ACLU of Northern California Executive Director to EdVoice: Stop Misleading Voters | ACLU of Northern CA

ACLU of Northern California Executive Director to EdVoice: Stop Misleading Voters | ACLU of Northern CA

ACLU of Northern California Executive Director to EdVoice: Stop Misleading Voters

ACLU of California Statement on Misleading Campaign Ad

.@edvoice Your mailer uses the ACLU's name in a manner that misleads voters. You are not a fly by night organization, and with your decision, you have damaged your reputation and standing with the ACLU-NC.https://t.co/p9oh57G9i9

— ACLU of Northern CA (@ACLU_NorCal) November 1, 2018

The Education Wave That Began In West Virginia May Change Politics For The Nation

The Education Wave That Began In West Virginia May Change Politics For The Nation

The Education Wave That Began In West Virginia May Change Politics For The Nation

Whether Democrats take back the House in the midterm elections may come down to races like the one in West Virginia’s third Congressional District.

“Richard Ojeda has taken a district that Trump won by almost 50 points … and turned into a toss-up,” writes Bill Scher for Politico. The article includes Ojeda in a list of 15 candidates that will not only determine control of the House and Senate, but also signal “how the party tries to oust President Trump” in 2020.

“If Democrats want to reclaim white working-class Trump voters in West Virginia, Ojeda may be their best hope to do so,” writes Elia Nilsen for Vox, “His … challenge is to persuade the Trump-loving voters of his district to send him to Congress as a Democrat.”

But if races like the one in West Virginia’s third Congressional District determine the direction of politics in the country, the fight over education will have a lot to do with it.

‘The Political Face’ of the Education Wave

Ojeda (you pronounce the “j”), a much-tattooed Iraqi war veteran who appeared in Michael Moore’s recent documentary, state senator of the district that includes counties that sparked the statewide teacher strike earlier this year that shut down schools in all 55 counties. His prominent support of the teachers made him the “the political face” of the strike, reported the New York Times .

The teachers eventually forced the legislature to fix the state employee’s health-insurance plan, raise public workers’ salaries, halt an expansion of charter schools, kill a proposal to eliminate seniority, and scuttle a bill that would take away the rights of unions to deduct dues through Continue reading: The Education Wave That Began In West Virginia May Change Politics For The Nation

What Should We Really Learn From New Orleans After the Storm? A Q&A With NEPC Fellow Bruce Baker | National Education Policy Center

What Should We Really Learn From New

Orleans After the Storm? A Q&A With NEPC Fellow Bruce Baker | National Education Policy Center

What Should We Really Learn From New Orleans After the Storm? A Q&A With NEPC Fellow Bruce Baker

Learn More:NEPC Resources on Charter Schools

NEPC Fellow Bruce Baker discusses his critique of a recent policy brief that attributed positive outcomes to market-based reforms introduced in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

What Should We Really Learn From New Orleans After the Storm? A Q&A With NEPC Fellow Bruce Baker | National Education Policy Center

Lawsuit Accuses Betsy DeVos And Her Deputies Of Being Motivated By Sexism | HuffPost

Lawsuit Accuses Betsy DeVos And Her Deputies Of Being Motivated By Sexism | HuffPost

Lawsuit Accuses Betsy DeVos And Her Deputies Of Being Motivated By Sexism
The lawsuit says that the education secretary’s decision to scrap Obama-era rules governing sexual assault on campus was based on bias and stereotypes.

A new filing in a lawsuit against the Trump administration accuses Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and a top deputy of being motivated in part by sexism in their policy decisions.

The lawsuit, originally filed in January, challenged DeVos’ elimination of Obama-era Title IX guidance on how sexual assault cases are handled on campus. But an amended complaint submitted Wednesday says that DeVos’ decision was influenced by discriminatory and stereotyped views of women. 

DeVos scrapped the Title IX guidance in September 2017, issuing her own interim guidance on the subject. Her version lowered the standard of evidence used in campus sexual assault cases. At the time, DeVos said that the Obama administration’s directive was an example of federal overreach. 

But plaintiffs in the filing say DeVos and her deputies had more nefarious motivations, and they use new Freedom of Information Act records as evidence. The records indicate that Department of Education leaders had solicited input from groups and academics who push inflated and widely discredited statistics regarding the prevalence of false rape allegations. A National Sexual Violence Resource Center study found that false reports Continue reading: Lawsuit Accuses Betsy DeVos And Her Deputies Of Being Motivated By Sexism | HuffPost

What’s Wrong with America’s Schools? David Berliner Blames America’s Failure to Eradicate Child Poverty | janresseger

What’s Wrong with America’s Schools? David Berliner Blames America’s Failure to Eradicate Child Poverty | janresseger

What’s Wrong with America’s Schools? David Berliner Blames America’s Failure to Eradicate Child Poverty

Despite lots of evidence about why we shouldn’t use test scores as a measure of school quality, for nearly twenty years, government programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have taught people to judge public schools by their standardized test scores. Last week the Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss published an in-depth reflection by David Berliner on what standardized test scores really measure. David Berliner is an expert, a Regents’ professor emeritus at Arizona State University, former president of the American Educational Research Association, and former dean of the College of Education at Arizona State.

Berliner is blunt in his analysis: “(T)he big problems of American education are not in America’s schools. So, reforming the schools, as Jean Anyon once said, is like trying to clean the air on one side of a screen door. It cannot be done!  It’s neither this nation’s teachers nor its curriculum that impede the achievement of our children. The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are often families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education… Our educational problems have their roots in families where food insecurity or hunger is a regular occurrence, or where those with increased lead levels in their bloodstream get no treatments before arriving at a school’s doorsteps. Our problems also stem from the harsh incarceration laws that break up families instead of counseling them and trying to keep them together. And our problems relate to harsh immigration policies that keep millions of families frightened to seek out better lives for themselves and their children…  Although demographics may not be destiny for an individual, it is the best predictor of a school’s outcomes—independent of that school’s teachers, administrators and curriculum.”  (Emphasis in the original.)

Many of the greatest in-school factors that affect test scores, Berliner believes, are in the drastic funding cuts across the states that last spring’s walkouts by teachers brought to our attention: “Yes, of course, there are in-school problems that need fixing, such as the re-employment of all the social workers, nurses, counselors and school psychologists lost after Continue reading:  What’s Wrong with America’s Schools? David Berliner Blames America’s Failure to Eradicate Child Poverty | janresseger

Confronting Inequity and Structural Racism by Building Community Schools | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Confronting Inequity and Structural Racism by Building Community Schools | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Confronting Inequity and Structural Racism by Building Community Schools

The last few decades of disinvestment and privatization have devastated public schools across the country, especially those in poor and distressed neighborhoods and communities of color. But we shouldn’t simply try to roll back the clock: long before the present crisis many schools were already failing the children who needed an opportunity to learn the most.

Out of that failure a growing movement of parents, youth, educators and community advocates are charting a better path forward: community schools. The community schools model holds at its core both research-proven methods and hard-won local insight from community members about what is most needed locally, which is what makes it a powerful evidence-based equity strategy!

As shown in our Loving Cities Index, barriers to a student’s success can be found both inside schools and far beyond the schoolhouse gate. Using whole-child wraparound supports — like health and dental clinics, mentoring, and counseling — community schools become hubs of activity and progress in the neighborhoods around them. And through collaboration with community based organizations, businesses and colleges to offer students real-world projects that make learning more relevant and engaging, they build connections that can open the door to future opportunities.

Many towns and cities across the country are already implementing a community schools strategy, and many more are planning to. For example, Journey for Justice, a national alliance of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations, is looking to create 10,000 sustainable, strong, neighborhood community schools! The Partnership for the Future of Learning recently released a “Community Schools Playbook,” a comprehensive step-by-step guide for those looking to promote and build community schools.  It’s the first of its kind guide with tools that you can pick up and get started with today.

This lively webinar covered community schools both in theory and practice.

NATIONAL

Confronting Inequity and Structural Racism by Building Community Schools | Schott Foundation for Public Education

How Teachers Might Save Arizona Schools from the Kochs | OurFuture.org by People's Action

How Teachers Might Save Arizona Schools from the Kochs | OurFuture.org by People's Action

How Teachers Might Save Arizona Schools from the Kochs

“A change in education is Arizona’s No. 1 issue,” Garcia said in a televised debate. “It is my strength, it is Ducey’s weakness, and it’s going to be the difference.” (Photo: Victoria Pickering/flickr/cc)

The moment Beth Lewis realized the powerful political forces she was up against was when she was seated in the gallery of the Arizona House watching Republican legislators, one-by-one, fall into line to support a new bill she and her fellow teachers had come to the capitol to oppose. Republican Governor Doug Ducey and others “working the bill” on the floor took any wavering members into a back room for a “conversation,” while lobbyists in the wings nodded and hand-signaled with lawmakers to track the bill’s progress. When the bill’s handlers agreed a vote was in order, it passed easily. Then, “it was like a party,” Lewis recalls, with lawmakers high-fiving each other and lobbyists shaking hands and backslapping. “It was sickening,” she says. “I realized our state legislators weren’t at all interested in representing the people.”

The bill, which the State Senate also passed and the governor quickly signed, opened up education savings accounts, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, to all of the state’s 1.1 million students. The new accounts, previously restricted to students with special needs and students attending schools receiving a grade of D or F on the state’s school report card, would provide $4,400 a year, 90 percent of the amount of money the state would typically send a district for enrolling a student, for a family to spend as they wish on their children’s education. Students with disabilities and poor students would receive more money than other students.

For parents to receive the money, on a debit card, they must agree not to enroll their children in a public school—essentially giving up their children’s right to a free public education. Other than that, the program has few regulations and there’s little oversight in how public Continue reading: How Teachers Might Save Arizona Schools from the Kochs | OurFuture.org by People's Action

We Discover Outstanding Candidates That Support Our Public Schools - NPE Action Endorsements - NPE Action

Endorsements - NPE Action

We Discover Outstanding Candidates That Support Our Public Schools - NPE Action Endorsements - NPE Action

NPE Action Endorsements

NPE Action Endorsements

When we discover outstanding candidates that support our issues, and it is a race that we are able to support, we endorse. Candidates must complete a questionnaire and have the support of our supporters in the area. We do our best to contact all candidates in the race. For more information contact carol@npeaction.org.

Endorsements - NPE Action