Six on Schools: The Numbers That Explain Why Teachers Are in Revolt; Ed Johnson: An Open Letter To Obama about Race to the To
philip panaritis
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"Frankly, it’s hard to figure why especially prominent Civil Rights leaders would forgo inviting you to a private conversation out behind the woodshed at the very moment you spoke the words “Race to the Top Competition.” Did they not understand competition made the Civil Rights Movement necessary more so than did so-called racism? That so-called racism is, in reality, but an insidiously malicious and hostile form of competition?
The point being, the aim of every form of competition has always been, and always will be, to produce as few winners as possible and as many losers as possible. Fine for sport competitions, but why would one facilitate attacking and harming the nation’s democracy-sustaining public educational systems by any manner of competition? Was cooperation between and among the states not an option?
All too often, the thinking is that winning means excellence, and losing means failure or “not good enough.” And that “competition builds character.”
But here’s the rub, Barack. In social systems, such as our public educational systems, people made losers by competition for no good reason invariably figure out how to win, if only in their own eyes. The massively systemic cheating on standardized tests that Atlanta experienced exemplifies the matter: A great many teachers and schoolhouse leaders the superintendent incited to compete for their job and bonuses for high standardized test scores figured they could win by changing students’ wrong answers to right answers."
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"Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Story of Privatizing Public Education in the USA
By Joanne Barkan
This article is dedicated to Paul Booth, 1943-2018
When champions of market-based reform in the United States look at public education, they see two separate activities — government funding education and government running schools. The first is okay with them; the second is not. Reformers want to replace their bête noire — what they call the “monopoly of government-run schools” — with freedom of choice in a competitive market dominated by privately run schools that get government subsidies.
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Public funding, private management — these four words sum up American-style privatization whether applied to airports, prisons, or elementary and secondary schools. In the last 20 years, the “ed-reform” movement has assembled a mixed bag of players and policies, complicated by alliances of convenience and half-hidden agendas. Donald Trump’s election and his choice of zealot privatizer Betsy DeVos as U.S. secretary of education bolstered reformers but has also made more Americans wary.
What follows is a survey of the controversial movement — where it came from, how it grew, and what it has delivered so far to a nation deeply divided by race and class."
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"When Students Are Cattle, Teachers Are Ranchers
Gov. Cuomo has championed a series of policies that, taken together, form a kind of feedback loop (See sidebar) threatening the foundation of public education in the state. Test scores are used to fire teachers and to label schools failures and close them down. In turn, those schools are replaced by nonunion charters, thereby weakening the membership base of the New York State United Teachers, the statewide teachers union, and its New York City local, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).
“I’ll never forgive Gov. Cuomo,” says Carol Burris, a former principal of the year at South Side High School in Rockville Centre on Long Island, now executive director of the Network for Public Education Foundation. She describes the climate in which the “reform” movement first began to pick up steam. The Obama administration’s 2009 “Race to the Top” initiative gave states an incentive to focus on test scores as a way of securing federal grants at a time when the housing crisis had left schools strapped for revenue.
“Cuomo, he just took advantage of it politically,” Burris explains. “All of a sudden, teachers and principals were seen as villains. We were not doing our job. We had to perform. And if only we were better, poverty would disappear because all of the kids at school, no matter how difficult their circumstances, they would go off to college and poverty would disappear.”
To gauge teacher performance, New York State uses a metric known as student-growth percentile (SGP). In theory, it is supposed to factor in economic data and other elements that contribute to test results, and then determine a teacher’s impact on learning by how much the percentile rankings of students under their charge have changed each year. The state DOE takes test data and compares that to statistical models for how much growth each student in a class should experience and assigns teachers ratings of “highly effective,” “effective,” “developing” or “ineffective.” Those who receive two consecutive “ineffective” ratings could face dismissal. As critics point out, if a teacher manages to inflate her students’ scores one year and preserve her job, then the next year’s teacher will be expected to surpass that."
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"That is not part of the commission’s charge, per se," the education secretary said.
Leahy shot back, "So, you're studying gun violence but not considering the role of guns."
"Federal Commission on School Safety
"Every child deserves to grow up in a safe community surrounded by a loving family and to have a future filled with opportunity and with hope."
In March 2018, President Donald J. Trump appointed U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to lead the Federal Commission on School Safety. The Commission has been charged with quickly providing meaningful and actionable recommendations to keep students safe at school. These recommendations will include a range of issues, like social emotional support, recommendation on effective school safety infrastructure, discussion on minimum age for firearms purchases, and the impact that videogames and the media have on violence." https://www.ed.gov/school-safety
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