OMG NO BROAD: Oakland schools pick Homegrown superintendent amid budget mess - SFGate

Oakland schools pick superintendent amid budget mess - SFGate:

Oakland schools pick superintendent amid budget mess

After a national search, the Oakland school board picked a city native and longtime employee to serve as superintendent and steer the district through a budget crisis.

Kyla Johnson-Trammel, now the district’s interim deputy superintendent, was selected from among dozens of applicants and is the sole finalist for the job, President James Harris announced during Wednesday’s school board meeting.

Johnson-Trammel, who turns 41 on Monday, was born and raised in East Oakland and has worked in Oakland schools for 18 years as a teacher, principal and administrator, district officials said.

“If you don’t know Kyla, she is third-generation Oakland, she is a native,” Harris said. “I would offer that you have someone before you who knows what it means to be of this town, and somebody who I believe and this board believes can guide us forward.”

Teacher union officials applauded the selection.

“Kyla Johnson-Trammel has developed the relationships, she knows who is who and she knows what is what,” said Trish Gorham, president of the Oakland Education Association. “She has totally proven her commitment to Oakland and Oakland’s children.

“She is the candidate,” Gorham said, “who will begin the healing in Oakland.”

The new superintendent will likely have her hands full in that healing process. The board meeting Wednesday was raucous, with Harris calling a temporary recess after speakers insisted on exceeding public comment time limits to protest proposed cuts to special education and reading programs.

Johnson-Trammel was previously the director of talent development and the associate superintendent for leadership, curriculum and instruction as well as a network superintendent for elementary schools. She was appointed interim deputy superintendent after Devin Dillon was appointed interim superintendent in February.

Johnson-Trammel’s experience has been more on the academic side of school management than the financial. But the new superintendent, who is expected to take over by July 1, will step into fiscal upheaval, including a projected $10 million shortfall this academic year and up to $20 million in cuts needed next year.

Due to declining enrollment and skyrocketing special education and cafeteria costs, among other issues, Oakland Unified has struggled to balance the books this year. And the district is still paying off a $100 million state loan required to ward off fiscal insolvency in 2003.

Dillon, who also applied for the permanent position, implemented a comprehensive hiring and spending freeze in April to ensure the district can pay its bills through June.

The deficit this year is in part related to lower enrollment than expected, which has meant significantly less funding from the state.

Aside from immediate budget problems, Johnson-Trammel must confront over the long term what Harris and other district leaders have acknowledged is an unsustainable business model: The district has too many schools and too few students.

The district has 86 schools for 36,600 students, while San Jose Unified, with nearly as many students, operates 41 schools. Sacramento City Unified has 43,000 students at 77 schools.

Thousands of Oakland students have moved to the nearly 40 charter schools in the city. But while district officials have merged some existing schools, they avoided closing any in recent years, despite the costs of principals and support staffers at the schools, many of which are under-enrolled.

“We are excited by the announcement of Kyla Johnson-Trammell as the Superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District. She represents the best of our aspirations for a home-grown, thoughtful, and values-driven leader, with experiences as an Oakland parent, teacher, school principal, and district administrator,” said Ash Solar, executive director of GO Public Schools, a nonprofit working on education issues in underserved communities, in a statement.

“Hard choices must be made,” Solar said, “and done right, they will include school leaders and community members in the Oakland schools pick superintendent amid budget mess - SFGate:

Betsy DeVos’ controversial statements on African-American colleges in the past

Betsy DeVos’ controversial statements on African-American colleges in the past:

Betsy DeVos’ controversial statements on African-American colleges in the past

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was booed and repeatedly interrupted by students Wednesday during her commencement speech in Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The hostile reception for DeVos, who was one of President Donald Trump's controversial cabinet choices, was mainly as a result of controversial statements she had made in the past regarding African-American colleges.

One of those came at the end of Black History Month this year, when she equated the role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) with her “school choice” policy.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, Feb. 23, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Joshua Roberts

“HBCUs are real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” DeVos said in a statement, Politico reported. “They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish.”

Read: Betsy DeVos’ Education Department Calls Him 'DeBois,' And Then Misspells Apology Tweet

DeVos’ statement eroded any goodwill from the African-American community Trump might have hoped for after signing an executive order beckoning the White House to take a more hands-on approach to higher education, stated a Politico report. 

Robert Palmer, an education professor at Howard University, branded DeVos’ statement “a bit crazy,” while Austin Lane, the president of Texas Southern University, an HBCU in Houston, found her statement to be puzzling.

“HBCUs were created for African-Americans because they had no choice and were unable to attend schools due to segregation laws,” Lane said.

When social media users blasted DeVos’ original statement, a spokesperson for the Education Department tried to calm the situation down by claiming her statement was taken out of context. In an effort to clarify her statement, DeVos made another comment, which Betsy DeVos’ controversial statements on African-American colleges in the past:

New Orleans’ Charter School Transformation: the Very Definition of Injustice | janresseger

New Orleans’ Charter School Transformation: the Very Definition of Injustice | janresseger:

New Orleans’ Charter School Transformation: the Very Definition of Injustice

When I look back, I can see that the year between September of 2005 and September of 2006 was when I realized deeply and in the most unforgettable way how powerful people can transform the systems we take for granted and in the process disempower the vulnerable.

In November of 2005, I couldn’t believe it when I learned—while bodies were still being discovered in the attics of New Orleans’ flooded and abandoned houses and while most people were staying with relatives in far away places or FEMA trailers in Houston—that the state of Louisiana had changed the law to seize the city’s public schools and fire all the teachers as part of a complicated school governance experiment driven by ideologues in the U.S. Department of Education, the state of Louisiana, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I had naively imagined that the goal would be to get families back to town as soon as possible and get children back in school under the secure guidance of the teachers those children knew.

Others were alarmed as well. Naomi Klein used the seizure and mass charterization of New Orleans’ public schools as the very definition of what she called “the shock doctrine”: “New Orleans was now, according to the New York Times, ‘the nation’s preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools’… I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism.'” (The Shock Doctrine, pp. 5-6)  Leigh Dingerson and the Center for Community Change published a short resource titled, Dismantling a Community. And later, in a book published by the Teachers College Press, Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City, Kristen Buras shared the voices of New Orleans’ high school students describing what had been done to their schools.

In July of 2006, I was able to spend a week in New Orleans and to write about it.  I listened to all kinds of people including experienced teachers—replaced by Teach for America recruits—who had lost their profession and lost their livelihood. Tracie Washington, a civil rights New Orleans’ Charter School Transformation: the Very Definition of Injustice | janresseger:

 

You Can’t Keep a Bad Charter Down

You Can’t Keep a Bad Charter Down:

You Can’t Keep a Bad Charter Down

“No question about @MagnoliaSchools academic superiority – questioning your reading skills.”

-Alex Johnson, VP LA County Board of Education

“Specifically, the CAASPP results in ELA and Math indicate that in both 2014-15 and 2015-16, 0% of the school’s English Learner (EL) population met or exceeded proficiency.”

– LA County Office of Education Staff

As the LAUSD prepared to take the unusual step of not renewing the charters of three Magnolia Science Academies last October, their chief executive claimed that “it would be wrong to punish kids [for poor management] by closing strong schools.” After the vote, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) released a statement complaining that charters were no longer “evaluated mostly on the degree to which they were helping students learn.” Ignored by both parties was the fact that the CCSA itself had ranked one of these schools as a one out of ten, which in no way can be considered “strong”. The other two were at best average with ranks of four and six.

The Magnolia organization appealed the LAUSD’s decision to the Los Angeles County Board of Education. In a meeting right before Christmas, this Board ignored the findings of both the LAUSD and their own staff and renewed these charters. This means that they will continue to operate within the borders of the LAUSD without any You Can’t Keep a Bad Charter Down:

My review of ‘letters to a young education reformer’ | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

My review of ‘letters to a young education reformer’ | Gary Rubinstein's Blog:

My review of ‘letters to a young education reformer’

I was eager to receive Rick Hess’s latest book ‘letters to a young education reformer.’  Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank.  Hess is one of the few defenders of the reform movement whom I respect.  His writings, like his column in Education Week, always have the nuance that most reform writers at places like The 74 and Education Post lack.

With states opting out of the Common Core, parents opting out of state tests, and prominent reformers even opting out of ed reform, the reform movement is currently experiencing a slump.  This book explains what is behind some of the failures of the reform movement.

Though the book is written in an informal tone with plenty of very interesting anecdotes, it is a very scathing critique of the reform movement, the style of reform that really became big with people like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and, of course, President Obama.

Hess knows what missteps reformers committed along the way to lead to this.  By writing about these mistakes in a series of letters to an unnamed ‘young education reformer,’ Hess hopes that the next generation of ed reformers will avoid those mistakes.

Many of these mistakes are things that Hess warned reformers about as they were making them.  They didn’t heed many of his warnings back then, but maybe now that they seem to be losing momentum, this book could be used not just by young education reformers, but My review of ‘letters to a young education reformer’ | Gary Rubinstein's Blog:

Betsy DeVos Spoke at Bethune-Cookman Commencement. Audience Noise Was Constant; FL NAACP Issued a Formal Opposition Statement. | deutsch29

Betsy DeVos Spoke at Bethune-Cookman Commencement. Audience Noise Was Constant; FL NAACP Issued a Formal Opposition Statement. | deutsch29:

Betsy DeVos Spoke at Bethune-Cookman Commencement. Audience Noise Was Constant; FL NAACP Issued a Formal Opposition Statement.

I watched US ed sec Betsy DeVos’ 23-minute speech to Bethune-Cookman grads on May 10, 2017. The full video is below:

I do not envy DeVos the task. DeVos stumbled over her words a number of times as she faced an audience of graduates set on actively resisting her as she spoke.

DeVos’ voice cracked as she spoke of Mary McLeod Bethune. I am sure the pressure to complete this speech was profound. However, DeVos is a walking controversy, the most controversial US ed secretary to date.

She made a smart decision to include the stories of three of the Bethune-Cookman students in her remarks. The graduate audience behaved best when DeVos spoke of these specific students.

She continued to verbally stumble. I have attended numerous graduations, and I have yet to hear a commencement speaker falter as much in his/her speech.

Based upon DeVos’ voice, particularly as her remarks approached the 19-minute mark, it seemed to me that DeVos might be on the verge of tears. Still, she seemed to regain composure around the 20-minute mark.

One can read the text of DeVos’ speech here.

She did not use the opportunity to overtly sell school choice.

DeVos did say that she “want[ed] to re-affirm this Administration’s commitment to and support for HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] and the students Betsy DeVos Spoke at Bethune-Cookman Commencement. Audience Noise Was Constant; FL NAACP Issued a Formal Opposition Statement. | deutsch29:

I’m The Rubber And You’re The Glue – redqueeninla

I’m The Rubber And You’re The Glue – redqueeninla:

I’m The Rubber And You’re The Glue

…why do we let Nick Melvoin’s words bounce off him and stick to LAUSD’s world?

Negative Ads Undermine Democracy

Mostly, the fourth board district school board race has been one of incessant negativity and lies. Why do we permit this uncivilized behavior? I can tell you in walking my neighborhood I am met with deep weariness, wariness and hostility. This is the legacy of democracy abused. This race has been nothing if not about Big Lies and electoral abuse, and that’s a lesson being bought – and paid for – dearly.

Independent Committee expenditures (IECs, the new normal for “PAC”s) in favor of both candidates have been about the same, averaging $1.8 million dollars at the moment. Each. You read that right. Think of the children. (Think of the printers.)

What is not similar is IC expenditures in opposition to their candidate. Melvoin’s IC devotes half an order of magnitude more in slandering Zimmer than his IC spends to oppose Melvoin.

Thus quite apart from the overall total spent which is obscene, a dramatic distinction between candidates is evident from what’s being spent to smear the other guy. Zimmer’s adherents spent less than one-quarter, 25%, of that average toward denigrating their opposition ($441K). Melvoin’s buddies sunk 140% of that average spent in support of their candidate ($2.4 million) on negative ads.

In fact, the amount Zimmer’s IEC devoted to negative campaigning is so comparatively trivial, the negligible difference between both campaign’s positive expenditures, which is just 6% – this sum ($114K) is 25% of what Zimmer’s camp spent in negativity altogether. His challenger spent 5.5x as much as the incumbent in stuffing our mailboxes with scurrilous lies.

So the current overall total of IECs is $6.4 million, and the electorate has I’m The Rubber And You’re The Glue – redqueeninla:

Big Education Ape: Sen. Bernie Sanders Endorses Steve Zimmer and Imelda Padilla for LAUSD School Board | UTLA http://bit.ly/2qLt181

Teacher Appreciation Week is a Pathetic Joke! | gadflyonthewallblog

Teacher Appreciation Week is a Pathetic Joke! | gadflyonthewallblog:

Teacher Appreciation Week is a Pathetic Joke!

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, America!

All over the country, millions of educators can look forward to a free burrito. Or maybe an Arby’s sandwich. Or a complimentary donut.

Because we REALLY appreciate teachers here.

What a pathetic joke!

I don’t mean to seem ungrateful.

I’ll redeem my coupon at Chipotle. I’ll take that Roast Beef Classic. I’ll grab that Dunkin’ Cruller.

But let’s be honest. These cheesy buy-one-get-one coupons don’t demonstrate appreciation. They’re guilt.

They’re a manifestation of the feeling that we SHOULD appreciate teachers, but don’t. Not really.

Not for one week, not for one day!

Why else would we begrudge them a middle class income? Why else would we provide them with so few resources and so much responsibility? Why else would we bar them from making any meaningful decisions about how their students should be taught yet hold them accountable for everything their students do?

Appreciate teachers? We don’t LISTEN to them. We don’t RESPECT them. Many of us don’t even LIKE them.

The only time we value teachers is when a maniac enters a school with a gun. Then – when they protect our children with their very lives – then we praise them as heroes!

On that day and that day only. But every other day – not so much.

We won’t do anything to keep guns out of the hands of school shooters. At most we want to arm teachers – Great! Something else to be responsible for on top of education, Teacher Appreciation Week is a Pathetic Joke! | gadflyonthewallblog:

VWCS delegation attends AFT meeting « The VW independent

VWCS delegation attends AFT meeting « The VW independent:

VWCS delegation attends AFT meeting

I am not biased. Okay, maybe a little biased. Regardless of one’s political views, parents should understand the sheer pride of watching their child represent her community, her school, and herself before an entire room filled with representatives from the American Federation of Teachers.

These AFT vice presidents and executive council members gathered from around the country into one giant conference room to collaborate efforts on promoting public school education. Van Wert City Schools was well represented during this meeting.

Van Wert High School student Madison Pauquette (center) speaks during a meeting of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, D.C., while Van Wert Federation of Teachers President Jeff Hood looks on. (photo submitted)

On the heels of a recent Van Wert visit from U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and American labor leader and educator Randi Weingarten, Van Wert’s own AFT president, Jeff Hood, was invited to share with the members of the AFT what the visit from an appointed member of Trump’s cabinet meant for a rural Ohio school that was both ordinary and extraordinary, according to Hood.

Hood decided to collaborate in this presentation with my daughter, Maddie Pauquette, who is a senior at Van Wert High School. The two of them spent a couple of weeks brainstorming and preparing to be heard in Washington, D.C., on May 9. The opportunity was surreal.

The experience was even more incredible as we arrived in Washington, met with the press, then entered the conference room and saw the advocators of public education with Weingarten leading the meeting. She clearly sees the value in educators and the role they have on the lives of students in both classrooms and communities. Weingarten is heard again and again calling “public education the cornerstone of our democracy”.

Hearing people in D.C. talk about Van Wert was crazy. The town of Van Wert, the school system of Van Wert, and travelers from Van Wert were being discussed within this group of important people who are passionate about education. Hood described to the audience his role in getting both DeVos and Weingarten to Van Wert to see public education in action.

Pauquette told the group of AFT representatives about her personal experience with their visit, taking on the role of a press member for the day. She said this gave her an outsider’s view of Van Wert’s education and the school’s accomplishments. She shared that this unique perspective gave her a new appreciation for the quality of education, the personal investment of Van Wert’s faculty in their students, and how the Project Based Learning model prepared her for life after graduation.

After a few bouts of laughter and applause, plus Weingarten’s display of Van Wert school spirit (she gladly put on a VWCS t-shirt, compliments of Hood), Weingarten told the entire room that Maddie is a product of their efforts.

Talk about an overflowing sense of pride for what I just witnessed in my daughter, who confidently shared before a room full of powerful adults a portion of her educational journey and her ambitions that derived from her experiences in the Van Wert school system. As a result, we can all feel some prideful bias in knowing that Van Wert provides a quality education to our kids and people in Washington, D.C., know about it.VWCS delegation attends AFT meeting « The VW independent:

To our wonderful school nurses: We need you more than ever! - Lily's Blackboard

To our wonderful school nurses: We need you more than ever! - Lily's Blackboard:

To our wonderful school nurses: We need you more than ever! 

Some days, 15 minutes can seem like an eternity…and then there are 15 minutes in the life of Maggie Beall, school nurse at Dassa McKinley Elementary School. She wrote about those minutes on our website, in “A Nurse’s Tale.”

As a recent day came to a close at her West Sunbury, Penn., school, she faced: a feverish third-grader who vomited in the health room, right in front of the asthma inhaler cabinet; two students who needed their inhalers at that moment; a kindergartener holed-up in the bathroom who’d stripped out of his wet clothes after he had an accident; and a boy who hit his head in PE and would have boarded the school bus home, had Maggie not been there to quickly assess his pupillary response, determine he had swelling on the brain, and send him to the hospital instead. 

That is called “handling your business.”

To Maggie Beall and the school nurses from coast to coast who do their jobs with the strength of Atlas, the grace of a swan, and the vitality of the Energizer Bunny:  Happy School Nurse Day!

Every year in May, we give a round of applause to the nurses who are providing students with the one-on-one attention, support, and comfort they need. Their duties range from the mundane to the heroic and they never know what they’ll encounter from one day (or minute) to the next. I’m just glad they’re part of our team.

Beth Mattey, RN, president of the National Association of School Nurses (NASN), tells a story about a school nurse whose actions saved a life.

The student was brought to the nurse’s office because he kept falling asleep in class. No one could pick him up from home. The nurse began her assessment as soon as the student came through her door. As required by the standards of care, she took the student’s blood pressure, but had trouble getting a reading. She asked the student to tell her why he was so tired. It turned out that he’d taken a drug overdose.

There was a time when overdoses of any kind in school were rare. But with the opioid crisis enveloping so many communities, nurses are seeing more of these. In fact, the NASN in 2015 recommended that school nurses should facilitate access to naloxone, a nasal spray that quickly reverses overdoses.

Regardless of what they face, we need school nurses now more than ever. And yet, there’s a shortage of them that’s likely to get worse as more of those who’ve been on the job for a while retire.

The average school nurse is over 55, according to NASN’s 2015 survey; fewer than 16 percent are under 40. The shortage is underscored by stories like the one from a couple of years ago in Philadelphia, where a 12-year-old died after an asthma attack at a school without a full-time nurse.

Maggie Beall leans on her file cabinet, which has photos as her as the Tooth Fairy

The recommended ratio for school nurses is one for every 750 students, but the most appropriate ratio will depend on the student population being served; if students have more complex health care needs, the optimal ratio is closer to 1:125. The average ratio varies widely across the country—from a high of one for every 396 students to a low of one for every 4,000 students.

In a 2015 survey, the NASN found that on average, nurses are covering more than one building, and as many as 1,000 students.

(The survey also yielded some good news: The number of nurses who assisted a parent or student with enrolling in Medicaid or another low-cost health care program fell dramatically in 2015. The NASN attributed this to an all-time low in the number of children who lack health insurance. Thanks, Affordable Care Act!)

As for Nurse Maggie, she’s lucky to be in one building, where she gets to forge close relationships with families. She To our wonderful school nurses: We need you more than ever! - Lily's Blackboard:

CURMUDGUCATION: SAT Test Prep Is Back

CURMUDGUCATION: SAT Test Prep Is Back:

SAT Test Prep Is Back

You may recall that one of the awesome parts of David Coeman's shiny new SAT test was going to be how impervious it was to any kind of test prep. Coleman's singular vision (because in Coleman's world, he's the only one with a vision) was a new SAT that would fix inequality in America. Because being able to afford expensive test prep would no longer matter.

Flexibility in viewing tomorrow's self-owned widgets

Well, okay. Maybe it will matter a little.

After a few years of declaring that your Jedi test prep mind powers won't work on the SAT, the College Board (which is totally a for-profit business and not some sort of service-oriented board of college representatives) has announced that test prep from their business partners at Khan Academy totally works! Totally! As proven by their own in-house self-produced research.

Just a couple of thoughts.

1) In house self-produced research conducted by a business to show how well its product works is... dubious? How about some tobacco institute research showing that smoking is healthy. Also, why did the College Board only "study" the results of their own business partner without looking at any other test prep vendors.

2) Correlation and causation, for the love of God! College Board's research shows a correlation CURMUDGUCATION: SAT Test Prep Is Back:

Jeff Bryant Democrats: Stop Flirting With The School Vouchers Scam! - The Zero Hour - The Ring of Fire Network

Democrats: Stop Flirting With The School Vouchers Scam! - The Zero Hour - The Ring of Fire Network:

Democrats: Stop Flirting With The School Vouchers Scam! – The Zero Hour

While the healthcare debacle is the big story of the week, it isn’t the only story. Richard Eskow, host of The Zero Hour, is joined by Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, Jeff Bryant, to talk about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ push for charter schools and voucher programs, and how it could be damaging to the education system.

 Democrats: Stop Flirting With The School Vouchers Scam! - The Zero Hour - The Ring of Fire Network:

Strange Days Indeed

 John Lennon- Nobody Told Me - YouTube:

Strange Days Indeed

John Lennon- Nobody Told Me

Everybody's talking and no one says a word

Everybody's making love and no one really cares

There's nazis in the bathroom just below the stairs.
Always something happening and nothing going on

There's always something happening cooking and nothing in the pot

They're starving back in China so finish what you got.
They're starving back in China so finish what you got.
Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Strange days indeed
strange days indeed.
Everybody's runnin' and no one makes a move

Everyone's a winner
and no one seems to lose.
There's a little yellow idol to the north of Katmandu.
Everybody's flying and no one leaves the ground

Everybody's crying and no one makes a sound.
There's a place for us in movies you just gotta stay around.

Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Strange days indeed
most peculiar
Mama.
Everybody's smoking and no one's getting high

Everybody's flying and never touch the sky

There's Ufo's over New York and I ain't too surprised.
Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Strange days indeed
most peculiar. Mama.

 John Lennon- Nobody Told Me - YouTube: