CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Finish Those Taxes Edition (4/14)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Finish Those Taxes Edition (4/14)

ICYMI: Finish Those Taxes Edition

Personally, mine are already mailed in. My circumstances changed so much this year I have no idea whether I took a bigger hit or not. But regardless of your tax status, here are some pieces from the week for your edification. Take a read, and support these writers by passing on their stuff. Remember-- when you amplify a news media piece about education and it garners more hits, you help convince editors that it's worth their time to cover education.

Most Vouchers Go To Students From Wealthier Districts

This is not a new piece, but it's a reminder that in Arizona, where vouchers have bloomed, they are rarely used by poor students to "escape" terrible schools. Good to keep in mind as vouchers enjoy a new push across the country.

The Plot Against America: Inside the Christian plan to "remodel" the nation. 

A deeper dig into the UDSA Today piece about copy-paste bills. And it does get to education and vouchers.

If We Don't Work On Pedagogy, Nothing Else Matters   

Not sure I agree with every single word of this essay from Robin Pendoley, but it's at the very least a place to start a discussion.

Betsy DeVos Can't Be Bothered 

Mary Sanchez at the Orlando Sentinel has kind of had it with the typical Betsy DeVos Congressional hearing performance.

The Toll College and Career Ready Education Has Taken On Students

Nancy Bailey talks about the damage done by this policy obsession.

LeBron James Opened a School That Was Considered an Experiment

Remember how King James was going to throw his weight and money behind a public school? Erica Green takes a measured, thoughtful look at how that's going. Worth reading not just for the work of the school, but to remember what journalism that is neither puffing up a miracle school nore tearing down an edu-disaster looks like.

DeVos's Staff Blocked Researchers

Jan Resseger looks a little more closely at how the department tried to thwart research about their spending on charter schools.

Beverly Cleary's Birthday

Not strictly an education story, but the woman turned 103 this week. Damn! Here are some nice birthday pieces from Oprah, Southern Living, and Scary Mommy.

Ron Desantis Has Big Hairy Audacious Goals For Florida Education

An excellent overview of just how very much trouble public education is in in Florida.

Betsy DeVos Quietly Making It Easier for Dying For-profits To Stick It To Students  

DeVos remains a fan of business; of students bilked by business, not so much. Here's one small, quiet way she's looking out for the former by sticking it to the latter.

Benchmark Assessments Don't Actually Do Any Good

Some thoughts about repeatedly weighing the pig.

Softly Killing Public Education

Add the St. Louis Dispatch to the list of newspaper editorial boards that have figured out that the push for vouchers is a push to kill and replace public education.

Bad Ideas and Educational Scripture  

Should we listen to the experts or to teachers (trick question).

Putting The Pieces Together   

The Momma Bears connect the voucher push of guys like Governor Lee to the drive to kill public education.


CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Finish Those Taxes Edition (4/14)

Obstacles To Building Better Writers

by Peter Greene / 1d

Writing well is one of the great uber-skills, a quality that will open an infinite number of doors in a student's life. Unfortunately, we are living through a golden age of bad writing instruction, driven by high stakes testing and shrunken, meager ideas about the very purpose of education. In 39 years, I had some success in teaching students to be better writers. If you are a teacher intent on b

APR 12

DeVos Pushes Questionable Charter Research

100+by Peter Greene / 1d

The New York Post headline is pretty definitive: " Case Closed: Charter schools deliver more education 'bang' for the buck. " Writers Patrick Wolf and Corey DeAngelis are plugging their new paper, and Betsy DeVos is on Facebook plugging it some more . DeAngelis we've met befor e. He's a Fellow for the Cato Institute , policy adviser for the Heartland Institute, and a Distinguished Working-on-his-P

APR 11

AZ: Kelly Townsend Wants To Shut Teachers Up

81by Peter Greene / 2d

Arizona's #RedForEd movement was long overdue. The state has been one of the nation's top playgrounds for charter profiteers , but at the same time, they have starved public schools for resources, with low and stagnant teacher pay along with the worst level of per pupil spending in the country. The state was lucky that its teachers walked out en masse last year , because they were already walking

APR 10

IN: Go Ahead And Shoot Teachers

500+by Peter Greene / 3d

When the story first broke that teachers at Meadowlawn Elementary School in Monticello, Indiana had been shot with pellets--execution style--as part of an active shooter drill , I decided not to get in to it here. The sheriff's department had agreed to knock it the hell off, the legislature had already moved to ban the practice, and the whole business was so clearly over the line, so obviously unn

Five Reasons Your District's Strategic Plan Failed

96by Peter Greene / 3d

Somewhere in school district offices all across the country, there are beautiful strategic planning documents, carefully bound, sitting on a shelf, gathering dust and having absolutely no effect on how the school district functions from day to day. They have utterly failed. Honest. I am absolutely a horse. It doesn’t have to be that way (read Andrea Gabor’s After the Education Wars for examples o

APR 09

Freedom and Indignity

by Peter Greene / 4d

The ed reform movement has always had a language problem, starting with the word "reform," which does not really adequately describe a movement built on privatization and corporate takeover. There have been other casualties along the way. I've railed long and fruitlessly about the continued use of "student achievement" and "teacher effectiveness" when what we really mean is "high scores on a narro

APR 08

WV: Lukewarm Charter Baloney and The Questions To Ask

100+by Peter Greene / 6d

West Virginia remains one of the untapped market for the ed reformster business, and privatizers are determined to keep hammering away. The most recent attempt involved a little bit of legislative extortion, as lawmakers tried using teacher raises as the sweetener in a bill intended to finally open West Virginia to both charter schools and education savings accounts (aka vouchers). West Virginia t

APR 07

ICYMI: Hello, April Edition (4/7)

by Peter Greene / 7d

It's practically like spring here in Northwest PA, but I still have some-- well, many-- choice items to share this week. Remember, these writers depend on you to boost their work, so if something here speaks to you, help push it out into the world! I Asked USED Three Questions Jeff Bryant just had three questions for the Betsy DeVos Department of Education, but they "created havoc" for the staff.

APR 06

Don't Be Fooled By This Proposal To End Testing

100+by Peter Greene / 7d

Tom Vander Ark has a long and checkered past in the ed reform biz , and he is ready to cash in on the next big thing (he's been ready for a while), which is why we find him at Forbes proposing an end to standardized testing . Just to be clear from the jump-- that's not a good thing. The article comes in two parts-- a pretty good take-down of the Big Standardized Test, and a pretty weak argument fo

APR 05

MO: Bipartisan Fight Against Charter Expansion

28by Peter Greene / 8d

Rep. Rebecca Roeber (R) of Lee's Summit, Missouri has proposed a bill to expand charter reach ; the state has basically confined charter schools to the Kansas City and St. Louis districts. But response to the bill has not been exactly a slam dunk. The bill would allow charters to open in communities of greater than 30,000 people or an accredited-without-provisions school district. The feelings abo

APR 04

College Board's AP Rate Hike Backlash

66by Peter Greene / 10d

The College Board, the company behind the dreaded SAT and popular AP courses has made changes to the registration for the AP exams . AP courses and the exams that go with them are supposed to provide students with a leg up on college applications. Though the changes, which amount to an increase in cost, were announced over a month ago, they now add to the conversation the nation is suddenly havin

APR 02

MT: Meat Widgets And Personalized Learning

24by Peter Greene / 11d

In Montana, the connection between Personalized [sic] Learning and vocational training has been made pretty explicit. There, some leaders are throwing support to PL not because it would be good for students or would solve educational problems, but because it would solve workforce development problem s. Solving workforce shortages one widget at a time. State Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, recently show

APR 01

Accountability Beyond the Bubble

42by Peter Greene / 12d

Accountability has always been an educational buzzword, and the modern reformy era has put accountability on a high, if somewhat cockeyed pedestal. Testing? Not testing? Running test scores through models soaked in magic VAM sauce? Regular school visits, inspections and audits? Administrators an

Chaos, Anarchy, and Violence in the Charter School Sector | Dissident Voice

Chaos, Anarchy, and Violence in the Charter School Sector | Dissident Voice

Chaos, Anarchy, and Violence in the Charter School Sector

Chaos, anarchy, and violence are inherent features of the free market.¹Instability, uncertainty, disequilibrium, unevenness, imbalance, volatility, turmoil, impulsiveness, alienation, greed, anxiety, jealousy, risk, irrational behavior, and “animal spirits” are fellow-travelers of advanced commodity production and exchange, especially in the final and highest stage of capitalism.

The free market abhors security, predictability, certainty, stability, and harmony—the very things modern humans need in today’s complex and evolving society. Hourly fluctuations and dislocations in the economy and society are considered good, desirable, and normal by free market fundamentalists. Such disruptions are not seen as a problem or something that belongs to a bygone era.

The “invisible leviathan” also guarantees winners and losers, hierarchies and inequalities, rewards and punishments. In addition, it constantly “innovates” more exotic and toxic forms of financial parasitism and decay that further enrich the top one percent while wreaking havoc in the productive sector and broader society.

The free market has been revealed time and again to be an anachronistic and damaging way of organizing society and the economy. It has failed millions for generations and simply does not meet the needs of the present or the future.

It is comical and tragic to hear and read the views of free market ideologues like former long-time chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, regarding how their free market worldview was shattered by the Wall Street-engineered economic collapse of 2008 that no one went to jail for—a fiasco that continues to stunt growth, degrade economies worldwide, and confuse economists and “leaders.” All major free market ideologues have long been members of the know-nothing club, which is why they have never been able to find a way to extricate the outmoded economic system from recurring crises that always leave millions unemployed, underemployed, impoverished, indebted, miserable, and insecure. No “policy,” “regulation,” or “reform” has CONTINUE READING: Chaos, Anarchy, and Violence in the Charter School Sector | Dissident Voice

Do You Eat at Chick-Fil-A? | Teacher in a strange land

Do You Eat at Chick-Fil-A? | Teacher in a strange land

Do You Eat at Chick-Fil-A?

We just finished two cross-country journeys in a Subaru Forester with a large dog. It’s a 4-day/3-night trip, with long, 10-12 hour driving days culminating in overnight stays in mediocre, pet-welcoming LaQuintas. There is little time or opportunity for interesting restaurant meals. All food is in our little cooler, picked up at a quick-stop market (the kind attached to gas stations) or obtained in a drive-through situation.

Yes, lots of fast food.  Yes, I know it’s not good for us. By the second or third day, we don’t care.

On the upside, we play endless games of Twenty Questions, listen to talk radio and laugh a lot. Most of the trip is excruciatingly dull (lookin’ at yew, Texas panhandle). Because we’ve done this trip, out and back, for four years, we know how pointless it is to look for an interesting or healthy take-out meal on I-40, other than the odd Route 66 diner. McDonald’s makes good coffee and while we’re there, we might as well get a sausage biscuit—that’s the prevailing spirit of this driving marathon.

What we don’t do is eat at places that are politically problematic. Papa John’s, Wendy’s and Waffle House are out. And we never eat at Chick-Fil-A.  I don’t mean just on-the-road eating. Neither of us had ever eaten at a Chick-Fil-A. In our whole lives.

This is not much of a sacrifice. There isn’t a Chick-Fil-A within three hours of our house—and only ten in our whole home state. Having serious socio-political problems with the founding principles of CFA, then deciding not to eat there is an empty gesture—unlike not buying L.L. Bean flannel sheets, which are awfully nice in a cold Michigan winter. But I have heard—from any number of people, especially those who live in the South—that Chick-Fil-A sandwiches, waffle fries and lemonade are super-tasty. The best.

So you know what’s coming, right? We’re in Oklahoma, and very low on gas, plus we all need a rest, so to speak. And it’s dinner time–we’re hungry. We choose an exit that CONTINUE READING: Do You Eat at Chick-Fil-A? | Teacher in a strange land

Fostering Parent-Teacher Relationships PLUS The Teacher in the Classroom - Teacher Habits

Fostering Parent-Teacher Relationships - Teacher Habits

Fostering Parent-Teacher Relationships

From notes, calls, and personal meetings to full-blown parent-teacher conferences, there are many different ways that parents can get involved in the education process. While this can often be for the better, it can also cause quite a bit of friction at times.

That’s why it’s crucial that educators are aware of the dynamics of the relationship between teachers and parents and understand how they can affect classrooms. Learning how to foster these relationships can take potential causes of stress and conflict and turn them into productive tools that can help everyone involved, especially the students themselves.

Getting Onto the Same Page

It’s no secret that parents and teachers don’t always agree. But the issue doesn’t always revolve around incompatible differences nor diametrically opposed opinions — even if they can often feel that way when we’re talking with our student’s parents. If you can step back and look at the bigger picture, it becomes a lot easier to stop pointing fingers and begin to understand where each party is coming from.

Different Methods

Chances are you’ve been in that uncomfortable situation where your teaching methods clash with the opposite party. This can be on a CONTINUE READING: Fostering Parent-Teacher Relationships - Teacher Habits

The Teacher in the Classroom

I rewrote Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” for teachers because I find it inspiring and increasingly relevant as teachers come under continual assault from those courageous enough to do the job.

Male version:

Female version:

The Teacher in the Classroom

Critics Protest Outrageous Award for Corporation Hawking Online Instruction for Pre-Schoolers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Critics Protest Outrageous Award for Corporation Hawking Online Instruction for Pre-Schoolers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Critics Protest Outrageous Award for Corporation Hawking Online Instruction for Pre-Schoolers

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is outraged that The Audacious Project is honoring the Waterford online preschool program, which will use this platform to expand their efforts to open additional  online preschools. Early childhood experts agree that this is harmful to children. I say it is a mean and stupid idea. Efforts to put little children in online schools should be denounced, not celebrated. Children need real interaction with real human beings.

Please sign the petition.

Early Childhood Advocates Call On The Audacious Project to Reconsider Major Award for Online Preschool
A TED philanthropy project would widen educational inequality and deprive children of the hands-on preschool experiences they deserve.

BOSTON, MA – April 12, 2019 – Early childhood advocates are calling on The Audacious Project, housed at TED and designed to fund ideas for social change, to postpone plans to designate Waterford UPSTART, an online “preschool” program, as one of the participants in its funding program for 2019.  Award winners will be announced at TED2019 in Vancouver on April 16. Last year’s award winners averaged $63 million in new funding. According to a Waterford representative, the funding will allow UPSTART to dramatically increase the number of children enrolled in its program.

In their call for The Audacious Project to postpone funding, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Defending the Early Years (DEY) point to their October 2018 Position Statement on Online Preschool, which has been endorsed by more than 100 experts in child development and early education. The experts and advocates say that online preschool programs like UPSTART are poor substitutes for high-quality early education, and that funding online programs instead of high-quality early education will make inequality worse, not better.

“There is a tremendous need for universal pre-K, and it’s admirable that The Audacious Project wants to address educational inequalities, but online preschool is not the answer,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, EdD, Professor Emerita at Lesley University and DEY Senior Advisor.“Kids learn by playing, exploring, and interacting with peers and caring adults – not by memorizing letters, numbers, and colors presented to them on screens. Children who receive UPSTART’s screen-based version of a preschool experience will be disadvantaged compared to children from more resourced communities who have play-based, experiential early education. A truly audacious project would take the funding intended for these online programs and direct it instead to giving low-income, rural, or otherwise underserved children the high quality, face-to-face education they deserve.”

UPSTART, which started with public funding from the state of Utah and has spread to at least seven other states, claims to promote “kindergarten readiness” through 15 – 20 minutes per day of online instruction. But advocates say that UPSTART’s lessons are poorly designed and developmentally inappropriate. An analysis of one UPSTART lesson by DEY found it was pedagogically unsound, “confusing” and “overloaded with distracting images.” UPSTART also recommends that children wear headphones and complete lessons alone, contrary to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that parents “co-view with your children [and] help children understand what they are seeing.”

“Online preschool should never be rewarded or considered a legitimate alternative to high-quality early care and education,” said Denisha Jones, PhD, JD, Director of Teacher Education at Trinity Washington University and Director of Organizing for DEY.  “I implore The Audacious Project to reconsider giving money to a screen-based program at a time where early childhood experts are increasingly concerned with screen time and the loss of high-quality interactions between children and educated early childhood teachers. Programs like UPSTART may be less expensive than real universal preschool, but those savings come at the expense of the low-income kids and kids of color they purport to help. We should be investing our money, time, and resources to ensure all children have access to affordable, high-quality, early childhood education.”

Last year, seven of The Audacious Project designees were granted a total of $441 million from partners including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. It is not yet known which groups are funding UPSTART, or exactly how much money the program will receive, but an email from a Waterford PR representative indicated that the award will be enough to “provide an opportunity for every four-year-old to be ready for kindergarten.” (Emphasis in original.)

The DEY/CCFC letter pointedly states, “We don’t believe your impressive list of funders and partners would be satisfied if their own children spent 75 minutes a week on a computer in isolation as a substitute for face-to-face preschool rooted in caring relationships and social interaction.” It also warns that a major expansion of online preschool could derail the growing movement for real universal preschool. It asks The Audacious Project to postpone the award and meet with advocates to better understand their concerns.

Added Josh Golin, Executive Director of CCFC, “Over and over, we’ve seen educational technology such as 1:1 programs, virtual charter schools, and personalized learning software falsely marketed as a panacea for inequality. Now the EdTech evangelists have set their sights on preschoolers. Isolated children on computers guided by algorithms can never replicate the joyful exploration and interactions at the core of the preschool experience. We urge The Audacious Project to rethink this award.”

The DEY/CCFC letter can be read in full here.

For Immediate Release

Contact: 
David Monahan, CCFC: david@commercialfreechildhood.org; (617) 896-9397

Critics Protest Outrageous Award for Corporation Hawking Online Instruction for Pre-Schoolers | Diane Ravitch's blog

MetWest Internships (Part 6) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

MetWest Internships (Part 6) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

MetWest Internships (Part 6)

As in all Big Picture schools, MetWest has structured the academic year to have students search for and enter into two-day a week unpaid internships during school hours. Called Learning Through Internship (LTI), there is a coordinator that oversees the entire program. Michael Cellemme heads this part of MetWest’s program. He is the only staff member that also worked as a Teacher/Advisor at the first Big Picture school (The Met) in Providence (RI). He is responsible for finding sites for internships, interviewing potential mentors, making matches between individual students and mentors, and monitoring what goes on in the internship.

Local mentors take on the responsibility of helping a student acquire the work and social skills necessary to succeed in a business, government agency, educational and health organization, and similar Oakland groups. Since 2002 when MetWest opened, the school has placed students with more than 500 organizations, including local hospitals, radio stations and restaurants to provide learning opportunities. Here are media descriptions of students and their internships.

MetWest’s individualized approach has made a huge difference for Kris McCoy. McCoy had struggled in school and was involved in an armed robbery part-way through his eighth grade year. He served time in juvenile hall for that offense. He also got into several fights his first year at MetWest.

“He came with an ankle bracelet, and with visits from his parole officer,” said McCoy’s teacher, Shannon Carey. “And needing to be the alpha male and CONTINUE READING: MetWest Internships (Part 6) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

If “arming teachers” can’t be insured, is the debate just a cruel charade? | The Edvocate Blog

If “arming teachers” can’t be insured, is the debate just a cruel charade? | The Edvocate Blog

If “arming teachers” can’t be insured, is the debate just a cruel charade?

Wake up Florida. We are being gamed again. There’s a good chance that the whole uproar overarming teachers is just an orchestrated distraction.

Zero evidence suggests that arming classroom teachers as described in SB 7030/HB 7093 is insurable. Right now, SB 7030/Arming Teachers is on its way to a full senate floor vote.  No one is stepping up to underwrite the enormous liability of putting guns into the hands of classroom teachers with scant training. Out of approximately three weeks of training, only 8 hours are devoted to learning to shoot. Where are the insurance companies for districts, unions or sheriff’s offices on this?

Following last year’s passage of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Safety Act, Stephanie Luke, Chair of the Lake County school board in Florida had this to say about insurance, “It’s a discussion we’re having with our lawyer and our insurance company,” Luke said, emphasizing that those talks are only at the early stages, as the board does not want to appear that it has come to any conclusions on a new policy. “But it (arming district staff) would be more liability,” she conceded.

It’s disturbing to think that the 2019 Florida Legislature, filled with impassioned debate and often deeply personal public outcry over the obvious insanity of arming a teacher, is a cruel political calculation providing cover for:

• the radical transformation of private religious school vouchers into a middle-class entitlement paid for by public school dollars
• the transference of public-school referendum money into the hands of charter CONTINUE READING: If “arming teachers” can’t be insured, is the debate just a cruel charade? | The Edvocate Blog

NYC Public School Parents: Come to rally on Monday to protest the Mayor letting charters access student information to help them recruit students

NYC Public School Parents: Come to rally on Monday to protest the Mayor letting charters access student information to help them recruit students

Come to rally on Monday to protest the Mayor letting charters access student information to help them recruit students

Please come and show your support and share with others.  Don’t let the Mayor chicken out on this important issue because he is more scared of the charter lobby than he is about ignoring parent wishes, violating their family's privacy and undermining our public schools.

PARENT LEADERS DEMAND THE MAYOR STOP GIVING CHARTER SCHOOLS ACCESS TO STUDENT PERSONAL INFORMATION TO MARKET THEIR SCHOOLS

NYC Parents call for protection of their children’s privacy

NEW YORK, NY —

What: Press conference to oppose DOE’s practice of sharing personal student information with charter schools

Who: NYC public school parents and parent leaders

When: Monday April 15, 2019 at 1:00 PM

Where: The steps of the Tweed Courthouse, 52 Chambers Street, downtown Manhattan

Why:   NYC public school parents and parent leaders  demand that the Mayor cease the practice of allowing charter schools access to student personal information.  NYC is the only district in the country which voluntarily shares this information with charters to help them market their schools and recruit students. In response to long-standing parent complaints, Chancellor Carranza has repeatedly promised parent leaders in recent weeks, both publicly and privately that this practice will be discontinued, but the Mayor has yet to make a commitment to do so and in the last few days has said no decision has yet been made.  

Parents have complained about the violation of their children’s privacy for years, and a FERPA complaint to the US Department of Education about this practice was filed in November 2017.  Moreover, by allowing access to this information, the DOE has encouraged the rapid expansion of charter schools, which are now costing our public schools more than $2.1 billion per year. As a result,  NYC public schools have less space and fewer resources to educate our neediest students.

While in the past, the DOE has suggested that public schools improve their “marketing”  to compete, they do not have the necessary funds to do so and in any case, most parents do not believe that the public schools  should be forced to divert what precious resources they have for this purpose.

###

The Education Council Consortium (ECC), made up of elected and appointed Community Education and Citywide Council members, was established to address issues that affect schools and communities throughout all five boroughs.  We meet regularly with the Chancellor to help shape, advise, provide feedback and comment on educational policies, visions and goals.

Media Advisory    

Monday April 15, 2019                                                                                     

For more information, contact:

NeQuan McLean   

347-470-4975

educationcouncils@gmail.com

NYC Public School Parents: Come to rally on Monday to protest the Mayor letting charters access student information to help them recruit students