In an excellent article, The Hechinger Report finds that many ed tech companies manipulate research findings to show that their products are successful. Ed tech companies promise results, but their claims are often based on shoddy research lays out their research in damning detail. This result isn’t surprising to me. And I can’t really see how it could be surprising to just about anyone. What is
This new video from CBS News provides a good overview, along with images, of what school re-openings look like around the world. I’m adding it to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL .
Free-Photos / Pixabay Here are new additions to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL : Schools face prospect of layoffs, furloughs as state budget shrinks is from CAL Matters. Reopening Schools in the Context of COVID-19: Health and Safety Guidelines From Other Countries is from The Learning Policy Institute.
The annual Condition of Education from the National Center for Education Statistics has been released. It has tons of info about all things education. And that info includes English Language Learners in Public Schools . The above map is one small slice from the report. I’m adding this post to: The Best Ways To Keep-Up With Current ELL/ESL/EFL News & Research The Best Places To Get Reliable, Valid
Katie Hull and I worked with Ed Week on creating two videos highlighting strategies for encouraging student intrinsic motivation to learn in distance learning. The first one was released last week, and the second one just came out. Here are both (you can see more videos on this topic and others on my video page ).
More Than 900 Children Have Been Expelled Under a Pandemic Border Policy is a depressing article in The New York Times this morning. Anyone who has any degree of surprise about this development can check out The Best Resources For Learning About The Terrible Practice Of Separating Immigrant Parents From Their Children .
I’m adding these new resources to various “Best” lists. You can find links to all of those many lists that relate to race and racism at “Best” Lists Of The Week: Resources For Teaching & Learning About Race & Racism: How to Develop Culturally Responsive Teaching for Distance Learning is from MindShift. I’m adding it to The Best Resources About “Culturally Responsive Teaching” & “Culturally Sustai
I’m fairly active on Pinterest and, in fact, have curated 21,000 resources there that I haven’t shared on this blog. I thought readers might find it useful if I began sharing a handful of my most recent “pins” each week (I’m not sure if you can see them through an RSS Reader – you might have to click throug
Cade Brumley Is Louisiana’s New Superintendent. What LDOE Chaos Has He Inherited?
On May 20, 2020, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) voted 8-3 to appoint Jefferson Parish superintendent, Cade Brumley, as Louisiana’s next state superintendent.
Brumley was not a choice of ed reformers. It seemed that their top choice was John White associate, Jessica Baghian, who currently serves as an assistant superintendent. Even so, some, like Sandy Holloway and Kira Orange-Jones, cast their initial votes for former St. James Parish superintendent Alonzo “Lonnie” Luce, who currently works for for-profit charter school management company, Charter Schools USA, as overseer of its Louisiana charter schools.
Brumley won the supermajority in a second round of voting. In the first round, all three candidates wound up with votes of 5-6. In Brumley’s case, the five voting for him included Ashley Ellis, Tony Davis, and governor John Bel Edwards’ three appointees, Doris Voitier, Belinda Davis, and Thomas Roque.
In a surprising move, Kira Orange-Jones, who headed the superintendent search committee, changed her vote in favor of Brumley in the second round, as did Holloway and Preston Castille.
Social Distancing Should Not Mean Student Push Out
Almost all schools in the U.S. have closed their doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Educators and policymakers have largely focused on finding solutions for providing instruction remotely, access to essential technology, meals to families, counseling services, special education services, and all of the other services schools typically provide to their communities. What has been lost in the conversation, however, has been any meaningful discussion about how the school closures are affecting students who face suspensions, expulsions, and other school discipline.
Jason is a 12-year-old Black student who has a learning disability in addition to generalized anxiety disorder and depression. For years, his mother, Jennifer, who is herself an educator, pleaded with Jason’s school district to provide him with therapeutic counseling, but the district repeatedly denied her request.
This year, in the continued absence of any meaningful support, Jason’s social-emotional needs escalated; as a result, he was involved in multiple physical conflicts with peers. However, rather than finally acknowledging that Jason needed more support and amending his Individualized Education Program (IEP), Jason’s school instead recommended him for expulsion. His mom called the East Bay Community Law Center, which immediately requested a copy of Jason’s school records. But then schools shut down due to COVID-19.
In light of the fact that schools will be closed for the remainder of the school year, one would expect the school district to rescind the expulsion recommendation. That’s not what happened. Instead, the district told Jason and Jennifer that they intended to continue with the expulsion process—in other words, carry on with business as usual. Now, even while trying to stay safe CONTINUE READING: Social Distancing Should Not Mean Student Push Out - LA Progressive
“In the healing from that breaking apart and the healing from that trauma, we can choose to either become harsher, angrier, more bitter, closed off, and controlling of other people—or we can take that moment to see that, even while we are breaking apart, we haven’t been broken.”
— Mai’a Williams in Parenting for Liberation: A Guide to Raising Black Children
The day California, my home state, issued it’s shelter in place order, I sent an email through Parenting for Liberation, an organization I founded in 2016 rooted in an Afro-futuristic vision of a world where black parents are in community with each other to raise black children without fear and instead parent for liberation, calling for a Blacks parents check in. Using the Erykah Badu meme, “Y’all alright?” created space to connect about how we were feeling. It’s not too often that Black parents are asked about how they are doing; as a Black mama I have struggled to push against the Black Superwoman phenom where I’m supposed to do it all and not need anyone. What I’ve grown to learn from the COVID Community Check in and also over the course of developing Parenting for Liberation is that a true “superwoman” is only as strong as her village, and the inherent power was in the collective.
Fifteen Black parents joined a virtual session a week later, connecting over our fears, worries, frustrations. It was a space where Black parents could take the cape off and be vulnerable with one another. It’s in the sharing of the difficulties and challenges that true healing can be possible. One participant reflected “There’s so much heaviness these days, which is also important to process and CONTINUE READING: Breaking Apart During COVID-19 – Parenting for Liberation
Over the past two months, our lives have shifted dramatically. One day, we were reading about the spread of COVID-19 abroad, and the next, most of the world’s population was sheltering in place. For those of us who are parents, we are suddenly everything to our children: teachers, caretakers, playmates, and more. All of this while holding the grief of an altered life with little time to process. Even as some states and cities begin reopening, the lingering effects of the coronavirus, and the accompanying political and economic shifts, will continue to inform us over this year and beyond.
We met at an Emergent Strategy training in Detroit in October 2018. During that weekend, we explored what it means to embrace change, harness creativity, and work collaboratively toward a more liberatory way of working and living. As two White people raising young children—Rachel has a 2-year-old and Jardana has a 4- and an 8-year-old—we have remained in support of each other around the exploration of antiracism, queerness, activism, and parenting.
We cannot pretend this pandemic is a great equalizer and ignore the Impact that it is having on Black people and other people of color.
We have been grappling with the questions: How do we enact antiracist parenting practices during the pandemic and beyond? And, how is this time asking more of us as parents committed to social justice? After conversations with our communities, we found many people were experiencing grief, fear, and isolation. While these feelings are a direct reaction to the coronavirus public health and economic crises, they’re also a response to the undeniable racial disparities these crises have exposed. Here, we discuss how to meet CONTINUE READING: Antiracist Parenting During COVID-19 and Beyond - Yes! Magazine
Amid all of the debate about when and how America should reopen its schools, there has been little talk about why we should bother to at all. The arguments are familiar:
We’re exacerbating inequalities and widening the achievement gap
Staying home is bad for kids’ mental health and social development
We can’t restart the economy without reopening the schools
Remote learning is a poor substitute for in-person learning and it sucks in all sorts of small and not-so-small ways.
Those are in fact all good reasons to return to school as it was. But none of them are good reasons to return to school as it is likely to be.
While no one knows exactly what reopened schools will look like next fall, we can look to schools that have reopened for some indications.
Ed tech companies promise results, but their claims are often based on shoddy research With few watchdogs, educators (and now parents) are forced to figure out on their own which education software really works
School closures in all 50 states have sent educators and parents alike scrambling to find online learning resources to keep kids busy and productive at home. Website traffic to the homepage for IXL, a popular tool that lets students practice skills across five subjects through online quizzes, spiked in March. Same for Matific, which gives students math practice tailored to their skill level, and Edgenuity, which develops online courses.
All three of these companies try to hook prospective users with claims on their websites about their products’ effectiveness. Matific boasts that its game-based activities are “proven to help increase results by 34 percent.” IXL says its program is “proven effective” and that research “has shown over and over that IXL produces real results.” Edgenuity boasts that the first case study in its long list of “success stories” shows how 10th grade students using its program “demonstrated more than an eightfold increase in pass rates on state math tests.”
These descriptions of education technology research may comfort educators and parents looking for ways to mitigate the devastating effects of lost learning time because of the coronavirus. But they are all misleading.
None of the studies behind IXL’s or Matific’s research claims were designed well enough to offer reliable evidence of their products’ effectiveness, according to a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University who catalog effective educational programs. And Edgenuity’s boast takes credit for substantial test score gains that preceded the use of its online classes.
A Hechinger Report review found dozens of companies promoting their products’ effectiveness on their websites, in email pitches and in vendor brochures with little or shoddy evidence to support their claims.
Michigan Settles Recent Detroit Case, Establishes Right to Literacy as a Federal Precedent
Sunday, May 17, 2020, was the 66th anniversary of the landmark education civil rights case, Brown v. Board of Education. America’s continued failure to realize the promise of the Brown decision has been appalling.
Although Brown and follow-up lawsuits ended de jure segregation (the intentional creation, by law, of segregated schools for black and white children), most Americans have found a way legally to persist in educating their children in racially isolated school settings. Two U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1970s are well known for protecting separate and unequal public education: the 1973 decision in San Antonio v. Rodriguez, which found that public education is not a federally protected right under the U.S. Constitution, and the 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley, which banned cross-district busing for racial integration. Across many school districts, including the schools in big cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and New York, children attend school in buildings that are more racially segregated than they were all those decades ago.
I first posted this list when I turned 60, and have made it an annual tradition to get it out on my birthday and re-examine it, edit it, and remind myself why I thought such things in the first place. I will keep my original observation-- that this list does not represent any particular signs of wisdom on my part, because I discovered these rules much in the same way that a dim cow discovers an electric fence.
1. Don't be a dick.
There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to deliberately go out of your way to add more. This is doubly in a time like the present, when everyone is already feeling the stress.
There's a lesson here, somewhere.
2. Do better.
You are not necessarily going to be great. But you can always be better. You can always do a better job today than you did yesterday. Make better choices. Do better. You can always do better.
3. Tell the truth.
Words matter. Do not use them as tools with which to attack the world or attempt to pry prizes out of your fellow humans (see Rule #1). Say what you understand to be true. Life is too short to put your name to a lie. This does not mean that every word out of your mouth is some sort of Pronouncement from God. Nor does it mean you must be unkind. But you simply can't speak words that you know to be untrue. I'll extend this to social media as well: if it's not the truth, don't post it.
4. Seek to understand.
Do not seek comfort or confirmation. Do not simply look for ways to prove what you already believe. Seek to understand, and always be open to the possibility that what you knew to be true yesterday CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: 19 Rules for Life (2020 Edition)
Chancellor Carranza, “There is no fat to cut … we’re at the bone,” Is he correct? Does the NYC School Management Model support schools effectively, or, Should we design a bottom-up model?
Susan Edelman, in then May 16th edition of the NY Post wrote,
“Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza says students will suffer next school year because he can’t find anything more to cut in the Department of Education’s $34 billion budget. Insiders say he’s lying.(no, not lying, committed to a model)
‘There is no fat to cut, there is no meat to cut — we are at the bone,’ Carranza testified Tuesday at a City Council budget hearing.”
How do you measure “fat”?
Let’s take a look at the Department of Education Organization Chart; the Chancellor added another layer, nine Executive Superintendents (and staff) each supervising a number of superintendents,
