PIE Network | Distribution of Education Funds in the American Rescue Plan - PIE Network

PIE Network | Distribution of Education Funds in the American Rescue Plan - PIE Network

Distribution of Education Funds in the American Rescue Plan

Updated March 15, 2021

Questions, or interested in adding to this document? Reach out to Patrick.  PIE Network | Distribution of Education Funds in the American Rescue Plan - PIE Network

NOLA Public Schools: Two charter networks violated state law on background checks | The Lens

NOLA Public Schools: Two charter networks violated state law on background checks | The Lens

NOLA Public Schools: Two charter networks violated state law on background checks

James M. Singleton Charter School failed to conduct criminal background checks for some of its employees and employed someone ineligible to work at the school because of a criminal conviction, according to a Wednesday letter to the school from the NOLA Public Schools district warning that the school’s practices on background checks violated state law. The district letter also said that the Louisiana State Police could not confirm the validity of a number of background checks in the school’s files.

The district issued a separate letter on March 10 citing KIPP New Orleans Schools for employing someone ineligible to work in a school because of a past criminal conviction. 

Schools are legally required to complete employee background checks to ensure they do not hire someone who’s been convicted of or pleaded no contest to one or more of a list of crimes outlined in state law. Many of the violations are serious or involve children, such as murder, assault, kidnapping, child desertion and carnal knowledge of a juvenile. Others involve prostitution or manufacture or distribution of drugs.

On Tuesday, a spokesman with the New Orleans Police Department told The Lens that the incidents are related but did not elaborate further.

“We’ve been advised that the principal of James Singleton School was instructed by school CONTINUE READING: NOLA Public Schools: Two charter networks violated state law on background checks | The Lens

Wayne Au: The futility of standardized testing in a crazy pandemic year - The Washington Post

The futility of standardized testing in a crazy pandemic year - The Washington Post

The futility of standardized testing in a crazy pandemic year

Critics of federally mandated K-12 standardized tests were upset when the Biden administration recently said it would require states to administer them this year. They raised pre-pandemic questions about reliability and validity of test scores — as well as concerns about how scores would be affected by the instability of the school year during the coronavirus pandemic.

In this post, a longtime testing critic looks at why giving standardized tests after a year in which children were educated during a pandemic is nothing but an exercise in futility. The author is Wayne Au, a professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington at Bothell. He is also an editor for the social justice magazine Rethinking Schools.

One month in, Biden angers supporters who wanted him to curb standardized testing

By Wayne Au

The Biden administration’s decision to require schools across the country to administer high-stakes standardized tests this spring caught many parents, students and teachers by surprise. It contradicts President Biden’s campaign promises to cut back on testing — and seems to ignore the deep inequities and wild inconsistencies associated with remote schooling over the last year.

What the administration and testing advocates seem to miss is that any data generated by high-stakes standardized testing this spring will be invalid and, therefore, useless. Even in non-pandemic years, high-stakes standardized tests don’t accurately and objectively measure teaching and learning.

I am a longtime critic of high-stakes standardized testing for reasons including:

• The racist history of standardized testing in the United States, including a direct lineage to our country’s eugenics movement. Over 100 years ago, U.S. psychologists used I.Q. tests to claim that intelligence and other traits were genetically based, and subsequently cast the poor, people of color, and immigrants as biologically less intelligent.
• Our high-stakes test scores today basically mirror the race and class inequalities produced by the racist and classist I.Q. tests created a century ago.
• For decades, research has shown that test scores do not accurately reflect teaching and learning. Rather, they overwhelmingly reflect levels of poverty and other non-school factors such as housing insecurity, food insecurity and access to health care.
• These tests do not work as promised. In the roughly two decades since high-stakes, standardized testing was federally mandated by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, there has been virtually no decrease in test-score inequality between major racial and economic student groups, and in some cases, the gaps in scores may have increased.
• High-stakes testing narrows the curriculum to tested subjects, restricts the amount of space for multicultural curricula and culturally relevant teaching, and has resulted in cuts to important time spent at recess and lunch.

These are all concerns I have about high-stakes, standardized testing in a normal year, let alone during CONTINUE READING: The futility of standardized testing in a crazy pandemic year - The Washington Post

We Need a Bigger Pie – Tennessee Education Report

We Need a Bigger Pie – Tennessee Education Report

WE NEED A BIGGER PIE

The League of Women Voters (LWV) is calling on Gov. Bill Lee and the Tennessee General Assembly to take bold action on school funding. The group notes that the state historically underfunds schools and suggests that now is the time to change that reality. In fact, the push from the LWV comes as the state is experiencing an unprecedented revenue surplus.

Here’s more from LWV from a media release:

Chronically underfunded school districts throughout the  state have been especially challenged during the pandemic. However, the inadequacies and  the gross underfunding predate this stressful year. Tennessee currently funds its public school  system at a level that consistently places it in the bottom five most poorly funded states in the  United States, per the National Education Association.

“This goes beyond how you slice the pie to provide varying amounts of funding to the diverse  counties of our state – the pie itself is simply not big enough,” said Debby Gould, president elect of LWVTN. “The League’s position on education is that the state’s coverage,  implementation, and funding of the Basic Education Program CONTINUE READING: We Need a Bigger Pie – Tennessee Education Report

Teacher Tom: We Can't Teach Mindfulness to the Experts

Teacher Tom: We Can't Teach Mindfulness to the Experts

We Can't Teach Mindfulness to the Experts

I was recently asked in a public forum if I've ever taught mindfulness to children. The question threw me. Yes, no, maybe, I don't know, can you repeat the question? 

Mindfulness is a radical Buddhist practice in which one focuses one's full attention on the present moment. This is something toward which I strive, even as I find it exceedingly difficult to achieve for more than a few minutes at a time. Recently, ironically, I was reading a novel in which one of the characters said something about mindfulness that sparked a train of thought that took my brain so far away from the present moment that I had to re-read several paragraphs. I find it a slippery thing to accomplish, requiring discipline, concentration, and practice. A quiet mind is a healthy thing, something valued by medical and spiritual practices from east to west.

Mindfulness as a concept has broken through into our popular culture, really taking off as a phenomenon in recent years. There are more than 100,000 books being sold on Amazon with some version of the word in the title, not to mention the proliferation of mindfulness workshops and seminars and CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: We Can't Teach Mindfulness to the Experts

Chicago Charter Chain Apologizes for “Racist, No-Excuses” Regime | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chicago Charter Chain Apologizes for “Racist, No-Excuses” Regime | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chicago Charter Chain Apologizes for “Racist, No-Excuses” Regime

The Noble Network is the leading charter chain in Chicago. It boasts of high test scores. It is the darling of the Chicago white elite, including such luminaries as former Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and billionaire Penny Pritzker, who served as Obama’s Secretary of Commerce. White apologists and admirers of the strict no-excuses discipline policy claimed that black and brown children needed the tough rules so that they could learn middle-class behaviors. David Whitman published a book praising “no-excuses” schools called Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, in which he praised the high-performing schools (mostly charters) that enforced “no excuses.” His book was published in 2008; in 2009, he became the chief speech-writer for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who often lavished praise on “no excuses” charter schools.

The Noble Network wrote a letter to its alumni, apologizing for its strict “no excuses” policy, which it acknowledged was “racist.” Over the years, critics have said that the practices of “no excuses” schools are racist, but they were defended by charter advocates based on their test scores. They argued that the ends justified the CONTINUE READING: Chicago Charter Chain Apologizes for “Racist, No-Excuses” Regime | Diane Ravitch's blog

Photos on Schooling during the Pandemic | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Photos on Schooling during the Pandemic | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Photos on Schooling during the Pandemic

Meghan Gallagher at The 74 Million gathered photos that capture some of the effects of the pandemic year when schools were shuttered and then slowly reopened. I have selected a few of them for this post. All 52 can be seen here.

Children play in front of a school in Orlando, Florida on March 20, 2020 that was closed due to the coronavirus but will begin distance learning on March 30. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

A teacher from P.S. 124 in New York City conducts remote classes on her laptop from her roof. (Getty Images)

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – APRIL 1: High School language arts teacher Emily Olin held her three-year-old daughter Genevieve on her lap as she distance taught her classes from her home in Minneapolis, Minn., on Wednesday, April 1, 2020. Olin never imagined life like this “u2013 teaching her students virtually while tending to her own kids at the same time. There is joy, but also great anxiety in making sure everybody gets what they need daily. (Photo by Renee Jones Schneider/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

SEE MORE PHOTOS: Photos on Schooling during the Pandemic | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

A School System Adrift: New York City Schools Search for Direction as the Political Landscape Evolves | Ed In The Apple

A School System Adrift: New York City Schools Search for Direction as the Political Landscape Evolves | Ed In The Apple

A School System Adrift: New York City Schools Search for Direction as the Political Landscape Evolves

The theory of action that describes the Board and the successor Department of Education are known as Newton’s First Laws of Motion … sometimes referred to as the law of inertia. An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction.

If you ask upper management in the Department why they’re following a particular policy the standard answer is, “That’s the way we’ve always done it,” Newton’s First Law of Motion –the law of inertia.

Meisha Porter begins her tenure on March 15th, the third chancellor to lead the Department of Education during de Blasio’s seven plus years in office.

Can she change the direction of the leviathan?

Education policy has become inexorably intertwined with mayoral politics.

On June 22nd voters will select the Democratic Party candidates for Mayor along with the Comptroller, 37 of the 51 members of the City Council and three out of CONTINUE READING: A School System Adrift: New York City Schools Search for Direction as the Political Landscape Evolves | Ed In The Apple

RE-IMAGINATION, OR JUST REBRANDING – Dad Gone Wild

RE-IMAGINATION, OR JUST REBRANDING – Dad Gone Wild

RE-IMAGINATION, OR JUST REBRANDING

“Once I called Miami City Hall a “bribe factory,” and another time described Tallahassee as a “festival of whores.” Too subtle? Possibly.” – Carl Hiaasen

 

An interesting event occurred Last Friday, MNPS announced its new literacy initiative, Literacy Re-imagined. A more appropriate title would have been, Literacy Rebranded. Rest assured there was nothing here that constituted a re-imagining, in fact, almost everything covered was a retread of past efforts.

The timing of the event was equally suspect.

The event took place at a time that is typically referred to as the “Friday news dump”. Politicians use Friday afternoons to drop information that they don’t feel like talking about. The thinking being that on Fridays people’s minds are already focused on the weekend. Meaning pass over their head unnoticed. Also, most of the staff is out of the office, so any follow-up questions will have to wait until Monday. The hope being, that by then people will have lost interest or something of greater interest came along. Holiday weekends are even more helpful for this tactic.

I would argue that 12:30 on a Friday before Spring Break is not the ideal time to announce the beginning of a “brand new era” unless you didn’t want a whole bunch of people heralding that moment. This school year has been the hardest one in my memory. For parents, teachers, and CONTINUE READING: RE-IMAGINATION, OR JUST REBRANDING – Dad Gone Wild

Evidence In Education: Is Supply Meeting Teachers' Demand | Shanker Institute

Evidence In Education: Is Supply Meeting Teachers' Demand | Shanker Institute

Evidence In Education: Is Supply Meeting Teachers' Demand

In today’s public schools, teachers and administrators are constantly pressured to implement new reforms and initiatives, most of which claim to be research- or science-based. Schools are often viewed as the recipients of new policies and new knowledge generated by research. In So Much Reform, So Little Change, Charles Payne states “Best Practice discourse lends itself to decontextualized thinking, reducing the problem of urban schooling to a cognitive one: if only our teachers and principals knew how to do it in the Big City...we should spend some time thinking with school people about what those reasons might be rather than just issuing more exhortations from on high” (p. 63). Including educators in the conversation is crucial for a successful rollout of any evidence-based intervention. Additionally, in order to best support our teachers, it is imperative we develop a system for them to have access to evidence-informed practices that are contextualized and can be tailored to their varying needs. 

While there are many problems with the “research to practice” approach, one barrier is that schools are frequently not given enough training, resources, and support to make sense of educational research. Educators need evidence, innovation, and new approaches; after all, much of their job is to constantly adapt their ways of teaching to meet the unique and changing needs of their students. But right now, too many educators are doing this work without the necessary tools to be successful. In this post I would like to sketch out a tool that could improve access to and applicability of research. By access, I refer not only to the ability of finding and downloading journal articles and other sources, but also to having the knowledge to discern questionable research. According to Paula J. Stanovich and Keith E. Stanovich (2003), a failure to discern good and bad research can cause teachers to try new methods that are not strongly supported by peer-reviewed research. Applicability refers to the extent to which research has practical implications for teachers.

A Research Portal for Teachers

As a teacher who is interested in research, I often wished I had a simple way to access research and teaching resources. I knew I could find great research on education, and I knew I could explore new CONTINUE READING: Evidence In Education: Is Supply Meeting Teachers' Demand | Shanker Institute

Maurice Cunningham - Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right - MassPoliticsProfs

Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right

Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right

Two of the important props of the far right in America are Christian conservatives and economic royalists like the Waltons and Charles Koch. Those ties are becoming evident in school privatization including in financial support the Massachusetts Parents United has offered to a Christian right group and in National Parents Union’s funding from a Koch-Walton joint venture that partners with a far right Christian home schooling network.

Here’s the Massachusetts Parents United $1,000 “sponsorship” from its Form 990 tax return for 2017:

 

 

 

Here are some headlines about National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and its leader Pastor Samuel Rodriguez from Right Wing Watch:

Samuel Rodriguez: New General in Global Anti-Gay Culture War

Samuel Rodriguez: Getting Conservative SCOTUS Trumps Immigration Reform

The Preachers on Trump’s Inaugural Podium (Pastor Rodriguez prayed at Trump’s inaugural).

Samuel Rodriguez Says Trump’s Supreme Court Will Save Religious Liberty

Sam Rodriguez Has ‘Disagreements’ With Harsh Anti-Immigrant Bill but Calls It a ‘Positive Development’ (also identifying Rodriguez as a “promoter of the Libre Initiative,” the Koch political outreach program to Latinos).

Samuel Rodriguez Joins Bid to Rebuild GOP Power in California

In short, Samuel Rodriguez and his National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference are cogs in the religious right’s alliance with the Republican Party.

The religious right-economic right connection is a component of conservative political power, as Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson recently argued in Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. The Waltons and Charles Koch fund MPU’s allied organization National Parent Union through a joint venture called the VELA Education Fund. VELA announced a grant to NPU on August 3, 2020, NPU having established a track record of nearly seven months. VELA has also given CONTINUE READING: Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right

CURMUDGUCATION: Donors Chose Monday: Books and Understanding

CURMUDGUCATION: Donors Chose Monday: Books and Understanding

Donors Chose Monday: Books and Understanding

 Donors Choose lets you set up filters, so that you can focus on what you choose. The most obvious is a geographic one that allows you to find classrooms in your area looking for help. But you can also set for the types of classrooms and the types of resources, as well as setting (as I usually do) for rural schools.

So one of the classrooms chosen for this week is Ms. McCord's at Allegheny-Clarion Valley Elementary School in Foxburg PA (a cool little town to visit if you're ever in the neighborhood). She's teaching third graders, and she'd like to expand the library for both reading and developing some human-being skills

With your support, I can help my students build character and spread kindness that will reach beyond the walls of my classroom. With purposeful teaching of social-emotional lessons with associated literacy, I am hoping that my students will grow both academically and emotionally.

Mrs. Fanning in Cordova, South Carolina, is looking for similar help. She's another teacher of rural poor students who is looking for some social and emotional learning to go with the literacy

There are many wonderful books available today that can help our students understand and state their feelings and I want them to be able to relate to characters in books that might be feeling like they are.

These books will be read aloud to students who are face to face for learning as well as students who remain virtual. While reading these books, we will be able to discuss our feelings as well as learn ways to be kind to others.

As always, I invite you to contribute to these classrooms, or search for others on Donors Choose, or donate to a local classroom. Stimulus money may trickle down to classrooms, but it's not going to get there this week. If you can share, that's a great thing.

CURMUDGUCATION: Donors Chose Monday: Books and Understanding

A VERY BUSY DAY Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... The latest news and resources in education since 2007 #REOPENSCHOOLSSAFELY #openonlywhensafe

 Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

A VERY BUSY DAY

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

The latest news and resources in education since 2007

THIS WEEK IN EDUCATION

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

The latest news and resources in education since 2007 - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2021/03/this-week-in-education-larry-ferlazzos_13.html

“Introducing Primary Sources to Students”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 2h

Introducing Primary Sources to Students is the headline of my latest Education Week column. Five educators share strategies for introducing primary sources to students, including English-language learners. Here are some excerpts: I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Using Primary Sources .

A Beginning List Of The Best Resources For Using Google Jamboards With English Language Learners – Please Add Your Own!

by Larry Ferlazzo / 11h

I know there are a ton of resources out there for using Google Jamboards in distance learning. However, I wanted to specifically being a list of resources for teachers working with English Language Learners (obviously, some Jamboard activities are good for ELLs and for everybody else). Please suggest additions either in the comments here, or on Twitter or Facebook. Here’s what I have so far: 5 wa

Tuesday’s Must-Read Articles On School Reopenings

by Larry Ferlazzo / 11h

geralt / Pixabay Here are new additions to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL (you might also be interested in SCHOOLS WENT REMOTE A YEAR AGO – HERE ARE MY CHOICES FOR THE BEST PIECES WRITTEN ABOUT SCHOOL REOPENING SINCE THEN): Debate, angst and many questions emerge over L.A. school reopening plans is from The L.A. Times. About half of LAUSD students won’t return t

“Eight Ways to Teach With Primary Sources”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1d

Eight Ways to Teach With Primary Sources is the headline of my latest Education Week column. Four educators share ways they use primary sources with students, including a strategy called “Zoom.” Here are some excerpts:

I Still Can’t Believe We Have To Make Standardized Test Plans The Same Time We’re Planning A Return To The Physical Classroom

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1d

geralt / Pixabay I’ve already shared many resources explaining why the decision to require standardized testing this year makes very little sense (see Why Is The Biden Administration Decision To Have Standardized Tests This Year An Extremely Unwise One? Let Me Count The Ways ). I laid out my perspective simply in a Twitter thread I thought readers here might find useful: Will teachers in the fall

Reflections From My Students On What They’ve Lost & Learned, & What They Need

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1d

sasint / Pixabay Last month, I published Neema Avashia’s guest post at my Ed Week column, Students Respond to Adults’ Fixation on ‘Learning Loss.’ It was a great post, and I shared more related commentaries at Trying To Bring Research, Sanity, Teacher Expertise & Student Voice To The “Learning Loss” Discussion. I took the questions that Neema asked her students, made some very minor modifications

My Favorite Student Comment On An Anonymous Class Evaluation

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1d

Yesterday, I shared HOW MY THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE STUDENTS EVALUATED OUR CLASS – AND ME! Though I listed many student comments, I should have highlighted my favorite one that was written in response to asking students to give my teaching a grade: “A-, Could be an A+ if he were more organized because sometimes class is a bit of a mess” Truer words have never been spoken about a year of full-time dist

How My Theory Of Knowledge Students Evaluated Our Class – And Me!

by Larry Ferlazzo / 2d

As regular readers know, I usually have students in my class do anonymous class evaluations three or so times each year (I don’t just wait until the end because then it’s too late to make any adjustments, at least for that class).

 Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007