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Newark: Black Students Walk Out of North Star Charter to Protest Mistreatment

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2022 //
24

On Friday, a large continent of Black students walked out of North Star Academy, a high-scoring no-excuses charter school in Newark, New Jersey. The students were protesting the mistreatment of Black students and teachers.

Chalkbeat reports:

Hundreds of students walked out of a Newark charter school and rallied outside City Hall on Friday to call attention to what students said is the frequent mistreatment of Black students and faculty.

Around 9 a.m., students began streaming out of the Lincoln Park High School campus of North Star Academy, which is New Jersey’s largest charter school operator with more than 6,000 students in Newark and Camden. After marching from the Central Ward campus to nearby City Hall, student organizers and a former teacher gave speeches about a culture of anti-Blackness they said pervades the school, while scores of students cheered and waved signs.

“We’re tired and we’ve been fed up,” 12th grader Kwadjo Otoo called out from the steps of the historic building, adding that some Black teachers and students continue to feel disrespected despite efforts by the charter operator’s leadership to address complaintsabout the schools. “Now they’re trying to pretend like something changed, but we know it’s the same school we’ve been going to forever now.”

Several students said multiple Black teachers over the years have left the school, which the students said is because the teachers felt overworked and undervalued. When well-liked Black teachers depart, their absence can leave students feeling isolated, they said.

“It’s very upsetting for us to build bonds with our teachers, to build relationships and connect,” said L. Drummond, a senior at the Lincoln Park campus, “and then see them chased out by the school.”

The school went into lockdown during the protest, and students who left were not allowed back in after they returned from City Hall. Locked out of school, the students began to disperse around 10:30 a.m.; some said they planned to walk home while others set out for a different North Star campus downtown.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Disruption, Education Industry, Newark, Racism, Resistance, Students

West Virginia: Students Walk Out to Protest “Optional” Prayer Meeting During School

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2022 //
11

More than 100 students walked out at Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia, to protest a religious revival in school.

The students “staged a walkout to protest a school-sanctioned religious revival that some of their teachers required them to attend.”

Earlier this week, teachers told students that during a non-instructive class period called COMPASS, they had to go to an assembly where a Christian prayer revival was set to take place. At the assembly, teens were told to close their eyes, raise their arms in prayer and give their lives to Jesus Christ. They were also told that if they didn’t follow the Bible, they would go to hell after they died.

According to reporting from The Associated Press, one student texted his parent, asking, “Is this legal?”

The tenets of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — and a number of Supreme Court rulings — suggest that it was not. According to the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, public schools cannot prevent students from expressing or sharing religious beliefs during school hours. However, school officials cannot impose prayer or other religious practices in the building, even if students are not required to take part; to do so constitutes a violation of students’ religious freedom.

Many students at Huntington High School — and their parents — agreed that the revival was not appropriate, and that it violated students’ rights.

“I don’t think any kind of religious official should be hosted in a taxpayer-funded building with the express purpose of trying to convince minors to become baptized after school hours,” said senior Max Nibert, one of the students who led the walkout. “My rights are non-negotiable…”

A spokesperson for Cabell County Schools claimed that the event was optional, and that two teachers made a mistake when they told students they were required to attend.

But once students were at the revival and tried to leave, some were told they couldn’t do so. A Jewish student reported being told they “needed to stay” at the assembly because the classroom where they would otherwise go was locked and unsupervised.

In other words, while the event may have been quietly billed as optional, there were no other options available for students who didn’t want to attend.

How long will it be until the U.S. Supreme Court, with its new-found devotion to unrestricted religious liberty, rules that religious observances in the schools are hunky-dory?

Categories Freedom, Religion, Resistance, Students, West Virginia

The Oakland School Board Meeting: Heartbreaking

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2022 //
28

I spent the past two hours listening to the Oakland, California, school board meeting, where the board is going to decide whether to close a large number of public schools.

The first group of speakers who addressed the board on their Zoom was students. Some were as young as first grade; others were in middle school or high school. Every single one of them pleaded with the board not to close their school. They talked about how much they loved their school and their teachers. They talked about how much they are learning. They talked about their friends and their community. They spoke passionately about their devotion to their school.

It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the student voices. The board gave them an hour to speak, then extended it by another half hour.

Not a single student said “Please close my school.”

Every student, every single one, pleaded with the board to keep their school open.

Will the board listen?

You can watch here:

https://ousd.zoom.us/j/88586792391?fbclid=IwAR1SI96Ita9iLOgBy5COeHeCttyxoAjRwTPyhG20ozvN6jDbOivbNH_1Fec

Categories Closing schools, Oakland, Students

Nancy Flanagan: A Legislator’s Guide to Education Policymaking

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2022 //
40

Veteran teacher Nancy Flanagan was asked by a candidate for advice about education policy. Nancy wrote a list of ten ideas that she thought would be useful guideposts. She now updates her guide for legislators.

She writes (and I summarize):

#1. You don’t know education just because you went to school…

#2. Plan to pay many non-photo op visits to lots of schools…

#3. Take the tests that kids have to take…

#4. Be picky about what you read, listen to, and believe…

#10. Honor our democratic foundations. Public education is the most democratic of our institutions, one of our best ideas as Americans. Public schools may be tattered and behind the technological curve, but systematically destroying the infrastructure of public education is profoundly selfish and immoral. Don’t be that legislator.

This is a thoughtful and thoughtful-provoking post. She updates it.

What would you add to her list?

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Standardized Testing, Students, Supporting public schools, Teachers

The Real Crisis in Education

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2022 //
31

The Network for Public Education posted this article by Mark Perna, which originally appeared in Forbes.

Mark C. Perna: Why Education Is About To Reach A Crisis Of Epic Proportions

If you missed this widely shared article the first time it was burning around the internet, here’s a chance to catch up. This piece by Mark C. Perna for Forbes lays out just how bad the current crisis is.

In order to reach and teach students effectively, teachers must forge a human connection with them. Today’s younger generations simply will not move forward in their education and career journey without that connection. This is a non-negotiable; it’s just who they are.

The vast majority of teachers truly want to forge that meaningful connection with students. In fact, for many it was the driving force behind their decision to enter the profession. But, understaffed and overworked as they are, many simply have no time to show students that they see, hear, and care about them. Survival mode—where many teachers have lived for the past two years—doesn’t allow much room for relationship building.

This creates a vicious cycle. Students aren’t performing, so more burdens are placed on teachers to help students hit the mark, thus decreasing teachers’ time and bandwidth to forge a human connection with students that is the basis for all learning. Teachers’ legs are cut out from under them, yet they’re still expected to carry their students across the finish line. It’s a gridlock.

What’s the fallout of all this burnout and lack of connection? We’ll see significant drops in three vital areas:

A drop in young people entering the profession, a drop in education quality, and a drop in graduation rates are three problems Perna predicts. Follow this link to read the whole piece.

You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/mark-c-perna-why-education-is-about-to-reach-a-crisis-of-epic-proportions/

———-

Categories Students, Teachers and Teaching

Virginia: More Than Half of School Districts Defying Youngkin Ban on Mask Mandates

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2022 //
30

The Washington Post reports that more than half the school districts in Virginia are defying Governor Youngkin’s order to eliminate mask mandates.

Youngkin boasted on a conservative radio program that only a small percentage of districts were not complying with his belief that masks should be optional.

But a Washington Post analysis shows that the majority of Virginia public school districts — enrolling more than two-thirds of the state’s students — have opted to disobey Youngkin’s mask-optional order. As of Wednesday, two days after the order was supposed to take effect, 69 districts, or 53 percent, are still requiring masks for all students inside schools. Cumulatively, those districts enroll 846,483 students, or about 67 percent of the state’s public school student population. The divide falls along partisan lines, although not perfectly: Almost every district that opted to make masks optional is in a locality that voted for Youngkin in the 2021 gubernatorial election.

The widespread defiance suggests Youngkin will have enormous difficulty in enforcing his mask-optional mandate, which is already the subject of two lawsuits: one from parents in Chesapeake, and one from seven school boards that oversee some of the state’s largest, most prominent school districts. A hearing on the second suit is scheduled for next week. Youngkin has said he will use every tool at his disposal to carry out his order as those cases wind through the court system, and his spokeswoman did not rule out disciplining disobedient districts by yanking their state funding…

Frederick Hess, a senior fellow and director of education policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he thinks Youngkin should stay the course on his masking policies, while vigorously fighting back against the two lawsuits challenging the executive order.

If parents prioritize the health and safety of their children, they will tell them to wear a mask in school and wherever groups of people congregate.

Categories Accountability, Health, Parents, Science, Students, Virginia

High School Students Excel in National Science Competition

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2022 //
106

The mainstream media loves to write negative stories about public schools. Here is a story featured in local news but mostly ignored by the national media.

The Society for Science and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals selected 40 high school seniors as finalists in their national science competition. Eighteen hundred students applied. Each of the finalists wins a prize of $25,000. The top ten winners will receive between $40,000 and $250,000.

The finalists will take part in a week-long competition from March 9-16, where they will undergo a rigorous judging process and compete for more than $1.8 million in awards. They will also interact with leading scientists and share their research during a virtual “Public Day” event on March 13.

Of the 40, nine went to elite private schools; three to charter schools; one was home-schooled. Twenty-seven are students in regular public schools. Seven are students at regular public high schools on Long Island in New York.

What is so impressive about the finalists is their topics, which display a remarkable range and depth of interests.

Here are a few project titles:

Project Title: Isolating and Characterizing Phosphorus-Solubilizing Bacteria from Rhizospheres of Native Plants Grown in Calcareous Soils and Sediments

Project Title: Evaluating Phragmites australis Wrack Accumulation in a Long Island Salt Marsh Ecosystem and Assessing Its Effect on Carbon Sequestration, the Nitrogen Cycle, and Sediment Biota

Project Title: Altered Development of Thymus in Tmem131Knockout Mouse Model of Down Syndrome

Project Title: Larvicidal “Trojan-Horse”: Experimentally Developing a Novel Low-Cost and Eco-Friendly Mosquito Vector Control Treatment

Project Title: Novel Fully MRI Compatible Nonmagnetic and Dielectric Pneumatic Servo Motor for MRI Guided Surgical Robotics

These are amazing students. Next time you hear a pundit ridiculing our schools and our teachers, think of these brilliant kids and their dedicated teachers. I feel better about our future after reading about them.

Categories New York, Science, Students

“I Am a New York City Public High School Student. The Situation Is Beyond Control.”

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2022 //
140

This statement by a student was published anonymously at Reddit. He wanted to explain what is happening in his school in regards to COVID. The situation, as he puts it, is “beyond control.” There are many absences, students as well as teachers. There is very little learning going on. The writer makes clear that he hates remote learning, but given the conditions in the school, he thinks remote learning is preferable to no learning.

The article has created quite a buzz. It has thus far received more than 5,000 comments, mostly from other students, reporting on their schools, but also from teachers. Meanwhile, the new Mayor, Eric Adams, assures the public that all is well.

The statement begins like this:

I’d like to preface this by stating that remote learning was absolutely detrimental to the mental health of myself, my friends, and my peers at school. Despite this, the present conditions within schools necessitates a temporary return to remote learning; if not because of public health, then because of learning loss.

A story of my day:

– I arrived at school and promptly went to Study Hall. I knew that some of my teachers would be absent because they had announced it on Google Classroom earlier in the day. At our school there is a board in front of the auditorium with the list of teachers and seating sections for students within study hall: today there were 14 absent teachers 1st period. There are 11 seatable sections within the auditorium … THREE CLASSES sat on the stage. Study hall has become a super spreader event — I’ll get to this in a moment.

– Second period I had another absent teacher. More of the same from 1st period. It was around this time that 25% of kids, including myself, realized that there were no rules being enforced outside of attendance at the start of the period, and that cutting class was ridiculously easy. We left — there was functionally no learning occurring within study hall, and health conditions were safer outside of the auditorium. It was well beyond max capacity.

Open the link and read the rest.

Some schools are managing very well with in-person learning. Others are not. Schools cannot make up for “learning loss” if there is no instruction going on.

An important point to bear in mind. For everyone, this is an unprecedented time. We are in the midst of a global pandemic. None of us has lived through one before. No one knows what will happen a week or a month or six months from now. We follow the science, protect health and life as best we can, don’t take risks, and hope it ends soon. Odds are COVID will become less virulent, manageable with vaccines, and fade into the long list of diseases from which we must protect ourselves. Maybe next winter, the doctors will remind us to get a flu shot and a COVID shot. Meanwhile, we do the best we can.

Categories Health, New York City, Safety, Students, Teachers

Los Angeles Times: The “Unentitled Kids”: California’s New Generation of College-Bound Stars

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2022 //
35

Teresa Watanabe wrote a wonderful story about kids in a public school in Los Angeles who are college-bound, despite their demographic profiles. They don’t have college-educated parents or SAT tutors. What they do have is a school—the DowntownMagnets High School— where the professionals are dedicated to their success. Read about this school and ask yourself why Bill Gates is not trying to replicate it? Why is it not a model for Michael Bloomberg or Reed Hastings or the Waltons? Why do the billionaires insist, as Bloomberg said recently, that public education is “broken”? Despite their investing hundreds of millions to destroy public schools like the one in this story, they are still performing miracles every day.

They represent the new generation of students reshaping the face of higher education in California: young people with lower family incomes, less parental education and far more racial and ethnic diversity than college applicants of the past. And Downtown Magnets, a small and highly diverse campus of 911 students just north of the Los Angeles Civic Center, is in the vanguard of the change.

Last year, 97% of the school’s seniors were accepted to college, and most enrolled. Among them, 71% of those who applied to a UC campus were admitted, including 19 of the 56 applicants to UC Berkeley — a higher admission rate than at elite Los Angeles private schools such as Harvard-Westlake and Marlborough.

This month, the Downtown Magnets applicants include Nick Saballos, whose Nicaraguan father never finished high school and works for minimum wage as a parking valet but is proud of his son’s passion for astrophysics.

There’s Emily Cruz, who had a rough time focusing on school while being expected to help her Guatemalan immigrant mother with household duties. Emily is determined to become a lawyer or a philosopher.

Kenji Horigome emigrated to Los Angeles from Japan in fourth grade speaking no English, with a single mother who works as a Koreatown restaurant server. Kenji has become a top student and may join the military, in part for the financial aid the GI Bill would provide.

“The main thing my kids lack is a sense of entitlement,” said Lynda McGee, the school’s longtime college counselor. “That’s my biggest enemy: the fact that my students are humble and think they don’t deserve what they actually deserve. It’s more of a mental problem than an academic one.”

What the students do have is a close-knit school community, passionate educators and parents willing to take the extra step to send them to a magnet school located, for many, outside their neighborhoods.

Principal Sarah Usmani leads a staff mindful of creating a campus environment both nurturing and academically rigorous; she has scrounged for money for a psychiatric social worker to help with mental health problems, an attendance counselor to stay on top of absences, an intervention counselor to monitor whether grades drop and an additional academic counselor.

And the students have McGee, who since 2000 has helped shepherd thousands to higher education.

On a recent morning, students lined up to see her in the campus College Center, an inviting space with comfortable sofas, a bank of computers, colorful pennants and stuffed toy mascots from dozens of colleges.

Never mind that it was Thanksgiving break. UC and Cal State application deadlines were just a week away, and McGee’s students needed her.
Ms. McGee, I need a fee waiver! I’m not sure about a major. How do I figure out my weighted GPA?

“I can say no to evening, weekend and holiday work, but that means someone won’t go to college,” McGee said. “There are too many kids, good kids who will take themselves out of the process, and they’ll go to a community college with a 3.9. I can’t carry that guilt.”

McGee keeps close tabs on as many students as she can, often suggesting they consider options other than “the religion of the UC,” as she says many parents, particularly Asian Americans, regard the renowned public research university system.

It’s all about fit, she tells them. If you like personal relationships with faculty, consider smaller private colleges. Think about leaving California to stretch yourself. She gently nudges students with low GPAs away from pinning their hopes on hypercompetitive UCLA and Berkeley and suggests well-regarded but more attainable alternatives: Cal State Dominguez Hills, Woodbury University, Mount St. Mary’s College, Dixie State University.

But she also needs to make sure her top students are aiming high enough.

The day before UC’s Dec. 1 deadline, McGee called Nick into the College Center to check in. The soft-spoken senior and his family live on an annual income of $30,000; at one point, when his father lost his job and the family faced eviction, they had to turn to relatives for help. His parents instilled in him an ethic to never waste — not money, not food, not college opportunities.


At Downtown Magnets, Nick entered the International Baccalaureate program, staying the challenging course when his friends dropped out. He tackled his weakest subject, English, by poring over Harvard professor Matthew Desmond’s exploration of evictions and poverty, to master academic language, text analysis and oral expository skills.

Physics is where Nick soars. His face lights up as he describes his hunger to unravel the mysteries of the universe: why it expands and whether it will stop; how stars become black holes.

Nick has earned a 4.47 GPA, making him the school’s fifth-ranked senior. He didn’t realize that until McGee called him in to tell him.

“You are in the top five, and this is a very competitive senior class,” she said. “If you want to apply to the Ivy Leagues, go for it! Know your worth, and give yourself the opportunities.”

Ivy League schools offer large financial aid packages that can make them cheaper than UC for low-income students, a point McGee amplifies by handing out lists of schools that meet full financial need without loans.
Nick had applied to UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and UC San Diego, along with Stanford. But McGee’s encouragement expanded his thinking beyond top California colleges to the Ivy League.

“I didn’t think I could apply to the Ivy Leagues,” he said. “I didn’t have that much confidence. Hearing from Ms. McGee that I can, I’m going to try.”

The story goes on to offer many other stories of students who came from homes where money was scarce. At Downtown Magnets High, they learned to believe in themselves, and they had the support and guidance to make good choices.

Don’t write off public schools. They have been the gateway to opportunity for millions of students, and they still are.

Someone please send this story to Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, the Waltons, Reed Hastings, John Arnold, Laurene Powell Jobs, and all the other billionaires who waste their money on charter schools, instead of paying attention to successful public schools like Downtown Magnet.

Categories California, Democracy, Higher Education, Los Angeles, Students, Supporting public schools

Jan Resseger: A New Book with Mike Rose’s Last Essay about Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 26, 2021 //
16

Jan Resseger received an early copy of a new book edited by David Berliner and Carl Hermanns (I contributed one of the essays), and she was delighted to discover that the volume contains what must have been one of Mike Rose’s last essays before his untimely death last summer.

She writes:

I just received my pre-ordered copy of a fine new collection of essays from Teachers College Press. In Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, editors David Berliner and Carl Hermanns pull together reflections by 29 writers, who, as the editors declare: “create a vivid and complex portrait of public education in these United States.”

It seems especially appropriate at the end of 2021 to consider one of the essays included in this new book—probably Mike Rose’s final essay—“Reflections on the Public School and the Social Fabric.” Rose, the wonderful writer and UCLA professor of education, died unexpectedly in August.

Rose considers the many possible lenses through which a public can consider and evaluate its public schools: “Public schools are governmental and legal institutions and therefore originate in legislation and foundational documents… All institutions are created for a reason, have a purpose, are goal driven… Equally important as the content of curriculum are the underlying institutional assumptions about ability, knowledge, and the social order… Public schools are physical structures. Each has an address, sits on a parcel of land with geographical coordinates… By virtue of its location in a community, the school is embedded in the social and economic dynamics of that community… The school is a multidimensional social system rich in human interaction… With the increasing application of technocratic frameworks to social and institutional life, it becomes feasible to view schools as quantifiable systems, represented by numbers, tallies, metrics. Some school phenomena lend themselves to counting, though counting alone won’t capture their meaning… And schools can be thought of as part of the social fabric of a community, serving civic and social needs: providing venues for public meetings and political debate, polls, festivities, and during crises shelters, distribution hubs, sites of comfort.”

Please open the link and read on!

Categories Democracy, Literature, Students
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