Rethinking Schools- Teaching Ferguson

Teaching Ferguson Compilation of blog posts and resources from Rethinking Schools, Teaching for Change, and Zinn Education Project

From Teaching For Change: Teaching About Ferguson by Julian Hipkins III Credit: Reuters As the new school year begins, first and foremost on our minds and in our hearts will be the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Teachers may be faced with students' anger, frustration, sadness, confusion, and questions.  Some students will wonder how this could happen in the United States. For others, unfortunately, police brutality and intimidation are all too familiar. Here are a few ideas and resources for the classroom to help students think critically about the events in Ferguson and ways they can be proactive in their own communities. READ MORE

From the Rethinking Schools Blog : Teach About Mike Brown. But Don't Stop There. By Rethinking Schools magazine contributor Renée Watson Credit: flickr user no scream @ the end This time last summer, I researched articles and collected poems about police brutality, racial profiling, and the murders of black men in the United States. The George Zimmerman verdict was fresh on my mind and I wanted to talk about it with my students once school was back in session. I revised a lesson I had taught six years prior on the murder of Sean Bell that asked young people to turn their pain into poetry. And now, here I am again, swapping out the articles I used last year on Trayvon Martin with articles about Mike Brown. I have accepted that I may have to teach this lesson every school year. READ MORE

The Paucity of Dan Walters' Commentary on School Issues

The column by Dan Walters in the Sacramento Bee entitled “California’s School Wars Heat Up” in the print edition for Dec.20, and “Powerful Factions Go to War Over Direction of California Schools,” http://www.sacbee.com/2013/12/20/6015661/dan-walters-powerful-factions.html in the on line version  seriously and deliberatively misinforms .  He frames the conflict between the School Establishment ( school administrators, elected officials, CTA]  vs. the “School Reformers”.   These are indeed two of the powerful factions, but not at all the complete story.

To understand the distortion lets see who these “reformers “  See the Democracy and Education Institute  https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg

The cadre Walters’ calls reformers  are not reformers. These are a corporate financed  advocates and  some well financed opportunists. In most cases they do not work in schools, rather they work in lobbyist offices financed by the Waltons, the Gates, and others.   See here https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/Home/corporate-funded-reform

There is at least one additional group who Walters ignores- the social justice equity oriented based school reformers who have been working in schools for decades to  improve school opportunities for low income and minority children.

Clear Cutting of Our Schools - and Sacramento

by Editorial Board. Rethinking Schools

No single policy reflects the bankruptcy of current education reform politics more than the mass closings of public schools. From Chicago to Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Detroit, and Philadelphia, these mass closings lay waste to communities, negatively impact children's lives, and help to dismantle not just public education but also the broader public sector, weakening organized labor and opening up the public space to commercial penetration and profit.

Ed. Note:  And Sacramento- See event below. 

City by city, any number of excuses have been employed to justify these attacks. Private foundations, including Broad, Dell, and Walton, wield their enormous wealth and influence. Broad's School Closure Guide has made its rounds through the education reform movement with cities like Chicago lifting its recommendations almost wholesale. Along with budget cuts, testing, and charters, school closings are part of the corporate reform playbook assaulting our schools.

Once school closings start, they simply do not stop. New York City has closed more than 140 public schools since 2002. Chicago capped almost a decade of closing more than 100 schools with its 49-school closure this year. After closing 23 schools, Washington, D.C., is closing 15 more. Pittsburgh has had four rounds of school closures in the past decade, amounting to a total decrease of 41 percent.

Problems with Common Core Standards

By the editors of Rethinking Schools

It isn’t easy to find common ground on the Common Core. Already hailed as the “next big thing” in education reform, the Common Core State Standards are being rushed into classrooms in nearly every district in the country. Although these “world-class” standards raise substantive questions about curriculum choices and instructional practices, such educational concerns are likely to prove less significant than the role the Common Core is playing in the larger landscape of our polarized education reform politics.

We know there have been many positive claims made for the Common Core:

• That it represents a tighter set of smarter standards focused on developing critical learning skills instead of mastering fragmented bits of knowledge.
• That it requires more progressive, student-centered teaching with strong elements of collaborative and reflective learning.
• That it equalizes the playing field by raising expectations for all children, especially those suffering the worst effects of the “drill and kill” test prep norms of the recent past.

We also know that many creative, heroic teachers are seeking ways to use this latest reform wave to serve their students well. Especially in the current interim between the roll-out of the standards and the arrival of the tests, some teachers have embraced the Common Core as an alternative to the scripted commercial formulas of recent experience, and are trying to use the space opened up by the Common Core transition to do positive things in their classrooms.

We’d like to believe these claims and efforts can trump the more political uses of the Common Core project. But we can’t.

Save Our Schools

Save Our Schools returns

by rethinkingschoolsblog

by Stan Karp
Last summer, the Save Our Schools march brought thousands of teachers, parents, and supporters of public education to Washington, D.C. The march and rally were hopeful signs of pushback against corporate ed reform.A school year that began with the media blitz around the pro-charter propaganda film Waiting for Supermanended with the voices of grassroots resistance in the nation’s capital.
From August 3 to 5, Save Our Schools supporters will gather again in D.C., this time for a “peoples convention” focused on giving more shape and substance to the SOS effort.
Rethinking Schools will be there, joining longtime friends and advocates for educational justice like Jonathan Kozol, Deborah Meier, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, and many others. We hope you will join us. More info here.
Rethinking Schools editor and parent activist Helen Gym and I will host a workshop session Saturday morning on education activism. We’ll share some lessons from Rethinking Schools’ 25-year history as a voice for social justice inside classrooms and communities. We’ll also share our experience with efforts to create local, state, and national coalitions to defend and improve public education, and we’ll invite discussion about how SOS might move that effort forward amidst the strongest corporate counterattack on public schooling we have seen in our lifetimes.

Criticism of Race to the Top

Dear friends,

In the past week there has been significant developments in the growth of anti-Race to the Top sentiment around the country.  An impressive coalition of national civil rights groups issued a statement critical of the Obama/Duncan administration's educational policies: Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn through Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It's worth the read. 

Similarly, a coalition of 24 community groups organized by Communities for Excellent Public Schools issued a stinging critique of the federal government's "turnaround" strategies. "Our Communities Left Behind: An Analysis of the Administration's School Turnaround Policies" is a comprehensive critique that shows why those policies won't work and offers concrete suggestions as to what will turn around struggling schools. For a summary see an article in the Washington Post.