These Students Want an Education

 Children and young adults need to see themselves in the curriculum.  Students, particularly students of color, have low levels of attachment to our communities, to  California and U.S.  civics messages in significant part because the government institution they encounter the most- the schools- ignore the students own history, cultures and experiences. This is not an accident- it was a choice. 

The 1987 California History Social Science  Framework still in use today to guide the selection of  California textbooks   expanded African American, Native American, and women’s history coverage but remains totally inadequate in the coverage of Latinos and Asians. The only significant change between the 1985 and the 2005 adopted Framework was the addition of a new cover, a cover letter, and a photo of Cesar Chavez.

You can help us change this situation.  See here

http://antiracismdsa.blogspot.com/2015/05/steps-toward-inclusive-history-of.html

What are they missing? The history of the Chicano movement.

For example:

The Chicano Movement began in 1965 in Delano, California when Dolores Huerta and Cesar E. Chávez, founders of the National Farm Workers Association (later it became the United Farm Workers union), led a national boycott against table grape growers in the region because they failed to recognize their collective bargaining rights. Chávez, the president of the farm workers union, and the farm worker struggle, became the face of Chicano protest and struggles. While the United Farm Workers union brought national and even international recognition to the plight of Chicanos for labor rights, it had overarching consequences. Many young Chicanas and Chicanos felt connected to the farm worker struggle even though the majority resided in urban areas and had never themselves worked in the California agricultural industry.

The Big Picture: Reinvent Eduction

California Schools get Significant New Funding

California is expected to get $6.7 billion more in revenue than originally anticipated in the January budget, bringing the total budget for K-12 in 2015-16 to $83 billion from all sources, according to Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised budget proposal. Based on how Proposition 98 works, $6.1 billion of that extra state revenue is earmarked for K-12 schools and community colleges – a big win for education.

Check it out here.

Local Control Funding Formula boost

The ​L​ocal ​C​ontrol ​F​unding ​F​ormula will get an additional investment of $2.1 billion, raising the total amount of cash for ​the state’s school finance system to $6.1 billion. That means a $1,000 increase per student on average.

See prior posts on Local Control Funding in Sacramento City Unified.

From www.edsource.org

None of these "reforms" work - they make this stuff up

We've suffered under the factory model of school reform for the past dozen years under No Child Left Untested. The pillars are simple enough. Privatize (vouchers, franchise charters); De-professionalize (fast-track teacher prep, short-term, disposable labor designed to churn in and out with paychecks low and no pension to worry about); Standardize (scripted texts, homogenized lessons, pacing guides to require each teacher to be on the same page on the same day); and above all else: Hit your number. Motivate staff, students, and systems with carrots and sticks, with the goal wrapped around a quota of kids hitting a cut score. Standardized tests are the measure of basic progress. Standardized tests decide if a child is succeeding. Standardized tests decide if a teacher is effective. Standardized tests decide if a school should be closed down. It is a classic industrial model.

There is no science that says this works with children. There is no evidence that elite private or high-performing public schools are elite or high-performing because they use this model. There's no evidence that parents are demanding it. None of those countries described as our "global competition" that out-perform us on international tests use this model. The corporate school model is not driven by science. It is strictly out of the pages of the New England Journal of We Make This Stuff Up.

But numbers are impressive, and too many people think numbers must mean what someone says they mean. Schools compete against each other by test score rankings that declare which ones are making more "adequate yearly progress" than the others. Teachers compete with each other by test score rankings that declare who is more "effective." Students are expected to perform to specifications each spring so we know which will advance and which will repeat third grade. Teacher are incentivized with prizes or threatened with punishments depending on their students' test scores, just as factory workers are incentivized with bonuses or threatened with losing their jobs depending on who is more efficient at moving the product down the line.

Peg with Pen: A Quick Guide to Resisting from Within for Educato...

Peg with Pen: A Quick Guide to Resisting from Within for Educato...: I get asked a lot about what it’s like to teach in the public schools while knowing the truths about corporate education reform. Obvious...



An excellent guide for educators working for justice.

Writer Off Track in Assault on Teachers' Unions

by Duane Campbell

Bill Whalen of the Hoover Institute recounts the difficult issues of riots in our cities and then blames Democrats and public school teachers for the problems. “Officials can no longer ignore Oakland riots.” ( Sac Bee Viewpoints, May 8)

What Whalen  doesn’t say is that the  continuing economic crisis and joblessness among working people- particularly the young, along with mass incarceration  and the school to prison pipeline has left many urban areas- including Oakland-  islands of despair, with  a drug economy, gangs  and nihilism.  Add in cases of police assault  these islands may explode.




Readers should know that the Hoover Institute is one of several conservative “think tanks”.  They fund advocates, often posing as scholars, to write advocacy pieces and semi news items to advance their political positions. They also provide staff and public relations advocates to get their pieces placed in news papers and television.

The problem  of  urban riots is not only the police- although they have a role. The police are the enforcement arm of a brutal and oppressive system.  It is understandable that police get blamed, and they should be held accountable when they use oppressive  police tactics.  However, we should recognize that the police are only the enforcement arm of  exploitive crony capitalism.  The police  are enforcing the rules.


Instead of dealing with the causes of the violence, Whalen uses the crisis to promote one of his favorite subjects – blaming teachers and their unions.  

Opting out of testing mania

Network for Public Education

Today, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights led 11 civil rights groups into a national disagreement with students who have exercised their constitutional political free speech rights and chosen to opt-out of high-stakes testing.

The Network for Public Education supports those who choose to opt out, because we believe these tests are now causing harm to students, and to the cause of educational equity. Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian has written a response to The Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights’ statement, which the Network for Public Education shares here. He states, “High-stakes standardized tests, rather than reducing the opportunity gap, have been used to rank, sort, label, and punish students of color.”

We support opting out of high stakes tests because:

• There is no evidence that these tests contribute to the quality of education, have led to improved educational equity in funding or programs, or have helped close the “achievement gap”.
• These tests, particularly those associated with the Common Core, have become intrusive in our schools, consuming huge amounts of time and resources, and narrowing instruction to focus on test preparation.
• These tests have never been independently validated or shown to be reliable and/or free from racial and ethnic bias.
• Instead the Common Core exams are being used as a political weapon to claim huge numbers of students are failing, to close neighborhood public schools, and fire teachers, all in the effort to disrupt and privatize the public education system.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Standardized Testing (HBO)

Students First sue California Teachers' Unions

The latest legal assault on the right of the state’s public-sector unions to collect dues was filed in Los Angeles earlier this month by StudentsFirst, the Sacramento-based, national school-privatization organization.

The federal suit, Bain v. California Teachers Association, was brought on behalf of four California public school teacher union members who claim that the state’s current “fair share” rules infringe on their rights by forcing them to choose between paying for union-supported political causes with which they disagree or quitting the union. It seeks to bar unions from collecting dues money earmarked for political purposes as a condition of membership.

At stake are an estimated tens of millions of dollars — and a corresponding political clout — that unions stand to lose if the suit succeeds in making voluntary the 30 percent to 40 percent of dues that members currently pay for political activities.

In addition to California Teachers Association and its parent organization, the National Education Association, the suit names as defendants the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and its parent, the American Federation of Teachers, as well as United Teachers Los Angeles. (Disclosure: The CTA and CFT are financial supporters of Capital & Main.)

Also being sued are the union locals where three of the teachers work along with the superintendents of Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), West Contra Costa Unified and Arcadia Unified school districts.

CFT’s Pechthalt

“These folks essentially want to have their cake and eat it too,” CFT president Joshua Pechthalt told Capital & Main. “They disagree, I guess, with all of the union’s political stances, and so they want to be able to opt out of that portion. … It seems pretty clear to me that part of the intent of this suit is to weaken public sector unions.”

Not so, insists StudentsFirst spokesperson Kellen Arno. “I think that all the plaintiffs involved in this case are ardent supporters of the union. They want to be a part of the union. They appreciate all the representation that the union provides. I think they just don’t want to be coerced into also supporting a political agenda.”

The plaintiffs include StudentsFirst activists April Bain, a math teacher with LAUSD, and Bhavini Bhakta, an Arcadia Unified teacher who has testified on behalf of StudentsFirst in the past on proposed state education legislation, and testifed for plaintiffs in last year’s Vergara trial, which successfully challenged the state’s teacher tenure laws.

The high-powered corporate law firm that brought that suit, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, is also behind Bain.

Also named as plaintiffs are LAUSD teacher Kiechelle Russell, a member of Educators 4 Excellence (a Gates Foundation-funded anti-teachers union group), and Clare Sobetski, a Teach for America high school teacher with the West Contra Costa Unified School District.

California law requires that a union represent all workers at a so-called agency shop in matters of collective bargaining and workplace grievances, regardless of membership status. In return, the union can charge nonmembers a fair share of costs incurred under its statutory obligation to represent them in collective bargaining.

The Bain lawsuit, however, contends that by forcing dissenting teachers to forego union membership and the additional benefits provided by unions for its members, the law represents an unconstitutional First Amendment burden.

“There’s something like 40 years of legal precedent establishing our right to determine the qualifications for membership,” Pechthalt said. “And to that extent, from our perspective, I wouldn’t call this a frivolous lawsuit, but it doesn’t have merit.”

StudentFirst’s Blew

Bain signals the first major attack against teachers unions by StudentsFirst since its founder, former Washington D.C. school superintendent Michelle Rhee, resigned under a cloud last August. She was replaced as the group’s president by Jim Blew, who has worked as an advisor to the Walton family, the owners of Walmart.

The group’s funders represent a who’s who of billionaires and right-wing education reform foundations that include the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hedge-fund managers David Tepper and Alan Fournier, the for-profit charter school management company Charter Schools USA, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Bain also follows on the heels of a barrage of lawsuits brought against unions in the wake of Supreme Court decisions in 2012’s Knox v. Service Employees International Union, Local 1000 and last year’s Harris v. Quinn, in which a conservative majority, led by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., used First Amendment arguments to chip away at state laws requiring public-sector workers to pay union dues.

Those decisions signaled the high court’s willingness to hear test cases aimed at overturning 1977’s landmark Abood v. Detroit Board of Education decision that allowed states to require all public employees represented by unions to pay union dues.

Chief among those cases is Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a suit similar to Bain that was filed in 2013 by the ideologically conservative law firm Center for Individual Rights. The suit was submitted on behalf a group of 10 nonunion teachers challenging Calfornia’s law that authorizes teachers’ unions to charge agency fees to nonmembers. That lawsuit is now on appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Friedrichs is sort of attacking [Abood] head-on,” labor attorney and Century Foundation fellow Moshe Marvit told Capital & Main, “saying that it should be overturned, that the whole agency fee or fair share provision model that Abood sort of formalized in the public sector should be deemed unconstitutional. Bain is not attacking Abood in the same way. It’s saying that a fair share balance should be struck, not necessarily in favor of a right to work, but more in favor of the idea that nonmembers should get all the benefits of membership.”

Marvit: Not optimistic about SCOTUS

The common denominator, Marvit added, is an argument conservatives have been making for a long time — that people shouldn’t have to join a union, and even if the majority votes for it, they shouldn’t have to pay for political activities. That doesn’t mean the logic employed by Bainisn’t convoluted.

“They’re saying it’s your First Amendment right to not be a member,” Marvit noted, “and also a violation of your First Amendment rights not to be a member. You know, that you should still have the right to vote in an organization that you don’t want to be a part of, which is very bizarre. I’m not saying it won’t go anywhere in the courts, but it is a strange First Amendment argument to make.”

For California teachers unions, bearing the brunt of the suits has forced them to reallocate resources away from initiatives aimed at benefiting public schools. But, Joshua Pechthalt adds, it also highlights the competing, market-driven vision for education of the corporate reformers.

“It’s about testing kids to death,” the CFT president declared. “It’s about frankly creating greater disparity between kids from well-to-do families … and the growing number of middle- and working-class kids who are both finding higher education out of reach while attending schools that have, over the last 10 to 15 years, deadened learning.”

With Friedrichs a strong possiblity to land on the Supreme Court’s calendar, Marvit isn’t optimistic about the future of Abood.

“It seems like in Alito’s decisions,” observed the attorney, “he’s very much kind of laying the groundwork for destroying Abood and inviting a case that attacks it head-on. I think that’s what Friedrichs was made for, and I can’t imagine they won’t accept it. And if they do, if they don’t use it to kill Abood, I think they’ll just take one more kind of furious swipe at it. But I think over the next few years, it’ll probably be overturned.”

Reposted from Capital and MainP

California Children in Poverty