Post-election, Push for Changes in Education Policy | California Progress Report

Post-election, Push for Changes in Education Policy | California Progress Report

New drop out /graduation rates posted

The U.S. Department of Education released data on Monday  detailing state four-year high school graduation rates in 2010-11 – the first year for which all states used a common, rigorous measure. The varying methods formerly used by states to report graduation rates made comparisons between states unreliable, while the new, common metric can be used by states, districts and schools to promote greater accountability and to develop strategies that will reduce dropout rates and increase graduation rates in schools nationwide.

California graduation  rates are

American Indian, 68%; Asian Pacific Islander 89%; Black 63%; Latino 70%, White 85%, LEP ( Limited English)  60%.

The new, uniform rate calculation is not comparable in absolute terms to previously reported rates.

School Vouchers and Jeb Bush

One of the things the right wing does is keep organizing.  While we rest and recover from an election, they are off on their next campaign.  They do this by having hundreds of advocates. So, while some recover, others launch their next campaign.

The Foundation for Excellence in Education’s annual conference starting this morning in Washington, D.C.

The agenda hits most of the main policies former Gov. Jeb Bush has supported: How to make teachers more effective; school district accountability; charter school accountability; the parent trigger and funding; and what to expect from new Common Core assessments.

The conference also features a number of keynote speakers, including Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

The full schedule is here. You can watch the keynote speeches online here.

C-SPAN is also streaming some of the conference online.

Obama Administration and Republican Right on school "reform", Vouchers, etc.

by Diane Ravitch,

If ever evidence was needed about the bizarre mind meld between the Obama administration and the far-right of the Republican party, here it is.

Secretary Arne Duncan is giving the keynote to Jeb Bush’s Excellence in Education summit in Washington, D.C. on November 28. Another keynote will be delivered to the same gathering of the leaders of the privatization movement by John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, who headed the Obama transition team in 2008. This is sickening.

Jeb Bush’s organization supports vouchers, charters, online virtual charters, and for-profit organizations that run schools. It also supports evaluating teachers by student test scores and eliminating collective bargaining. Jeb Bush believes in grading schools, grading teachers, grading students, closing schools, and letting everyone “escape” from public schools to privately-run establishments. The free market is his ideal of excellence, not public responsibility, not the public school as the anchor of the community, but privatization.

Here is the press release (Podesta’s keynote was announced earlier):

Arne Duncan to Give Keynote at the
2012 National Summit on Education Reform
WASHINGTON – The Foundation for Excellence in Education today announced U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will deliver a breakfast keynote address for the fifth annual Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform. This keynote will take place at the JW Marriott in Washington, DC, Nov. 28.

Prior to becoming the U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan served as the chief executive officer of  Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the longest-serving big-city education superintendent in the country. Among his most significant accomplishments during his tenure as CEO, an all-time high of the district’s elementary school students met or exceeded state reading standards, and their math scores also reached a record high. At high schools, Chicago Public Schools students posted gains on the ACT at three times the rate of national gains and nearly twice that of the state’s. Also, the number of CPS high school students taking Advanced Placement courses tripled, and the number of students passing AP classes more than doubled.
Unfortunately, we have reached maximum capacity for the Summit, and registration is closed. However, you can enjoy this exciting event from the comfort of your own computer. All keynote speeches and general sessions will be streamed live at www.ExcelinEd.org/Everywhere, and all strategy sessions will be filmed and available after the event. Click here to view this year’s agenda.

Share My Lesson Plans

  

Share My Lesson: The Imperative Of Our Profession

Posted by Leo Casey on July 5, 2012. From Shanker Institute web site.

Leo Casey, UFT vice president for academic high schools, will succeed Eugenia Kemble as executive director of the Albert Shanker Institute, effective this fall.

“You want me to teach this stuff, but I don’t have the stuff to teach.” So opens “Lost at Sea: New Teachers’ Experiences with Curriculum and Assessment,” a 2002 paper by Harvard University researchers about the plight of new teachers trying to learn the craft of teaching in the face of insubstantial curriculum frameworks and inadequate instructional materials.

David Kauffman, Susan Moore Johnson and colleagues interviewed a diverse collection of first- and second-year teachers in Massachusetts who reported that, despite state academic standards widely acknowledged to be some of the best in the country, they received “little or no guidance about what to teach or how to teach it. Left to their own devices they struggled day to day to prepare content and materials. The standards and accountability environment created a sense of urgency for these teachers but did not provide them with the support they needed.”

I found myself thinking about this recently when I realized that, with the advent of the Common Core State Standards, new teachers won’t be the only ones in this boat. Much of the country is on a fast-track toward implementation, but with little thought about how to provide teachers with the “stuff” – aligned professional development, curriculum frameworks, model lesson plans, quality student materials, formative assessments, and so on – that they will need to implement the standards well.

Many veteran educators will make do by stitching together tried and true lessons in new and different ways. Others will be scrambling to find quality materials with which to plug holes, as well as rethinking approaches to old content in order to meet new learning objectives. And many, as the article says, will be “lost at sea.”

Teaching Chicano/Latino history in schools

The Democracy and Education Institute has again submitted a proposal for support of efforts to update the California History Social Science Framework so that California students would study Chicano/Latino history as a part of their k-12 education.

https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/chicano-mexican-american-digital-history-project.

Explanation of why new legislation is needed.

https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/chicano-mexican-american-digital-history-project/why-california-students-do-not-know-chicano-history

African American history and Women’s History ( White women) has been included since 1986. 

Hands Off Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid- Bernie Sanders

We are not broke. We were robbed !

DSA is a part of the Coalition on Human Needs. ( See list at end of post).  We ask that each of you contact your Senators and Congress people to preserve essential  human needs from Republican budget cuts.   Sample letter below.  Do not allow the Corporate CEO's who are funding the Fix the Debt campaign to cut the budgets for poor and working people.

1. NO tax cuts for the richest 2% of Americans.

2. NO benefit cuts to Social Security, Medicare or

Medicaid.

SAVE for All

Strengthening America’s Values and Economy for All

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear (Representative or Senator):

Last year, organizations from across the country came together to endorse basic principles to address America’s short- and long-term economic and budgetary problems. These are the imperatives of Strengthening America’s Values and Economy (SAVE) for All: to protect low-income and vulnerable people; promote job creation to strengthen the economy; increase revenues from fair sources; and seek responsible savings by targeting wasteful spending in the Pentagon and in other areas that do not serve the public interest.

We call on you to follow these principles as you face budgetary decisions of immediate and long-lasting national consequence. To achieve sustained growth, fiscal stability, and economic security for all our people we must invest in job creation, ensure that job seekers have the opportunity to work, and protect vulnerable people from hardship. We cannot promote the common good by cutting more and more services and jobs. But we can meet our nation’s needs responsibly by ending tax reductions benefiting the wealthiest two percent and by seeking savings that do not compromise human or military security.

Putting the most vulnerable people at risk is the wrong response to our nation’s fiscal situation. Automatic cuts to domestic programs that are scheduled to take effect in January 2013 under the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act will inflict devastating harm. Estimated conservatively, a year of sequestration cuts1 will deny WIC nutrition aid to 750,000 mothers and young children, prevent more than 413,000 adults and youth from getting job training and deny education and training to more than 51,000 veterans, eliminate reading and math help to more than 1.8 million low-income public school children, deny child care to the low- to moderate-income families of 80,000 children, stop nearly 34,000 women from being screened for breast and cervical cancer, prevent nearly 27,000 infants and toddlers from benefiting from special education early intervention services, force 185,000 households to lose rental assistance vouchers, and stop 734,000 households from receiving home heating and cooling aid. These are only a few examples of the impact of the scheduled cuts. They threaten children’s healthy development, deny security to seniors, throw roadblocks in the way of a competitive labor force, and allow preventable disabilities to hold back our children.

These and other cuts have steep costs, among them hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, lagging productivity, and escalating medical expenditures in the years to come. Coming on top of cuts written into law through FY 2021 they will drop domestic and non-military international appropriations to their lowest levels in 50 years as a share of the economy. Allowing such a wholesale abandonment of investments in education, preventive health, housing, public infrastructure, and nutrition is an affront both to conscience and to common sense. We urge you to avert these sequestration cuts.

Crenshaw School Community (Los Angeles) fights for real school improvement

Crenshaw School Community Fights For Real Improvement and Against LAUSD Superintendent’s Scorched-Earth Approach

By:

Christina Lewis, Crenshaw High Special Education Teacher

Irvin Alvarado, Crenshaw High Alumni, Coalition for Educational Justice Organizer

Alex Caputo-Pearl, Crenshaw High Social Justice Lead Teacher, UTLA Board of Directors

Eunice Grigsby, Crenshaw High Parent, Crenshaw High Alumna

On October 23, LAUSD Superintendent Deasy announced he intends to reconstitute Crenshaw High School.  This scorched earth “reform” that is destructive for students, communities, and employees has been used at Fremont, Clinton, Manual Arts, and more in LAUSD, despite courageous push-backs at those schools.

The Crenshaw school community is determined to fight back.  The slogan that permeated the emergency 150-person Crenshaw Town Hall Meeting at the African-American Cultural Center on October 4 crystallizes the struggle -- “Keep Crenshaw: Our School, Our Children, Our Community.”

In an attempt to disarm the push back and win public support, Deasy is combining the reconstitution with a full-school magnet conversion.  Crenshaw stakeholders are, of course,  open to conversations about changes that will improve conditions and outcomes for our students -- but those must be collaborative, well-resourced, and must serve all students.  That said, it is clear that Deasy’s main objective is not magnet conversion – it is to take top-down control of the school and reconstitute (which means removing all faculty and staff from the school, with an “opportunity to re-apply”). 

The school community says NO to any form of reconstitution, and YES to school improvement that includes stakeholders and holds LAUSD accountable for its years of neglect and mismanagement. 

Teachers' Unions and School Reform - Diane Ravitch

How Teachers Unions Lead the Way to Better Schools

    Diane Ravitch upends the "bad teachers" narrative.

By Amy Dean

I have a concern: Teachers are getting pummeled. Too often,
they are being demonized in the media and blamed by
politicians for being the cause of bad schools. Right-wing
governors, power-hungry mayors and corporate "reformers" -
all ignoring root issues such as poverty and inequality -
have scapegoated the people who have devoted their lives to
educating our children. Moreover, these forces are seeking
to destroy the collective organizations formed by educators:
teachers unions.

The stakes for our country could not be more profound. The
labor movement and the public education system are two
critical institutions of American democracy. And they are
two that go hand in hand. Teachers unions have played a
critical role in advocating for public education, but you'd
never know it from mainstream media coverage. Therefore,
there is a great need to lift up this tradition and
highlight the efforts of teachers to collectively push for
top-notch public schools.

To figure out how we can push forward on this issue, I
talked with Diane Ravitch, one of the country's leading
education historians and public school advocates. A
professor at New York University, Ravitch is a former
Assistant Secretary of Education and the author of several
books, including 2010's The Death and Life of the Great
American School System: How Testing and Choice Are
Undermining Education.

What was Kevin Johnson doing during the recent election ?

In this case the News and Review covers what the Sacramento Bee ignores.

Speaking of that whole Waiting for ‘Superman’ cult: What was Sacramento’s first couple doing this election season while hundreds of millions of dollars were on the line for Sacramento schools? Roving the country, trying to screw up other people’s school systems, of course.

Michelle Rhee, patron saint of the teacher-bashing movement, has been using her Sacramento-based StudentsFirst organization—a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization, of course—to funnel money into ballot measures in several states.

In Michigan, StudentsFirst funded anti-union groups trying to defeat a ballot measure that would put the right to organize unions for private and public employees into the state’s constitution. It’s a right that is recognized in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but apparently not one that Rhee thinks Michigan teachers (or any other workers) should have.

“I love teachers. Effective teachers,” she told members of the Michigan state Legislature while lobbying against the measure. By “effective” Rhee means teachers with high test scores: exactly the kind of evaluation system she instituted as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., schools before her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, was unelected and Rhee had to follow. The same kind of system that Raymond was warning about in his critique of Race to the Top.

An Open Letter to President Obama on School Reform

From: Bill Ayers

Dear President Obama: Congratulations!

I’m sure this is a moment you want to savor, a time to take a deep breath, get some rest, hydrate, regain your balance, and take a long walk in the sunshine. It might be as well a good time to reflect, rethink, recharge, and perhaps reignite. I sincerely hope that it is, and I urge you to put education on your reflective agenda.

The landscape of “educational reform” is currently littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on all sides. Sadly, your administration has contributed significantly to the mounting catastrophe. You’re not alone: The toxic materials have been assembled as a bipartisan endeavor over many years, and the efforts of the last several administrations are now organized into a coherent push mobilized and led by a merry band of billionaires including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton, and Eli Broad.

Whether inept or clueless or malevolent—who’s to say?—these titans have worked relentlessly to take up all the available space, preaching, persuading, promoting, and, when all else fails, spreading around massive amounts of cash to promote their particular brand of school change as common sense. You and Secretary Arne Duncan—endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of reactionary politicians and pundits—now bear a major responsibility for that agenda.

A significant role for Democrats for Educational Reform

Democrats for Educational Reform.

Gloria Romero -- The former Senate leader  remains bitter from her loss in the Supt. of Public Instruction race two years ago. Formerly favored by labor, a member of CFA. Her harsh videos and ads against Prop 32 joined with others in the anti union effort. She actively campaigned for Prop.38, the anti teacher union effort on school funding.  Prop. 38 – the Munger Inititative- was qualified and funded substantially to take resources and votes away from the effort to fund education in Prop.30.  She lost.

Former California State Senator Gloria Romero is the State Director of Democrats for Education Reform. 

CFT On Prop. 30 Victory

CFT president Pechthalt on Prop 30 victory, Prop 32 defeat

November 7, Sacramento—CFT president Joshua Pechthalt issued the following statement this morning:  "Educators are overjoyed that Proposition 30 passed.  In standing up for public education and social services, a majority of Californians declared that we can turn the Golden State around.  The huge blizzard of deceptive and scary political advertising couldn’t obscure the reality that our schools are underfunded. "The people have spoken:  the best way to build a better education system is to properly fund it by asking those who can most afford it, the wealthy, to pay their fair share in taxes.  As a result, educators will be in a better position to help the students of the state achieve their dreams. "The decisive victory of Prop 30 reveals an important shift in California’s orientation.  For more than thirty years it has been common wisdom that “Californians don’t like taxes.”  No more.  Prop 30 shows voters once more understand what Oliver Wendell Holmes said a century ago:  “Taxes are the price we pay for civilized society.”  Prop 30 is a sign we can create a fair tax system to accomplish California’s priorities.

Victory for California's Students

 Voters Protect Schools, Pass Prop. 30, Defeat 32

Contact: Claudia Briggs at 916-296-4087 or Mike Myslinski, 408-921-5769

SACRAMENTO—California students and working families won a clear victory today as voters clearly demonstrated their willingness to invest in our public schools and colleges and also rejected a deceptive ballot measure aimed at silencing educators, other workers and their unions.

“Today’s vote signaled that Californians believe in the value of public education and investing in our students and schools,” said Dean E. Vogel, president of the 325,000-member California Teachers Association. “They want to see funding restored to our schools and colleges. They want to stop the tuition hikes and class size increases. They want to see students have music, and art, and libraries and access to counselors and nurses. They want to see our schools flourish and our students succeed.”

Passage of Proposition 30 will stop $6 billion in midyear cuts to our schools and colleges. In addition, local communities will receive funding to keep police on the street and our state can begin to pay down the wall of debt it’s amassed over recent years.

Big win for schools as Prop 30 defies polls

Big win for schools as Prop 30 defies polls  Ed Source

Thank you.

Thank you.  Every vote was important.

Great victories in California.

We defeated the billionaires efforts to  crush organized labor and to continue the anti tax radicalism.

We defeated the anti labor proposition 32.

We passed Prop. 30, to fund schools, universities and social services.  The schools will be funded this year and next year.  This is a floor under austerity.   It raises taxes on the rich to pay for services.  It does raise income tax by ¼ of  percent – but 90% of the tax increases are on the rich . A tax of 1-3 % on those who make over $250,000 per year.

My own Congressional district is so close that it can not be called yet. 

The Final Push: It's On Us

It's on us to pass Prop. 30 also.

The Nov. 1  Field  Poll says that if the election were held today 48 % would vote Yes on Prop. 30 to fund schools, colleges and public services, 38 % would vote no, and 14 % are undecided. That is too close.  We need your effort this weekend to get the 14 % to become a Yes vote.  This vote is our best opportunity to reverse the austerity cycle of budgeting used in California for the last 4 years since the economic crisis.

Please  act on this email.   There is a list of 30 actions you can take this weekend.

The California Dream was built on a system of public schools and colleges that gave every Californian access to the education needed to get ahead.

Today, I’m asking you to join me in supporting Proposition 30 because we can’t keep cutting our schools and still keep the economy strong for the next generation. 

With your YES vote on Prop. 30, we can:

▪                Stop another $6 billion in cuts to our schools this year.

▪                Prevent steep tuition hikes for college students and their families.

▪                Invest in our schools and colleges so we can prepare the next generation for the jobs of the future.

Let’s work together to invest in our children and a strong economy for California’s future. 

Join me in voting YES on Prop. 30.

Here is what we need you to do:

Pick  at least 4.

▪                Write a Letter to the Editor

▪                Call 30 people in the state to vote for Prop 30

▪                Before school, place Prop 30 signs at the corners of the school ground- public property

▪                Put a sign in your car

▪                Write everyone on your email list

▪                Change your Facebook picture to Yes on 30

Why is the vote on Prop 30 so close ?

 And, what can we do about it ?

by Duane Campbell

            A new Field  Poll says that if the election were held today 48 % would vote Yes on Prop. 30 to fund schools, colleges and public services, 38 % would vote no, and 14 % are undecided. That is too close.  This vote is our best opportunity to reverse the austerity cycle of budgeting used in California for the last 4 years since the economic crisis.

            My experience in tabling for Proposition 30 in  on the Sac State campus  for the last 6 weeks  has reminded me of a major problem – we are not communicating  with and educating the vast majority of people of the need to support public education and other public services.

In one recent experience a beyond middle age African American woman stopped by the table to discuss California Prop. 30, an effort to fund schools, universities, and public services.  I will use her case as an example.   Her experience as a college student was that her fees went up.  Over the last 4 years university fees went up over $ 2,400.  Her experience was that her fees were pushing her out of the university.   Her question,  why do my fees go up ?  Doesn’t the federal government pay for our education ?   Why should I have to vote on this ?