Now here is an interesting debate topic: Who really controls the Florida legislature?
Jeb Bush or ALEC?
Or are they the same people with different organizational ties?
Read here to learn about ALEC’s role in Florida.
Recently, ALEC was about to pass a resolution condemning the Common Core standards, but Jeb intervened to stop it. He probably reminded them of the profits that corporations will make as the test scores plummet across the land in response to “tougher,” more “rigorous” standards.
Ken Bernstein is one of the nation’s best education bloggers. He blogs frequently at The Daily Kos. He is wise in the ways of federal policies and politics. He also is a gifted teacher and a great person. One of the great rewards of writing my last book was that I met this great and generous man.
Today, Ken wrote a great article about the new Network for Public Education. He explains more about the founding board members than we did ourselves.
He explains why this new organization is necessary:
“This effort is unlike other efforts. It is explicitly political, because politics is how educational policy is controlled. In that sense even though a number of us have connections with Save Our Schools (which is an ongoing organization) we do not see this as being at cross-purposes.
“I did say “we.” I am a contributing member and intend to help this group in any way I can.”
This is a great suggestion for the Network for Public Education: we need students and student organizations to join with us!
If you are a student, please join us. If you are part of a student group, please join us!
This is where you can sign up: http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/network-membership/
We need you.
“I’m sure you have many pressing priorities as a new organization, but I would strongly recommend that you devote considerable attention to actively engaging US high school students in the process of reversing the privatization of public education and ending the obsession with standardized testing.
“Students have intimate knowledge of what really works in the classroom and doesn’t. They have borne the brunt of the testing regime and understand better than anyone the horrors of obsessive standardized testing.
“They should (and most want to) take ownership for the quality of their OWN education, and now have an opportunity to do so. As educators, we should recognize this as the “teachable moment” of a lifetime for young citizens and we ought to seize the day (Carpe Diem!) Please have a Network youth wing (by whatever name).
“I hope you will help educate and coordinate the actions of young activists nationally, provide them with first rate resources to organize peaceful, effective actions, and access to advice from wise, sympathetic adult educators. To do otherwise would ignore perhaps the most powerful constituency for authentic reform, as well as the main victims of our misguided policies of recent years.”
When I heard about Strongsville, I thought I was reading a children’s storybook about a wonderful, all-American city, a city where all the families are happy and have nice houses, and the children play in well-equipped playgrounds, and go to wonderful schools.
Think of it: Strongsville. It evokes Wheaties and Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy, the town where everything is just fine.
But then I got this letter from a teacher:
My name is Christina Potter and I have taught in the Strongsville City Schools in Strongsville, Ohio for the last eight years.
When I was hired in Strongsville, a great community with excellent schools, many other teachers said I was lucky, and they were jealous of my new job, and during the first two years, they were right; things were great with all sides working together,and we earned Ohio’s highest ranking, Excellent with Distinction.
As time went on a division started to occur between the administration and the teachers. During our 2010 contract negotiations the school stated that times were difficult and they needed the teachers to make concessions. In good faith, and promise of a levy, we agreed to an additional two year pay freeze on top of the three years we had already taken. We also increased our medical expenses, took on an additional duty period, and agreed to work two days unpaid. Times were tough, but everyone was striving to make Strongsville great.
Then, everything went haywire. With the ink still drying on our contract, the Board tried to take the levy off the ballot but failed, so instead, they informed the community to vote the levy down. Then we learned that while the district cried broke in 2010, it spent $500,000 to hire an attorney who publicizes himself as a union breaker. Every school district in this area that has hired him has either gone on strike or threatened to. Needless to say, the teachers, who negotiated in good faith, were outraged.
When our contract ended in June 2012, the district asked for extra time before negotiating to get its finances in order, so on July 19th, the first negotiation session took place. Upon walking in, their attorney put a contract down on the table and told us it was a take it or leave it offer and refused to negotiate one item at a time. After months of failing to negotiate a contract, our Education Association declared an impasse, and a Federal Mediator came in to oversee negotiations. Here is the timeline of recent events:
1. On February 15th, 2013 the teachers of the Strongsville Education Association (SEA) overwhelmingly passed a strike authorization.
2. On February 22nd, SEA submitted a 10-day notice of our intent to strike.
3. On March 1st, I had to hand in my I.D. badge and keys and have all of my personal belongings out of the building by 3:15 p.m. After 3:15, the doors would be locked, and anyone still on school property would be arrested even though we had not taken a final strike vote; we also had another negotiation session scheduled for Saturday morning. For all intense purposes we were not on strike yet but we were being locked out of the buildings, our email accounts and our grade books.
4. On March 2nd, both negotiating teams and the School Board members met with the federal negotiator. At that time the school gave its final offer which was only slightly different than their original.
And that takes us to where we are today, on strike. Many of my fellow teachers are also Strongsville residents, who have children in the system. They fear we are destroying our great public schools by trashing the teaching profession within them, instead of working toward a settlement. They feel the Board has chosen to waste tax payer money and painted teachers as greedy; meanwhile, it has forked over another $500,000, for a total of $1 million, to an attorney instead of using the money for books and technology.
Why are we striking in the cold, wind, and snow from 5:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. We, the Strongsville teachers, feel we are not just standing for the SEA, but for all of our fellow public school teachers in the Ohio and across the nation during this statewide/national epidemic of privatizing our public schools. If this contract goes through other school districts may soon go after their teachers, and we cannot in good conscience allow that to happen. As a teacher and a parent of two, I believe in public education and its hard working teachers, who too often are the brunt of undeserved bashing.
The teachers of Strongsville will hold a rally this afternoon at 4 pm in the center of Strongsville, at the gazebo, at the corners of Pearl Rd. and Rt 82.
They say that if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When you have made billions of dollars by selling technology, you start thinking that you hold the answer to all the world’s problems.
Bill Gates thinks he has the answer to education: standardized testing, data, and measurement, with lots of technology.
Does he know that every child is different?
Does he know that standardized tests are subject to random error, human error, measurement error, and other errors?
Do his own children take standardized tests?
Please, Bill, teach in an urban school for one week. Just one week. Let us know how it goes.
Take the standardized tests that you value so much. Not the fourth grade tests, but the twelfth grade tests. Publish your scores. Please.
In his inimitable style, combining wit and solid analysis, Bruce Baker dissects the latest “data-free drivel” from ConnCAN.
Baker responds to a report claiming that the state was helping low-performing, high-needs districts. Not true, says Baker.
And he has the evidence to back up his response.
The question: Why do the news media report “studies” by advocacy groups with an agenda without recognizing that they are not disinterested research? They are kind of like the research and studies on nicotine and smoking by tobacco companies.
Caveat emptor.
Randi Weingarten and other protestors were arrested and hauled off in handcuffs while demonstrating against school closings in Philadelphia. Neither the Mayor nor the School Reform Commission was willing to meet with Weingarten.
After her release from custody, said the article in the Huffington Post,
“Weingarten said she sees the school closure plan as siphoning money away from public schools, since the plan doesn’t touch charter schools. “This was really a plan to eliminate public education,” Weingarten said. “This is not about how to fix public schools, but to close them — not how to stabilize but to destabilize public schooling.”
“Weingarten called the closings immoral. “When the powers that be ignore you and dismiss you, then you don’t have any choice but try to resort to civil disobedience to try to confront an immoral act,” she said.
“So she joined parents and union activists to form a group of 19 people who blocked the entrance to the meeting. She said she intentionally told Philly teachers not to join, lest they lose their teaching certification, and discouraged parents who are undocumented immigrants from participating.”
Great reporting by Howard Blume in the Los Angeles Times about the school board race.
DFER–the hedge fund managers who call themselves Democrats for Education Reform–put out a hilarious press release boasting of the victory of Monica Garcia over a field of four candidates with no funding. She outspent her closest competitor by 50-1, more or less.
But the nearly $4 million raised by the billionaire boys wasn’t enough to beat Steve Zimmer.
True, the teachers’ union spent $1 million. But why shouldn’t they? They are directly affected by the decisions of the school board, unlike Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and the other tycoons who tried to buy Zimmer’s seat.
Zimmer is independent. He won’t do the union’s bidding. But at least, he won’t set out to do harm and he will understand the consequences of his actions on real teachers and real children, not computer projections thereof.
I just received a press release from the Chicago Teachers Union, alerting the public that CPS plans to close schools and to increase class sizes. To call this “reform” is outrageous. The children in Chicago needs smaller classes, not classes of 35-40. A teacher who is a “high-quality” teacher in a class with 24 students will not be a “high-quality” teacher if placed in a class of 35-40 students. Many of the students will have disabilities, or language learning issues, or behavioral problems. Instead of instruction, the teacher will spend most of his or her time on classroom management. This is just more of the corporate reform babble; neither Bill Gates nor Michael Bloomberg ever put their own children in classrooms with 35-40 students. Why do they want to do that to other people’s children?
Below is the CTU press release:
CPS Target of 30 to 40 Students in a Classroom is a
Dangerous Benchmark for Utilization ‘Crisis’
If 80 schools are shuttered class sizes will balloon
CHICAGO—The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) opposes the larger classroom sizes that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) targets as “ideal” in its threats to close 13 percent of the city’s neighborhood schools by the end of this school year. Both research and teacher experience indicate that smaller class sizes, particularly at lower grade levels, contribute to increased learning and optimal classroom activity as teachers are better able to modify instruction to meet the needs of individual children and better communicate with their parents.
A recent press report indicated that the so-called “utilization crisis” manufactured by CPS is based on the assumption that 30 the ideal number of students for an “average class size.” Because the typical Chicago classroom has far fewer than 30 students, raising the target figure to 30 made it easier for CPS to manufacture a utilization crisis and use that as justification for closing scores of public schools.
“What CPS has done is damaging on two fronts,” said CTU President Karen GJ Lewis. “First, they’re misleading the public with this space ‘crisis’ they’ve created using their own benchmark, and second, the benchmark they’ve set is much higher than the city and state average and what we know provides the best environment for our students to succeed.”
CPS class sizes are already among the highest in Illinois. Last year, early grade classrooms in the city were on average larger than those in 95 percent of the districts in the rest of the state. Classrooms in CPS high schools had the fifth highest class size compared to other districts in Illinois. Many high schools and elementary schools slated for turnaround actions in recent years had multiple oversized classrooms.
Tennessee’s Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio) found that smaller class sizes had positive effects at the early childhood level (k-3), across all school locations (rural, urban, inner city, suburban), on every achievement measure and for all subjects (reading, mathematics, science, social science, language, study skills).
The study also found that students assigned to small classes of 15 students in early grades graduated on schedule at a higher rate (76 percent) than students from regular classes of 24 (64 percent). The same students also completed school with an honors diploma more often than students from regular classes and dropped out of school less often (15 percent) compared to the regular classes (24 percent).
“Smaller class sizes are a proven school policy that works, narrows the achievement gap and is manageable for both our teachers and students,” said CTU Research Director Dr. Carol Caref.
Echoing education reformers Bill Gates and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, CPS Communication Director Becky Carroll was quoted in the press saying that a teacher of high quality “could take 40 kids in a class and help them succeed.”
Lewis said, “This just evidence of what we’re dealing with at City Hall and CPS–insults and untested hypothesis. This is the result of having decision makers who are completely out of touch—or just plain ignorant—when it comes to what’s going on in the classroom.”
Helen Gym of Parents United for Public Education in Philadelphia writes here:
Diane Ravitch's blog 