Holy freeloading! Here are 10 ways religious groups take from the public purse

Holy freeloading! Here are 10 ways religious groups take from the public purse:

Holy freeloading! Here are 10 ways religious groups take from the public purse

Have you ever thought about starting a new religion or perhaps a hometown franchise of an old one? Perhaps you’re just looking for a career ladder in a religious enterprise that already exists. No? Maybe you should.

Religion is big business. There are lots of options (over 30,000 variants of Christianity alone), and if the scale is right it can pay really, really well. Creflo Dollar, founder of World Changers Church, has an estimated net worth of $27 million. Benny Hinn comes in at $42 million. Squeaky clean tent revival pioneer Billy Graham bankrolled around $25 million. Even Eddie Long who has been plagued by accusations of sex with underage male members of his congregation can count his bankbook in the millions.

You say you don’t have star power? No worries. Millions of ordinary ministers, priests, missionaries, religious hospital administrators and other church employees earn solid middle- or upper-middle-class incomes in the God business. The pay is good, and for most positions it doesn’t matter what race you are or what grade you happened to get in chemistry.

That said, starting or expanding a religious enterprise doesn’t come cheap, even in an established religion that transforms ordinary members into volunteer outreach staff. Christianity spends an estimated $16 billion annually on the kind of marketing-service blend traditionally called “missionary work.”

Missionary work may include disaster relief or education with recruiting in the mix. An earthquake survivor might receive a solar-powered Bible to go with his rice and beans and sutures. A Hindu child might get free schooling, pencils and paper included, along with the message that the gods his parents worship are actually demons. Among people who are less desperate, the offerings can be more nuanced and less expensive. For example, a lonely student might get offered kindness and dinner by someone who is paid to live near campus as a friendship missionary. Sometimes mention of heaven or hell is all the enticement needed, though even then there may be costs associated with print materials and distribution. Soldiers in Iraq gave out Jesus coins and a little cartoon book showing that when an IED killed a Muslim, he or she went to hell, a fate that could be averted by conversion.

The cost of rice, beans, medical supplies, pencils, swag, facilities and salaries can add up. Fortunately, some of religion’s bigger players have gotten creative in recent years. They’ve figured out how to pay for at least part of their growth on the public dime. Having taxpayers cover a portion your costs, even overhead or infrastructure, drives up your margin. It may actually make the difference between a religious enterprise that is a fiscal black hole and one that is lucrative. So, whether you’re thinking about positioning within a small religion or large, one that’s new or one that’s well established, it’s worth taking a look at these ten examples to see if there’s something you can borrow.

1. Fund your religion classes with school vouchers, tuition tax credits or capital grants. If your religion has or can open accredited private schools, public funding prospects are growing rapidly. Thirteen states created or expanded voucher programs in 2013, accelerating a trend from recent years. Vouchers allow parents to divert their children and tax dollars away from public schools and into private institutions, which then have wide religious latitude. Such a school can include classes in which children memorize sacred texts, for example, but also can infuse a religious perspective into classes as diverse as literature, history, and computer science. The opportunities aren’t limited to grade schools. In New Jersey, an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva is slated for $10.6 million in higher education grants to improve its male-only training in “Talmudic scholarship.” Mind you, the ACLU is quibbling.

To maximize your own public funding you may have to get creative. In Arizona any resident can divert a part of his state income tax to your school to fund a specific student. That means you need those students or their parents to get out and do the solicitation for you!

2. Get free facilities for after-school clubs in public facilities. Child Evangelism Fellowship recruits grade-school children in the U.S. and abroad to born-again Christianity. In 2001, they took a case all the way to the Supreme Court and won the right to use public school facilities for their afternoon clubs. They persuaded the justices that they were teaching moral values, rather like the Boy Scouts and other groups that have long had access to public facilities. But parents who have sat in on the clubs assure us that these “values” include very specific dogmas and doctrines—things like heaven, hell and even biblical justification of genocide. Last year CEF operated over 4,000 Good News Clubs in public school facilities.

3. Nudge your doctrines into public school textbooks and discussions. Texas sets textbook standards for the whole country, and if a tenacious group of Texans gets their way, you may be able to move your message directly into public school curriculum. Members of the state’s textbook review panel have recommended adding creationism to biology texts while reducing coverage of the dominant competing theory. You may think that their account of the creation story is mistaken; yours may be different. But in the long run, their long hard work to blur the boundary between science and myth helps the whole religious sector.

To make matter better, allies in the Texas Republican party proposed a platform in 2012 that prohibited schools from teaching critical thinking skills. Others have pushed to require that each high school offer “Bible as literature” electives, confident that devout teachers will know how to use the course material.

4. Support military missionaries on government salaries. Twenty to 30 years ago, Holy freeloading! Here are 10 ways religious groups take from the public purse:

Laura Chapman on the Gospel of Milton Friedman | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman on the Gospel of Milton Friedman | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Laura Chapman on the Gospel of Milton Friedman 

Lara Chapman has written a valuable analysis of the religious, libertarian case for school vouchers. Thank you, Laura, for doing this prodigious research for the benefit of everyone else.

Laura writes:

“Long post. The author of the Friedman Foundations for Educational Choice “research,” Dr. Greg Forster ends his report–titled “A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence On School Choice, Fourth Edition–with the following:
.
“Ultimately, the only way to make school reform work on a large scale is to break the government monopoly on schooling. The monopoly is not just one powerful obstacle to reform among many; it is what makes all the many obstacles as powerful as they are. The monopoly ensures that no meaningful accountability for performance can occur, except in rare cases as a result of Herculean efforts. The monopoly empowers a dense cluster of rapacious special interests resisting efforts to improve schools.

“Worst of all, the monopoly pushes out educational entrepreneurs who can reinvent schools from the ground up. Only a thriving marketplace that allows entrepreneurs to get the support they need by serving their clients better can produce sustainable innovation.
In any field of human endeavor—whether education, medicine, politics, art, religion, manufacturing, or anything else—entrepreneurs who want to strike out in new directions and do things radically differently need a client base.
….
“School choice has the potential to solve this problem by providing enough families (size) with enough dollars (strength) and enough choice (suffrage) to support educational entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, existing school choice programs fall short on all three dimensions. Only universal choice can open the door to the full-fledged revolution in schooling America needs in the new century. “ p. 36

“The author is preaching the gospel of the Friedman Foundation, but also a bit more. The author is a devoted believer in “universal choice,” evidently so religious schools can flourish and be tax-subsidized.

“I reach this conclusion from Forster’s discussion linking charters school programs to civic virtues and to religious values (pp. 30-31), and to his faculty position at Trinity International University a regionally accredited school operated by the Evangelical Free Church of America, headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois. His main job there seems to be serving as the director of the Oikonomia Network at the Center for Transformational Churches.

“The Oikonomia Network includes over 100 “theological educators theological educators and 18 evangelical seminaries” initially funded by the Kern Family Foundation. The network operations include a newsletter, website, network-wide events and “content creation.” The content creation includes “Theology that Works,” a paper written by Greg Forster that explains “how theology as a discipline can be in fruitful dialogue with the world of economic disciplines and activities.” More here. http://oikonomianetwork.org/economic-wisdom-project/

“Forster also has a faculty post at Acton University, where his bio says that he “has a Ph.D. with distinction in political philosophy from Yale Laura Chapman on the Gospel of Milton Friedman | Diane Ravitch's blog:

CURMUDGUCATION: aPARCColypse Now

CURMUDGUCATION: aPARCColypse Now:

aPARCColypse Now

The last ten days have been a test of how diligent PARCC might be about protecting their sad test (and, yes, a test of the internet's ability to coin a PARCC-based pun to refer to this dustup). For those of you playing along at home, here's a rundown of what has happened and what issues are involved and some of the questions on the table at this point.



Events kicked off when Celia Oyler, an education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, posted an anonymous critique of the PARCC fourth grade reading exam. That post was picked up by some other bloggers, including me, but within a few days PARCC was on the case.

Initially they went after tweets that linked to Oyler's article. That in itself was an.... interesting move because none of the tweets actually included allegedly copyrighted material, but they did link to posts that did include the test prompts. This suggests its own little DMCA research project-- just how many degrees of separation from copyrighted materials can companies legitimately pursue? Apparently a link to a post containing allegedly copyrighted materials is not okay. What about a link to a source that contains a link? A link to a link to a link to a link?

The clean-up of twitter seemed to be job one, taken on so quickly that the DMCA request filed included a misspelled job title for the guy at PARCC filling the request (Kevin Michael Days, Assoicate Director, Operations). Meanwhile, Oyler got a letter, not from the PARCC legal department, but from PARCC chieftain Laura Slover herself, requiring Oyler to take down the allegedly copyright materials AND requesting that she hand over the name of the anonymous teacher.

Next up-- going after the posts themselves. Diane Ravitch's post just kind of went away overnight; Ravitch's blog is on the wordpress platform, which turns out to be an important detail. Many other CURMUDGUCATION: aPARCColypse Now:

Great Reading Must Be Felt, Not Standardized | gadflyonthewallblog

Great Reading Must Be Felt, Not Standardized | gadflyonthewallblog:

Great Reading Must Be Felt, Not Standardized

I made my classes cry today.

That sounds terrible, but if I’m honest, I knew it would happen and meant to do it.

I teach in an urban district and most of my 8th grade students are African American and/or impoverished. We’re reading Harper Lee’s classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” together, and the kids were loving it.

Until today when we got to the verdict in the Tom Robinson trial.

Jaquan closed his book with wide eyes.

“What the heck happened?” he asked.

Other students in the room murmured their agreement.

“They found him guilty!? What the F!?”

“I hate this book.”

“This is so freakin’ racist.”

I let them go on for a moment.

Frankly, it was the reaction I had been expecting.

It happens every year around this time.

Until this moment, my kids were really into the book. They were enjoying the case and excited by how well the defense attorney, Atticus Finch, had proven that Tom, a black man in the 1930s South, is innocent of raping a white woman.

But even last night I knew what was coming. The next day – today – I’d have to go and break their hearts when they read what the jury actually decides. Some of them were bound to be crushed. And today they were.

For those who haven’t cracked this book open in decades, let me recap.

There is no physical evidence that the crime actually took place. Moreover, because Great Reading Must Be Felt, Not Standardized | gadflyonthewallblog:

Jim Wasserman: Stop treating teachers like saints | Dallas Morning News

Jim Wasserman: Stop treating teachers like saints | Dallas Morning News:

Jim Wasserman: Stop treating teachers like saints

Tom Fox/Staff Photographer

Harry C. Withers Elementary School teacher Irma De La Guardia teaches a dual language course for third graders.

There is a billboard off Central Expressway that drives me crazy. It says, Want to Teach? When can you start? To understand why this is bothersome, consider if it said, Want to perform Surgery? When can you start? or Want to design buildings? When can you start?

The fact is, we look at those professions and know they take more than desire. Yet, society seems to think teaching is just a matter of heart. As a teacher, I don’t perform surgery or design buildings, but I am responsible for the most precious thing in people’s lives, their children, and people should want a skilled professional doing this job, too.

Still, people laud me for following my “calling” or tell me what a noble profession I have, but the emphasis is on the “noble” part over the professional part. In fact, I had to train for many hours, be mentored, and, even today, 20 years later, I must continue to study and develop my craft. Sure, I care deeply about all my students, and I could not be an effective teacher without doing so. But just as you want more from an architect than that he cared greatly, I have to have a set of skills to coherently deliver information to students and effectively develop their skills for the future. Calculus is not taught nor empathetically learned merely out of a love of math.

On the other end of the spectrum, teachers often get counseled by people who advocate a disengaged “business model” to education, or who tout the latest educational program for student success. What neither group considers is how much professional personalization is required for teaching, and often on the fly. Does the businessman’s “product” ever refuse to be sold because it just broke up with his girlfriend, is dealing with a family divorce, or is contemplating suicide? And how does the latest educational program address the kid who just never enjoys or gets writing, no matter how much you empower her? Teaching (as opposed to educational theory) involves a room of students, no two of whom are exactly alike, with a teacher recalculating hundreds of variables in the moment. Indeed, some of my first lines of lessons today originated as fourth or fifth efforts while refusing to give up on an “unteachable” child a couple of years ago.

So what’s the problem with creating a sainthood of teaching? Believe me, I appreciate the accolades, even the (incorrect) assumption that I am of superior virtue. But the negative implication behind pedagogical hagiography is that accolades become my remuneration, and that it would be improper to reward me in a more pecuniary way. The median salary for a teacher in Texas is $38,000 per year, very low compared to other professions that require at least a college degree, certification and specialized knowledge. “God bless you” and Starbuck’s cards are nice, but mortgage companies don’t ask for those on loan applications. And please don’t say we get summers off. Those days are gone for most teachers who, in the ever-shortening summer, must devote time to professional development and lesson Jim Wasserman: Stop treating teachers like saints | Dallas Morning News:

Chicago Study Tests Mindfulness in Elementary Schools - The Atlantic

Chicago Study Tests Mindfulness in Elementary Schools - The Atlantic:

Does Mindfulness Actually Work in Schools?

Scholars want to know whether the practice helps young kids of color succeed academically.

Courtesy of Kathy Richland Photography

A research team in Chicago has spent a year studying whether students who are taught to be in touch with their emotions do better academically. And they say the initial results are promising.

Perhaps counterintuitively, when kids take a break from a classroom lesson on the solar system to spend a quiet moment alone watching a three-minute nature video, or participate in a teacher-guided breathing exercise with their class after lunch, they seem to become better overall students. That’s likely because the children have a renewed sense of focus, they handle transitions from one lesson to the next better, and they need less time to regroup if they become upset about something, said Amanda Moreno, an assistant professor at the Erikson Institute, a child-development-focused graduate school in Chicago.

Moreno and her team received $3 million, most of it from the U.S. Education Department, to study what is known as “mindfulness” in more than 30 high-poverty Chicago public schools over the course of four years. They are watching approximately 2,000 kindergarten through second-grade students. My colleague took an in-depth look at mindfulness here, but the basic idea is to allow kids, as Moreno told me, to “slow down and not be on automatic-pilot and not be overwhelmed by all the things they could be focusing on.” The idea has been popular in some public and private schools for years, but there’s been little in the way of evidence to back it up as an effective academic intervention, and where studies exist, they’ve tended to focus on older students. Erikson says its ongoing research is the largest mindfulness study of children funded by the federal government ever conducted and the only in the country to focus specifically on whether mindfulness exercises improve academic achievement for young kids of color from low-income families.

That focus is important because, if mindfulness proves effective, low-income children of color may stand to benefit disproportionately. Children growing up in poverty are more likely than their affluent peers to be exposed to violence and to experience long-term stress that can derail their academic progress. Some research has suggested that children living in high-stress environments (drug-addicted parents, abusive caretakers, neighborhood gun violence) are constantly on edge, ready to fight or take flight, which can lead to outbursts in class that turn into suspensions and even expulsions, all detrimental for learning. And recent brain science suggests that exposure to stress can shorten periods of brain development, meaning it’s especially crucial to limit stress in the early years when brain growth is rapid.

When disadvantaged kids aren’t focused in class, achievement gaps can widen, and, Moreno suggests, purely academic attempts to close those gaps miss the significant impact that the state of a child’s emotional and social well-being can have on his ability to learn math. For kids who have suffered from prolonged stress or trauma, mindfulness seems to offer a way of “short-circuiting” the fight-or-flight response, Moreno said. It helps kids with the greatest self-regulation challenges adapt to slower, more methodical classroom settings. Moreno said she’s heard from teachers with students who have gone from five or six tantrums a day to none because they know they can go to their classroom’s “calm spot” whenever they feel like they’re spiraling out of control.

Moreno pushes back at the idea, levied by critics of mindfulness in the classroom, that it is a craze designed to turn kids into compliant robots or a form of victim-blaming. “[Proponents] see mindfulness as a way to amp up an education system that will create compliant students who can manage their own behavior, focus on Chicago Study Tests Mindfulness in Elementary Schools - The Atlantic:

Trying to Educate the Education Reformers, Without Success

Trying to Educate the Education Reformers, Without Success:

Trying to Educate the Education Reformers, Without Success

Peter Cunningham, former deputy to Arne Duncan, accused Carol Burris and me of “attacking” Campbell Brown. He says we “attack” anyone who disagrees with us. Peter now runs a website called Education Post, where he received $12 million from various billionaires (including Walton and Bloomberg) to defend the corporate reform movement of high stakes testing, evaluating teachers by tests scores, and privatization of public schools.

Anyone who reads my post about Campbell will see that there was no attack. I was doing my level best to educate her about what grade level means and why NAEP proficient is not and should not be used as a “passing mark.” Campbell mistakenly said that 2/3 of American students were “below grade level.” What the national test calls “proficiency” is equivalent to an A. No one expects the majority of students to score an A; if they did, we would call it grade inflation.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a former award-winning principal, tweeted with Campbell, hoping to set her straight. So did Tom Loveless of Brookings, who told her that she was wrong and urged her to correct her error. For some reason, Peter Cunningham did not include Tom in the list of people who were “attacking” Campbell.

Obviously, neither she nor Peter bothered to read the links to scholarly studies and government websites included in my post. They should. They might learn something and stop bashing American public schools and their teachers. I served seven years on the NAEP governing board. I could help them if they are willing to learn.

As for calling Campbell “telegenic,” that’s no insult, that’s a compliment. If you call me telegenic, I would say thank you.Trying to Educate the Education Reformers, Without Success:

Follow Diane Ravitch on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DianeRavitch

Common Core testing group wages aggressive campaign against critics on social media - The Washington Post

Common Core testing group wages aggressive campaign against critics on social media - The Washington Post:
Common Core testing group wages aggressive campaign against critics on social media

The Common Core testing group called PARCC Inc. has been waging an aggressive campaign to take down several dozen social media references to the PARCC test being administered to students this spring — items that include questions from the exam and some that don’t.

Dozens of education bloggers have been writing about the PARCC exam since May 7, when an anonymous teacher posted a piece on the blog of Celia Oyler, an education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, that harshly critiqued the fourth grade PARCC exam and offered three questions from the test many students are taking this spring. Other education writers and activists began to weigh in, critiquing those questions as being either inappropriate for the grade level or nonsensical, and publishing some test items.

PARCC Inc. officials say these postings and tweets violate their copyright and can lead to problems with test validity.

“Students are given an unfair test environment when anyone posts active test questions on the Internet – whether the test is PARCC, the SAT, or any other exam,” Heather Reams, director of communications and public relations at PARCC Inc., said in a statement (which you can see in full below).

Take-down requests are sent to the hosts of blogs or websites such as Twitter, and the hosting service then removes, or blocks, the post. Asked why PARCC would seek to remove items that critique the test but don’t actually disclose test questions, Reams said in an interview that “the intention is to ensure that we have the validity of the test protected.” Asked if the disclosures threatened the validity of the entire test, Reams said that the problem would be “specific for that question,” and that most students had already taken PARCC before the publication on Oyler’s blogs.

[A 16-year-old takes the PARCC exam. Here’s her disturbing report.]

PARCC Inc. is  a non-profit organization that supports the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, which itself is one of two multi-state consortia that were given millions in funding from the Obama administration to create new standardized tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards. The PARCC test and other Core tests have drawn scrutiny, with hundreds of thousands of parents opting their children out of the exams amid increasing criticism about their content and the potential consequences the exams carry.

Leonie Haimson, an education activist who founded the non-profit Class Size Matters and is a co-founder of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, said that flawed test questions should be publicized. She and others argue that it is “fair use” for writers to reveal a few items from a test if the intent is to critique the test questions.

“There needs to be at least as much accountability for those who make and give the tests as they’re urging on our students, teachers and schools,” Haimson said. “Yet there can’t be any, without complete transparency showing the flawed quality of these assessments.  As with the [badly worded] Pineapple question [on a 2012 Common Core test in New York], which triggered outrage and has become a symbol of the defective nature of the standardized tests imposed on our children, it is the public’s right to know.”

[‘Talking pineapple’ question on standardized test baffles students]

Oyler received a letter dated May 12, 2016, from Laura Slover, the chief executive officer of PARCC Inc., threatening possible legal action if the questions were not removed from the blog. It said in part (and you can see the full letter below):

Your reproduction of those items infringe the PARCC, Inc. copyrights in the test, amplify the teacher’s breach of confidentiality, and threaten the utility of the assessments, both as their administration is completed over the next few weeks and in versions of the assessment to be administered in the future.

We have noted that a number of websites have linked to your site, further undermining the utility of the assessments. As an infringer, you can be held personally liable for the damages incurred by PARCC, Inc. and those who have contributed financially to the creation and validation of the assessments, including without limitation the possible need, not only to create replacement items, but to create and revalidate new test forms.

Oyler has said she received the post anonymously and doesn’t know who the teacher is. She did, Common Core testing group wages aggressive campaign against critics on social media - The Washington Post:

CURMUDGUCATION: edTPA Still Baloney

CURMUDGUCATION: edTPA Still Baloney:
edTPA Still Baloney

The National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) decided to take a look at edTPA, the teacher evaluation program of dubious value. CALDER's headline may be welcome to the folks at edTPA, but a quick look under the hood reveals a big bunch of baloney. The paper is informative and useful and pretty thorough, but it's not going to make you feel any better about edTPA.

CALDER is a tentacle of the American Institutes for Research, the folks who brought us the SBA test.The report itself is sponsored by Gates Foundation and "an anonymous foundation," which-- really? Hey there, friend? Have you had any research done on your money-making product? Certainly-- here's some fine research sponsored by anonymous backers. You can totally trust it. CALDER does acknowledge that this is just a working paper, and "working papers have 
not undergone final formal review."

What are we talking about?

edTPA is a system meant to up the game of teacher entrance obstacles like the much-unloved PRAXIS exams. Coming up with a teacher gatekeeper task than the PRAXIS is about as hard as coming up with a more pleasant organization that the Spanish Inquisition. In this case, there's no reason to assume that "better" is the same as "good."

The idea of coming up with something kind of like the process of becoming a board certified teacher is appealing, but edTPA has been roundly criticized (more than once) for reducing the process of learning the art and science of teaching to a series of hoop-jumping paper-shuffling, an expensive exercise that involves being judged via video clips. The CURMUDGUCATION: edTPA Still Baloney:

Beware: The Education Reform Industry Is Watching You! | The Progressive

Beware: The Education Reform Industry Is Watching You! | The Progressive:
Beware: The Education Reform Industry Is Watching You!

Several weeks ago a fourth-grade school teacher posted a blistering online commentary on the Common Core PARCC test. Among other criticisms she wrote:

Right out of the gate, 4th graders are being asked to read and respond to texts that are two grade levels above the recommended benchmark. After they struggle through difficult texts with advanced vocabulary and nuanced sentence structures, they then have to answer multiple choice questions that are, by design, intended to distract students with answers that appear to be correct except for some technicality.

Columbia University’s Teacher College Professor Celia Oyler read the anonymous commentary and reposted it in mid-May. In response, she received an official letter from the CEO of PARCC threatening legal action unless she removed the post because it contained “copyrighted material.” The PARCC letter also demanded that she provide the company with the name of the anonymous teacher who wrote the article.

She wasn’t alone.  

Other education bloggers and advocates who posted a link to Oyler’s original article or tweeted about the story also received an email warning that they should remove the link or expect legal action. The Common Core PARCC test is paid for with taxpayer funds and the test is given by public school teachers in public schools, but public criticism of the test is, according to the PARCC, an infringement of the company’s rights.

Oyler refused to provide the name of the author but did remove materials that she deemed might be copyrighted.  She also renamed her post: The PARCC Test: Exposed [excerpts deleted under legal threat from Parcc].

Blogger and Progressive Education Fellow Peter Greene put it this way:

So this is what we've come to—it's an act of brave rebellion, a risk to career and livelihood, to publish some questions from PARCC's Big Standardized Test.



At Outrage on the Page, an anonymous teacher has taken the what-shouldn't-be-dangerous step of publishing actual questions from the fourth-grade PARCC. This is a dangerous move because, of course, we are all sworn to secrecy about our BS Tests. In PA I must swear that I won't look at the test, and if I do, I will promptly forget everything I see there. We've known for a while that Pearson has a security team that monitors social media for any student security breaches. Because at the end of the day, BS Test manufacturers are more worried about their proprietary money-making property than they are about making a good test or providing real test results.



You know what kind of test needs this sort of heavy security? A crappy test. 

So who is PARCC? And where do they get off claiming that their interests trump freedom of

- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/05/188728/beware-education-reform-industry-watching-you#sthash.zS3fEFgw.dpuf

Did your CT legislators support students, parents and teachers or Malloy and the Common Core testing mania? - Wait What?

Did your CT legislators support students, parents and teachers or Malloy and the Common Core testing mania? - Wait What?:

Did your CT legislators support students, parents and teachers or Malloy and the Common Core testing mania?

Earlier this month, the Connecticut General Assembly adjourned without even voting on one of the most important pieces of legislation being considered.  It was called Senate Bill 380 – AN ACT CONCERNING THE EXCLUSION OF STUDENT PERFORMANCE RESULTS ON THE MASTERY EXAMINATION FROM TEACHER EVALUATIONS.

Opposed by Governor Dannel Malloy, charter school advocates and the corporate education reform industry, the bill would have required the state to fix its flawed teacher evaluation law and reduce the state’s obsession with Malloy’s massive standardized testing scheme.

Instead of keeping the unfair, inappropriate and discriminatory Common Core Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) as part of the state’s flawed teacher evaluation program, the proposed law would have required Connecticut to adopt a system that is based on the real factors that determine whether a teacher is successfully doing their job in the classroom.

But Malloy and his allies, including the two major charter school lobby groups, ConnCAN and CCER, demanded that legislators defeat the bill and keep the existing shameful system in place.

Doing Malloy’s bidding, rather than what was right for Connecticut’s children, parents, Did your CT legislators support students, parents and teachers or Malloy and the Common Core testing mania? - Wait What?:

Colorado and Relay: Continued Blank Space. Guest Post by Peggy Robertson | BustED Pencils

Colorado and Relay: Continued Blank Space. Guest Post by Peggy Robertson | BustED Pencils:

Colorado and Relay: Continued Blank Space. Guest Post by Peggy Robertson

In case you didn’t know it, Colorado tax payer dollars are being spent this weekend for educational leaders in Colorado to fly to New York for another session with non-educators at Relay fake graduate school.

They will learn more scripted material to bring back to Colorado to inflict upon teachers and children – further diminishing any democratic thinking. A compliance, racist and militant model of discipline and teaching to the test is the model of public education for our black and brown communities via Relay. And no pushback. None.

They are rolling it out without any parent knowledge. As I have watched various leaders and districts embrace Relay I wonder why these leaders don’t sport a Relay t-shirt or speak of Relay by name? I find that fascinating. The name “Relay” remains very much hush hush. Why so quiet? Why not loud and proud? Reminds me of other times in history when horrific events occurred and no one believed it could be truly happening. Is the silence – refusal to use the name “Relay” – due to the personal shame of inflicting such educational malpractice on our children – malpractice these leaders would NEVER allow their own child to endure? I wonder. Please – let us know who you are. Which schools? How many are silently implementing Relay? I’d like to be clear about what I’m dealing with as we move forward in CO to expose and shame.

And don’t talk to me about people needing paychecks and simply doing what they’ve got to do to hold down a job – they also took these jobs along with a commitment to do right by Colorado and Relay: Continued Blank Space. Guest Post by Peggy Robertson | BustED Pencils:

New report is ‘huge warning sign’ that desegregation has failed in US schools

New report is ‘huge warning sign’ that desegregation has failed in US schools:

New report is ‘huge warning sign’ that desegregation has failed in US schools

Report illuminates extent to which US schools are becoming more segregated, with more than 60% of schools with high levels of poor students racially divided

When Terrance Green was a student at Detroit public schools starting in the 1980s, he celebrated his experience in the overwhelmingly black district.

“The teachers were outstanding … there was a very strong ethos around racial identity, around civil rights, around celebrating who we were,” he said.

It wasn’t lost on Green, however, that just north of 8 Mile Road – the demarcation line of Detroit and its suburbs – students had access to a significantly higher amount of resources.

“I do remember … 8 Mile being like the psychological barrier, even in the early 80s it was,” said Green, 33. “I knew there were these suburbs [that] had more amenities, but I don’t think I could articulate that as an elementary school child.”

A fourth-generation Detroiter, Green’s entry into the city’s public school system was only several years removed from a seminal 1974 US supreme court ruling on school desegregation, Milliken v Bradley, which ended a plan to integrate mostly white suburban schools into Detroit’s public school system. The city’s population continued to swiftly decline in the years that followed, eroding the school system’s resources in tandem until the state declared a financial emergency.

How do you have meaningful desegregation when you have white flight occurring at rapid rates?

Terrance Green

Green, a professor of educational policy and planning at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed to the Milliken decision as a “death knell” to implementing the supreme court’s 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education to desegregate school systems.

“How do you have meaningful desegregation when you have white flight occurring at rapid rates, but we can’t involve suburban school districts where this was occurring?” Green said. “It stopped mandatory desegregation efforts metropolitan-wide.”

A report released this week by the Government Accountability Office illuminated the extent to which school systems across the US are, once again, becoming more segregated. The report found that more than 60% of schools with high levels of poor students were racially segregated, which the report defined as being at least 75% black or Latino.

The study reviewed federal data from 2001 to 2014 and found 16% of all US schools were both racially segregated and poor, increasing from about 7,000 schools in 2001 to 15,089 by 2013 to 2014. Observers and advocates for school desegregation said the report should be a “huge warning sign” that needs to be addressed.

“There are many who believe in this country that we are operating on an even playing field,” said Jadine Johnson, staff attorney at the Massachusetts-based Opportunity to Learn Campaign.

“I think what this report revealed … is that the legacies of slavery in this country, the legacies of Jim Crow, are alive and active,” she said. “That did not go away with Brown v Board of Education.”

Compared to other schools, the GAO report found, segregated schools offered fewer college prep, science, and math classes to take, and a disproportionate number of students were either held back in ninth grade, suspended, or expelled.

Michigan congressman John Conyers was among several lawmakers who requested the report, which was released on the 62nd anniversary of Brown v Board of Education. Conyers and Virginia congressman Bobby Scott are pushing legislation that would amend Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and restore the rights of parents to file lawsuits against segregated school districts under claims of disparate impacts, which are based on ascertaining the discriminatory effect of a policy rather than ascertaining New report is ‘huge warning sign’ that desegregation has failed in US schools:

K-12 EDUCATION:

Better Use of Information Could Help Agencies Identify Disparities and Address Racial Discrimination

GAO-16-345: Published: Apr 21, 2016. Publicly Released: May 17, 2016.

If PARCC, Inc., Is the Owner of PARCC Items, Produce the Document Proving It | deutsch29

If PARCC, Inc., Is the Owner of PARCC Items, Produce the Document Proving It | deutsch29:

If PARCC, Inc., Is the Owner of PARCC Items, Produce the Document Proving It

In a letter issued around May 12, 2016, to professor Celia Oyler regarding Oyler’s publishing three “live” PARCC items on her blog on May 07, 2016, PARCC, Inc., CEO Laura Slover wrote the following as part of a warning email to Oyler:

Parcc, Inc. is the owner of all intellectual property contained in the various PARCC assessments (other than third party literary excerpts, for which we have reprint permission), including the essay prompts you have posted.

According to Slover, her nonprofit, PARCC, Inc., owns the rights to the PARCC test items.

In the DMCA takedown notice sent to bloggers and others who shared Oyler’s post on Twitter, Slover is identified as the copyright owner of the items:

DMCA Takedown Notice

== Copyright owner: Laura Slover
== Name: Kevin Michael Days
== Company: PARCC Inc.
== Job title: Associate Director, Operations
== Email address: kdays@parcconline.org

== Address: 1747 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, 6th Floor
== City: Washington
== State/Province: District of Columbia
== Postal code: 20006
== Country: United States
== Phone (optional): 2027488077
== Fax (optional): n/a

Here is why I challenge the idea that Slover’s PARCC, Inc., is “the owner of all intellectual property contained in various PARCC assessments”:

PARCC, Inc., is not synonymous with the PARCC consortium. PARCC, Inc., is only the “project manager” for the consortium. Moreover, PARCC, Inc.’s position as project manager is not permanent; it is set to expire in 2017. So, how is it that the PARCC consortium would surrender ownership of its intellectual property to an entity with which it has a temporary relationship?

As project management partner for the PARCC consortium, PARCC, Inc., could surely handle PARCC test promotion and licensing, and it could even police social media on behalf of the PARCC consortium. (See more regarding PARCC, Inc., role in this Linkedin ad for a director of contracts management.) But there is a freedom that comes with ownership (“the” owner, at that)– an ability to exercise free rein over what is owned.

In a May 17, 2016, press release regarding Oyler’s post, Heather Reams, Director of Communications and Public Relations, at PARCC, Inc., alludes to copyrighted materials. However, Reams does not go so far as to tell the public that PARCC, Inc., owns the items:

Students are given an unfair test environment when anyone posts active test questions on the internet – whether the test is PARCC, the SAT, or any other exam. Because of this, states rely on Parcc Inc., a non-profit organization, to help ensure that every student who takes a test does so on an even playing field without any unfair advantages or disadvantages, and this requires that copyrighted materials be closely guarded.

Guarding copyrighted material is not the same as owning the material. Thus, Reams’ If PARCC, Inc., Is the Owner of PARCC Items, Produce the Document Proving It | deutsch29: