Marc Steiner Show

August 31, 2018

https://therealnews.com/stories/50-years-ago-as-world-watched-chicago-police-attacked-protesters-at-68-democratic-convention

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DEMOCRACY NOW!

August 28, 2018

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/28/1968_dnc_protests_50_years_later?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=0474bc8fea-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-0474bc8fea-191184861

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LOUD & CLEAR

August 28, 2018

https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiosputnik/education-for-liberation-with-bill-ayers_15

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Modern Slavery

August 24, 2018

From August 21 – September 9, 2018, prisoners will participate in work stoppages, sit-in strikes, commissary boycotts, and hunger strikes to demand major reforms to the country’s prison and criminal justice systems, including “humane living conditions, access to rehabilitation, sentencing reform, and the end of modern day slavery.”

In recognition of the history of slave rebels and prison resistors, the nationwide prison strike is planned for August 21, the day Nat Turner led an uprising of slaves in 1831 and the 47th anniversary of the death of George Jackson, a prominent African-American prison advocate; until September 9, the 47th anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion, the largest prison uprising of the 1970s prison movement, in which more than 40 people were killed.

Organizers of the action have released a list of ten demands directed at elected officials:

1. Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.

2. An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.

3. The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their rights.

4. The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and parole. No human
shall be sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.

5. An immediate end to the racial overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole denials of Black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular problem in southern states.

6. An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting Black and brown humans.

7. No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.

8. State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation services.

9. Pell grants must be reinstated in all US states and territories.

10. The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted. Representation is demanded. All voices count.

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TEACHERS!

August 23, 2018

http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2018/08/back-to-school-how-teachers-can-fight-against-anti-immigrant-sentiment.html

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Ora Schub—PRESENTE!

August 22, 2018

Celebration of Ora’s Life
Saturday, August 25th
South Shore Cultural Center
7059 S. South Shore Drive
Chicago, IL  60649
4:30 – 7:30 pm
program will begin at 4:45 and last approximately 1 hour
light appetizers will be served following the program
All are invited – please share this.

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The brilliant Barbara Ransby: please join us!

August 20, 2018

https://www.semcoop.com/event/barbara-ransby-making-all-black-lives-matter

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Rick Ayers on Ronnie Kitchen

July 25, 2018

http://www.kzoo.edu/praxis/state-terror/?/

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Gary Orfield said in one paragraph what it took me a whole book to say, and not as well…

July 24, 2018
 
The thing that is most irritating about most of the failed reforms is that they began under the leadership of people with no experience in public schools who had contempt for educators and researchers, who they assumed were very inferior to them because they took those low paying relatively low prestige jobs. They thought they were much more intelligent, they had a very romanticized version of markets that ignored the way markets often fail minorities and the poor, and they did not want to learn but simply to impose their obviously superior ideas. They thought that there was no downside risk because of these earlier assumptions and had no notion at all of the scale of damage they could cause in several decades of truly misguided reforms which became the agenda for the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama administrations and created another whole system of segregated low quality publicly supported largely unregulated charter schools that divided public resources and put the residual public system into even more difficult financial situations, giving up the idea of common schools and democratic values altogether.

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Who Elected You to Run Public Education, Bill Gates?

July 23, 2018
 
Carol Burris, the brilliant executive director of the Network for Public Education, has written the definitive account of Bill Gates’s disastrous teacher evaluation project, which wasted $215 million of his dollars, but over $350 million of state, local, and federal dollars (ours).
 
I urge you to read it. Not many are likely to read the 600 page RAND report evaluating the project. Burris did. The results were both a tragedy and a farce.
 
A few excerpts:
 
The study examined the effects over six years of the Gates Foundation’s Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IP) initiative that included, as a key feature, teacher evaluations systems similar to New York’s. It concluded that the IP project did not improve either student achievement or the quality of teachers. In fact, it did more harm than good…
 
The cost was astronomical. Across the seven sites over half a billion dollars were spent — $574.7 million between November 2009 and June 2016. While many believed that the Gates Foundation paid the bill, overall the foundation paid less than 37 percent — $212.3 million. Taxpayers paid most of the costs via local or federal tax dollars.
 
Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools was one of the participants. Its program alone cost $262.2 million. Federal, state and local taxpayers paid $178.8 million, far more than the Gates Foundation’s contribution of $81 million. Gates used his money as a lever to open the public treasury to fund his foundation’s idea. The taxpayers picked up the lion’s share of costs.
 
There were indirect costs as well. According to the study, the average principal spent 25 percent of her time administering the complicated evaluation system and teachers spent hours every month on their own evaluations.
 
The report estimated that “IP costs for teacher-evaluation activities totaled nearly $100 million across the seven sites in 2014–2015 … the value of teacher and SL [school leader] time devoted to evaluation to be about $73 million, and the direct expenditures on evaluation constituted an additional $26 million.” According to Business Insider, the total cost of IP was nearly $1 billion.
 
When President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, decided to include compliance with similar models of evaluation in order for states to receive Race to the Top funds, billions of federal taxpayer dollars were put in play. States and local school districts were forced to ante up for data-collection systems, new tests designed to produce metrics of student growth, training seminars that infantilized experienced principals, and pages upon pages of rubrics designed to turn the art and science of teaching behaviors into a numerical score…One of the goals of IP was to help districts recruit better teachers and to assign the most effective teachers to classrooms with low-income minority students. This was to be accomplished through revised recruitment practices as well as financial incentives for teachers to work in high-needs schools.
 
One participating district, Shelby County Schools in Tennessee, turned over its teacher recruitment efforts to the New Teacher Project (TNTP). TNTP was founded by Michelle Rhee, the controversial former chancellor of D.C. public schools who was a leader in corporate-style education reform. The Gates Foundation gave TNTP $7 million in 2009, the year that it published a report entitled “The Widget Effect,” which was highly critical of the teacher evaluation systems that the foundation was so anxious to replace.
 
Shelby County Schools allowed TNTP to run its human-resources department, resulting in a strained relationship between TNTP and the existing staff. Other participating districts and CMOs used some TNTP services and, following the advice of TNTP, sought teachers from alternative preparation programs, most notably Teach for America (TFA).
 
This, according to the report, resulted in increased teacher turnover, since many TFAers only “intended to remain in teaching for only a few years.” The report found no evidence that the quality of the teachers recruited improved.
 
Access to ‘effective’ teachers for disadvantaged students
 
A related goal of the project was to move “effective” teachers into schools with the most disadvantaged kids. Not only was this goal not realized, there was evidence that in one district access to more effective teachers declined.
 
Even with a cash incentive, teachers were reluctant to transfer to schools with high needs because they believed that would result in their receiving a lower VAM score, which was now part of their evaluation. VAM refers to value-added modeling, which in this case uses student standardized test scores in a complicated computer model to supposedly determine the “value” of a teacher on the growth of student achievement by in part factoring out all other influences.
 
There was statistically significant evidence that the project decreased low-income minority students’ access to effective teachers in Hillsborough County Public Schools — both between schools and within the same school — as teachers sought to flee to the honors classes to avoid low VAM scores, which under the new evaluation system, could cost them their jobs.
 
Although the report notes that some reformers hoped that the new evaluation system would result in teacher dismissals in the range of 20 percent, the actual rate of dismissal based on performance was similar to the rate under the former system — around 1 percent.
 
About Diane Ravitch:
 
My website is dianeravitch.com.
I am a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University.
I was born in Houston, Texas, attended the Houston public schools from kindergarten through high school, and graduated from Wellesley College in 1960. I received my Ph.D. in the history of American education in 1975.
I am the mother of two sons. They went to private schools in New York City. I have four grandsons: two went to religious schools, the third goes to public school in New York City, and the fourth will go to the same wonderful public school in Brooklyn.
I live in Brooklyn, New York.
 
Carol Burris is Executive Director of the Network for Public Education. She served as principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in NY from 2000-2015. Carol received her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her dissertation on equitable practices in mathematics instruction received the 2003 National Association of Secondary Schools’ Principals Middle Level Dissertation of the Year Award. In 2010, she was recognized by The School Administrators Association of New York State as the Outstanding Educator of the Year, and in 2013 she was recognized by the National Association of Secondary School Principals as the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Carol serves as a Fellow of the National Education Policy Center and is the co-director of its Schools of Opportunity program. She authored three books on educational equity. Articles that she has authored or co-authored have appeared in Educational Leadership, The Kappan, the American Educational Research Journal, Theory into Practice, The School Administrator and EdWeek.

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