Marc Epstein, a veteran New York City teacher, describes a common phenomenon: the proliferation of junk food, which contributes to child obesity.
He recalls his own student days, when teachers absolutely prohibited chewing gum and snacks in the classroom.
In today’s schools, junk food is everywhere.
It’s bad for students, bad for discipline, and indicative of a society that refuses to set appropriate limits, allowing children to engage in harmful behaviors.
John Dewey said it more than a century ago, and it is still true: What the best and wisest parent wants for his child is what we should want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely and, unchecked, destroys our democracy. (Forgive the paraphrase, but that is close to exactly right from memory.)
Here Leonie Haimson, New York City’s leading parent advocate, gives the same advice to President Obama. She calls on him to get rid of the test-driven policies of Race to the Top, which are ruining the public schools, and stop the privatizing.
What a terrible legacy is would be for President Obama if he left the presidency four years from now with a record of having used federal funds to disestablish public education in city after city, state after state.
She says:
Instead of pauperizing, standardizing, digitizing and privatizing education, we know what works to increase opportunities for children. Just witness the sort of education Obama’s own daughters receive: small classes with plenty of personal attention from experienced teachers, a well-rounded education with art, science and music, and little or no standardized testing. By instituting these reforms in the 1970s, Finland was able to turn around its school system and now outranks nearly all other nations in student achievement. If it’s good enough for Malia and Sasha, it should be good enough for inner-city public school students in New York City or Chicago.
From a reader in Michigan:
A Message to all Supporters of Democracy
The people of 77 the 83 counties in Michigan voted successfully to repeal Michigan’s Emergency Manager Law. Governor Rick Snyder and the extremist-controlled Michigan legislature are now attempting to circumvent the will of the people by passing new legislation that is every bit as unconstitutional, anti-democratic and vile as the law the people have just rejected. The proposed bill, HB 6004 “Educational Achievement Authority”, violates our State Constitution and will substitute unelected bureaucrats with dictatorial powers for local, duly elected representatives of the people. Tell Governor Snyder and the Michigan Legislature to vote no on any legislation that attempts to circumvent the will of citizens who voted to repeal PA 4, the Emergency Manager Law.
That’s why I created a petition to The Michigan State House, The Michigan State Senate, and Governor Rick Snyder.
Will you sign this petition? Click here: http://signon.org/sign/stop-the-takeover-of-1?source=c.em.cp&r_by=562537.
Please forward this to your email address contacts and add to your Facebook page. It is important that this petition be circulated ASAP as the Michigan legislature is currently holding hearings on HB 6004. We have had over 1300 citizens add their names so far, but we need thousands of signers to sufficiently represent and reiterate the will of Michigan’s citizens.
Thanks for all you do.
Pease read Paul Krugman on the Fake Skills Shortage.
Every time you hear Arne Duncan or someone from the US Chamber of Commerce or the Business Roundtable complain that they can’t find skilled workers, think of this article and remember. The big corporations outsource jobs to where the wages are lowest. They send the jobs to countries where workers get half or less than American workers. They don’t send them to other countries because skills elsewhere are higher and more plentiful, but because wages are less. It’s all about cost-cutting and profit.
Here is one very impressive piece of news from the elections.
In Santa Clara County, school board member Anna Song ran for re-election and was opposed by a massive amount of money from charter supporters.
Song had dared to vote against a proposal to authorize 20 new Rocketship charters in her district.
She was one of two board members who voted in opposition a year ago.
Maybe she thought it would be tantamount to privatizing a large part of the public school system.
Rocketship supporters predicted that the achievement gaps in the district will be closed by 2020.
For that effrontery, the charter lobby amassed a fund of nearly $250,000 to punish her.
The fund was enriched by contributions from very wealthy individuals, few of whom lived in the district, as well as a member of the board of the Rocketship charter corporation:
“Among the big donations to the PACs are $75,000 from the California Charter Schools Association Advocates; $50,000 from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; $50,000 from Gap heir John J. Fisher; $40,000 from Emerson Collective, the nonprofit run by Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs; and $10,000 from Rocketship charter schools board member Timothy Ranzetta.”
The local newspaper endorsed her opponent.
The president of the school board endorsed her and said she was the “policy wonk” of the board and a consistent advocate for teachers and the neediest students.
Anna Song raised less than $10,000.
Anna Song won. It wasn’t even close.
EduShyster celebrated Black Friday not by shopping but by thinking about ways that Walmart could really make a difference in the lives of children.
For example, it could provide their parents a living wage and decent benefits or allow them to join a union.
Instead, the Walton family is a big funder of charters and vouchers and other aspects of the conservative reform movement to privatize public education and break teachers unions so that teachers can be treated like Walmart employees.
Walmart is one of the most data-driven organizations in the world. It practices “just-in-time” inventory and outsources its manufacturing wherever wages are lowest.
That may be its model of school reform.
Read her post to see which “reform” organizations are on the Walton/Walmart payroll.
Thanks to Jersey Jazzman for discovering this gem from Sesame Street.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor explains to fuzzy character Abby Cadabby that there are good careers for girls like her.
Like teaching.
To have a career, you have to have training.
By “training,” she didn’t mean five weeks of training.
She was referring to a “career,” not a job.
As part of its wide-ranging investigation into the financial practices of the state’s booming charter sector, the Arizona Republic identified numerous instances where board members and family members were self-dealing.
Here are a few prime examples.
Of those highlighted here, this is the most startling:
$42.3 million for curriculum
Primavera Technical Learning Center
City:Chandler | Grades: 6-12 | 2011 enrollment: 3,160
Number of schools: 2 | Year opened: 2001
Payments: Damien Creamer and Vanessa Baviera Rudilla run one of the largest online schools in Arizona, and the non-profit school contracts with a for-profit company, American Virtual Academy, for its curriculum and software. Creamer and Rudilla are officers of the non-profit and earn salaries. American Virtual Academy also is owned by Creamer and Rudilla. From fiscal 2007 to 2011, the non-profit paid $42.3 million to American Virtual Academy. The non-profit is exempt from state purchasing laws. Damien Creamer said when the school started it purchased software and curriculum from a number of vendors. The curriculum was mediocre and the software burdensome and unwieldy, he said. As American Virtual Academy’s products developed, the school began using its services. Because the company is the only one to offer such an online platform, getting price quotes from other vendors is not an option, he said. Creamer said he makes sure the non-profit school and his for-profit company operate at arm’s length.
Back when I was a conservative, I was a founding member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which is now the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
TBF was a continuation of work that Checker Finn and I started in the early 1980s as the Educational Excellence Network.
We advocated for liberal education and for higher standards for all students.
Checker was always more enthusiastic about choice than I was, but we worked together harmoniously in our shared distaste for humbug of any kind. We even traveled together in Eastern Europe at the invitation of the AFT, to talk about education and democracy.
When I left the conservative fold, I left the board of TBF.
While I still disagree with TBF’s love affair with school choice, I admire the honesty and transparency that has distinguished the organization.
In this latest report, TBF hired an experienced journalist to investigate why Edison failed in Dayton, Ohio, as an operator of a large charter school. Checker was one of the founding gurus of Edison.
The story is fascinating.
Most interesting is this quote:
“Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, whose sister organization sponsors the two schools overseen by the Alliance for Community Schools board, is among the most disillusioned about Edison’s effort in Dayton. Finn was at the table with Whittle and Chubb when Edison was conceived, and he was an early proponent of its education model. He said that the company’s “horror show” in his hometown is a special embarrassment.
“They did an abysmal job in Dayton,” Finn said. “I think it was an implementation and an accountability failure.”
An assistant secretary of education under former President Ronald Reagan, Finn said he has become “cynical” about the for-profit model in education. “Shareholder return ends up trumping the best interests of students,” he said. Having watched education management companies for 20 years, “Most of the models I admire today are run by non-profit groups.”
Now that is newsworthy! Checker is one of the most prominent of the conservative champions of choice, and he here admits that he has become cynical about the for-profit model.
Tell that to Governor Snyder in Michigan, where 80% of the charters are for-profit. Or to Governor John Kasich in Ohio, who has collected millions of dollars in campaign funding from for-profit operators.
And thank you, TBF, for showing other advocacy groups what it means to be transparent and self-critical and honest.
A high school in San Antonio initiated a bizarre requirement this fall.
Every student is expected to wear an electronic badge, presumably so the district knows how many students are in school and can track their movement.
When a student objected on religious grounds to wearing the tag , the district suspended her.
She is suing the district.
The district claims it needs to follow every student so as to make sure it was getting all the state money that is tried to attendance.
But there are genuine reasons to be concerned about breaches of civil liberties.
This affair is but one more evidence of intrusive practices that technology makes possible.
When we go online, someone somewhere is tracking whatever we do, whatever we purchase, which websites we visit, and this information is then sold to other companies.
Our personal information is being marketed without our knowledge or permission.
What is it that seems so objectionable about asking all students to wear a barcode?
Well, to begin with, they are human beings, not products on a grocery shelf.
People should not be treated as inventory.
When I think about tracking people, I think of the anklets that people are required to wear by judges, because they might be a risk to flee the country or go into hiding.
But students are not prisoners or suspects.
This matter is reminiscent of the kerfuffle over the galvanic skin response bracelets, which students are supposed to wear so that evaluators can measure students’ excitement or engagement and simultaneously (perhaps) evaluate the teachers’ ability to get them excited or engaged.
You have to wonder, first, who dreams up these ideas, and second, who reviews and approves them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 