Read it and laugh.
Then ask yourself why the writers at the Onion are so much smarter than every major newspaper, TV channel, and other mainstream media.
Archives for the month of: May, 2015
Leonie Haimson and Diane Ravitch
Patrick Sullivan and Monica Major
Emily Horowitz and Cynthia Wachtell
invite you to
Class Size Matters Annual “Skinny” Awards Dinner
When: Tuesday, June 9 at 6:30 PM
Where: Il Bastardo/Bocca Di Bacco
191 7th Ave (21st St)
New York, NY 10011
A fundraiser for Class Size Matters
Please join us to honor the New York leaders of the Opt-Out Movement
Change the Stakes
NYC Opt-out
NY State Allies for Public Education
An opportunity to enjoy a four course dinner with wine
And to celebrate three organizations that led a historic movement resulting in 200,000 students refusing to take the NY state tests this year !
Tickets: $250 – Defender of Public Education
$150 – Patron
$75 – Supporter
To buy tickets please click here or here:
http://www.nycharities.org/events/EventLevels.aspx?ETID=8217
Gene V. Glass, distinguished researcher of education at Arizona State University, surveys the amazing spread of school choice in Arizona and asks what are the results of the spread of choice. You have heard the stories about how vouchers and charters will “save poor kids from failing schools,” will create competition to improve public schools, will work wonders for everyone. It turns out that Arizona is the choice capital of the world but is still waiting for that miraculous success that its advocates promised and still promise.
Professor Glass shows how dramatically choice has spread across Arizona, with the urging of choice advocates in the government and the private sector.
Glass writes:
Now Arizona is the school choice capital of the world: 1) 500 charter schools – soon to be closer to 600 if New Schools for Phoenix has its way, and they will; 2) huge virtual academies run by out-of-state companies like K12 Inc.; 3) open enrollment laws; 4) tuition tax credits subsidizing families sending their kids to religious schools; and 5) a history of active homeschooling. In fact, the number of students whose parents have “chosen” is staggering. There are 1,100,000 students of K-12 school age in Arizona. Of that number, 180,000 attend charter schools, 200,000 have exercised their right to switch school districts under open enrollment laws, and about 80,000 attend private (mostly religious)schools or are homeschooled. That amounts to more than 400,000 “choice students” in Arizona out of a population of a little more than one million for a choice ratio of about 40% plus.
With nearly half of all students enjoying the benefit of choice – with its effects on driving incompetent teachers out of work, shutting down bad schools, stimulating private and public schools to reach higher levels of effort and innovation – the condition of K-12 education in Arizona must be nothing short of fantastic!
But, to hear the state’s politicians and business leaders speak of it, Arizona’s school systems are terrible. Below average; lagging behind other nations; a threat to the economy of the entire state; not preparing students for college or careers; in need of major reforms; bring on the Common Core. Arizona’s education system is the paragon of choice, and yet it is a mess. Somebody needs to get their stories straight.
Julian Vasquez Heilig reports that the school board of Santa Ana, CA, will decide today whether to hire TFA to teach students with disabilities.
Why would anyone hire the least experienced, least prepared youngsters to teach children with the greatest needs?
Blogger Louisina Educator writes of the combination of forces fighting for Common Core:
“These heavily promoted standards pushed by an alliance of so called education reformers such as the Gates Foundation, The Broad and Walton Foundations, the Pearson education publishing conglomerate, and the Obama administration are also supported by the Charter School Association, big business interests LABI, CABL, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber of Commerce and two astro turf groups (phony grassroots organizations funded by the big foundations). All of these groups will also be fighting hard to kill HB 21 and 340 that would only modestly curtail the expansion of New Charter schools in Louisiana.
“The dedicated and informed parents and educators who oppose Common Core and PARCC testing are so outgunned by the privatization and Common Core promoters that the battle this week could be compared to confronting an Abrams tank with a BB gun.”
Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center on Long Island in Néw York, is retiring to spend her time fighting phony and harmful “reforms.”
Burris has been one of the most effective critics of Common Core and high-stakes testing. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the legislsture’s passage of Governor Cuomo’s anti-teacher, anti- public school evaluation plan based on test scores.
Burris is a brilliant writer and a terrific organizer. She will be a tremendous addition to the struggle to save public education and protect children.
According to this article at Huffington post, State Superintendent of Education Glenda Ritz is thinking about running against Governor Pence next year. She won more votes than he did in 2012.
He has been harassing Ritz ever since in an effort to belittle her. He made a fool of himself nationally by signing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, then backtracking when national corporations complained that they would boycott Indiana if the state allowed anti-gay discrimination.
Ritz has a chance to restore common sense and decency to Indiana. Go, Glenda!
David Sirota and Matthew Cuningham-Cook report that the Andrew Cuomo administration continues to funnel state bond business to campaign contributors.
They write:
“New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is undeterred. Despite revelations last week that the governor’s officials have steered state housing bond work to his campaign contributors in apparent defiance of federal pay-to-play rules, New York state officials on Friday announced they are giving those same donors even more lucrative business — this time on a massive new transportation revenue bond. The announcement of the deal — which was not competitively bid — comes as a top compliance lawyer in Washington, D.C., suggested that the deal between Cuomo’s administration and the governor’s donors may run afoul of the federal rules.
“According to a prospectus released Friday afternoon, the state’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has designated JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America to help manage a new $225 million bond. The deal was given to the firms without competitive bids, according to MTA spokesperson Adam Lisberg. As International Business Times has reported, the political action committees of those three financial institutions have given the Democratic governor more than $132,000 in campaign contributions since 2012, and the same three banking groups have been given work by Cuomo’s housing agency on 27 separate bonds worth more than $3 billion.
“A rule of the federal Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) prohibits bond work from going to financial firms that make campaign contributions to public officials who control bond decisions. Cuomo appoints the head of the state housing agency that gave the firms housing bonds, and he nominated four of the board members of the MTA — including its CEO — who made the decision to direct the transportation bond work to the three firms.”
One of Arne Duncan’s significant initiatives is the so-called “turnaround strategy,” which usually requires dramatic action, like closing the school, firing the principal, and firing all or most of the staff. This is the Shock Doctrine at work.
The strategy is disruptive and destroys careers, but Duncan continues to defend it.
The Obama administration’s favorite D.C. think tank–the Center for American Progress–reviewed the turnaround strategy and declared it a great success. CAP has regularly applauded all of Duncan’s initiatives. The president of CAP is John Podesta, who headed Obama’s transition team. He is presently chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Carmel Martin, previously an assistant secretary in the US DOE under Duncan is now executive vice-president for policy at CAP.
The National Education Policy Center, known for its reviews of think-tank reports, published a scathing analysis of CAP’s report.
“BOULDER, CO (May 11, 2015) — A recent report from the Center for American Progress claims to offer clear lessons about research-based, effective methods for turning around low-performing schools. A new review, however, concludes that these lessons are not supported by rigorous research.
Tina Trujillo of the University of California, Berkeley reviewed Dramatic Action, Dramatic Improvement: The Research on School Turnaround for the Think Twice think tank review project. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.
Trujillo, an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, studies the political dimensions of urban district reform and trends in urban educational leadership. The report Trujillo reviewed was written by Tiffany D. Miller and Catherine Brown and published by the Center for American Progress.
Dramatic Action, Dramatic Improvement argues that the body of available research determines that bold actions are necessary for schools to improve measurably. The authors advocate for the School Improvement Grant (SIG) federal program to bring about the most effective methods for turning around low-performing schools.
The SIG program’s policies have a superficial appeal, given the unsatisfactory outcomes at these schools. But those policies, like the report, are based on unwarranted claims, are unsupported by rigorous research, and are in fact contradicted by the empirical evidence, Trujillo writes.
She points, for instance, to the claim that dramatic changes in staffing and management can spur fast and sustainable improvement. Such disruptions often lead to poor school performance, but this readily available research is not mentioned or addressed in the report.
In her review, Trujillo finds the authors’ rationale “narrow, incoherent, and misleading.” The report, she asserts, fails to incorporate lessons learned from plentiful research on school improvement, high-stakes accountability, and federally funded turnarounds.
“In the end,” Trujillo states, “schools, districts, and states that follow the report’s advice stand only to reproduce the unequal conditions that have led, in part, to their need for dramatic turnaround in the first place.”
Dave Woo, a teacher at Urban Prep Charter Academy for six years, explains that his school needs a union to hold it accountable for its free-wheeling use of taxpayer dollars.
“When a majority of teachers and staff at Urban Prep decided to organize a union represented by the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, one of the first actions we took was to file a FOIA request in order to get a better sense of how the Urban Prep network uses the tax dollars and private donations it receives. Here are some of the things we found:
“Urban Prep spends over a quarter of a million dollars a year renting out downtown office space across the street from the Trump International Hotel and Tower for the network administrative staff.”
But that wasn’t all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 