DID YOU MISS DIANE RAVITCH'S BLOG TODAY? A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

DID YOU MISS DIANE RAVITCH'S BLOG TODAY? 

A site to discuss better education for all

TODAY

Andrea Gabor Asks for Your Help to Elect a Texan

by dianeravitch / 1h

Andrea Gabor is a friend and a wise writer about education. She sent the following appeal: Dear Friends, First and foremost, I hope this note finds you safe and healthy. As many of you know, I was supposed to lead another student, political-reporting trip this spring, this time to the Texas border; Covid19 foiled our travel plans and, instead, my students produced a fabulous pack of articles on l

Peter Greene: How to Replace Distance Learning with Genuine Personalized Learning

25by dianeravitch / 1h

Peter Greene knows, as do we, that the tech industry has stolen and misused the term “personalized learning,” which to them means a student in front of a computer that holds his or her data. In this post, he reimagines a future of genuine personalized learning, in which there are small classes and one to one instruction. But what if we reclaimed the term “personalized education”? What if we decid

Save More On What You Really Need—It's Easy

by Honey

sponsored

If you aren't using this tool when you shop online, you're probably wasting money.

Pawan Dhingra on “Hyper Education” and Its Consequences

23by dianeravitch / 2h

I recently read Pawan Dhingra’s new book Hyper Education, which explores the competitiveness that some parents feel about their children’s schooling and their fear that their children might be “falling behind.” This pressure, as many here have noted, makes children feel stressed out and deprives them of imaginative and creative activities. I invited Professor Dhingra to write a précis of his book

FairTest: More Than Half of Nation’s Universities Drop Entry Tests for 2021

82by dianeravitch / 4h

FairTest has been battling the abuse, misuse, and overuse of standardized testing since the early 1970s. It took a global pandemic to demonstrate that students applying to college need not take a standardized test for admission. How will colleges decide whom to admit? They will figure it out. Just watch. Many colleges and universities went test-optional years ago and managed to choose their first

YESTERDAY

We Are No. 1! In New Coronavirus Infections

61by dianeravitch / 18h

Thanks to a complete absence of national leadership in the United States, the coronavirus is spreading. Other countries have shut it down. Not us! We are free to get diseased! Dana Milbank writes here about what happens when a nation has leadership and what happens when it does not. How nice it would be to be in Tokyo today. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government moved to its last stage of reopening o

FDA Drops Trump’s Favorite Drug, Hydroxychloroquine

by dianeravitch / 23h

Politico reports that the Federal Drug Administration has withdrawn authorization for emergency use of a drugs repeatedly endorsed by Trump. Based on various trials, the FDA concluded that the drug is not effective at preventing the coronavirus nor is it effective as a treatment for the virus. Trump recently claimed that he was taking the drug himself. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she worried

Shocker! Supreme Court Supports Rights of LGBT Workers

24by dianeravitch / 1d

In a stunning surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that LGBT workers are protected by the Civil Rights Act. In the biggest surprise, the decision was 6-3 and was written by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch. What a nice surprise for Pride Month! Adam Liptak of the New York Times wrote: The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace

New York Times Exposes Charter Schools for Collecting Aid Meant for Small Bisinesses

200+by dianeravitch / 1d

Erica L. Green of the New York Times wrote a detailed expose of charter schools , some with the backing of billionaire donors like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, that have sought and received federal coronavirus aid intended for small businesses. Thus, they collect funding as “public schools,” yet collect federal aid as small businesses. Peer-reviewed studies have shown that charter schools, a

Yale Drops SAT Requirement for Class Entering in 2021

25by dianeravitch / 1d

Bad news for the College Board, which owns the SAT. Yale University is going test-optional for the class entering in fall 2021. Today Yale became the fifth Ivy League school to adopt a test-optional policy for the class of undergraduates who will be applying for admission in the fall of 2021. It joins Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania who have also announced they wou

John Thompson on Trump’s Big Rally in Tulsa

100+by dianeravitch / 1d

John Thompson is a retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma. He writes here about the resumption of Trump’s big political rallies, beginning in Tulsa. The attendees will have to sign a waiver releasing the campaign of any liability if they fall sick with COVID. Will Trump promote the disease amongst his enthusiastic base? He won’t wear a mask. To show their macho, his followers will copy him, in

Little Rock: Peaceful Protestors Shut Down Four Walmarts

100+by dianeravitch / 1d

For many years, the Walton family has owned the state of Arkansas. Their collective wealth exceeds $150 billion, yet Arkansas is one of the poorest states in the nation. All that money, and very little has trickled down. Perhaps you have seen the ads on national television about how much Walmart cares 

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

CURMUDGUCATION: To Those Of You Worried About The Covid Slide

CURMUDGUCATION: To Those Of You Worried About The Covid Slide

To Those Of You Worried About The Covid Slide

Dear concerned policy makers, bureaucrats, and edu-wonks:

Ever since NWEA, the testing manufacturer that promised it can read minds by measuring how long it takes students to pick a multiple choice answer, issued their report on the Covid-19 Slide, you have been freaking out a little because they hear you say that distance learning has been disastrous and if we do it again in the fall, we'll produce a generation of students too dumb to come in out of the rain.  Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to members of Congress has been experiencing bovine birth events in response to the report. I just want to make two quick points for you.

First, you don't need to freak out over the study. Because it's not so much a "study" as a rough best guess about how students might do on a single not-great standardized test of math and reading. On the other hand, you can freak out a little bit, because while the report is ludicrous, if you actually talk to teachers and students and families, you'll hear that distance disaster school is not great. But you really don't need to base any of your argument on NWEA's totally made up numbers.

Second. Let's pretend that the numbers aren't made up. Let's pretend that it's true that, due to the CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: To Those Of You Worried About The Covid Slide

Inside the case for defunding police in schools - Los Angeles Times

Inside the case for defunding police in schools - Los Angeles Times

Inside the decade-long movement to defund police in schools 

In the midst of the 1980s war on drugs and in the wake of devastating mass school shootings throughout the country, bolstering school police in Los Angeles was seen as a safety imperative by many educators and parents.

But for the last decade, a number of student advocacy groups have pushed the school board to reduce police presence in their schools, saying Black and Latino children are targeted for discipline more than others.

The Los Angeles School Police Department now employs about 470 officers and civilians, including placement of an armed and uniformed officer at every high school. In a highly publicized turn last week, the leadership of the Los Angeles teachers union voted to support the elimination of the $70-million school police budget.

The union’s public announcement on the steps of City Hall — compelled by two weeks of protests and outrage over police brutality against Black people and the killing of George Floyd — has increased the urgency of the debate within the nation’s second-largest school district. The union leadership joins a number of community-based organizations who say the $70-million school police budget should be used to hire more counselors and build restorative justice programs.

 “This moment is different because if you all remember a couple weeks ago, people acted like ... the call to defund police was a radical call,” said Black Lives Matter Los Angeles co-founder Melina Abdullah, a Cal State Los Angeles professor of Pan-African Studies and an L.A. Unified parent. “We’re at a moment when all of a sudden, our most radical imaginings are possible. We can end the system of policing as we know it. We can defund the police. And we have to begin with our children.”

The Los Angeles schools movement comes as school districts and universities throughout the country have joined city debates over defunding or reorganizing police departments.

Ultimately it’s up to the school board, which authorizes police spending, to decide whether to take action — two of seven school board members said they did not support the move, one said the issue should be discussed during budget deliberations CONTINUE READING: Inside the case for defunding police in schools - Los Angeles Times 

New research evidence for summer school programs

New research evidence for summer school programs

Research evidence for summer learning
Disappointing results for in-person summer school programs hint that short virtual programs may not be successful

On June 10, 2020, as the U.S. Capitol remained partially shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a virtual hearing on what schools ought to do. Speaking over a video feed from his home in Silver Spring, Maryland, former Obama administration Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. called for “summer distance learning” as one way to mitigate the months of lost learning from school closures.  

Summer school is on many policymakers’ minds. King, who is now the president of Education Trust, a nonprofit that advocates for low-income students, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national teacher’s union, jointly argued for additional funding for summer schooling in an April editorial in the Hill newspaper.  In June 2020, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a think tank based at the University of Washington, posted a survey of summer school plans around the country. Only slightly more than half of the 100 U.S. districts the organization is tracking were planning to offer summer school for elementary and middle school students in 2020, as of the latest update, on June 9. (Summer school is more prevalent for high schools students to retake failed classes.) For the schools that are holding summer school, instruction in most cases will be exclusively virtual — over the internet. But the type of instruction, hours and curriculum vary wildly, depending upon which city or town you happen to live in. 

I was curious what lessons we could take from previous research on summer school to guide us during this unprecedented summer. I could find only one large, well-designed study, published in 2016, that tested how much kids actually learn in voluntary summer school programs. It was targeted at 3,000 low-income children in five cities in 2013. Most of the CONTINUE READING: New research evidence for summer school programs