A Lie All Teachers Should Believe - Teacher Habits

A Lie All Teachers Should Believe - Teacher Habits

A Lie All Teachers Should Believe

What is the most empowering belief a teacher can have? 

That’s a question I was recently asked. A few answers came quickly to mind:

All students can learn.

I make a difference.

The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I believe the most empowering belief a teacher can have is a lie.

How, you might wonder, can teachers be expected to believe a lie when they know it’s a lie?

The same way we walk around believing all sorts of lies in spite of knowing the truth.

For example, we believe we’re better than others in all sorts of ways, even though our logical brains know how unlikely that is. Researchers have found that we rate ourselves above average on everything from our driving ability to our academic performance to the quality of our personal relationships.

We persist in the belief that more money will make us happier, even CONTINUE READING: A Lie All Teachers Should Believe - Teacher Habits

Oregon Save Our Schools: Save Money, Gain Time, Dump SBAC!

Oregon Save Our Schools: Save Money, Gain Time, Dump SBAC!

Save Money, Gain Time, Dump SBAC!

Last week the Oregon Legislature’s Joint Committee on Student Success unveiled its plan to increase funding and improve public education. Oregon Save Our Schools would like to suggest a way that the legislature could save a little money and improve education: assess Oregon’s assessment system.

The most egregious problem with the state assessment system is the Smarter Balanced Assessment (also known as SBAC, coming out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium). This is the assessment that students in grades 3 through 8 and grade 11 currently take to fulfill the federal requirement for annual testing.  SBAC is a tremendous drain on time and resources if the vast majority of Oregon’s educators are to be believed.

While there is a federal requirement for annual testing in those grades, the federal government does not require a specific assessment. High school students and families have opted out of SBAC to the extent that the state is considering many other options for the federally required grade 11 assessment but elementary students will still be subjected to the months long annual slog through the Smarter Balanced Assessment if our legislators don’t act to change that.

SBAC consists of two tests for English Language Arts (ELA) and two for Math. It takes an average of 8 hours to complete the four CONTINUE READING: Oregon Save Our Schools: Save Money, Gain Time, Dump SBAC!

Sac Union contract crisis shows what’s wrong with Sacramento and CA | The Sacramento Bee

Sac Union contract crisis shows what’s wrong with Sacramento and CA | The Sacramento Bee

Do the math: Teachers + health costs + insanity = we all lose

Even if you don’t live in the City of Sacramento, or if you don’t have kids in the city public school system on the verge of blowing up, what is happening here affects you too.

Why? Because the demolition of a public school system serving more than 40,000 kids in the capital of California is representative of all that is wrong in the wealthiest state in America – and what is wrong in Sacramento.

We’re talking about places filled with people who talk a great game being “progressive.” Yet two-thirds of Sac City teachers are white; a majority of the leadership of the Sacramento City Teachers Association, their union, is white, too.

Meanwhile, if the school system goes into insolvency, the primary victims will be black and brown kids who make up a majority of the district student population.

Isn’t that the way it always is in Sacramento? You have affluent Curtis Park right across the way of North Oak Park. You have the gracious Pocket neighborhood right across Interstate 5 from Meadowview. Land Park is a world away from Del Paso Heights. Kids in the upscale neighborhoods are privileged because their parents can raise funds for their schools if the district blows up. (And lest you think I’m just lecturing, I include myself in this group.)

OPINION

Or, seeing affluent Sacramento families move their kids to expensive charter or private schools wouldn’t be surprising.

But everybody else will be stuck in schools whose programs will be gutted. And we’re already talking about a district that disproportionately suspends African American students. We’re talking about a district whose elite college prep programs are already lacking in diversity, such as the Humanities and International Studies Program (HISP) at C.K. McClatchy High School.

Why are these programs lacking in diversity? Because a very small number of black and brown students qualify for HISP by the time they reach high school.

Before elaborating on these points, let’s talk about how all of this defies simple logic.

How can the City of Sacramento be booming and California be soaring at same time the Sacramento City Unified District is upside down? It’s facing a $35-million budget deficit. Unless a deal is reached at the end by the end of June, the district could run out of money in the next school year.

It would then have to be bailed out by the state, which would strip local budget control from a locally elected school board members and its hand picked superintendent.

That would hurt Sacramento’s image, damage efforts to recruit businesses to relocate here, result in the unemployment of many unionized workers and – last, but not least – hurt thousands of kids.

Remember the kids? AND NOW THE TEACHER BASHING CONTINUE READING: Sac Union contract crisis shows what’s wrong with Sacramento and CA | The Sacramento Bee

Questions for Ann O’Leary: Why Are You Protecting California’s Corrupt, Wasteful Charter Industry? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Questions for Ann O’Leary: Why Are You Protecting California’s Corrupt, Wasteful Charter Industry? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Questions for Ann O’Leary: Why Are You Protecting California’s Corrupt, Wasteful Charter Industry?

Ann O’Leary is Chief of Staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom. Previously she was education advisor to Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She is a lawyer and a very accomplished person, with a long history in Democratic politics. She was leading the Clinton transition team right before the election of 2016. For several years, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which strongly defends charter schools and Obama’s failed Race to the Top program.

During the 2016 campaign, when it was clear Hillary would be the nominee, Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education and I went to see O’Leary at the Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn. We tried to persuade her that Hillary should oppose charters. After all, school choice is a Republican priority. It is supported by the Waltons, the Koch brothers, ALEC, the DeVos family, and every Red State Governor. Democrats should support public schools, we argued, not privatization. We failed. We went back again, after the convention. O’Leary was unmovable. The best we could get from her was a promise that Hillary would oppose for-profit charters.

We knew that was a meaningless offer, because large numbers of nonprofit charters hire for-profit management companies.

We were thrilled when Gavin Newsom and Tony Thurmond were elected, because the charter industry placed its bets on Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor, who ran third, and on Marshall Tuck for Secretary of Education. Tuck’s campaign spent twice as much as CONTINUE READING: Questions for Ann O’Leary: Why Are You Protecting California’s Corrupt, Wasteful Charter Industry? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Congress Should Defund the Charter Schools Program and Invest the Money in Title I and IDEA | janresseger

Congress Should Defund the Charter Schools Program and Invest the Money in Title I and IDEA | janresseger

Congress Should Defund the Charter Schools Program and Invest the Money in Title I and IDEA

The Network for Public Education published its scathing report on the federal Charter Schools Program three weeks ago, but as time passes, I continue to reflect on its conclusions. The report, Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride, is packed with details about failed or closed or never-opened charter schools.  The Network for Public Education depicts a program driven by neoliberal politicians hoping to spark innovation in a marketplace of unregulated startups underwritten by the federal government. The record of this 25 year federal program is dismal.

Here is what the Network for Public Education’s report shows us. The federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) has awarded $4 billion federal tax dollars to start or expand charter schools across 44 states and the District of Columbia, and has provided some of the funding for 40 percent of all the charter schools that have been started across the country. Begun when Bill Clinton was President, this neoliberal—publicly funded, privatized—program has been supported by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.  It has lacked oversight since the beginning, and during the Obama and Trump administrations—when the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General released a series of scathing critiques of the program—grants have been made based on the application alone with little attempt by officials in the Department of Education to verify the information provided by applicants.  Hundreds of millions of dollars have been awarded to schools that never opened or that were shut down: “We found that it is likely that as many as one third of all charter schools receiving CSP grants never opened, or opened and shut down.”  Many grants went to schools that illegally discriminated in some way to choose their students and served far fewer disabled students and English language learners than the local pubic schools.  Many of the CSP-funded charter schools were plagued by conflicts of interest profiteering, and mismanagement. The Department of Education has never investigated the scathing critiques of the program by the Department’s Office of Inspector Genera; neither has the Department of Education investigated the oversight practices of the state-by-state departments of education, called State Education Agencies by CSP, to which many of the grants were made. Oversight has declined under the Department’s leadership by Betsy DeVos.

One of the shocking findings in the Asleep at the Wheel report is that a series of federal administrations—Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have treated this program as a kind of  CONTINUE READING: Congress Should Defund the Charter Schools Program and Invest the Money in Title I and IDEA | janresseger

Louisiana Educator: Local School Systems Should be Able to Choose their own Academic Content Standards and Tests

Louisiana Educator: Local School Systems Should be Able to Choose their own Academic Content Standards and Tests

Local School Systems Should be Able to Choose their own Academic Content Standards and Tests

This bill, by Senator Milkovich which will be debated in the Senate Education Committee this week, would allow each school system to opt out of the state content standards and accountability tests and to choose their own set of content standards for the students in their district. The process would allow the parents of each school district, when a petition is signed by at least 10% of the voters to hold an election to choose the academic standards and tests that would apply to their students.

Senate Bill 128 will be heard at 11:00 a.m., Wednesday, April 17 in the Hainkel committee room. Any interested citizen is allowed to attend and comment on the legislation.

The present Louisiana content standards and state LEAP and End of Course tests are based primarily on the Common Core standards. These standards were never tested by using field trials or any other means before they were adopted by BESE. The Common Core standards were a set of academic mandates for ELA and math for each grade that were arbitrarily written by a set of self appointed academic elites mostly representing testing companies and other college related persons. A huge campaign financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and the Federal government got many states such as Louisiana to adopt the standards and their accompanying tests sight unseen.

The Common Core standards are not appropriate for our students and have resulted in a decline in academic achievement and readiness of our students for life and careers. Louisiana has now dropped to its lowest achievement ranking ever compared to other states.Please read the following posts, here, here, and here, on the Louisiana Educator blog that give you all the data you need to determine that the common core standards are not appropriate or effective as the best CONTINUE READING: Louisiana Educator: Local School Systems Should be Able to Choose their own Academic Content Standards and Tests

Study: There’s no evidence that hardening schools to make kids safer from gun violence actually works - The Washington Post

Study: There’s no evidence that hardening schools to make kids safer from gun violence actually works - The Washington Post

Study: There’s no evidence that hardening schools to make kids safer from gun violence actually works

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on measures to harden public schools in an attempt to make students safer from gun violence, but a new report says there is no evidence those measures have worked. Instead, it says, they have created “a false sense of security.”

Researchers at the University of Toledo and Ball State University conducted a comprehensive review of 18 years of reports on school security measures and their effectiveness and wrote in their paper, which was recently published in the journal Violence and Gender:

This comprehensive review of the literature from 2000 to 2018 regarding school firearm violence prevention failed to find any programs or practices with evidence indicating that they reduced such firearm violence. Hardening of schools with visible security measures is an attempt to alleviate parental and student fears regarding school safety and to make the community aware that schools are doing something.

Federal data show that 2018 was the worst on record for school shootings and gun-related incidents. The Naval Postgraduate School’s K-12 School Shooting Database says there were 94 school gun-violence incidents, a record since the data started being collected in 1970. The database includes every instance a gun is displayed or fired on campus or if a bullet hits school property for any reason.

The Washington Post has maintained its own school shootings database for several years, and it found that since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado — in which 12 students and one teacher were killed by two teenagers who then killed themselves — more than 226,000 children at 233 schools have been exposed to gun violence. At least 143 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and 294 have been injured.

The review published in Violence and Gender of 89 journal publications and some media reports was undertaken by James H. Price, professor emeritus in the Department of Public Health at the University of Toledo, and Jagdish Khubchandani, an associate professor of health science at Ball State University.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gun violence is among the leading causes of death for young people. But Price and Khubchandani wrote that little is actually known about how to prevent CONTINUE READING: Study: There’s no evidence that hardening schools to make kids safer from gun violence actually works - The Washington Post

antiracismdsa: Babies, As Young as 5 Months old, Held at El Paso Tent City

antiracismdsa: Babies, As Young as 5 Months old, Held at El Paso Tent City

Babies, As Young as 5 Months old, Held at El Paso Tent City

Gabe Ortiz, Daily Koz 
Hundreds of people, including infants as young as 5 months old, have been detained in “an emerging tent city” at the El Paso Border Patrol Station in conditions that one visiting legislator has described as filthy and totally unfit for families, the Daily Beast reports. “Five U.S. Army tents meant for battlefield hospitals have been repurposed to hold men, women, and children, including infants. Two of the tents were erected over the past week, expanding the facility’s capacity by several hundred people.” Outside, the prison camp is surrounded by barbed wire, with little room to move around. Inside, vulnerable families are languishing for days on end in awful conditions, said Rep. Nanette Barragán of California, who toured the facility last month. She said officials told her their “goal” was to assure people got showers every three days—how generous—but what she saw and heard was “unhealthy.” “One woman had a baby, a five-month-old baby and said she’d been there for five days,” she said. “The baby had filthy clothes. The situation is unhealthy. People are in a confined space, they’re not getting showers, their clothes are dirty, babies are not getting Pampers like they should be. These ladies were crying and telling us their stories and it was just heartbreaking.” These families aren’t sleeping on cots but rather “on a temporary floor that covered the asphalt parking lot beneath, with babies sometimes sleeping on their parents’ legs to avoid the hard floor.” It was just days ago that border officials were forcing detained people to sleep on dirt and rocks in a now-closed cage under a bridge, also in El Paso. Officials were more than happy to allow media to photograph that horror show, as well as to perp-walk children to add some images to the administration’s propaganda campaign.  But now “reporters are forbidden from the facility, leaving The Daily Beast CONTINUE READING: antiracismdsa: Babies, As Young as 5 Months old, Held at El Paso Tent City

NYC Public School Parents: NYC parents tell the Mayor to stop stalling and stop giving charter schools access to student information

NYC Public School Parents: NYC parents tell the Mayor to stop stalling and stop giving charter schools access to student information

NYC parents tell the Mayor to stop stalling and stop giving charter schools access to student information

Video and press release below about our press conference this afternoon.  Sorry for the low quality- it was broadcast on twitter live. 

For immediate release: April 15, 2019

For more information contact: NeQuan McLean, 347-470-4975, educationcouncils@gmail.com

NYC parents tell the Mayor to stop stalling and stop giving charter schools access to student information to market their schools

This afternoon, in front of the NYC Department of Education headquarters, NYC public school parents told Mayor de Blasio to stop bowing to the charter school lobby and halt the practice of giving charters access to student personal information to market their schools.  Instead, they said, he should listen to parents’ concerns, stop violating their children’s privacy, and cease this practice, which by helping charters expand, causes the loss of funding and space from our public schools.

In recent weeks, Chancellor Carranza has repeatedly promised parent leaders, both publicly and privately, that this practice would be discontinued, but the Mayor has yet to make a commitment to do so, and in the last few days he has said that he has not yet made a decision.  

Said Johanna Garcia, public school parent and President of Community Education Council in District 6 in Upper Manhattan:  “It is unconscionable that this practice continues. For more than a decade, parents and advocates have complained to DOE about the privacy violations incurred by allowing charters to access our children’s personal information without our consent.  I filed a FERPA complaint to the US Department of Education about this practice in November 2017.  Moreover, I am not aware of another school district in the country that voluntarily makes this information available to charter schools and undermines our public schools in the process."

NeQuan McLean, co- chair of the Education Council Consortium and the President of Community Education Council in District 16 Brooklyn said: “My mailbox is continually flooded with deceptive promotional materials from charter schools.  As a result of expensive marketing campaigns and the damaging co-location policies of the DOE, my district has been overrun by charters.  The Mayor repeatedly says he listens to parents; we are saying loudly and clearly that he should end this practice now.”

“Not only is personal student information unnecessary for appropriate marketing, providing access to it is an unacceptable violation of student privacy,” said Mark Cannizzaro,  CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: NYC parents tell the Mayor to stop stalling and stop giving charter schools access to student information

The Center for American Progress—Not Progressive on Education - Progressive.org

The Center for American Progress—Not Progressive on Education - Progressive.org

The Center for American Progress—Not Progressive on Education

Over the past decade, the left-leaning Center for American Progress has become one of the most relentless voices for the corporate  “education reform” movement. Although originally created as a left-leaning think tank to counterbalance groups like the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, in recent years the center has  become indistinguishable from the ed reform voices on the right.

CAP’s preferred policies—on charter schools, high stakes testing, test-based teacher evaluation, TFA, and national college-and-career ready standards—are the same positions taken by  right-leaning think tanks including  the Thomas Fordham Institute. Even compared to groups like the Heritage Foundation or AEI, CAP is different only in its willingness to say the words “Common Core.” CAP has even partnered with AEI and the Chamber of Commerce on ed reform.

CAP was founded in 2003 by John Podesta, former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff, counselor to Barack Obama, and current Hillary Clinton campaign chairman. Podesta’s CAP is wide-reaching and deeply funded with plenty of Soros money, among other sources. CAP has united a diverse group of organizations including the two major teachers unions, TFA, and the union-hating Democrats for Education Reform under the banner TeachStrong.

• CAP has advocated for teacher merit pay. While they have pointed out that teachers don’t make enough, they advocate raising the pay for only someteachers, by linking teacher salaries to student results on the Big Standardized (“BS”) Tests.
  
• CAP has pushed for charter schools, arguing that students must be rescued from underfunded, resource-poor public schools and their terrible CONTINUE READING: The Center for American Progress—Not Progressive on Education - Progressive.org

CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

Imagine. You live on the 300 block of your city, and your neighborhood is starting to look kind of run down, mostly because the city has redirected a ton of your tax dollars to the neighborhood on the 400 block. You try to fight city hall, but that's futile, so instead, you get the neighborhood together, and you collect money from amongst yourselves to upgrade sidewalks, clean the streets, refurbish the curbs, and just generally fix the place up. And then the city sends a message-- "That money you just collected? You have to give some of it to the neighborhood in the 400 block."

Congratulations. You live in Florida.

Florida's elected Tallahassee-dwellers have pretty much dropped all pretense; under Governor Desantis, the goal is to completely demolish public education, with no more cover story than to insist that the resulting privatized system is still a "public school system." I have seen better gaslighting from a fourteen year old saying, "I did not throw that pencil at Chris" even though he watched me watch him do it.

The Tampa Bay Times offers some background:

Let’s check the record. For years, Republicans who control the Legislature have attacked teacher unions as the enemy and complained about under-performing public schools while starving them of financial resources. They would not let local school districts keep additional tax revenue created by rising property values. They gave them little or no money for construction and renovation. And last year, they increased base spending per student by a grand total of 47 cents.

We'll put Swampland Charter right here.

Florida has been systematically starving its public school system, so some districts took the most logical step available to them-- they levied taxes on themselves to raise teacher salaries, replace programs that were cut, and basically use their own local money to reverse the problems caused by state- CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

EssayBot will do your homework. But it won’t get you an A. - Vox

EssayBot will do your homework. But it won’t get you an A. - Vox

This bot will do your homework for $9.95 a month. Does it actually work?
According to one 10th-grade history teacher, it’s unlikely to get you an A.

“EssayBot is the highly acclaimed online platform giving essay writing assistance to students and subject authors. As the program has been produced with the most sophisticated tools and technologies, it is extremely automated and individualized. This US-based corporation works with the only purpose to give honest and convincing aid to authors for creating superior volumes that will get rewards and praises.”

That’s what EssayBot says when I asked it to describe itself. The service aims to be the holy grail for the world’s burnout 11th-graders. Type in your prompt — any prompt, from your history assignment to the question “what is EssayBot?” — and the machines get to work.

“TO GIVE HONEST AND CONVINCING AID TO AUTHORS FOR CREATING SUPERIOR VOLUMES THAT WILL GET REWARDS AND PRAISES”

Your opening paragraph is pulled whole cloth from a database of scholastic material. Then the diction is gently rephrased, with synonyms swapped in for non-essential words, until it can fly under the radar of the average plagiarism detector. From there, you can import a laundry list of additional paragraphs related to the subject of your essay, or you can use a drop-down menu called a “sentence creator,” perched patiently next to your blinking cursor. Write a word and EssayBot does its best to think up a sensible follow-up clause, based on the contours and language of what you’ve already got written down. All this for only $9.95 a month, or $49.95 a year. If you’ve ever spent a sleepless school night staring at an empty Word doc, you know what it’s like to be desperate enough to pay up.

I discovered EssayBot via YouTube ad, and when I put the site’s name into Google, I found hundreds of cautiously hopeful students taking to forums and review sites over the past year, asking if EssayBot is too good to be true. Procrastinating teens are an underserved market.

Aaron Yin, the proprietor of EssayBot, has been trying to sell AI text generation for years with limited success. His first attempt came in 2017 with a service that automatically constructed résumés, and the tech infrastructure of EssayBot was initially intended to help small businesses generate branding copy. But that angle never took off. Instead, Yin needed to find a hungrier demographic, and the millions of young men and women on a humanities deadline CONTINUE READING: EssayBot will do your homework. But it won’t get you an A. - Vox

Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics – Wrench in the Gears

Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics – Wrench in the Gears

Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog. I continue to research, to map, to watch talks and prop myself up reading books about resistance. A friend told me I needed to take a break and get some perspective-to MAKE something.

Eventually, I did. I spent a few weeks making a quilt for a colleague who is expecting her first child. I viewed it as a meditation on hope for young people coming up, those who might work together to build a future that acknowledges past harms, rectifies injustice, and creates space to be otherwise.

As I stood over the cutting mat,

sat at the kitchen table with my foot on the sewing machine pedal,

crouched on the quilt inserting basting pins, and

hand-stitched the binding,

I fought a growing sense of alarm that keeps rising in my chest.

So many stories coming through my social media feed attest to the fact that Big Data, Big Brother, and global finance are on the move.

• Pearson joining with Tom Vander Ark’s Learn Capital on a $50 million venture fund advancing innovative education enterprises prioritizing augmented reality. Here
• DataKind and Commit!, Strive’s partner in Dallas, making plans to run the data of the school district’s 500,000 children through machine learning to see what patterns they can discern. Here
• A story about income sharing agreements funding tuition for higher education. Here
• Former McKinsey Mayor Pete’s South Bend, Indiana being set up as a pilot cradle to grey “City of Lifelong Learning” via the Drucker Institute-yeah, Peter Drucker the father of management science and mentor to Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren and Bob Buford (deceased), the Institute’s Board Chair Emeritus, Texas television tycoon, and mega-church consultant. Here

We are striding towards a cybernetic reckoning, one that aims to meld people with machines in service of viciously lean efficiencies that profit the global elite. Power players in finance, tech, faith communities, and the government want nothing more than to engineer a future for the masses that allows them to maintain control and preempt insurgency. To them the poor are numbers, 1s and 0s set up to be harvested and poured into CONTINUE READING: Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics – Wrench in the Gears

Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back. - The New York Times

Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back. - The New York Times

Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back.

While cursive has been relegated to nearly extinct tasks like writing thank-you cards and signing checks, rumors of its death may be exaggerated.

The Common Core standards seemed to spell the end of the writing style in 2010 when they dropped requirements that the skill be taught in public elementary schools, but about two dozen states have reintroduced the practice since then.

Last year, elementary schools in Illinois were required to offer at least one class on cursive.

Last month, a law went into effect in Ohio providing funding for materials to help students learn cursive by fifth grade.

And beginning this fall, second graders in Texas will learn cursive, and will be required to know how to write it legibly by third grade.

Even as keyboards and screens have supplanted pencil and paper in schools, lawmakers and defenders of cursive have lobbied to re-establish this old-school writing pedagogy across the country, igniting a debate about American values and identity and exposing intergenerational fault lines.

When Anne Trubek, the author of “The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting,” started studying the resurgence of cursive about a decade ago, reasons for teaching it focused on developing a civilized, well-mannered population.

“People were upset about the idea that you might not seem educated if you didn’t know cursive,” she said.

But in recent years, the reasoning for cursive became associated with “convention, tradition, conservatism,” she said, and tied to discussions about school uniforms and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Indeed, several Republican lawmakers have spearheaded campaigns CONTINUE READING: Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back. - The New York Times

Asleep at the Wheel: - Network For Public Education

Asleep at the Wheel: - Network For Public Education

Asleep at the Wheel:

Download [6.63 MB]

Read the Executive Summary

This report details the Network for Public Education’s two month examination of the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP). Our investigation found a troubling pattern of insufficient applicant review, contradictions between information provided by applicants and available public data, the gifting of funds to schools with inadequate financial and governance plans, a push-out of large grants to the states with little supervision by the department, and the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

By comparing claims made by charter grant applicants to information on state databases and school websites, we found numerous examples of federal tax dollars being misspent due to an inattentive process that routinely accepts applicants’ claims without scrutiny.

We found that it is likely that as many as one third of all charter schools receiving CSP grants never opened, or opened and shut down. In fact, the failure rates for grant-awarded charter schools in California has reached nearly four in ten.

American taxpayers have a right to demand that their tax dollars not be wasted. Tax dollars that flow to charter schools that never opened or quickly close should not be considered the cost of doing business. And a program with a stated commitment to spread “high-quality” schools should not be a major funding source for schools that leave families in the lurch and promote discriminatory enrollment practices that increase segregation and unequal opportunity for students with disabilities, behavioral challenges or English CONTINUE READING: Asleep at the Wheel: - Network For Public Education