Breaking up the summer break: Is year-round education good or bad?

Breaking up the summer break: Is year-round education good or bad?:

Breaking up the summer break: Is year-round education good or bad?

It's back-to-school season for much of the country, but for some students, school is never out.

For some, classes are in session all year long: About 3,700 K-12 public schools across the country operate on a year-round calendar — approximately 4 percent of all U.S. schools in 2011-12, according to the latest data available from the National Center for Education Statistics.

A year-round calendar, also referred to as a balanced calendar, reorganizes the 180 school days by shortening the traditional summer break, dispersing those days into several smaller breaks throughout the year. These breaks (usually two to three weeks long) are called intersessions, and schools can use that time for remediation and enrichment programs for students. The method is popular in other countries, but U.S. research has been deemed too inconclusive to draw any long-term conclusions.

David Hornak, executive director of the National Association for Year-Round Education, an organization that advocates for shorter summers to help improve student achievement, explained to CNBC's "On the Money" that a year-round calendar helps stem summer learning loss often seen in children when they break for the extended holiday.

"On average, a teacher on the traditional calendar is required to re-teach between four and eight weeks annually after the summer intermission," said Hornak, who's also the superintendent of Holt Public Schools in Holt, Michigan — where two schools in his district operate on a year-round calendar. He referred to the findings in the 2006 published Charles Ballinger and Carolyn Kneese book "School Calendar Reform."

When learning loss compounds year after year, Hornak argued Breaking up the summer break: Is year-round education good or bad?:

Surprise! Amid Rising Inequality, One School Gap Is Narrowing : NPR Ed : NPR

Surprise! Amid Rising Inequality, One School Gap Is Narrowing : NPR Ed : NPR:

Surprise! Amid Rising Inequality, One School Gap Is Narrowing

Recent studies and government reports continue to highlight what many American's know by their wallets: Rising income differences, debt and stagnant real wages are among the biggest problems besetting the nation.

That economic inequality is reflected in America's schools, right? Absolutely.

But a study just out shows that the gap in school readiness between rich and poor children entering kindergarten closed significantly — by 10 to 16 percent —from 1998 to 2010. Some ethnic/racial achievement gaps declined as well.

I spoke with the study's lead author, Sean Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University.

Your study's results are kind of surprising given the widening income inequality over the same period, no?

Yeah, actually really quite surprising. Certainly it wasn't the finding we expected when we started the study. We thought because income and equality continued to grow and because achievement gaps had been growing for several decades, we thought we would just see that they had continued to grow but the data say otherwise.

Why do you think the gap has narrowed? More parents more engaged, doing more at the pre-K level across all incomes? Or are there other factors?

I think the two most likely explanations are improvements in the quality of preschool available to low-income families and more engagement of families across the income distribution, but particularly low-income families, in sort of cognitively enriching activities with their kids.

Give us some examples. Reading consistently to your child, taking them to museums, that kind of thing?

Yeah. We looked at the data to sort of see what parents say they have been doing with their kids over the last year. In the 2010 cohort, parents say they're doing more reading to their kids, they have more books at home. They're taking them to zoos, libraries, museums, places like that more. Their kids are doing more, playing more with computer games that are designed to teach them literacy and early numeracy skills, shapes, colors, sounds, letters, stuff like that. All of those things together we know are likely to help kids get ready for kindergarten.

What's interesting is the increase in those kinds of activities is more pronounced among low income families over this 12-year period than it is among high income families.

That is interesting. How was school readiness defined in the study?

These are studies where, in 1998 and 2010, the National Center for Education Statistics sent trained early childhood assessors out to 1,000 kindergartens around the country. In each kindergarten they sat down one-on-one with about 15 to 25 kindergarten students. And they asked them a structured set of questions to see if they could recognize letters, sound out words, count, recognize shapes, recognize colors and a variety of things like that. These were all sophisticated, kind of one-on-one Surprise! Amid Rising Inequality, One School Gap Is Narrowing : NPR Ed : NPR:

Why California is struggling to craft a fair, forward-looking way to assess public schools

Why California is struggling to craft a fair, forward-looking way to assess public schools:

Why California is struggling to craft a fair, forward-looking way to assess public schools

 (Photos by Rachel Luna/The Sun, SCNG) PHOTOS: State Superintendent Tom Torlakson tours San Bernardino school's linked learning program

Fifth grader Sandy Salgado, 10, shows State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson how she uses CoralDRAW program in her iSTEAM lab class during a tour of Bing Wong Elementary School in San Bernardino Friday.Rachel Luna/Staff Photographer

Between 1999 and 2013, California’s Academic Performance Index boiled everything about the state’s K-12 public schools down to a single number between 200 and 1000. That’s going away in a new, more nuanced system that’s now under construction.

In the old model, the desirability of neighborhoods or even whole communities in large part hinged on their API score. Careers were made or lost based on how far a school or district was from the magic 800 target number. And under the federal No Child Left Behind law, failure to steadily increase an API score — even an already high one — could mean dire trouble for a school or district.

But the API was only based on the results of standardized tests taken by the students. And those results, research has repeatedly shown, largely just measure the socio-economic environment the students come from and don’t paint much of a nuanced picture beyond that.

“That was essentially a measure of the average level of student achievement at the school. That’s not a very good measure of how good a school is, from the standpoint of how good a school is at making a kid smarter,” said Morgan Polikoff, a USC associate professor of education. “It’s a pretty good measure of the kind of kids who are enrolling in the school, like what the poverty level of the school is, but not how good the school is at teaching.”

In 2014, California’s State Board of Education pulled the brakes on calculating API while the state switched over to new standardized tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Those new Smarter Balanced tests, which students took for the second time this past spring, will be just one factor in a new accountability being created to replace the API score.

“I think they will go with a single number,” said Dale Marsden, superintendent of the 53,000-studentSan Bernardino City Unified School District, “but it won’t be based on a single factor.”

A draft version of a proposed color-coded reporting system for public schools was released in July. The proposed report card draws a lot from the NCLB-successor, Every Student Succeeds Act. It looks at how a school does in English Language Arts and math standardized tests but also looks at how well students learning English as a second language are doing, graduation rates, chronic absenteeism, suspension rates, college and career readiness and other factors.

“Schools do a lot more than just test scores,” Polikoff said. “By boiling everything down to just one test Why California is struggling to craft a fair, forward-looking way to assess public schools:

This week in the war on workers: Charter schools get the John Oliver treatment

This week in the war on workers: Charter schools get the John Oliver treatment:

This week in the war on workers: Charter schools get the John Oliver treatment

Charter schools got the John Oliver treatment, and it's brutal. Oliver opened by saying “we’re going to set aside whether or not charter schools are a good idea in principle,” because there are already a lot of them, “So instead we’re going to look at how they operate in practice.” And, as regular readers here know, how they operate in practice is often shady AF. Here’s just one example from an 18-minute segment filled with examples:

Voiceover from Frontline: By law charter schools must be nonprofit. But the schools can hire an educational management company or EMO to run the school and the EMO can try to make a profit. [David] Brennan calls his EMO White Hat Management.

Brennan: Education is first, last and always a business. If it’s run like a business it can be done profitably.

Oliver: Yes, education is first last and always a business. Take the ‘l’ off the word ‘learning’ and what do you got? ‘Earning.’ Take the ‘e’ off and what do you got? ‘Arning.’ Yeah, sure, that’s not a word, but it could be in one of our English classes. Now that man’s company, White Hat Management, worked on the contracts where each charter would pay 95 percent or more of its government funding to White Hat, which as a private company, isn’t obligated to provide the same level of transparency as, say, a school district. So taxpayers could have little idea how that money was being spent. And who can say if that’s a good system or not? All I know is, White Hat ran 32 of the lowest-performing schools in the state. And if you do essentially the same terrible thing more than 30 times in a row, you’re not a management company. You’re basically Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits Volumes 2 and 3.

Watch the whole video below.

● What are the top 10 H-1B employers?

● We are witnessing a new age of social justice movements—and that includes labor.

● Local food? What about local farm working conditions?

● Genteel union-busting in the Ivies:

I’m entirely unsurprised that Columbia’s response to [the NLRB ruling allowing graduate students to unionize] is to threaten an appeal and put up a union-busting website. Thanks to the training that I acquired at Columbia, I can tell you that Columbia is a historically union-busting institution: President Seth Low personally approved the use of Columbia students to help bust a national machinist worker’s strike in 1901, and the tradition continued with Columbia students acting as strike-breakers in a 1905 transit strike, a 1920 railroad strike, and a building trades strike in 1936, until the rise of student leftism finally made collegiate scabbing uncouth.

And again, I was there when the GSEU held a “Free the Ballot Box” protest on the steps of Low Library to protest management having locked up the ballot boxes in the NLRB election that had been held shortly before the Brown decision, which election had come only after four years of management stalling and failed appeals that dragged on for years after the NLRB had made its ruling in 2000 granting the right to organize.

● Remember how 401(k) retirement plans were supposed to bring more people into This week in the war on workers: Charter schools get the John Oliver treatment:

Dirty smear tactics of charter schools | Editorial | lehighvalleylive.com

Dirty tactics smear efforts of charter schools | Editorial | lehighvalleylive.com:

Dirty smear  tactics of charter schools

Is this any way to promote a charter school?

The pending debut of the Innovative Arts Academy Charter School in Catasauqua in September might have been uneventful, considering school officials said they had met their goal of enrolling 300 students for the sixth-to-12th-grade school.

This fledgling Catasauqua charter school denies authorizing, paying for or sending out this mailer.Contributed photo 

Then a newspaper ad in the Morning Call and an anonymous mailer raised the school's profile dramatically. They touted the drug bust of a Liberty High School student last year, asking parents" "Why worry about this type of student at school?" and advising them to "Come visit Arts Academy Charter School."

Reaction to the unsigned mailer, which listed the school's address, was immediate. Bethlehem Area School District Superintendent Joseph Roy called it a low blow and an impetus for the Legislature to reform the state's charter school act.

Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, a critic of the state's approach to charter schools, said he wants to know who drew up and authorized the promotions. He asked the U.S. Department of Education Office of Inspector General to look into it.

"Unfortunately we have become accustomed to dirtball mailers and tactics like this in political campaigns," DePasquale said. "But when it spills over into our education system and one public school appears to have attacked another it becomes downright deplorable."

While there's nothing unfactual about the student drug bust in the ad and mailer — and we support anyone's right to speak out about education funding and choice — we agree with DePasquale's concern about the tactics used in an anonymous mailer. The broadside is felt deeply by public school officials and supporters, considering Pennsylvania's charter schools are funded by taxpayer money funneled through district budgets. Public school boards have a say in approving charters within their boundaries, but the state's enabling law has generated a flurry of charters, which compete with public districts for students.

So who's behind the ad and mailer? Charter school officials say it's not them. School attorney  Daniel Fennick said the school is trying to divorce itself legally from the mailers and stop any unauthorized advertising. School CEO Loraine Petrillo resigned over the flap and other issues.

With no one stepping up, we're left to consider the underlying details: Developer Abe Atiyeh, who has leased other buildings for charter schools in the Lehigh Valley, is the owner of the building housing the new school in Catasauqua. Previously he paid a consultant a per capita fee to sign up enrollees at another charter school. Last week an Atiyeh employee made a public records request of the Bethlehem Area School District, seeking 10 years of arrest records on Liberty High School students.

When asked about the mailers and ads, Atiyeh refused to comment and hung up on an Express-Times reporter.

Time and a thorough investigation should reveal the source of the solicitations, which, even if they are legal, dip into a simplistic, fear-mongering approach to draw students from public schools to charter schools.

We hope DePasquale and others get to the bottom of this and answer the legal questions involved. Lawmakers who have been hearing pleas to correct the flaws in the state's charter school law should consider this another reason to get moving.Dirty tactics smear efforts of charter schools | Editorial | lehighvalleylive.com:

White students disproportionately use Ohio school voucher program | The Columbus Dispatch

White students disproportionately use Ohio school voucher program | The Columbus Dispatch:

White students disproportionately use Ohio school voucher program

White students appear to get into private schools using taxpayer-funded vouchers at a higher rate than black students, raising questions about why that’s happening.

Ohio’s original voucher program, called EdChoice, allows students assigned to low-performing public schools to seek acceptance to a private school that accepts vouchers. A Dispatch analysis of 2014-15 data shows that the schools eligible because of their failing test scores were 61.3 percent black, but black students represented 48.5 percent of the students who were attending a private school on a voucher that year.

Whites made up 21.4 percent of the students attending qualifying low-performing schools, but 33.4 percent of those who applied and were accepted to a private school under the voucher program, state records show.

Add in a second, fast-growing Ohio voucher program, known as the EdChoice expansion program, which provides low-income students with vouchers even if they aren’t assigned to a low-performing public school, and the enrollment grows even more disproportionately white.

While census data show that about 29 percent of school-age children (ages 5-17) who live in poverty in Ohio are black, black students make up only 18.4 percent of expansion vouchers granted in 2014-15. Whites made up 64.3 percent of the expansion program, but only about 56 percent of the Ohio kids in poverty. The expansion program paid for more than 3,600 vouchers in 2014-15, triple the amount awarded the previous year.

“It is concerning,” said Nana Watson, president of the Columbus branch of the NAACP. “It’s concerning that it doesn’t seem to be balanced. We have more white children in the expansion program. And why is that?”

Asian, Latino and multiracial students appear to get vouchers at rates close to — within 1 or 2 percentage points — the proportional size of potential applicants, data show.

“It is illegal for any school to discriminate on the basis of race,” said Brittany Halpin, spokeswoman for the state Department of White students disproportionately use Ohio school voucher program | The Columbus Dispatch:

Movement to Opt-Out of Standardized Testing Bolstered By Judge's Ruling | FlaglerLive

Movement to Opt-Out of Standardized Testing Bolstered By Judge's Ruling | FlaglerLive:

Movement to Opt-Out of Standardized Testing Bolstered By Judge’s Ruling

A Leon County judge Friday declined to immediately order that students in a potentially precedent-setting lawsuit be promoted from third to fourth grade, but her rejection of several state arguments could fuel a movement that seeks to allow children to “opt out” of a standardized test.

In a 50-page ruling, Circuit Judge Karen Gievers turned down a request from parents for an injunction against five districts that held students back in the third grade after they refused to answer questions on the Florida Standards Assessment. She ordered a sixth district, Hernando County, to offer an alternative route for students to qualify for the fourth grade, but the ruling doesn’t explicitly say students in the lawsuit must be promoted.

In many ways, though, elements of Gievers’ ruling could be seen as a clear-cut defeat for the Florida Department of Education and at least some of the school districts. In addition to Hernando County, the judge was particularly scalding toward the state education agency and Orange County.

Also, Gievers found that students who fill out their names on the Florida Standards Assessment, break the seal on the test and then refuse to answer questions have “minimally participated” — as parents contend. The state rejected that interpretation, saying that students have to at least answer one question to be considered to have participated.

“Whether the statewide defendants decide that at least one question must have been answered for the defendants to score the test … is irrelevant. By being present, by breaking the seal and putting their names on the test packet, the students did participate in the test,” Gievers wrote.

A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education said the agency is reviewing the ruling.

The ruling could provide new oxygen to the “opt-out” movement, which has argued that under state law, parents have the right to tell their children to minimally participate in the test and then ask for the students to be promoted to fourth grade based on a “portfolio.”

The Florida Department of Education and the school districts say that while the law spells out ways to advance that don’t require passing the assessment, it doesn’t give students the opportunity to completely refuse to take the test.

Gievers also wrote that Orange County’s treatment of parent Michelle Rhea and her daughter was “particularly blatant, arbitrary and capricious,” because some students were allowed to move on after completing a portfolio, while Rhea’s daughter was denied a portfolio. But Gievers said she couldn’t issue an injunction about the girl because Rhea has moved her to a private school pending the outcome of the case.

And Gievers rejected arguments by the districts that the case should be broken up, with the Florida Department of Education fighting a lawsuit in Tallahassee while the districts face courts in their home counties.

Procedurally, the case is complicated because several parents have held their children out of school, enrolled them in private schools or begun home schooling them in response to the students being retained in third grade. In those cases, Gievers ruled, she couldn’t order the districts to do anything immediately because the students are not in public schools.

However, parts of at least some of those claims can still be heard at a later phase in the lawsuit.

Gievers brushed aside arguments from parents who clash with what some districts will accept as “portfolios,” an alternative to receiving the required grade on the Florida Standards Assessment. She said those claims would have to be heard by an administrative law judge first, because they concern a state rule.

A hearing concerning the Hernando County students, if the parents and the districts can’t agree on a resolution, is set for Monday afternoon.

–Brandon Larrabee, News Service of Florida Movement to Opt-Out of Standardized Testing Bolstered By Judge's Ruling | FlaglerLive:

Personalized Learning, Surveillance and Counterinsurgency within the State-Finance Matrix

Personalized Learning, Surveillance and Counterinsurgency within the State-Finance Matrix | Mythos: Education, Political Economy and Culture:

Personalized Learning, Surveillance and Counterinsurgency within the State-Finance Matrix

The Role of Big Data, EdTech and Militarized Austerity within America’s Authoritarian Democracy 

by Timothy Scott

“The NSA has nothing on the monitoring tools that education technologists have developed to ‘personalize’ and ‘adapt’ learning for students in public school districts across the United States” –Jesse Irwin, Model View Culture

The state-finance matrix defined: Influenced by David Harvey’s notion of the state-financenexus, the state-finance matrix is a highly disciplined neoliberal landscape where state power structures and technologies facilitate and protect the activities and interests of finance capitalism over all else. This matrix provides an insulated environment for financialization via securitization, which simply described, is a process where financial institutions bundle together (illiquid) financial assets – primarily loans – and transform them into (liquid) tradable securities that can be expeditiously bought and sold in secondary financial markets. Within this globalized environment, digital securities trading – including “fictitious” trading, hedging and speculating in derivative markets – generates “phantom wealth”; whereby the exchange of capital, money and currency is detached from material or labor value. In the twenty-first century, debt is the new global currency and is a primary source of (intangible) wealth accumulation.

Rebooting the System for a New Age

Writing in Forbes Magazine in 2013, technology entrepreneur Naveen Jain made an assessment of the historical origins of mass public education by pointing out that, “Our education system was developed for an industrial era.” Jain went on to explain that the U.S. education system,

…today uses the mass production style manufacturing process of standardization. This process requires raw material that is grouped together based on a specific criteria. Those raw materials are then moved from one station to another station where an expert makes a small modification given the small amount of time given to complete their task. At the end of the assembly line, these assembled goods are standardized tested to see if they meet certain criteria before they are moved to the next advanced assembly line.

Jain makes this point not as a critique of education serving the interests of capitalism through the application of the scientific management model of production (Taylorism) to schooling. On the contrary, he does so to make a case that current education reform policies are a continuation of the original mission of U.S. public education as an instrument of social control, yet only being modernized to bolster financialized capitalism. As Jain puts it, “Our education system is not broken, it has just become obsolete.” He goes on to explain: 

When I think of all the tremendous, seemingly impossible feats made possible by entrepreneurs, I am amazed that more has not been done to reinvent our education system. I want all entrepreneurs to take notice that this is a multi-hundred billion dollar opportunity that’s ripe for disruption.

The means by which such financial “opportunities” reside by “reinventing” education are made more explicit when Jain goes on to claim, “Rethinking education starts with embracing our individuality…[j]ust think of the opportunities we can unlock by making education as addictive as a video game” by flipping the current model on its head and use “technology to focus on our learners.” Using the same historical context that Jain does to support this argument, the superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools (and rising star in the education reform industry), Alberto Carvalho decreed in 2015, “Unfortunately, for most American students the old factory model of education still applies. This is a recipe for failure and frustration. We cannot address Digital Age needs with Industrial Age education.” Carvalho goes on to claim:

We must leave behind us the days of sorting students by age and instruction by subject. More and more, our 8th-graders are studying alongside 6th-graders of similar ability, interests and readiness. After all, we aren’t grouped by age in the employment marketplace. No one told Mark Zuckerberg he couldn’t be CEO of Facebook because he wasn’t born the same year as Bill Gates.

Jain and Carvalho’s edicts are an integral part of the education technology (EdTech) industry’s marketing narrative, as a driving force and beneficiary of the financialization of public education. Be it venture philanthropists, federal and state policymakers or EdTech executives, the current mission of education reform is to “reinvent” education, propelled by a narrative of benevolent intent and remedied by meeting the needs of financial markets through embracing education technologies. In doing so, the EdTech industry promotes its products as being student-centered, competency-based “anytime-anywhere learning” or more specifically as “personalized learning.” According to its advocates, personalized learning simply means the differentiation of digitized coursework for students based on their different skill levels that allows them to engage in learning activities at their own pace through the use of digital tools. Accordingly, the Gates Foundation claims on its Personalized Learning page, “In personalized learning, the student is the leader, and the teacher is the activator and the advisor.” On its Digital Tools and Content page, the foundation goes on to report that personalized learning Personalized Learning, Surveillance and Counterinsurgency within the State-Finance Matrix | Mythos: Education, Political Economy and Culture:

In politically hot Sacramento, no contest for several prominent school boards | The Sacramento Bee

In politically hot Sacramento, no contest for several prominent school boards | The Sacramento Bee:

In politically hot Sacramento, no contest for several prominent school boards

#MinnickSCUSD

Michael Minnick for SCUSD School Board 2016

In a city where politics is sport, Sacramento City Unified School District board races have attracted rising political stars and gobs of campaign money over the years.

But for the first time in decades, the capital city’s school district couldn’t attract enough candidates for a single competitive race in the November general election, allowing two incumbents and two aspirants to quietly take board seats without having to shake a single voter’s hand.

The ballot shutout doesn’t stop at Sacramento City Unified. Two other large Sacramento County districts, San Juan and Folsom Cordova, also will have no contests. Three people will slide into four-year terms at San Juan and two will become trustees for Folsom Cordova without a vote cast.

It’s been more than 20 years since all candidates have been uncontested in either San Juan or the Sacramento City districts. In the Folsom Cordova Unified School District, no-vote elections are becoming the norm. In the last two trustee elections, in 2012 and 2014, all candidates were unopposed, said outgoing Trustee Teresa Stanley.

“We’re just taking it that we’re doing something right. Because nobody wants to get in there and stir things up,” Stanley said.

But Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said voters suffer by a lack of competition at the ballot.

“Elections are a process where you pitch your ideas and hope people agree with them,” she said. “And if they do, you get elected and they hold you accountable. If there is no election, we don’t have that accountability process unfolding as it’s supposed to.”

Two years ago, school board campaigns in Sacramento City Unified were grueling and costly. Total fundraising reached nearly $200,000 by election day, including $50,000 spent by the Sacramento City Teachers Association on behalf of four candidates.

The teachers union spent heavily in an attempt to defeat trustee Jay Hansen, who has called for the district to reconsider its employee benefits and focus on reducing pension obligations. An SCTA mailer showed Hansen, first appointed in 2012, as a shotgun-toting, cigar-chomping trustee.

He survived, buoyed in part by $31,000 from California Charter Schools Association.

“I was a bit jealous,” Hansen said when asked about this year’s lack of competition. He thought the tenor of the presidential campaign may have played a role.

“It’s so vitriolic at the national level,” he said. “I’ve talked to people who are turned off by the whole thought of public office.”

When trustee Gustavo Arroyo decided earlier this month not to run for re-election, he said he “made the rounds” to let people know he appreciated their support. But he made no formal announcement. And the teachers association did not put forth a candidate for his seat.

Only one person filed for the post: Sacramento City College adjunct instructor Michael Minnick. He said he was surprised when he learned he was the only candidate in the race.

“It’s a little anti-climactic without an election night,” he said. “It didn’t occur to me at any point that I could be done by August. What is awesome about this is I have four months to get connected with the neighborhood,” which includes Tahoe Park, Glen Elder and other south area neighborhoods.

This time, the teachers association is backing only one candidate, Mai Vang, said SCTA 1st Vice President David Fisher.

Vang is a community activist who helped wage an unsuccessful campaign in 2013 to block school closures in underserved Sacramento neighborhoods. She replaces two-term trustee Diana Rodriguez, who announced Aug. 3 she would not run again. The seat represents south area neighborhoods, including Florin and Meadowview.

Two incumbents will get new four-year terms to the Sacramento school board: Christina Pritchett, this year’s president who is finishing her first term in office, and Jessie Ryan, elected in 2014 to fill a mid-term vacancy.

Alexander said the limited number of candidates could be linked to a crisis in civic engagement nationally.

“We live in a time when the majority of people eligible to vote don’t vote,” she said. “ManyIn politically hot Sacramento, no contest for several prominent school boards | The Sacramento Bee:

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article98327292.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article98327292.html#storylink=cpy

Even the National Charter School Association Says California’s Charter Oversight is Deficient | Diane Ravitch's blog

Even the National Charter School Association Says California’s Charter Oversight is Deficient | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Even the National Charter School Association Says California’s Charter Oversight is Deficient

Greg Richmond, president and chief executive of the National Association of Charter Authorizers, wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times calling on the state to overhaul the selection of those that can authorize charter schools. At present, the process is a free-for-all, and almost anyone can open a charter school. Local boards are authorizers; county boards are authorizers; if both of them turn down an applicant, the applicant can appeal to the state board and overturn the local and county boards.

California is awash in charter schools. According to a recent report by the ACLU, at least 20% of them engage in illegal discrimination to keep out the students they don’t want.

California also has had a steady parade of scandals, of charter owners who line their pockets with taxpayers’ money.

Will the state clean up the sector? Will it establish accountability and transparency, both for authorizers and for the charter schools? Or will the powerful California Charter School Association fight reform legislation every step of the way, calling in the debts owed by legislators who accepted their campaign cash?Even the National Charter School Association Says California’s Charter Oversight is Deficient | Diane Ravitch's blog:

 

United Opt Out National - The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform

United Opt Out National - Home:

The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform

United Opt Out National serves as a focused point of unyielding resistance to corporate education reform. We demand an equitably funded, democratically based, anti-racist, desegregated public school system for all Americans that prepares students to exercise compassionate and critical decision making with civic virtue.

United Opt Out National - Home:

Our Movement

United Opt Out National, Inc. is registered as a nonprofit organization incorporated in the state of Florida since the fall of 2011. As the opt out movement grows, we grow - sometimes in different directions and sometimes together - as we adjust to policy changes that impact our schools.  We, the administrators of UOO, are now focused on the acquisition and the restoration of the civil and human rights for our public school communities, the students that attend public schools, the parents who send their children to public schools, and the citizens who support public schools via their time, efforts, and tax dollars. 

United Opt Out National - Home:

Our Goals

1. Push legislators to embrace "the original intent of Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which was to facilitate equitable, thriving, and successful public education for all schools via distribution of funding free of strings attached other than need and a comprehensive and viable game plan for success.


2. Push for the collection of data that reveals how resources are allocated to schools: funding, qualified instructors, textual materials, curricula, support facilities, diverse students and support staffs, and technology. Well resourced and integrated individual schools, districts, and states help to mitigate many of the harmful effects of racism and poverty.
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​3. Push for protections for quality pedagogy, the teaching profession, and public school funding that the newly legislated Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) attempts to tear down via the push toward isolationist computer based digital instruction that facilitates indoctrination, free for all data mining, and compromised cognitive, physical, and social development; the alternative teacher certification programs that place unqualified people in classrooms, and the unregulated charter industry that strips public schools of resources, increases segregation, and allows for theft of public money.

4. Continue the expansion of the Opt Out movement in communities that have not been largely activated though are the majority of those most badly compromised - non-whites, students with disabilities, second language, and the impoverished -with support from major civil rights groups whom we have helped to "see the light."
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5. Facilitate election campaigns for school boards, federal and state legislative bodies, PTA /PTSA, union leadership, and local community leadership.


​6. Devise a list of direct actions for local, state, and national public education advocacy. 
Over the last four years we have been successful in making Opt Out mainstream, and we have been successful in encouraging and supporting direct actions all across our nation. We will continue to be a part of the solution.
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7. Join the campaign to fight Citizens United.
We plan to organize and work alongside individuals and organizations who are fighting Citizens United.

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Your Voice

We continue to need your help, your support, and your voice in the battle to demand an equitably funded democratically based, anti-racist, desegregated public school system for all American citizens and residents that prepares students to exercise compassionate and critical decision making with civic virtue.

Visit the Contact and In the News pages for your voices. You will find state contact person emails, links shared by activist to various state and district testing policies, opt out letter templates for high stakes testing and digital instruction; and links to state and district support groups. These resources will replace our state guides and provide more up to date resources for parents, students, and teachers. These are your spaces to build!  We ask that you email links and newsworthy items to unitedoptoutnational.org@gmail.com, and we will post them.United Opt Out National - Home:

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Don’t Forget that Our Stories Count - Sign AB1726 — Hmong Innovating Politics

Don’t Forget that Our Stories Count - Sign AB1726 — Hmong Innovating Politics:

Don’t Forget that Our Stories Count - Sign AB1726

Written By: Jonathan Tran, HIP Member. Content reflects Mr. Tran's personal opinions and do not reflect the position of any other organization

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Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. Like so many other Southeast Asian families, my parents worked A LOT. They took multiple shifts and worked overtime whenever they could. That left the child rearing during those long hours to my “ah kong” (grandpa) and “ah ma” (grandma). One of my earliest memories was a casual day with ah kong in the garden we had in the backyard. He paused from his yard work when I came up behind him. I distinctly remember him reaching into a massive bucket, his face beaming with excitement and pulling out a giant guava the size of my head. I didn’t appreciate this until I was older, but growing a mutant-sized guava in the desert of Los Angeles is no easy task. I could feel the pride he had in this monstrosity of a fruit because of all the labor and time he had put into growing and cultivating it.

I was too young to remember most of the stories ah kong would tell me about coming to the United States as refugees from Vietnam--so most of what I know comes from stories I heard from my dad. There was nothing in those stories that made ah kong sound extraordinary. His family grew up painfully poor in Southern China and the economic conditions were so awful that his family uprooted and moved to Vietnam. His story in Vietnam was not particularly spectacular either as he worked as a garment merchant selling children’s clothing sewn by my grandma in local markets in Vietnam. His harrowing journey to America--surviving war, escaping Vietnam as a boat person, living over a year in a refugee camp in Indonesia; is heartbreaking but also shared by many others who had to endure similar or worse tragedies. There’s no one single story about my grandpa that stands out for me. Instead, I remember my grandpa’s collective narrative--the persistent grit and grind and sacrifice at every stage of his life. In many ways, the pride that ah kongexpressed with the giant guava fruit was a microcosm of the same type of grit and grind that he had known all of Don’t Forget that Our Stories Count - Sign AB1726 — Hmong Innovating Politics: