BREAKING BAY AREA NEWS: In a news conference this afternoon, the 3,000-member Oakland Education Association union set a strike date of Thursday, Feb. 21. Please see OEA news release below…..
Mike Myslinski
Headquarters Communications
California Teachers Association
408-921-5769 (cell)
NEWS RELEASE
February 16, 2019
Oakland Education Association
272 East 12th Street
Oakland, CA 94606
Contacts:
–OEA President Keith Brown on cell at 510-866-8280.
–Mike Myslinski with CTA Communications on cell at 408-921-5769.
On Twitter: @oaklandea, #Unite4OaklandKids, #WeAreOEA, #RedForEd, #WeAreCTA
OEA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OaklandEA/
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oakland Education Association Sets Strike Date
of Thursday, Feb. 21, to Fight for Oakland Schools
Priorities Remain – Smaller Class Sizes, More Support for Students,
Living Wages and a Halt to Destructive School Closures
OAKLAND – To stand and fight for the quality schools that all Oakland students deserve…
View original post 1,181 more words
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 
myfellowteachers
February 18, 2019 at 10:58
I agree that all students deserve a quality school. That’s why school choice ought to be championed by teachers’ unions. . . poorly performing schools close, and all of those children and their families get to choose a school that is demonstrating quality results, rather than remaining stuck in a bad school. Charter schools often offer such a choice, and do so with 80% of the per student allotted dollar amount. So how is it draining public schools when they keep the other 20%? Doesn’t that mean they have extra dollars for their remaining students? I doubt parents appreciate having their children miss days of instruction so the adults in a union can scream on the street corners. Isn’t there a better way to resolve differences than using children as bargaining chips? Unions may be unwittingly driving parents toward choosing charter schools and other alternatives that don’t disrupt their child’s education.
Lloyd Lofthouse
February 18, 2019 at 15:58
Someone going by the opaque name of My Fellow Teachers wrote, “That’s why school choice ought to be championed by teachers’ unions. . . poorly performing schools close, and all of those children and their families get to choose a school that is demonstrating quality results,”
My first response: MFT, “You are full of moldy baloney for brains!”
Yes, that was an angry response to someone I think is another ignorant alleged troll.
Why would I respond that way?
Because I taught for thirty years in public schools that would all be labeled FAILURES due to misleading and flawed test results.
For instance, California started to grade its public schools based on statewide standardized tests years before the Fraud called Common Core came along like a pile of cow dung and forced high-stakes, rank-and-punish tests on the nation using bribery to make it happen.
During those years before the malignant virus called Common Core, California used its own standardized tests to rank schools on a scale of 1 to 10. The high school where I was teaching the last sixteen years of the thirty I was a classroom public school teacher ended up being ranked two or three and was under pressure to raise that rank or face being taken over by the state.
The poverty rate in most of the schools in the district where I taught ran from 70 percent to more than 90 percent. The community around the first-grade school where I taught as a long term sub, the middle school where I was hired full time and the high school where I finished my thirty years was located in a community ruled over by violent, multi-generational street gangs.
Violence and poverty are horrible partners when it comes to nourishing a healthy learning environment,, but there were still students who graduated with honors from that high school and went on to attend colleges and universities like MIT and Stanford.
Even a study out of Stanford revealed this factual truth: “Poor ranking on international test misleading about U.S. student performance, Stanford researcher finds.”
… “There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.
“Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.” …
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
Now, back to Nogales High School in La Puente, California where I taught until 2005. One year, when California published the results of the state’s standardized test ranking all the states public schools from failing to great, many of the students/children in my English classes laughed and some said, “I (their teacher and all the other teachers) were failures because the school had failed.”
I quieted them all down and corrected their thinking. A few miles away from Nogales was Walnut Valley High school. On that scale of one to ten, it was ranked a NINE, one of the highest rankings in the state at the time up in the top 10 Percent.
This is what I told my students at Nogales, “If we switched students but kept all the teachers in place, next year, Nogales would earn that NINE and be ranked in the top 10 percent but Walnut Valley High school would be ranked near the bottom, because that label that says a school is failing comes from the result of the students test scores, not from the quality of teachers or teaching.” I pointed out that learning only/mostly takes place when the students ask questions, read the work, read books for fun, and do all the assignments.
When I was done, not one student in my English classes argued with me, because they knew most of them didn’t do the reading, read on their own, and complete the classwork and homework required to learn what the teachers were struggling to teach them.
Walnut Valley High School is located in an area without multi-generational street gangs or a high ratio of child poverty like the community where I taught for thirty years. In fact, the grade school I started teaching was in an area so violent, so dangeorus, that there were coils of razor wire along the roof to keep the gangbangers off the roofs so they wouldn’t use axes to chop their way into the school and loot it. The local police would not patrol the streets around the schools at night because it was so dangerous. One morning I arrived to discover the classroom doors were riddled with bullet holes that the custodians were filling in and painting over.
Poverty and violence is the reason schools are being labeled failures and it seldom if ever has anything to do with the teachers or quality of teaching.
There is an old saying that fits “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make the horse drink it.”
myfellowteachers
February 19, 2019 at 21:23
I’m not likely to read responses that begin with an insult. Each person on earth has inherent value and worth and ought to be treated as such. I appreciate that you have your own personal convictions and beliefs, and much prefer healthy, respectful debate and reasoning to ridicule.
Lloyd Lofthouse
February 20, 2019 at 07:30
Sorry, with me, you can’t get off that easy by alleging I started off my comment with an insult directed at you specifically.
I don’t think of it as an insult. Ignorance is a reality and anyone who supports publicly funded school choice between transparent public schools where local school boards are elected by voters in that school district to oversee those schools and make sure they adhere to the laws and rules that came about by the legislative process as defined by state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution versus a publicly funded, opaque, private sector charter schools managed by CEOs and stockholders that do not answer to the voters or follow the same rules and laws is ignorant.
All the publicly funded schools in the U.S. must adhere and follow all the same laws and legislation that governs the K-12 schools, There cannot be two publicly funded systems. One that must obey the laws and one that doesn’t have to.
What is wrong with all publicly funded schools in the U.S. following all the same rules and laws like they do in Finland where parents have a choice between publicly funded schools that are public or private but all those schools must follow all the same rules and all the teachers in Finland must be paid the same and meet the same high standards regardless of the school is public or private?