Experienced education journalist Jeff Bryant is collecting stories about successful community schools and he would like to hear from you.

Jeff writes:

Education Writers, Bloggers, Podcasters, Content Sharers WantedA national network has organized a project to lift up stories from public schools about their success in using the community schools approach for transformational school improvement. There is a treasure trove of powerful stories about community schools ready to be told. There is authoritative research to validate the approach. And there are audiences eager to learn of an alternative to decades of failed education policies. But we need people – writers, podcasters, TV and print journalists, videographers and community leaders — to tell those stories to the American public. We can connect you to people in these communities so you can tell their stories through your own outlet, your social media channels, or in a regional or national media outlet to a much larger audience. if you’re interested in joining this network, contact Jeff Bryant at jeffb.cdm@gmail.com.
Jeff

Maurice Cunningham is a political science professor at U of Mass who specializes in following the money, especially Dark Money, where the donors are anonymous.

The Koch-Walton backed National Parents Union is experiencing turmoil at the top and severe mismanagement with two boards of directors featuring revolving directors and a disappeared co-founder.. 

The organization is holding a convening on May 15 and its members should demand some answers. 

Here are questions they should be asking the leadership. Any media member who would like to learn about who is pulling the strings at NPU, feel free. 

1. National Parents Union has two boards of directors, one board listed on the NPU webpage, and another on record with the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Corporations Division. The website board members are Peter Cunningham, Dan Weisberg, Vivett Dukes, Arthur Soriano, Vincent Slaughter, Maria del Carmen Parro de Cano, and Dr. Paul Bloomberg. The directors listed on the November 2020 annual report required in Massachusetts are Keri Rodrigues and Tim Langan. There are important legal consequences involved in serving as a director. Can leadership clarify who exercise powers over the National Parents Union? This would be a good question to be asked by Mr. Cunningham, Ms. Dukes, Mr. Soriano, Mr. Slaughter, Ms. Parro de Cano, or Dr. Bloomberg. 

2. The74 identified Ms. Rodrigues as elected in January 2020 to the presidency of NPU for a period of three years.  In the annual statement required to be filed with the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office in November 2020 Ms. Rodrigues is recorded as serving a term as president that ends on December 31, 2025. How long is Ms. Rodrigues’s term and when will the next election for officers of National Parents Union occur? A good question for anyone wanting to run for the well-compensated position of president.

3. In The74, Alma Marquez was identified as a co-founder and was also recorded as elected secretary-treasurer for a three year term. By August 2020 Ms. Marquez disappeared from NPU’s website. Ms. Marquez was also recorded as a director in NPU’s Articles of Organization filed with Massachusetts Secretary of State and signed by President Rodrigues on April 4, 2019. Ms. Marquez was dropped on the November 2020 annual report and from the webpage. What has happened to Ms. Marquez? Will there be an election for her successor as secretary-treasurer? 

4. Not only Ms. Marquez has disappeared. Original website board member Gerard Robinson disappeared sometime between November 15 and December 8, 2020. Since March of this year original website board member Bibb Hubbard has disappeared meaning, that two of the four original website board members and the co-founder have been ousted in little over a year. Why are they gone and what explains the management follies? 

5. In the 2020 annual report filed with the Massachusetts Secretary of State the two directors are identified as Ms. Rodrigues and Tim Langan. Ms. Rodrigues is listed as president and clerk, Mr. Langan as treasurer. They hold the same positions with Massachusetts Parents United (with one additional director), where they are also the two highest paid employees. Does National Parents Union have a Compensation Committee to assure fair compensation and adherence to ethical guidelines over conflicts of interest?Who are the highest compensated directors and officers, and what do they make?

6. On May 8 on Fox News Ms. Rodrigues stated that “We’ve got parent organizations in all 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico.” The only independent analysis of NPU membership shows that membership is largely charter schools and chains in twenty-two states with only four parent organizations represented. Will NPU go public with a list of its parent organizations?

7. According to published reports at The74, the Vela Education Fund, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, National Parents Union has received funding from the following oligarchs through their own foundations or philanthropies they contribute to and control: the Walton family, Bill and Melinda Gates, Michael Dell, the late Eli Broad, Reed Hoffman, John Arnold, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, and Charles Koch. Are there other major donors? What is the annual budget?

8. The Vela Education Fund, a joint venture of the Walton family and Charles Koch, funds National Parents Union as well as the Home School Legal Defense Association, which has been identified as conservative Christian and anti-gay. Is the funding relationship with Vela consistent with NPU’s stated goal of honoring diversity? 

9. Charles Koch also seems to be behind a new far right operation called Parents Defending Education, which is explicitly set up to fight against diversity and to honor the country’s white heritage. Will NPU denounce Parents Defending Education?

10. On the May 8 FoxNews program Ms. Rodrigues indicated reservations about the FDA’s approval and CDC review of the Covid-19 vaccine for 12-15 year olds. Is NPU advocating that CDC guidance is unreliable and that parents should not have their 12-15 year old children vaccinated against Covid-19?

A real board and real members would want answer to all of these questions. Open the floor!

[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy.]

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, reports that the Republican Governor and Legislature are determined to stop teachers from teaching about racism, sexism, and bias because such topics Dow discord and racism. This “cancel culture” at its worst. Every sentient adult who has studied American history knows that racism runs deep and strong in our history and present culture and the best way to eliminate it to confront it honestly.

Thompson writes:

As Education Week explained, across the nation, legislators are attempting to “make it harder for teachers to talk about racism, sexism, and bias in the classroom,” and directly or indirectly ban Critical Race Theory. Oklahoma passed HR 1775 banning mandatory gender or sexual diversity training or counseling, while implicitly threatening lessons about racism.

Oklahoma provides just one example of the way public education and civil discussions are under assault. But it allows us to take inventory of the fraught overall situation, and why the assault on anti-racism is so disturbing and divisive.

As Public Radio Tulsa reported:

HB1775 takes most of its language from an executive order then-President Donald Trump issued in 2020 to ban diversity training by federal agencies and entities receiving federal funding. Civil rights groups challenged that order in court, and a judge blocked it. President Joe Biden rescinded it after taking office.

But, according to Gov. Kevin Stitt, “House Bill 1775 codifies” the words of Martin Luther King calling for “a day when people in America would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Gov. Stitt also said, “now more than ever, we need policies that bring us closer together – not rip us apart.” But the Black Wall Street Times reports that its questions for the governor met with this response:

The spokesperson stated, “Hi Sarah, thanks for reaching out but our policy is to respond to journalists, not activists pretending to be reporters. Good luck! – Carly”.

The Oklahoma City Free Press reports that the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission protested: “the intention of the bill clearly aims to limit teaching the racial implications of America’s history. The bill serves no purpose than to fuel the racism and denial that afflicts our communities and our nation. It is a sad day and a stain on Oklahoma.”

But one of the bill’s authors said it was necessary because of the “harmful indoctrination [which] has infiltrated Oklahoma schools from as early as pre-kindergarten classrooms all the way through college courses.”

Although conservatives now claim their “cut and paste” bills are anti-racist, the Washington Post’sPaul Waldman correctly explains they want to be attacked as racist so they can claim, “We’re the real victims here.”

And a look at the rightwingers’ spin makes their mindset clear. For instance Oklahoma Sen. Shane Jett told the Washington Times that his office “is investigating a handful of K-12 schools where the left-wing philosophy is being taught or incorporated in online classroom materials.” He blames the University of Oklahoma, i.e. “the Democratic People’s Republic of Norman,” for this Marxist indoctrination.”

The Oklahoma Policy Institute’s Ahniwake Rose writes, “We don’t have to dig too deeply to see that Oklahomans still need schooling on these subjects” that HR 1775 makes more risky to teach. Rose notes:

In just the first four months of this year, we have made national news for: a lawmaker referring to “colored babies” in a floor debate, a lawmaker saying transgender people suffer from “mental illness,” another lawmaker comparing efforts to end abortion to the fight against slavery, one elected official comparing Black Lives Matter to the KKK, a state senator making a lewd oral sex reference about the nation’s first Black female vice president during a television interview, a school teacher telling his middle school class that we need a “white history month” after seeing one of his students wearing a t-shirt expressing Black pride and sports announcers caught on a hot mic referring to high school basketball players as “f—– n——.”

Digging just a little deeper, the Human Rights Campaign notes that HR 1775 “is the eighteenth anti-LGBTQ bill to be enacted this year. In addition, 8 anti-LGBTQ bills are on governors’ desks awaiting signature or veto and several more are continuing to move through state legislatures across the country, including SB2 in Oklahoma.”

Moreover, this week’s New York Times reported that, “Two brothers, 8 and 5, (who are Black) were removed from their Oklahoma elementary school classrooms this past week and made to wait out the school day in a front office for wearing T-shirts that read ‘Black Lives Matter.’” The schoolsuperintendent saw the shirts as disruptive “in this emotionally charged environment,” where politics is creating such “anxiety … that I don’t want our kids to deal with.”

This leads to the next source of anxiety for schools navigating the new law as the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre begins on Memorial Day. And that raises the question of whether HR 1775 would also criminalize the Centennial Commission’s curriculum on the Tulsa Massacre?  (And would teachers risk their jobs by drawing upon the “Killers of the Flower Moon” and telling its story of the mass murder of Osages in order to still their oil land rights?)

So, would it be risky for a teacher to assign Tulsa, 1921: Reporting a Massacre by the Tulsa World’sRandy Krehbiel. It presents both sides of the argument whether the desire to take the land owned by black Tulsans was a cause or an effect of the burning of Greenwood. Krehbiel concludes that the prime driver of the mass murder was anger by whites prompted by blacks seeking equal social status, as he also concludes that racism was “engrained” in every aspect of the Jim Crow culture. Could a teacher include that judgment in a lesson on the Massacre? This week, however, the Oklahoma City School Board voted their unanimous opposition to HR 1775, and the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission is being pressured to remove Gov. Stitt and others who supported that “potentially crippling legislation” from its board, as it was announced by “the New Black Panther Party and affiliated organizations that 1,000 armed Black men will march in Tulsa on the weekend of the observance.”

The passage of HR 1775 was almost certainly about sowing discord, even more than changing instruction. So, what’s next?

The Kansas City Star reported on an unprecedented injection of money into the city’s local school board races. An unknown group with unknown donors has given more than $100,000 to pro-charter candidates. This concealment is known as Dark Money.

A newly formed nonprofit has already pumped tens of thousands of dollars into two contested races for the Kansas City Public Schools board, raising suspicions about the group and the candidates vying for seats in Tuesday’s election. 

Blaque KC, short for Black Leaders Advancing Quality Urban Education, has spent more than $100,000 on political consultants, mailed advertisements, radio spots, digital advertising and newspaper ads, according to reports filed this week with the Missouri Ethics Commission. That eclipses the combined fundraising haul of about $42,400 reported by campaign committees for the four candidates — including the two candidates backed by Blaque — running for contested seats on the board. 

While campaign committees regularly report individual donors and expenses, Blaque KC is spending independently of the candidates. And its leader won’t say where the money originated — leading to questions about Blaque KC’s motives. Some believe its ultimate goal is to disrupt the district’s center of power and usher in even more charter schools in Kansas City.

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/education/article250350646.html#storylink=cpy

The race is over. The two Dark Money candidates won. The people of Kasnsaas City deserve to know who bought seats on their school board and why.

If I were betting, I’d guess The City Fund, established initially by billionaires Reed Hastings (Netflix) and John Arnold (ex-Enron) with a startup grant of $200 million. It’s purpose, apparently, is to find small and medium-size districts where a strategic contribution can give charter advocates the upper hand. District by district, they are disrupting, defunding and destroying public education.

The following post was published by the Economic Policy Institute, which is pro-worker, pro-union, and not funded by free-market billionaires.

As we near the end of #TeacherAppreciationWeek, it is worth remembering that one of the ways we can show our appreciation for teachers is to pay them a living salary.

EPI has been tracking trends in teacher pay for over a decade and a half. Our most recent report finds that, on average, teachers earn nearly 20 percent less than similar workers in other occupations. The size of the gap also varies across by state and can be as large as 32.7% less than other comparable college-educated workers.

Teachers typically have better benefits packages, but even after adjusting for the value of these benefits, the average compensation gap remains 10.2%.

Take a look at EPI’s map that measures the pay gap between teachers and similar workers in each state2 and then share it with family and friends.

Leslie T. Fenwick is Dean emerita of the Howard University School of Education. She is an eloquent critic of efforts to deprofessionalize teaching. She believes that teachers need more, not less, preparation for the classroom. This post appeared in Politico.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated harmful educational inequalities in the preK-12 public education system. The nation’s poorest students, Black and Latino students, and our disabled students have been the most negatively impacted by school closings necessitated by the pandemic. Black students in high poverty schools have been especially hard hit because of the racialized, historic and ongoing disinvestment in the education of Black children and youth.

One of the most obvious — and dangerous — ways this inequality shows up is by channeling a proportionally larger share of less qualified or alternatively credentialed teachers to schools with higher percentages of Black, Latino and disabled students. Black and Latino students are more likely than their white peers to be taught by teachers in training who are in alternative teacher preparation programs. These alternative route programs differ from traditional teacher preparation programs in at least one significant way: Most alternative route teacher interns become teachers of record prior to completing any teacher training. This means that as teachers in training, they are not profession-ready on Day 1. They are training on the backs of our neediest students — the students who most need a profession-ready teacher.

The pandemic and racial unrest have revealed just how much further the nation has to go to fulfill children’s constitutional right to equal educational opportunity. State constitutions define this right to an education in beautiful and compelling language as a “democratic imperative,” “fundamental value” and “paramount duty.” Yet, despite these powerful phrases, nearly 30 years of research shows that in schools serving students of color where 50 percent or more are on free or reduced lunch (one indicator of poverty status), these students are 70 percent more likely to have a teacher who is not certified or does not have a college major or minor in the subject area they teach. This finding holds true across four critical subject areas: mathematics, English, social studies, and science.

A review of the typical requirements for traditional teacher preparation and alternative programs — especially those that are not based at universities — reveals just how different the programs are in terms of substantive coursework and the length of time spent devoted to reflective and supervised practice under a fully certified and prepared preK-12 teacher (usually with at least three years of successful teaching experience) and university faculty member. It is clear that these two routes are not producing similar calibers of teachers and, even if they did, the alternative route program places an undue burden on the preK-12 students who are assigned a teacher-in-training as their full-time teacher of record.

This trend of placing untrained and uncertified individuals as teachers of record in schools serving the urban poor and disabled students is accelerating during the pandemic as states utilize more back door routes into classrooms through emergency certificates — in some states, these are granted to individuals with only a high school diploma. This practice is generating a new wave of uncredentialed teachers.

This reality is ill-matched to another circumstance: high stakes standardized tests and graduation examinations are more often used in states with higher percentages of Black and Latino students. How can we continue to educationally malnourish students, raise the bar on what they are expected to know and demonstrate on standardized tests, and lower the standards for the adults who teach them?

Covid-19 has had a profound impact on the teacher pipeline, creating shortages that disproportionately affect Black, brown and low-income students. Are you a teacher or education professional? Tell us how you have seen the pandemic affect teacher training or certification programs and you might be invited to a private discussion with Leslie Fenwick, PhD, and reporter Carly Sitrin.

Teacher quality is clearly tied to opportunity to learn in four categories: the quality of resources, school conditions, curriculum and the teaching that students experience. Yet the data about each of these opportunity-to-learn categories reveal alarming trends. According to the Schott Foundation, which researches and advocates for racial justice in the public school system, Native American, Black and Latino students have just over half the opportunity to learn, compared to white non-Latino students in the nation’s best supported and best performing schools. Additionally, the Schott study found that low-income students of any race or ethnicity have just over half of the opportunity to learn, compared to the average white, non-Latino student. Therefore, the availability and placement of fully credentialed, profession-ready, caring and effective teachers for students of color and poor students is especially acute.

As citizens and leaders, we can certainly tinker around the edges of the current order and attempt to return to a pre-Covid sense of normalcy, but this will not serve the nation well. One reason is that students of color are now the majority of our public school population, which means the majority of today’s public school students have probably not benefited from the prevailing order. In sustained and systematic ways, the new majority of public school students have had their education and life chances stymied by a social contract that consistently ensures lack of access to the best educational resources: namely, teachers.

The federal courts have recognized this reality. Nearly a decade ago, in a case known as Renee v. Duncan, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the practice of disproportionately placing uncertified teachers, teachers in training or teacher interns in classrooms serving poor and minority students is “discriminatory” and “does harm.” Further, the court indicated that the appellants in the case provided evidence that 41 percent of interns in California taught in the 25 percent of schools with the highest concentration of students of color. Further, 61 percent of California’s teacher interns taught in the state’s poorest schools. The court starkly stated: “We conclude that the appellants established injury in fact. This disproportionate distribution of interns … results in a poorer quality education than appellants would otherwise have received.”

Not only is a disproportionate share of students of color saddled with teachers in training, remarkably, nearly 40 percent of special education teachers are coming from alternative preparation routes. This means that while these students come to school ready to learn, their teacher is not fully prepared to teach. They are learning. To teach. On them.

Clearly, the proliferation of ill-credentialed “teachers” and their placement in schools serving the urban poor is linked to a broader issue of the devaluing of public education and the students of color and poor students who have become the majority constituency of public schools. Unfortunately, common sense has not gotten us to equality of educational opportunity and educational equity. Research has not gotten us there. Court decisions and decrees have not gotten us there. State and federal policymaking has not gotten us there. Time has not gotten us there. And, though the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing us to reconfigure and recalculate how to deliver schooling, we should not revert to a “normal” that continues to disadvantage our students who are most in need.

So, what can be done to rectify these problems? There are at least three policy responses that will help:

— Enforce through federal and state statutes and regulations the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Renee v Duncan.

— Incentivize states to approve only those teacher preparation programs — whether they are university-based or not — that meet national accreditation standards.

— Incentivize states to work with districts to develop plans that equitably distribute fully certified, profession-ready teachers.

Ultimately, there are larger questions at stake. Are we as a nation prepared to confront our beliefs about whose children we deem worthy and unworthy of investment? Are we willing and able to dismember the infrastructure, mechanisms and policies that have us ideologically and financially disinvesting from children of color and children from families experiencing poverty? What state, district and school policies and practices routinely privilege white and affluent students and disenfranchise students of color and poor students? How do we move past a deficit perspective about Black and other students of color and create teaching and learning environments that affirm the intellectual capacity and cultural heritage of all students?

In the unfolding pandemic, economic crisis and reckoning on race, governors and mayors are shaping our shared future. Who are the power players, and how are they driving politics and influencing Washington?Full coverage »

The Black Lives Matter movement and protests continue to rightly place structural racism front and center, reinvigorating discussions about diversity in the teacher workforce, the need to change curriculum content imagery and authorship so that it is not exclusively white, and the equitable assignment of teachers so that more students have access to profession-ready teachers.

The Black, Latino and poor children who are languishing in too many under-resourced schools will soon be the majority of adult Americans. They already constitute the majority of public school students. What will it mean for American democracy when these young people — many of whom have been pushed and held at the margins of the social, political and economic order — are the majority of adult citizens? Will their commitment to democracy and public schooling be resonant or absent? What we do now will answer this question in the near future.