Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

The University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education is a major honor for a book. This year’s winners wrote an important book that shows that education alone does not overcome poverty. The implication is that society must have social and economic policies that reduce poverty in addition to providing equal educational opportunity. In 2015, the award went to Andrew Hargreaves and Michael Fullan for their book, Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School; in 2014, I received the award for The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education; in 2013, Pasi Sahlberg received it for his book Finnish Lessons. The judges have good taste and very high standards!

LOUISVILLE, Ky., Dec. 2, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Those born into poverty are unlikely to escape it—even if they have access to better opportunities through education. That’s a key conclusion drawn by…

Jonathan Pelto warns that the innocent-sounding group “Students for Education Reform” is actually a front for the hedge funders’ “Democrats for Education Reform.”Not many student-led groups have a budget in excess of $7 million. DFER is one of the richest and most insidious of the privatizers. Like all reformer groups, the name is intended to confuse the public about the purpose of the organization, which is to privatize public schools, not to reform them.

Pelto writes:

Dedicated to promoting the privatization of public education, more taxpayer funds for privately owned, but publicly funded charter schools, the Common Core, the Common Core testing scheme and a host of anti-teacher initiatives, Students for Education Reform, Inc. (SFER) was created in late 2009, according to their narrative, by a couple of undergraduate students at Princeton University.

Claiming to have over 100 chapters across the country, the “student run” advocacy group has, as of…

“Social Impact Bonds,” which are a bonanza for financial investors like Goldman Sachs, is included in the new ESSA that passed the House yesterday. All efforts to strip it out must concentrate on your senators.

The matter appears in Title I, Part D, Section 4108, page 485.

Title IV, A.

And in a section called “Safe and Healthy Students.”

Social Impact Bonds are defined on page 797 as “Pay for Success.” Investors are paid off when a student is not referred to special education.

This business of profiteering in public education can only be stopped by electing people to office who will fight it.

Pat Toomey is obsessed with child predators in our public schools.

When I came to Washington, D.C., this summer to visit 
the U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, he was lobbying to get his “Passing the Trash” bill included in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

His proposed legislation – now part of the Senate version of the ESEA – would ban school districts from helping known pedophiles from finding teaching jobs at different schools. Toomey is hopeful the provision will remain in the final version of the law that eventually will reach President Obama’s desk.

I met with his education aide who cheerily told me her job was to comb through the nation’s newspapers everyday and count the number of teachers accused of acting inappropriately with children. I’d mention issues like inequitable funding, standardized testing and Common Core. She’d solemnly quote back the number she’d found in her…

Ever wonder who is the supplying the money behind the privatization of public schools?

It is a long list, and it starts with the U.S. Department of Education. Every year since 1992?, your taxpayer dollars have been used to open schools that drain resources from your public schools while selecting the students they want. If your state has charters, you can expect that they will lobby the legislature for more charters. They will close their schools, hire buses, and send students, teachers, and parents to the State Capitol, all dressed in matching T-shirts, to demand more charters. Since the children are already enrolled in a charter and can’t attend more than one, they are being used to advance the financial interests of charter chains, which want to expand.

The big foundations support the growth of the charter industry: the Walton Family Foundation has put more than $1 billion into charters…

Jamaal Bowman wrote a powerful and important letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo. Bowman is a Néw York City middle school principal.

Please read and share. Help it go viral. It is an incisive critique of corporate reform. When did it become “liberal” to attack unions, career teachers, and public education? This used to be the agenda of the far rightwing of the Republican Party.

He writes:

“I hope this letter finds you and your family in good health and good spirits. I write not only to you, but also to those who share your view of public education….

“I also want to personally thank you for allowing me to provide testimony to the common core commission at the College of New Rochelle…..The work of the commission, along with your hiring of Jere Hochman as Deputy Secretary of Education, has me very excited about the direction in which we are…

When Indiana Governor Mikr Oence was asked about the sharp drop in state test scores, he responded, “Dont take it personally.”

Donna Roof of the Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education sent her reply to Governor Pence in this post.

It begins:

“So, Governor Pence, you recently told a teacher not to take the ISTEP results personally.

“Well, actually, Governor…

“When I see developmentally inappropriate education curriculum, I take it personally.

“When I see students suffer from anxiety and other health issues due to pressure to pass high stakes tests, I take it personally.

“When I see students subjected to an abundance of test prep, I take it personally.

“When I see recess being cut to allow for more test prep time, I take it personally.

“When I see children fearing they’ll be held back if they don’t pass a high stakes test, I take it personally.

“When I…

It’s funny. As I read all the comments about Syrian refugee children and their potential arrival in the United States over the next couple months, I marvel at people’s opinions and their lack of knowledge. I have a unique perspective because my children both attend a school where there is a high population of English Learners and children in poverty. It also serves a large population of refugees. Refugees that arrive from all over the world, places with terrorist organization every bit as active as those in Syria, just without the headlines.

There are students at my kids’ school who, just last year, lived in fear of violence. Some of them might have been carrying rifles themselves; after all, they arrived from war-torn countries like Somalia and Nigeria were the recruitment of children as soldiers is an established practice. The possibility also exists that their parents may have been complicit…