I won’t summarize Mike Klonsky on “KIPP and Kopp” and the boycott idea. Suffice it to say that nothing’s going to happen on that front.
Archives for the month of: May, 2018
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented in strong terms from today’s Supreme Court Decision curtailing workers’ Rights.
As the oldest Justice, age 85, she has many admirers who count on her to fight for the average person, not the powerful. She is now affectionately called The Notorious RBG.
Trump’s appointee Neil Gorsuch provided the decisive vote in the 5-4 Decision. He may be the most conservative Justice on the Court.
“In Monday’s case, decided by a bitter 5-4 vote, the conservative majority ruled that employers may forbid employees from banding together to fight wage and other workplace issues covered by arbitration agreements. The court said a federal arbitration statute overrides federal labor law intended to protect workers’ bargaining power.
“Speaking for the four liberal dissenters, Ginsburg said the decision threatens to return the country to a time in the late 19th century and early 20th when workers were forced to take jobs strictly on the boss’s terms and “yellow dog” contracts, forbidding employees from joining labor unions, were common.
“The employees who had brought Monday’s case claimed they had been underpaid in violation of the Fair Labor Standards and wanted to join in a class-action lawsuit in federal court. The Supreme Court majority agreed with their employers that the arbitration contracts they had signed prohibited any collective proceedings.
“Ginsburg declared the agreements “arm-twisted, take-it-or-leave-it contracts.” She noted that the cost of a lawsuit dissuades most workers from seeking to redress a grievance on their own and emphasized the “strength in numbers.”
“She said federal laws dating to the 1930s protect workers’ rights to band together to confront employers about working conditions. “Federal labor law does not countenance such isolation of employees,” she insisted.”
We can pray that Trump does not get a second pick, or that the Democrats control the Senate after 2018 and can block him from picking someone else who wants to set the clock back 100 years and restore the Age of Robber Barons.
Sara Stevenson is a librarian at O. Henry Middle School in Austin. She is retiring at the end of the school year.
She wrote this tribute to the two substitute teachers who died in the massacre at Santa Fe High School in Texas.
Substitute Teacher Martyrs
After each school shooting, I usually have to wait a couple of days before I can read about the victims. Once they are personalized and named, the force of the tragedy strikes another blow. In this latest mass shooting at Santa Fe High School, I noticed that two of the fatalities were not just teachers, but substitute teachers.
Substitute teachers are our unsung heroes. In Austin ISD, substitute teachers make between $75 and $85 per day of service, the latter if they are Texas certified teachers. (Long-term substitute commitments receive an additional $20 after twenty consecutive days). Still, the typical rate is $12 per hour. This compares to an average of $9 per hour for beginning workers at McDonalds.
I went to high school in the 1970s, and I’m still ashamed at how we treated one of our more famous substitute teachers: Mr. Story. He was a retired teacher who wore a suit with a Goodbye Mr. Chips cap and rode his bicycle to school. Times were a’changin’, and Mr. Story was far from cool, so we ignored him, talked to our classmates, and didn’t take him seriously. We snickered when he got angry.
Classroom management is difficult, both a subtle art and practice that takes a career to master, but the regular teacher has the great advantage of setting the tone, the perimeters, and, over time, building relationships with her students. The substitute teacher often enters hostile territory, where children trade names with their peers, pretending to be each other, and often treat the guest teacher disrespectfully. And it’s not just the students. In some schools both staff and faculty treat the substitutes disparagingly, ignoring them in the lunchroom or faculty lounge.
With so many teachers being women of child-bearing age, hiring strong, effective, and committed substitute teachers is especially important during the minimum six weeks’ maternity leave, a sixth of the entire school year. Many substitute teachers are retired teachers who need the extra funds. Austin ISD is one of only twenty Texas school districts which contributes to both the Teacher Retirement System and Social Security. 40% of teachers nationwide depend solely upon their TRS pension. In Texas, retired teachers often go many years before seeing a cost-of-living increase.
Other substitutes are prospective teachers, wisely practicing and “shopping” for a school they would like to work in permanently. Still, I worry that the demanding and often frustrating, sometimes humiliating, experience of subbing will discourage them from the teacher career path, especially in Austin where the unemployment rate is now a low 2.8%.
Substitute teachers are truly the forgotten force of the education world, and these two martyrs, Cynthia Tisdale and Ann Perkins, lost their lives so that the instructional day could continue in the regular teacher’s absence.
I look at their photos in the newspaper today and read:
Anne Perkins, a substitute teacher known as “Grandma Perkins” to her students.
Cynthia Tisdale, a substitute teacher, mother of three and grandmother of eight children.
They lost their lives in the service of educating young people on the lowest rung of the teacher appreciation ladder. These women were needlessly martyred because our elected officials refuse to deal with the epidemic of gun violence in our society.
From Politico:
Former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan endorsed the notion of pulling all public school children out of school until gun laws change. Duncan’s former aide, Peter Cunningham, tweeted on Friday: “Maybe it’s time for America’s 50 million school parents to simply pull their kids out of school until we have better gun laws.” Duncan said it’s a “brilliant” idea that’s “tragically necessary. What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe? My family is all in if we can do this at scale. Parents, will you please join us?” (The Twitter links are in the post.)
Now, they know that nothing happens quickly in Congress. They know the NRA controls the Republican majority. Even if Democrats won both houses of Congress (a big if), Trump would veto anything bill that offended the NRA? Are they suggesting that schools should close for a year or two or three or four or five?
Should we take this seriously? Or is it grandstanding from a guy who was Secretary of Education for 7 years and said nothing (that I remember) about gun violence?
This article by Amadou Diallo in The Hechinger Report describes schools in Philadelphia that rely on project based learning rather than standardized testing. Unlike many such articles, it acknowledges the differences between schools with selective admissions and those that accept all applicants.
A snippet:
An unqualified success for these new schools would be results like those at Science Leadership Academy, a magnet school that is home to the district’s longest-running project-based learning program, which opened in 2006. The school combines rigorous research with student-driven projects that have impact beyond the school building. One student project involved putting on a city-wide Ultimate Frisbee tournament. In the 2016-17 school year, 99 percent of its seniors graduated, and 84 percent attended college immediately afterward. Algebra, Biology and English literature proficiency scores at the school are more than double the district high school average.
“Projects are really hard, collaboration is really hard.”
“As a magnet school,” said Science Leadership Academy principal Chris Lehmann, “we need to be able to prove that the learning we engage in here shows up on the test … without falling into a teach-for-the-test problem. It’s a balancing act. It always has been.”
It may prove difficult for other schools to replicate Science Leadership Academy’s performance, however. As a magnet school, it has selective admissions and attracts students from a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds (fewer than half its students receive free or reduced-price lunch, for example) than the city’s other project-based learning schools.
Lehmann acknowledges the inherent advantages at a school that’s able to choose its students — applicants must meet minimum grade requirements and sit for an interview — but, like his counterparts at Philadelphia’s nonselective project-based learning schools, he argues that we need to be taking a more holistic view of school performance. “How you judge a school is an incredibly nuanced thing,” he said. “The way that we take care of each other and the way that we learn are intertwined.” There may not be a quantitative metric to assess whether students are being provided with meaningful work in an environment that lets them know they are cared for, but Lehmann believes that without those components, grades and test scores become an end unto themselves.
“There’s no [statewide] assessment for being able to look people in the eye and speak clearly.”
Vaux Big Picture High School principal Gabriel Kuriloff
Tamir Harper is an 18-year-old senior at Science Leadership Academy whose passion is education reform: In 2017 he founded a nonprofit that advocates for quality urban education. He says that when he arrived at the school he was obsessed with grades. “I just wanted to know ‘How can I get an A?’ I didn’t care if I was learning, or comprehending,” he said. “Now I’m a student that wants to learn, and I don’t worry about the end result [grade]. I’m into the process.” He says a big part of that shift was the relationships he forged at school. “We’re not just project-based, we’re a community-driven school,” he said.
Fellow senior Madison Militello, 18, says her middle school was very strict, with no room for individual connections. “Here I don’t feel like the teachers are above me. I feel like we’re on the same level,” she said, noting that she’s still close with some teachers even though she doesn’t have their classes anymore. “You can’t teach a group of students you don’t have a connection with.”
That sentiment was a common refrain at Vaux, LINC and Workshop, each of which offer slightly different approaches to project-based learning in underserved communities. Educators at each are confident that the skills their students are acquiring — collaboration, critical thinking and problem-solving — will eventually manifest themselves in improved results on more traditional metrics like math and reading tests. More importantly, however, they believe that students will be much more prepared for the real world when they leave school. Whether project-based learning done on a larger scale can turn the tide in Philadelphia is another question.
“You can create the perfect school model and it’s still not going to solve American poverty,” Hauger said. “We’re moving the needle for every child who comes through the door and sometimes that doesn’t feel like enough.”
In 2013, Rahm Emanuel closed 50 public schools in one day. If for no other reason, he will go down in history as the mayor who shuttered 50 public schools on the same day. Never happened before.
What happened to those schools? Watch this short video.
Did he think that schools are like hot dog stands or shoe stores? If you don’t make a profit, you close it and move on? Did he forget that he was cutting the arteries away from communities, families, and children?
Tina Trujillo at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado’s Michelle Renée suggest that government agencies and policy-makers, including the U.S. Department of Education, would be wise to look at educational research as they guide school turnarounds.
Evidence shows that top-down, punitive efforts are ineffective and counterproductive. Instead, a collaborative, community-driven approach—combined with significant, sustained financial investment and a focus on improving the quality of teaching and learning—has been proven to be the better path to school improvement.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, has fun comparing the boasts of reformers and their response to flat scores on NAEP.
They were so sure that the Common Core and charters would promote dramatic gains in testcscores. But they didn’t.
Read how reformers explain their embarrassment.
That choking sound you hear is me writing the headline for this post.
Just when you thought the charter advocates could not sink any lower in seeking rationalizations for privatization, they go lower yet again.
Writing for the National Education Policy Center, Julian Vasquez Heilig critiqued a University of Arkansas study that purports to show that charter schools are more productive and profoppduce a higher return on investment than public schools. The study under review is called “Bigger Bang, Fewer Bucks.”
What would you care about when comparing two sectors, one of which is staffed by professional educators, the other staffed mainly by TFA temps? Would you care about test scores? Parent satisfaction? Teacher turnover? Student projects? Graduation rates? College acceptance rates? Would you consider how the creation of a second sector affects the health and vitality of the first sector? Would you Permit the Second sector to cripple the first sector?
How about return on investment?
This is a mode of thinking with which I am not compatible. I’m reminded of reading I did in the 1990s, when I learned about efficiency experts who studied the curriculum. I was writing a book called “Left Back,” published in 2000. These scientific curriculum experts worked out a way to compare the cost and value of different subjects. They concluded that Latin was not worth teaching because the unit cost was too high. They would understand this new Arkansas study.
Heilig writes the abstract of his critique:
“A report released by the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform contends that charter schools produce more achievement per dollar invested, as compared to public schools. This newest report is focused on city-level analyses in eight US cities (Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, New York City, San Antonio, and Washington D.C.) and uses cost effectiveness and Return on Investment (ROI) ratios. It concludes that charter schools deliver a weighted average of an additional 4.34 NAEP reading points and 4.73 NAEP math points per $1000 invested. The report also argues that that charter schools offer an advantage of $1.77 in lifetime earnings for each dollar invested, representing a ROI benefit of 38%. However, there are a variety of methodological choices made by the authors that threaten the validity of the results. For example, the report uses revenues rather than actual expenditures – despite well-established critiques of this approach. The report also fails to account for the non-comparability of the student populations in charter and comparison public schools. Three other problems also undercut the report’s claims. First, even though the think tank’s earlier productivity report included a caveat saying that causal claims would not be appropriate, the new report omits that caution. Second, the report’s lack of specificity plagues the accuracy and validity of its calculations; e.g., using state-level data in city-level analyses and completely excluding race and gender. Finally, the authors again fail to reconcile their report with the extensive literature of contrary findings.“
Jean Marzollo died in her sleep at the age of 75. The Network for Public Education expresses its sincere condolences to her family. Jean was a staunch and generous supporter of our work on behalf of public schools, early childhood education, children’s privacy, and other issues that she cared about.
She was well known as the author of the popular “I Spy” series for children. She wrote more than 150 children’s books, all reflecting her love of children and her understanding of their curiosity and humor.
She was born in Manchester, Connecticut, and graduated from Manchester High School. She graduated from the University of Connecticut, earned an MA in teaching at the Harvard graduate school of education and taught high school English. She worked in the publishing industry and eventually began writing books for children.
The millions of children who enjoyed her whimsical writings will miss her.
So will we at the Network for Public Education.
Matt Barnum, writing in Chalkbeat, describes the mixed reactions of high school students to Common Core math.
Some hated it.
Some liked it.
Some found it confusing.
The Common Core standards were supposed to get students to understand math more deeply. For some California high school students, it didn’t work out that way.
“I like working in the old books, because they actually explain it to me,” one said. “Do you want me to learn it? Or do you want me to stare at the problem?”
That’s one response from a survey of students who experienced the shift to the new standards in their math and English classes. The study is quite limited, emerging from interviews from just 54 high-achieving seniors. But it gets at something often overlooked in the political controversy that would eventually surround the standards, which most states adopted in 2010: what it felt like for students to see their classrooms change.
Some of the student’s responses, published last month in a peer-reviewed academic journal, may be surprising. Many blamed the Common Core for encouraging more group work — something they almost universally disliked. In some schools, though, the students appreciated what they perceived as a move away from teacher-led instruction.
Diane Ravitch's blog 