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The billionaires’ front group called “Families for Excellent Schools” has enlisted the actress Jennifer Hudson to support their campaign for charter schools. She probably thinks these are regular families, not realizing that the “Families” are the Waltons, the Broads, the Paul Tudor Jones family, and other hedge fund managers and equity investors. These are the billionaire families, not the people who need quality public schools for ALL children. Their schools will exclude children with disabilities, English language learners, students returning from prison, and children with behavior problems. All of these children will be dumped in the public schools, while their more fortunate peers are skimmed off. Then the boasting begins. FES is the same organization that has tried to derail Mayor de Blasio’s progressive agenda for children and heaped tens of millions on charter schools, not public schools. Please, Jennifer Hudson, don’t be fooled!

Here are sample tweets:

Good Morning…

Students streamed out of their classrooms chanting in unison in the mountainous Utuado region of Puerto Rico earlier this month.

They took over the halls and doorways of Luis Muñoz Rivera High School on Thursday, Sept. 10, locking their arms together to create a human chain.

They paralyzed their school, shut it down, and allowed no one in or out.

The reason? Not too much homework. Not lack of choice in the cafeteria. Not an unfair dress code.

These roughly 100 teenagers were protesting the loss of their teachers. And they vowed to occupy their own school until the government gave them back.

Six educators had been ordered to other schools, which would have ballooned classes at the Rivera School to 35-40 students per classroom.

Government officials claimed the high school had too few students to justify the cost. However, with more than 500 young people enrolled, the school…

In November 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the Hillsborough County (Florida) Public Schools a $100 million grant as part of its “Empowering Effective Teachers” effort:

Hillsborough County Public Schools

Date: November 2009
Purpose: to support Hillsborough County as part of a cohort of Intensive Partnership Sites to improve teacher effectiveness to transform outcomes for low-income, minority students
Amount: $100,000,000
Term: 80
Topic: College-Ready
Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Tampa, Florida
Grantee Website: http://www.sdhc.k12.fl.us/

The grant was to be paid in 80 installments; if such installments were monthly, then the grant would be paid over roughly seven years, with the final payment made at the end of the 2015-16 school year.

Of course, Gates had some ideas about how this “teacher effectiveness” business should work. The report linked above has as its second sentence, “A teacher’s effectiveness has more impact on student learning than…

The Walton Family Foundation gave away $375 million last year. It gave away $202 million to educational groups.

The foundation’s money is generated by the vast earnings of Walmart. The foundation was established in 1987 by Sam Walton. At least six of the Walton family members are billionaires, maybe more. As they die off, the foundation will grow larger.

The leader of the education part of the Walton Foundation is Marc Sternberg, a favorite of Joel Klein’s, who moved from New York City to Bentonville, Arkansas.

The foundation is not only very wealthy, it has an ideology. It is rightwing. It is reactionary. It does not like public schools. It favors privatization and deregulation, which is what you might expect of a powerful corporation that hates government telling it what to do (like paying its employees a living wage). It hates unions. It loves charters and vouchers.

You might ask…

One of the major victories of the Seattle Education Association was that it reached agreement with the district to eliminate VAM. Henceforth, teachers will not be judged by the test scores of their students. Ding, dong, the fake metric of teacher evaluation is dead! At least in Seattle.

Here is a report on the settlement in the unfriendly, anti-teacher Seattle Times:

Highlights of tentative 3-year contract:
Raises: 3 percent in first year; 2 percent in second; 4.5 percent in third (state cost-of-living raise is additional). More in 2017-18 for some teachers for collaboration, and eight hours of “tech pay” for all school employees.

Discipline: Half day of training on reducing disproportionate discipline for all school employees. Equity committees launched in 30 schools……

Testing: New joint union-district committee to review and recommend testing and testing schedule.

Teacher evaluations: Test scores will no longer play any role.

School day: Will be longer…

This sounds hopeful. California has established a new agency to help and monitor struggling schools, and it will be led by a veteran educator, Carl Cohn.

I know Carl Cohn. He is the paradigm of a sensible and wise leader. He opposes punitive measures. He understands that what matters most is capacity-building and that requires collaboration and trust.

Here is a snippet from the interview linked above:

Cohn says:

“I think this is a dramatic departure from the past. Most of those other efforts were driven by state capitols and the federal government, but this is a major departure. The reason that I’m involved is that it is an opportunity to prove that the state of California has it right to emphasize teaching and learning and support for schools as opposed to embarrassing and punishing and shaming, which is what some have been all about since No Child Left Behind.

One of my dearest high school friends was a bit of a doofus.

Who am I kidding? So was I!

One of our favorite things to do after school was plop on the coach and play shoot ‘em up video games. “Smash TV” was a particular favorite.

We’d bob and weave while clutching controllers and rapidly jamming our thumbs on the buttons.

And at such times, we‘d talk.

No great philosophical problems were solved during these mid-afternoon gaming sessions. We’d talk trash, dissing each other’s gaming skills, bragging about our own, and occasionally quizzing each other with trivia on a shared topic of interest.

We both loved movies, so my buddy used to shout out cinematic quotations and ask me to name where they came from.

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

“Luke, I am your father!”

“Go ahead, punk. Make my day!”

None of these…

The Illinois PARCC results were released yesterday and with no surprises. Failure! It’s happening in all the PARCC states. I know a little about why but I wanted the perspective of a teacher so I reached out to one for whom I have great respect. She’s an insightful Chicago teacher of disadvantaged 8th-grade students who cares. Late last night she responded by email. The story she tells is sad and admittedly angers me as it should anyone who reads this. How could our so-called leaders be so incompetent? Or is it part of a plan to demoralize the students and teachers and in the process destroy traditional public schooling? Or are they just plain stupid? Here is her email. I have removed a partial sentence that contains personal information.

First of all, the students are not accustomed to taking a test on the computer.  There are different tools and if…

Seth Sandronsky, a journalist in California, loves Mercedes Schneider’s new book, “Common Core Dilemma: “Who Owns Our Schools?”

In this review, he summarizes the main themes of the book.

He writes:

“Uncle Sam helped to spur the Common Core State Standards, the newest “big thing” in education reform that profits businesses. Mercedes K. Schneider names the actors and unveils their deeds and words in Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? (Teachers College Press, 2015).

“A laser-like focus on a politically-connected class of edupreneurs propels her empirical case against education privatization’s bid to establish national test-driven assessments and standards for K-12 public schools. There is a vital history here, away from public view for years.

“Schneider clarifies such deliberate obscurity. In an Introduction, 11 chapters, Conclusion, Glossary, Notes and an Index, she investigates the relevant CCSS methods and motives.

“Schneider begins with a look at the Elementary and Secondary…

On November 17, 2015, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) will vote on either the PARCC assessments or the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) as the statewide assessment system for Massachusetts.

In 2015, districts were able to decide on either PARCC or MCAS, with over half using PARCC.

Massachusetts commissioner Mitchell Chester chairs the governing board of the struggling PARCC consortium, and in November 2015, he is to make a formal recommendation to BESE on which assessment system to choose.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker has made two new appointments to BESE. One is Michael Moriarty, a Holyoke education and community development expert.

The other is Harvard University economist Roland Fryer, who was (hmmm…) promoted from assistant professor to full professor after a single year on the Harvard University faculty (and skipping right over associate professor, to boot).

Fryer is also the faculty director of Harvard University-based