The New York Times has a fascinating analysis of the mayoral election in Chicago.
In 2011, Rahm Emanuel cruised to victory with a 31% margin. In the 2015 primary, he did not win a majority.
Rahm’s base is white voters.
If Chuy Garcia turns out the Hispanic vote and wins the black vote,Rahm could lose.
The Néw York Times says Hillary Clinton will be forced to choose between the Wall Street big donors and the teachers’ unions.
The real choice is between Wall Street money on one hand and millions of parents and teachers who are fed up with high-stakes testing and privatization of public schools, on the other.
Then it refers to the Democrats for Education Reform as a “left of center group,” even though its program is indistinguishable from that of Republican governors and it was denounced by the California Democratic Party as a front for corporate interests.
If you live in or near Milwaukee, try to meet and hear these veterans of the Great Néw Orleans Con Job:
On March 26th and 27th you will have a chance to interact with three activist immersed in the fight for public education in New Orleans.
On Thursday, March 26, 2015 at 4:30 p.m. at Milwaukee High School of the Arts (2300 W. Highland Ave.) they will conduct workshops. All are invited.
Friday, March 27, 2015 • 6:00 p.m. at Parklawn Assembly of God (3725 N. Sherman Blvd.) they will participate in a community meeting and panel.
Karran Harper Royal is a New Orleans
public school parent who
cares about real education
reform. She is an advocate
for disabled and challenged
children and an educational
policy consultant.
Dr. Raynard Sanders
has more than 30 years of
experience in teaching,
educational administration,
and economic/community
development. He is a former
New Orleans high school principal.
Dr. Kristen Buras is an
associate professor in
Educational Policy Studies
at Georgia State University
in Atlanta. Buras has spent
the past decade researching
school reform in New Orleans.
See below for leaflets for both events:
Expert Panel Flyer 2015
The D.C. Charter board turned down a request by BASIS charter school to expand. The board was concerned about attrition. BASIS said it needed more revenue.
The interesting parts of this story:
1. Charters were supposed to meet the needs of at-risk students. BASIS requires students to pass AP courses.
2. The school keeps the tuition if the students return to public schools. “The city’s funding rules allowed BASIS to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in per-pupil allotments for the students it lost after Oct. 5, while the schools that received those students got no additional money.”
3. The school’s rent is going to nearly double next year. Somebody is cleaning up with public money. “The BASIS lease was structured so that this year’s rent, about $1.1 million, will nearly double next year to $2 million.”
Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic governor of Virginia, signed a law repealing the A-F letter grades for schools. As Lindsay Wagner of NC Policy Watch reports, this action takes place at the same time that North Carolina learned that the letter grades are highly correlated with the proportion of disadvantaged students in the school. Thus, the report card serves to stigmatize schools with high poverty levels, making it harder for them to recruit teachers and setting them up for takeover and privatization.
The A-F letter grades are Jeb Bush’s idea. As State Superintendent Tony Bennett showed in Indiana, the formula for the letter grades can be manipulated to protect campaign donors who own charter schools. Mainly they stigmatize schools that serve the neediest children.
Jason Stanford, an investigative journalist in Texas, writes that he took the fourth grade ELA test, composed of sample questions from the Smarter Balanced Assessment. He decided to do this after learning that a sixth grader challenged legislators to take the test.
A 6th grader in East Texas recently challenged state lawmakers to do what she and every other public-school kid have to do during testing season: “Sit in a room for up to four hours, without talking, writing, drawing, reading, or using your cell phone.” Because millions of children are taking Common Core standardized tests this time of year, I did her one better. I took a 4th-grade English Language Arts practice test. The good news is I passed.
The bad news is that the test is basically worthless, highlighting the folly of using standardized tests to measure a child’s ability to read and write. And to the Texas 6th grader’s point, in no way whatsoever was I able to quietly sit still for that long. Of course, it didn’t take me four hours to complete the sample test. I don’t want to brag, but I’m very advanced for a 4th grader.
There were questions that he found confusing. There were questions that made him want to strangle whoever wrote them. There was no real literature. There were questions with no right answers or possibly two right answers. The big problem, he concludes, is the assumption that standardized tests can assess what children understand or know or can do.
The writing portion of the test was ludicrous. Students were given a business card-shaped rectangle in which to record their analysis. You could replace this entire test with a book report and come out ahead. Actually, you could probably buy every child in America first editions and come out ahead. The price tag on SBAC tests in California alone is $1 billion.
We’re so focused on measuring children that we’ve stopped developing them. These tests don’t measure what we want our children to learn and are a waste of money. That Texas 6th grader has a point. I can’t sit quietly. This test is failing our children.
Audrey Beardsley, one of the nation’s leading experts on teacher evaluation, recently visited Néw Mexico and there found an unhappy, test-obsessed school system.
She says Néw Mexico has gone “high stakes silly.” She attributes this to state commissioner Hanna Skandera, who was deputy commissioner in Florida when Jeb Bush was governor. Hanna never taught. She believes in the Bush gospel of testing.
What’s more, teachers in NM must sign a contract promising never to disparage the tests in school or in public. Beardsley tried to make sense of the state’s VAM program but couldn’t. Then she learned that a group of rocket scientists at Los Alamos tried to understand it, and they couldn’t either.
A group of activist parents have turned the tide against high-stakes testing in Texas. They organized, informed themselves, informed others, and button-holed their state legislators about the overuse and misuse of testing in Texas’s public schools. Because of their activities and their persistence, they persuaded the legislators to reduce the number of tests needed to graduate. They are continuing their campaign by exposing the cost and continued overuse of standardized testing.
The group is called TAMSA, or Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, but admirers often call them “Moms Against Drunk Testing.”
They created a powerpoint to explain their concerns.
The powerpoint can be seen here. Watch it and consider doing the same thing in your state. If we organize and mobilize like TAMSA, we can turn around legislatures across the nation.
Can you imagine the legislators of your state inventing a new way to evaluate their profession, without inviting any members of the profession to have a say?
Can you imagine the legislators telling the medical profession how to evaluate doctors, but not asking the advice of any doctors?
Let’s not talk about lawyers, because most of them are lawyers, and they wouldn’t dream of evaluating themselves.
Here it is: a new plan to evaluate teachers, but no one knows what it means. Of course, the writer of the article assumes that the teachers’ union is the main opposition to legislated evaluation. They forget that parents don’t want test scores to be the most important way to judge the quality of their child, their school and their teachers. They don’t want the school to give up the arts so there is more time for test prep. They don’t want Albany telling their principal how to decide which teachers are best. Legislators don’t credit them with caring about their children.
Newsflash to Albany: Parents love their children more than you do.
A group called the “Hedge Clippers” organized a protest in front of the building where hedge fund manager Dan Loeb lives, to protest his funding of Republican control of the state senate, as well as charter schools. This is the kind of political activism that was common in the late 1960s to protest the war in Vietnam, but has seldom been seen in this country since then.
A story on WBAI reported the protest rally:
Shame the hedge fund billionaires, go where they live and demonstrate. This is a technique used in Latin America called escrache, but it’s also being used in New York City.
“Hedge Clippers, I guess you can kind of consider everything we do as part of Occupy Wall Street.” Activist Nick McMurray says Hedge Clippers keep the movement going.
“You can call us radicals, but at the end of the day we’re just people putting our foot down and we’re trying to stand up for what’s right and for what we really need in the world and in New York State.”
Zachary Lerner with NY Communities for Change @nychange led Hedge Clippers in a mic check: “Dan Loeb’s politics demonize the immigrants. Dan Loeb’s politics are hostile. Dan Loeb’s politics are powerful. Dan Loeb’s money is massive, so We the People are fighting back.”
Over the weekend, the Hedge Clippers chose the Central Park West residence of hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb as their target. The hedge fund mogul gave over a million dollars to a super pac, New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany. According to a Nation Magazine expose, it poured $4.3 million into six senate races. This helped tip the balance in favor of Senate Republicans here in New York State, where we have six times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. And Dan Loeb sits on the board of Success Academy, Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools
“There’s a paper trail for everything.” says Nilsa Toledo, a hedge clipper with New York Communities for Change. “He has given mega money to Success Academy and all these pacs for charter schools, on top of giving mega millions to our Senate and our Governor who is supposed to be representing the people, not just the people with a lot of zeros in their bank accounts. That’s really unfair. That’s why we’re standing together against it.”
Toledo has children in public schools in Flatbush, Brooklyn. She says billionaire hedge funders like Dan Loeb, behind charter school funding and lobbying efforts, hurt public schools forced to co-locate, to share their space. “I think that they should pay their own way. They shouldn’t co-locate in public schools. It happened to my son’s school and the quality is so different. In the charter side they have flat screen tvs. Every kid has a laptop and meanwhile I’m paying for that, but in my son’s school, they are lacking. Textbooks are still from 1998. lt’s really disgusting. The teacher’s have to pay out of their own pocket, just to make sure the kid’s have basic education and it’s not right. Our public schools are already owed billions of dollars. Public schools in the city have been underfunded and our government is ignoring that, but meanwhile they are passing policies that benefit the few. All these tax breaks and all these loopholes that are being exploited by these guys are not being closed, but meanwhile our kids are suffering, our communities are suffering and we need to stand up together to make a change.
Mindy Rosier teaches Special Education at a Special Needs School in Harlem. She came out to protest the hedge fund billionaire: “For Daniel Loeb to pay his fair share, to pay his taxes. He’s a contributor to Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy which has been stealing from my school for eight years and tried to kick us out, so I’m here to stand up for my community, for my students, for public schools. If you’re not helping the public schools out, you’re not a friend to the City as far as I’m concerned.”
Protesters chant, “Pay your taxes, Dan Loeb. Pay your taxes, Dan Loeb.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 