

“For years, critics of Michigan’s charter school laws have pointed to the same issues that the Free Press is reporting on this week,” said Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan. “The response by National Heritage Academies and other charter operators show that they are not interested in talking about real charter school reform. Education should be centered around making successful students —not profits.

“One day of advertising like this could put a teacher in the classroom and one week of ads would fund an entire classroom,” Scott continued. “The use of education dollars for internet advertising is further proof that Michigan’s charter schools lack proper oversight. Clearly, NHA is more concerned with their reputation than they are about educating Michigan’s children, which is precisely the problem.”

Meanwhile, the outstanding reporting by the Free Press is getting attention. Here’s Susan Demas at MLive:

The fact that outright falsehoods and gross oversimplifications passed for high-minded debate [about charter school legislation] in the Legislature should make us all weep.But the Republicans won. Now taxpayers are now spending $1 billion on charter schools every year to educate some 140,000 kids. The scary part is there’s still almost no oversight of charters, which “enables scams and insider dealing,” as we now know from an exhaustive, yearlong Detroit Free Press investigation. [...]

So was it an accident that the laws were written so poorly that charlatans could cash in? I suppose you could argue Gov. Rick Snyder and lawmakers were naive, but Washington Post education columnist Valerie Strauss warned in 2011 about the lack of oversight.

And a lot of money was spent to get the bills passed. StudentsFirst, led by the controversial Michelle Rhee, helped write the bills and dumped $1 million into Michigan in advertising.

Here’s Jack Lessenberry at Michigan Radio:

A few are doing an excellent job. But overall, on average, the education provided by Michigan’s charter schools is slightly worse, than in conventional public schools. Charter schools, we sometimes forget, are public schools in another form.They get taxpayer dollars, and the newspaper’s investigation uncovered a pattern of abuses that make Kwame Kilpatrick look small-time. To quote the Free Press directly, their investigation found “wasteful spending and double-dipping. Board members, school founders and employees steering lucrative deals to themselves or insiders.”It also found schools that were allowed to operate despite miserable academic records. Given human nature, you might have expected some of this, but that when it was uncovered, it would be followed by indictments, trials, disgrace and prison sentences.

But none of that has happened, for one reason. There are no state standards for who operates Michigan’s charter schools, and none for how to oversee them. That’s 

Detroit For-Profit Charter School Spends Big On Ads | PopularResistance.Org:

6-26-14 The Whole Child Blog — Becoming Better Listeners

The Whole Child Blog — Whole Child Education:

Becoming Better Listeners

Post written by Melinda Moran At its heart, differentiation is about knowing your students—not only where they are relative to learning goals, but also who they are as learners, or better yet, as people. Because our students are really people "under construction," differentiation is most successful when we continually update our notions of who our kids are. Ironically, technology—that c

by ASCD Whole Child ... / 9min 

6-26-14 The Whole Child Blog — School Nutrition Environment and Services

The Whole Child Blog — Whole Child Education: THE WHOLE CHILD BLOGSchool Nutrition Environment and ServicesJune 26, 2014 by Learning and HealthNutrition is essential for student success. Healthy, active, and well-nourished children are more likely to attend school and are more prepared and motivated to learn. Although the primary responsibility of schools is to foster academic achievement, schools

by mike simpson / 7h 

6-27-14 the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University)

the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University):

Loss: A Dog’s Life

I was listening to sports talk radio, an interview with Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, who characterized an athlete’s career as “a dog’s life,” meaning that career is short. And this spoke to me in the wake of having just lost our first family dog, Hershey, a chocolate lab we had for about 14 years. On the Sunday night just after the U.S. World Cup match with Portugal, Hershey began to bar

1 by plthomasedd / 6min

Who Are We? We Are the Resistance

Diane Ravitch’s post about the debate over the Gates moratorium includes a comment from John Thompson that deserves close attention: In a note to me, John Thompson pointed out that our side, which doesn’t have a name, cherishes the clash of ideas. The “reformers” march in lockstep (my words, not Thompson’s) in support of test-based accountability for students and teachers, Common Core, and school

9 by plthomasedd / 37min 

6-26-14 the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University)

the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University): Obama Education Agenda and the Tone-Deaf FolliesEarly and often, the Obama administration’s education agenda, headed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has driven the public narrative about public schools, teachers, and students with a relentless claim that everythin

by mike simpson / 7h 

6-27-14 empathyeducates

empathyeducates:

Obama Education Agenda and the Tone-Deaf Follies

By Paul L. Thomas, Ed.D. | Originally Published at The Becoming Radical. June 26, 2014 Early and often, the Obama administration’s education agenda, headed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has driven the public narrative about public schools, teachers, and students with a relentless claim that everything […]

by empathy / 20min 

Why Kids Care More About Achievement Than Helping Others

Seattle Municipal Archives/Flickr With thanks to my parents who often practiced as they preached. Mom and Dad often reflected, in raising a child you need to think – Does my tone of voice, body language, and facial expression, all together, communicate what I believe? If as a […]

by empathy / 6h 

YESTERDAY

18 Things White People Should Know/Do Before Discussing Racism

Americans, for decades now, have aspired to be colorblind, just not completely. Oh we long to see pretty pink crocuses and yellow daffodils flowers bloom in the spring. We want to walk through tall green grasses and bathe in the bright sun. We want to wear colorful […]

by empathy / 9h hide  //  save

JUN 24

Editorial: A Complete Education Includes Humanities

Photograph; Stan Gutiontov, a student at Northwestern University’s Feinberg/Chicago Tribune By Times Editorial | Originally Published at Tampa Bay Times. Friday, June 21, 2013 5:30am The humanities and social sciences have been under attack by Gov. Rick Scott and other politicians who are insisting on a more […]

100+ by empathy / 2d

6-27-14 Curmudgucation

CURMUDGUCATION:

CAP Releases New CCSS Baloney Sandwich

For a couple of days I have had CAP's new "report" open on my desktop, trying to slowly drag myself through it. From its odd cover image (uniformed school children, grasping gigantic pencils; one tries to nonchalantly look at the other's paper, while the cheatee looks bag with an expression of "Oh, no, you didn't") to its final pages of "endnotes" cataloging reference

by Peter Greene / 6min 

NEA Gives Unencouraging Assembly Preview

The NEA issued an open letter on behalf of itself and "the educators of America." It says something about my tortured relationship with my national union that when they speak, I become anxious. Are they going to say something useful, or are they going to embarrass me again? Let's see how things go this time.We start with a history lesson. NCLB was a thing. It involved testing. The testin

by Peter Greene / 6min

Buy Mercedes Schneider's Book

Mercedes Schneider is pissed.There are many things that come through in her book A Chronicle of Echoes, but what's most immediately palpable is her anger at what has been done to public education in this country. And as each chapter unrolls, it's impossible not to see why she is so angry.Schneider is one of the most important bloggers in the edublogosphere. She is a tireless researcher, with a car

13 by Peter Greene / 1h 

6-26-14 Curmudgucation

CURMUDGUCATION: Seven Trends in the Teacher Work ForceIn April, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education released a paper entitled "Seven Trends: the Transformation of the Teaching Force." What the title lacks in sass and flash it makes up for in accuracy, and although the most recent data are from 2012, it still makes for interesting reading. Let's look at the seven trends.Larger

by mike simpson / 7h

6-27-14 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School:

Fox 5 New York Brings Joel Klein Onto "News" Show To Peddle Amplify Tablets

From MyFoxNY.com back in March: Former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is now the Executive Vice President for News Corporation (parent company of FOX 5). Klein visited the set of Good Day New York on Tuesday to discuss the new Amplify tablet.   The device is designed for teachers and students."Teachers love it; students love it. The teacher can personalize (the tablet.)  A teache

by reality-based edu... / 29min 

FBI Seizes 80,000 Emails From News Corporation Servers

Interesting news: The FBI has seized 80,000 potentially damning emails from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., giving the media titan worries on both sides of the Atlantic in the ongoing phone hacking scandal. While Murdoch was in London on Thursday facing the fallout from the conviction of one of his former star editors, it was disclosed in the U.S. that the FBI took and shared the mountain of emails

by reality-based edu... / 3min 

Westchester Residents Demand Tax Deadbeat Governor Cuomo Submit To Tax Assessment

Tax deadbeat Governor Cuomo and his consort Sandra Lee have refused to let the tax assessor into their Westchester home in order to avoid a property tax increase.That move is not playing well around Westchester - so fellow Westchester residents have decided to follow suit and refuse to let the assessor into their own properties:Westchester County residents joined gubernatorial candidate Rob Astori

by reality-based edu... / 12min 

The UFT MUST Endorse Andrew Cuomo For Governor

I am calling for the UFT to enthusiastically and vocally endorse Governor Andrew M. Cuomo for re-election this November.Sure Cuomo has shown himself to be anti-union, anti-teacher and anti-traditional public schools during his tenure as governor.And sure it makes no sense that a teachers union would continue to support a politician who hates unions, teachers and traditional public schools, as the

by reality-based edu... / 46min hide  //  save

UFT Planted "Kiss of Death" On Espillat With Union Endorsement

From State of Politics:In a statement sent out this afternoon, Sen. Adriano Espaillat conceded the primary for the 13th congressional district to incumbent Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel. He also declared his candidacy for re-election to the state Senate. Espaillat had held off on conceding to Rangel, saying he’d wait until “every single vote” was counted before admitting defeat. This comes after

by reality-based edu... / 2h 

6-26-14 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School: LIRR Unions Do Not Take Kindly To Newest MTA Offer, Negotiation StrategyFrom the Daily News:The MTA’s decision to publicize its newest contract offer to LIRR workers — who are threatening a strike next month — has union leaders considering whether to ditch a new round of negotiations set for Friday.Anthony Simon, a spokesman for a coalition of Long Island Rail Road unions, w

by mike simpson / 7h 

Financial Corruption and Academic Failure in Charter Sector Beg for Oversight | janresseger

Financial Corruption and Academic Failure in Charter Sector Beg for Oversight | janresseger:

Financial Corruption and Academic Failure in Charter Sector Beg for Oversight

Posted on June 27, 2014 by janresseger

Earlier this week, tracking an extraordinary investigative series on charter schools by theDetroit Free Press (still ongoing today) , this blog commented: “Although the federal government has been creating huge incentives for states to expand rapidly the number of charter schools—by making the removal of statutory caps on the authorization of new charters a condition for a state even to submit an application for a Race to the Top grant and by making available additional federal grants to expand charters, the federal government has left the oversight and regulation of charters up to the fifty state legislatures.”  The Free Pressseries is titled, “How Michigan Spends $1 Billion but Fails to Hold Schools Accountable.”

Yesterday Jeff Bryant, in his weekly column at the Education Opportunity Network, raised the same concern: Will Anyone Stop Charter School Corruption?  Bryant examines the Free Press‘s expose on Michigan’s charter schools and also looks at theft of tax money by unscrupulous charter operators in three additional states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. He notes that, “The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed controversial legislation to expand federal funds for more charter schools without placing any substantial new regulations on those schools.” “And in Washington, DC, that House legislation that would expand federal funding to these sorts of schools has been joined by a Senate version that is now steaming toward bipartisan consideration.”

In Ohio, Bryant examines Akron Beacon-Journal coverage of David Brennan’s for-profit White Hat Management Company, whose charter schools have “enjoyed such carte blancheoperation that Ohio lawmakers approved additional funding for about 77 of those schools and Financial Corruption and Academic Failure in Charter Sector Beg for Oversight | janresseger: