- To read the detailed 31 page report go to: The Network for Public Education’s A 50 State Report Card
- To read the detailed 31 page report go to: The Network for Public Education’s A 50 State Report Card
The Shocking 50 State Report Card on Support for Public Education in the U.S.
Why Does the GOP Want to End Local Control?
A very big threat to our republic, the US Constitution and the people’s voice through the democratic process, and it is being pushed hard by the Republican Party.
Lyndsey Layton has a terrific article in today’s Washington Post about the move by GOP governors to end local control when it suits them. They like to say that they are “saving” people or children. Think Flint. Think Detroit. Think Newark. As the late Derrick Bell said in the title of a book, “And They Are Not Saved.”
The GOP once made local control a basic principle. Now it’s not. As Layton points out, Governor Kasich took over Youngstown schools in quiet coup. Governor Deal of Georgia wants to create a takeover district like the so-called “Achievement School District” in Tennessee. Governor Snyder in Michigan has taken over several cities and school districts. The GOP in Virginia wants to supersede local control.
The one thing that all these takeovers have in common is that none has succeeded. Not one. What they do best is to extinguish democracy and give the…
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Unions Can’t Just Be About What We’re Allowed to Do: Social Justice Unionism
If labor unions were an animal, they’d be an old hound dog napping on the porch.
They’re slow to get up and chase away burglars but they do like to howl at night.
Most of the time you don’t even know they’re around until the dinner bell rings. Then that ancient mutt is first to bolt into the kitchen to find a place at the table.
It’s kind of sad really. That faithful old dog used to be really something in his youth.
He was fierce! He’d bark at trespassers even tearing them apart if they threatened his patch of land.
Old Uncle Sam used to yell at him and even threaten the pooch with a rolled up newspaper, but that dog didn’t care. He had a sense of right and wrong, and he didn’t mind getting into deep trouble fighting for what he thought was fair.
Today, however, the…
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Laura Chapman on Gates’ Plans for Teacher Education
Bill Gates has lots of money and a lot of really bad ideas about education—ideas he is forcing on the United States and then the world.
Reader Laura Chapman, retired consultant in arts education, often writes powerful comments. Here is her description of the Gates Foundation’s plans for teacher education.
Gates is not the only funder of specific content in EdWeek. Gates is also the major funder of the annual Quality Counts report in EdWeek, a report card.
Even more interesting is that Gates Foundation has recruited Lynn Olsen, a top EdWeek journalist, to replace Vicki Phillips whose farewell note included some self congratulations about getting the Common Core in place and so forth.
New initiatives for the Gates Foundation focus on getting rid of teacher education in higher education except as an authorizer of credentials, including a masters degree in “effective” teaching. More charter colleges of education are the next step. Relay is one model.
The aim is to dump scholarship in and about education within teacher preparation in favor of a bundle of “high…
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Sandra Stotsky: Massachusetts Excelled Without Annual Testing
Why are so-called education researchers not looking at what Massachusetts did and did not do to increase low-income student achievement without the use of high stakes tests? The answer is obvious. It’s called GREED!
Sandra Stotsky was deeply involved in the transformation of public education in Massachusetts from 1999-2003. As senior associate commissioner of education, she oversaw the development and implementation of curriculum frameworks and testing of entry-level teachers. Massachusetts rose to the top of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. As she explains here, the Bay State did not have annual testing.
She writes:
“K-12 schools have coped with an abundance of mandated testing since the early 1990s. Worse yet, under federal guidelines, the consequences of poor student performance have in the name of accountability come to fall more on teachers than students. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) expanded the educational-level testing mandated in the 1994 authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), mandating annual testing for reading and mathematics in grades 3-8, once in high school, and at several grade levels in science.
“The 2015 re-authorization of…
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Who is stealing from teachers? Sh-h-h. It’s a trade secret.
I’ve known about this legalized theft for some time. It hasn’t reached California yet, but we can be sure that these frauds, who are buying our elected leaders, want to pick the lock to California’s public vault too. If you pay into a retirement pension fund, this is a MUST read. If you vote, be careful who you vote for—beware of Trumps and Bushes in sheep’s clothing. For those who are elligible to vote and don’t, I can’t say what I want to say to those fools.
After several years of being made to seem like another crazy “conspiracy theory” by corporate media coverage of teacher pension theft, the pension theft pattern has emerged into the open. There can no longer be a conspiracy (secret plan of destruction) theory when corporations and pension raiders have had laws passed to protect them from the open theft of our pensions via undisclosed fees for undisclosed investments to undisclosed sources.
Today the manner of theft is out in the open. Who has stolen how much? That is a (now) a legally protected “trade secret.”
The New York Times reports that New York City’s pensions are “hanging by a thread.”
Why? “Trade secrets.”
Fred Klonsky and David Sirota explain New York City’s and Illinois’ latest “trade secrets” that rip us off and endanger the length, size and existence of our pensions. Undisclosed fees – win or lose. High risk hedge and…
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Top 10 Reasons School Choice is No Choice
On the surface of it, school choice sounds like a great idea.
Parents will get to shop for schools and pick the one that best suits their children.
Oh! Look, Honey! This one has an exceptional music program! That one excels in math and science! The drama program at this one is first in the state!
But that’s not at all what school choice actually is.
In reality, it’s just a scam to make private schools cheaper for rich people, further erode the public school system and allow for-profit corporations to gobble up education dollars meant to help children succeed.
Here’s why:
1) Voucher programs almost never provide students with full tuition.
Voucher programs are all the rage especially among conservatives. Legislation has been proposed throughout the country taking a portion of tax dollars that would normally go to a public school and allowing parents to put it toward tuition…
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Corporate driven public education reform is destroying OUR children’s health and future
I was reading the latest issue of National Geographic Magazine when I saw the following paragraph and realized that the test obsessed corporate public education reform movement is threatening the health and future of most of America’s children.
Daniel Stone wrote, “Hard on the Eyes: Rates of myopia have increased around the world, particularly in Asia. In China about 90 percent of 17-to-19-year-old are nearsighted, up from an estimated 10 percent in the 1950s. Myopia is pandemic in the U.S. too, reports the National Eye Institute. Once thought to affect bookish children, nearsightedness is no believed to ‘arise form a lifestyle of not just too much study but of too little time outdoors,’ says researcher Ian Morgan. Glasses can clear up vision, but exposure to sunlight seems to be the best defense. A 2013 study in Taiwan found that spending school recess outside can prevent myopia’s onset.” – National Geographic Magazine, February 2016
There’s a lot more information out there that supports traditionally known methods of educating our children and little or no reputable support for the test obsessed rank-and-punish corporate system that billionaire oligarchs like Bill Gates funds with hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars to force autocratic, opaque, for profit corporate education methods on us and our children.
For instance, “Too much testing is killing recess” – Miami Herald.com
5 Health Benefits of Playing Outside – Care.com
- Improves Vision
- Promotes Social Skills
- Increases Attention Span
- Reduces Stress
- Provides Vitamin D
And there is more, a lot more:
“We are experiencing a cultural shift toward increased academics at the earliest possible age,” says Rhonda Clements, Ed.D., a professor of education at Hofstra University and president of the American Association for the Child’s Right to Play. The organization, part of the International Play Association, formed in 1973 with the mission of “protecting, preserving and promoting play as a fundamental right for all children.” Since then, it has become a leading advocate of preserving recess in schools.
Susan Ohanian was inspired to write the book What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? when she read a 1998 New York Times article detailing the fact that Atlanta was building a new school without a playground. Then-Superintendent of Atlanta Schools Benjamin O. Canada explained the policy this way: “We are intent on improving academic performance. You don’t do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars.” – parenthood.com
“Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.” – ucla.edu
“11 problems caused by the standardized testing obsession” – washingtonpost.com
- The obsession with high-stakes standardized tests is stifling creativity and imagination in the classroom.
- Standardized tests are being used in high-stakes ways to evaluate and punish teachers.
- The obsession with standardized tests is promoting a culture of cheating in many schools.
- When standardized tests are the most important thing, the fostering of critical thinking in the classroom gets short shrift.
- Standardized tests mostly benefit companies making millions from them.
A Kindergartner’s Nightmare: Is this education? Is this what we want for our children and grandchildren? – seattleducation2010
“Today, more than a decade later, the law (that supports high stakes testing) is uniformly blamed for stripping curriculum opportunities, including art, music, physical education and more, and imposing a brutal testing regime that has forced educators to focus their time and energy on preparing for tests in a narrow range of subjects: namely, English/language arts and math. For students in low-income communities, the impact has been devastating. – neatoday.org
Positive Effects of Extra Curricular Activities on Students – dc.cod.edu
“Extracurricular activities are activities that students participate in that do not fall into the realm of normal curriculum of schools. They are found in all levels of our schools. There are many forms of extracurricular activities such as sports, clubs, governance, student newspaper, music, art, and drama. Extracurricular activities are totally voluntary so students that do not want to participate in them do not have to. Lunnenburg states in his article that “Extracurricular activities serve the same goals and functions as the required and elective courses in the curriculum. However, they provide experiences that are not included in formal courses of study. They allow students to apply the knowledge that they have learned in other classes and acquire concepts of democratic life.”(2010, 2) Extracurricular activities have many positive effects on education. The positive effects that extracurricular activities have on students are behavior, better grades, school completion, positive aspects to become successful adults, and a social aspect.”
Education Inc.: How Private Companies Profit from Public Schools – commondreams.org
“For statewide testing in Texas alone, the company (Pearson) holds a five-year contract worth nearly $500 million to create and administer exams.” … “The mingling of business and education blurs the line between learning and profit-making. Some education reformers advocating for increased reliance on testing also lobby for the large testing companies. It’s often difficult to tell if lawmakers stick with education policies because they’re effective, or because they’re attached to high-dollar contracts.
“The emphasis on testing opened the door to more for-profit companies. In addition to the big testing contracts, No Child Left Behind requires schools that fail to meet requirements three years in a row to offer free tutoring. Companies soon rushed in to fill the need. By 2008, according to a PBS documentary, tutoring for standardized tests amounted to a $4 billion industry. Charter schools can subcontract their entire operations to for-profit companies.”
In conclusion: if you have read this far, who do you think benefits from corporate driven public education reform—funded by a few billionaire oligarchs, like Bill Gates, the Walton family and the Koch brothers—our children or the corporations and names behind the systematic destruction of community based, democratic, non-profit, transparent public education?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
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Florida: Democratic Leader in House Urges Parents to Opt Out
Florida’s Democratic leader of the House is urging parents to opt their children out of testing. If other Democrats joined in, there would be a groundswell of support for opting out.
“Florida Rep. Mark Pafford, leader of the House Democrats, is urging parents to consider taking their children out of the annual spring Florida Standards Assessments.
“I hope every parent begins to take the time to understand how serious this issue is,” Pafford said at a recent press availability. “That their children are being subjected to tests that in the end don’t amount to much. That the data that comes from those tests are sometimes shared so late it doesn’t matter.
“And, frankly… you have to question the purpose of these tests, whether they’re being used in the best way for children in advancing the public education system, or whether, in fact, they’re being used to create a bastardized type…
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Detroit Public Schools: Beyond a State of Emergency
Reading this post brought back a flood of memories that caused my eyes to fill with tears. I also taught in classrooms and schools that were run down and in need of serious upgrading and repairs.
Since 1999, the state has been “taking over” Detroit Public Schools. Since 2009, Detroit’s schools have been subject to a stream of emergency managers who move in for just under 18 months, do not answer to voters, and can basically do what they want without consequence.
The Detroit Public Schools state takeover is a dismal failure, as noted in this February 2015 Metro Times article:
The district’s struggles can be traced to a skein of historic factors, beginning with the city’s long-declining population, a trend that started in the 1950s and continues today.
Another major factor was the approval of 1994’s Proposal A in a statewide referendum that radically changed the way Michigan finances education, shifting from a primary reliance on local property taxes to a “per pupil” foundation grant provided by the state.
The two factors — the continued loss of students and the state funding that comes with them…
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 