Comparison, Prop. 30 and 38

	Yes on Prop. 30	No on Prop. 38
Impact on CSU	CSU avoids a $250 million trigger cut. Students receive $498 tuition refund. Provides revenue for future faculty bargaining.	Does nothing for the CSU system, students, and faculty.
Helps Balance State Budget	Expected to generate over $7 billion annually and will balance the state budget by paying back debt to education.	Expected to contribute $1.5 billion in 2012-13 and $3 billion thereafter to pay back state general obligation bond debt for only four years.
Prop. 98 Impact	All funding will go through the state’s general fund and helps repay the money owed to public education.	These funds cannot be used to support the Prop. 98 guarantee and do not help pay back what is owed to public education. Creates another state special fund.
Who’s Taxed?	Families with incomes over $500,000 and 0.25% increase in sales tax rate. The income tax increase focuses on high earners.	Income taxes are raised on all income levels for almost all Californians. It will be a significant hit to the middle class.
Attractive to Broad Coalition	Education, labor and business support Prop 30 as it helps balance the state budget by paying down the wall of debt and providing funding for public education.	Due to a narrow focus on K-12 and early childhood education, higher education and other essential services are left out.

Yes on Prop 30 - White Board

Economic Crisis cost 300,000 Teachers' jobs

SACRAMENTO PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE: Economic Crisis cost 300,000 Teachers' jobs: The 300,000 teacher gap In September, public-sector employment increased by 10,000.  However, over the last four years, it has decl...

A Gold Star for the Chicago Teachers Union

A Gold Star for the Chicago Teachers Strike

After 10 years of top-down disruptions, teachers showed
the power of collective action by those who work in
schools.

By Karen Lewis and Randi Weingarten Opinion

Wall Street Journal September 23, 2012

After more than a decade of top-down dictates,
disruptive school closures, disregard of teachers' and
parents' input, testing that squeezes out teaching, and
cuts to the arts, physical education and libraries,
educators in Chicago said "enough is enough." With
strong support from parents and many in the community,
teachers challenged a flawed vision of education reform
that has not helped schoolchildren in Chicago or around
the country. It took a seven-day strike - something no
one does without cause - but with it educators in
Chicago have changed the conversation about education
reform.

These years of dictates imposed upon teachers left
children in Chicago without the rich curriculum,
facilities and social services they need. On picket
lines, with their handmade signs, teachers provided
first-person accounts of the challenges confronting
students and educators. They made it impossible to turn
a blind eye to the unacceptable conditions in many of
the city's public schools.

Teachers and parents were united in the frustration
that led to the strike. Nearly nine out of 10 students
in Chicago Public Schools live in poverty, a shameful
fact that so-called reformers too often ignore, yet
most schools lack even one full-time nurse or social
worker. The district has made cuts where it shouldn't
(in art, music, physical education and libraries) but
hasn't cut where it should (class sizes and excessive
standardized testing and test prep). The tentative
agreement reached in Chicago aims to address all these
issues.

Chicago's teachers see this as an opportunity to move
past the random acts of "reform" that have failed to
move the needle and toward actual systemic school
improvement. The tentative agreement focuses on
improving quality so that every public school in
Chicago is a place where parents want to send their
children and educators want to teach.

Chicago Teachers Give Us All a Lesson

Two-thirds of parents supported the Chicago school teachers' protest in spite of the inconvenience caused by the strike.

by Dean Baker

We don't know the final terms of the settlement yet,
but it appears that the Chicago public school teachers
managed to score a major victory over Rahm Emanuel,
Chicago's business- oriented mayor. Testing will not
comprise as large a share in teachers' evaluations as
Emanuel had wanted; there will be a serious appeals
process for teachers whom the school district wants to
fire, and laid off teachers will have priority in
applying for new positions.

If these seem like narrow self-interested gains for the
teachers and their union, think again. Teaching in
inner city schools is a difficult and demanding job.

Most of the children in Chicago's public schools are
poor. Their families are struggling with all the issues
presented by poverty. Many of the schools are in high
crime areas and serious crimes often take place on
school premises. It can be a lot harder job than
working for a hedge fund.

It will not be possible to get committed and competent
people to teach in the public school system if they
cannot be guaranteed at least a limited amount of job
security and respect. The $70,000 annual pay that was
ridiculed as excessive by so many pundits would not
even be a week's salary for many of the Wall Street
types who do nothing more productive than shuffle
paper.

Chicago Strike Suspended

More to follow.  Mayor Rahm Emanuel threat not helpful.

Graduate Them, Don't Incarcerate Them! | California Progress Report

Graduate Them, Don't Incarcerate Them! | California Progress Report

Chicago Teachers _ Not Yet.

The Chicago Teachers Union's House of Delegates met Sunday afternoon, and decided to stay out on strike while delegates talked to rank and file teachers about the tentative deal reached Friday:

Delegates were not receiving written contract language about the deal so some wanted to keep the strike in place until they could see written language and bounce it off their constituents in schools.

Lewis said the delegates don’t trust the school board at this point.

“Why would you make a decision on something you haven’t had a chance to look at?” she said. “They have language. They see the language. But it’s not finished. We’ve been almost guaranteed that it might be finished by Tuesday.”

The distrust leading union delegates to ask for more time and details makes sense, given how Chicago Public Schools management has treated teachers in recent years. Once teachers leave the picket lines, they face a real possibility that management will pull back on any details not yet hammered out in the proposed contract.

Thousands Rally in Chicago Teacher's Strike Against Corporate-Backed Edu...

Why Did the Chicago Teachers' Strike Happen ?

Why Did the Chicago Teachers' Strike Happen ?

Chicago Teachers Go on Strike <http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=833>
Bill Barclay <http://dissentmagazine.org/atw/author.php?id=197> - September
10, 2012 2:50 pm

Today the Chicago teachers went on strike—their first in almost twenty-five
years. The road to the strike has been a long one that includes 1) efforts
by the hedge-fund elite behind Stand for [on] Children (SFC) to make such
an occurrence impossible; 2) the desire of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel to
impose on Chicago public schools a model of corporate privatization; and 3)
important changes in the functioning of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

*Stand on Children
*

Broad Foundation Wants to Step on the Gas

Choosing Democracy: Broad Foundation Wants to Step on the Gas: Broad Foundation Wants to Step on the Gas : The Broad Foundation wants to step on the gas….A recent  memo  from The Broad Center (TBC) pr...

Chicago Teachers' Strike _ update

Where we are in Chicago today: 

This morning (Monday, September 10, 2012) the Chicago teachers went on strike – for the first time since 1987.  The road to the strike has been a long one that includes (i) efforts by the hedge fund elite behind Stand for (on) Children (SFC) to make such an occurrence impossible; (ii) the desire of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to impose on Chicago public schools a model of corporate privatization; and (iii) important changes in the functioning of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). 

Stand on Children

The efforts of SFC are by now well known.  A brief review: after spending almost $4 million on Illinois legislative races, SFC got as payoff SB7.  The bill made it impossible for the CTU to pass a strike vote – or so SFC CEO Jonah Edelman bragged in June 2011to the Aspen Ideas Festival that “The unions cannot strike in Chicago.”  Edelman and his allies figured that the requirement for 75% approval for a strike with the further provision that abstentions counted as no votes could not be met. 

Turns out they were wrong.

In early July, CTU membership voted by over 90% (and excluding abstentions, by 98%) to authorize their house of delegates to call a strike if contract negotiations fail.

“Reforming” Chicago Public Schools

When Emanuel ran for mayor of Chicago, one of his announced political goals was to “reform” Chicago public schools.  The system is the third largest in the country and has a high percentage of children from low income families (80% of Chicago’s public school attendees qualify for free lunches).  To understand what “reform” means to Emanuel, we should take the advice of Deep Throat regarding Nixon’s Watergate, “Follow the money.”  It is a good guide to what Chicago is and is not doing for its school children.

TIF monies nicely illuminate the real priorities of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Board of Education.  Earlier this year, Roosevelt University Professor Stephanie Farmer’s analysis demonstrated that TIF spending for education over the past two decades has been biased against open enrollment schools (what we use to call “public schools”).  These schools constitute 69% of total Chicago schools, but they have received less than 48% of TIF money for building maintenance, repair, and upgrading.  In revealing contrast, nine selective-enrollment high schools (charter and magnet) that make up 1 percent of the total number of schools got 24 percent of the money spent on school construction projects.  Overall, CTU estimates that TIFs remove $250 million/year from the CPS.  This is almost half of the budget shortfall forecast by the Board.  (See:  http://createchicago.blogspot.com/2012/06/research-brief-3-tax-increment.html)

The charter school mantra reigns supreme in the thinking of both Emanuel and his appointed Board of Education.  In analyzing the Board’s proposed budget, the CTU pointed out that it:

increases charter school spending by 17 percent, but does not address the rampant inequality in education programs across the district. In 2002, charter school spending was about $30 million; now, CPS proposes a whopping half-a-billion dollars to a failed reform program that has been shown to provide its students with no better education outcomes.

The last decade has seen a huge growth in (nonunionized) charter schools despite lack of any evidence of their alleged effectiveness.  Chicago’s 600 plus schools include 110 charters and another 27 schools run by private firms.  Meanwhile what is the situation for the bulk of Chicago school children?  A quarter of the open enrollment elementary schools have no libraries, 40% have neither either art nor music instruction while many others must choose one or the other but can’t get both.   

Mayor Emanuel sends his children to the private Chicago Lab School – where all of these “extras” are available.

Chicago Teachers Prepare for a Strike

Tomorrow is Decision Day in Chicago. by Diane Ravitch.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has tried to bully the Chicago Teachers
Union and its leader Karen Lewis.

Lewis was elected by the members because they knew she would
stand up for them.

Emanuel has the support of the Wall Street hedge fund managers
organization, somewhat absurdly called Democrats for Education
Reform. He also has the other big-monied people in Chicago, as
mentioned in this article in the Chicago Tribune, including
billionaire Penny Pritzker.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-teacher-strike-politics-20120909,0,6860745.story

The article mentions that DFER staged a protest at union
headquarters to oppose a strike. I wonder how many hedge fund
managers send their children to Chicago public schools. I am
trying to imagine hedge fund managers marching in front of
union headquarters and carrying signs. I am guessing that what
happened was that they "staged" a protest, meaning that they
hired out-of-work actors to carry protest signs. Maybe the
unemployed actors have children in the Chicago public schools.
read more here. http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/spirits-high-at-the-chicago-teachers-unionctu-strike-hq/#more-16465

The great thing about having Karen Lewis there is that every
teacher in America knows she will stand strong for them. She
will not sell them out. And she will not sell out the
children.

She knows that teachers' working conditions are children's
learning conditions.

26 States Cut Their Education Budgets For This School Year

26 States Cut Their Education Budgets For This School Year: pStates have made deep cuts to their education budgets in the years since the Great Recession, and as their budgets remained crunched by lower levels of tax revenues, more than half are spending less on education this school year than they did last year, a new analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [...]/p

Yes on Prop 30

Yes on Prop 30

Stop Special Exemptions | No on Prop 32

California legislature assaults teachers while failing to provide school funding

            Following assaults on teachers in Tennessee, New Jersey, New York and Florida – among others- the California legislature this week is using the “gut and amend” procedure to change the current teacher evaluation system in the state. The brutal assault in Florida led to the defeat of the moderate governor Christie by Tea Party advocates in 2010.

            In California legislators claiming to be responding to a Los Angeles judge’s ruling that Los Angeles was improperly implementing the current law, legislators are trying change the law before Friday using Assembly Bill 5.   An active advocate of the yet undefined plan is Michelle Rhee’s organization, so called “Students First.”

            Using the argument that these changes are necessary to respond to the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top,  which has never been passed into law, anti union forces are arguing for test based accountability systems.  These are popular politically on the right but they have failed in state after state to  improve the schools.

            The legislature could improve the schools by doing their job –that is to adequately fund the schools.  As California cuts over $5 billion from the schools conditions and learning in these schools deteriorate.  Instead of doing their job and providing the resources some legislators call for a new system of teacher evaluation.

It wasn't the bankers- It was the Teachers' Union.- Christie

     The looting of the U.S. and the economic crisis were not caused by Wall Street and the corporations,  it was the Teachers’ Union.

Chris Christie.

At the Republican convention.

"Now having squandered trillions on mismanaged wars, tax cuts designed especially for the rich, a gigantic real estate bubble, and massive bailouts for its banks, the United States is confronting a major fiscal problems.  At the same time, America’s fundamental economic competitiveness has declined severely, as its physical infrastructure, broad band services, educational system, workface skills, health care and energy policies have failed to keep pace with the needs of the advanced economy. ….

The principal reason for this is that politically powerful interest groups have been able to block reform: the financial services, energy, defense, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, and processed food industries, the legal, accounting, and medical professions; and to a lesser extent, several unions- these and other groups , including, of course, lobbyists and politicians, have ferociously resisted efforts to improve  America’s future at their expense.

            Meanwhile, both political parties are ignoring, lying about, and/or exploiting the country’s very real economic, social, and educational problems."

Charles H. Ferguson,   Predator Nation; Corporate Criminals, political corruption, and the Hijacking of America.  2012.

Corporate Makeover of Public Education

excerpt from Charter Schools and the Corporate Makeover of Public Education: What’s at Stake?

by Michelle Fine and Michael Fabricant

In this book we track the history of charters from social justice alternatives to a campaign to dismantle and decentralize public education, through to the contemporary movements for educational justice.  It is within this context that the following six questions animate our writing:

How did a social justice education movement, initiated by teachers and teachers’ union, evolve into a corporate campaign to dismantle existing structures of public education?

What is the relationship between the promise of charters and contemporary evidence of their impact?

Even if charters in the aggregate were academically more successful than local schools – and the evidence is dubious – what are the consequences of a deregulated charter movement for participatory democracy, racial equity and deep accountability to community and youth?

How does the twinning of corporate profit and Black/Latino/poor community pain resonant across the history of the U.S., manifest itself in the current rush to reshape public institutions toward private interests and ever more inequitable forms of (dis)investment?

Billionaire donors drive anti-teacher, pro-testing education reform agenda

Billionaire donors drive anti-teacher, pro-testing education reform agenda

Which CEO made $5 million stealing your kid's lunch money?

The Chicago Public Schools: Another World is Possible

The Chicago Public Schools: Another World is Possible

Republicans sell off public schools - Thom Hartmann

Save Our Schools Initiative | California Progress Report

Save Our Schools Initiative | California Progress Report

Pass the Schools initiative

   The  Sacramento Bee in both its editorial position on Sunday, July 8,  and its news reporting name  the fall initiative tax measure  to preserve  funding for  our schools  Governor Brown's Tax proposal.   This naming, this framing, is selected to defeat the proposal.  It is not Governor Brown's proposal- it is a proposal from all of us who worked on the Millionaires Tax, from teachers, union members,  the majority in the California legislature and all of those who wish to save our schools from further devastation.

 The legal  title  is  the  Schools and Local Public Safety Act and it will be on the November ballot.  We should insist that the press use the proper title for this tax initiative.   If passed it would prevent  $4.8 billion in cuts from our  k-12 schools and $1.3 billion in cuts from our colleges and universities. 

 California voters  are faced with a choice.  Shall we raise taxes and fund the schools, or shall we continue the current practice of cut, cut, cut ?  In the fall election we will be faced with at least three choices.  Continue the present austerity program  or choose between two tax proposals.  If the anti tax forces have their way and we do not pass new taxes the effects on the schools will be devastating – as will be effects on public safety, health clinics and local services.

Texas Republicans seek to criminalize thinking

Criminalizing Thinking

Dumb, Ignorant, Mean or Greedy

By

Rodolfo F. Acuña

I am having trouble getting into this essay on the war on critical thinking. I cannot figure out whether it is dumb or ignorant.  My mother would say that the people conducting the war are malditos, mean.  The reality is that the criminalization of rational thought goes beyond being dumb, ignorant or just plain mean.   

Because the consequences are so calculated and far reaching, it is important to break it down so everyone can understand it and where we are headed.

Fascism did not start on February 27, 1933 with the burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin; it did not begin with the building of concentration camps after the fire. It was all planned and a strategy of division, doubt, and fear simply bore fruit at this point.

Hitler summed up his strategy; he sowed the seeds of “mental confusion, contradiction of feelings, indecision, [and] panic.”

Were the German people dumb, ignorant or just plain malditos?  Some were all of the above.

Hitler and his gang set out to stamp out all vestiges of freedom and decency in German society. It is a story goes back to the early 1920’s and was formed after great forethought. 

It used symbols such as the black swastika within the white circle, triggering images of hate toward Jews.  Similarly, the Tea Party movement uses the flag with the circle of stars, the border and the tea kettle to nurture fear and hate.

Lakeview sit-in supporters protest school board meeting | SF Politics

Lakeview sit-in supporters protest school board meeting | SF Politics

California High School Dropout Rate

 SACRAMENTO—Graduation rates among California's public school students are climbing and dropout rates are falling, with the biggest gains being made among English learners and the state's largest minority groups, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announced today. (at cde.ca.gov) June 27,2012.

More than three quarters, or 76.3 percent, of students who started high school in 2007 graduated with their class in 2011. That is up 1.5 percentage points from the 2010 graduation rate. Larger gains were seen among Hispanic and African American students at 2.2 and 2.3 percentage points respectively, with the biggest increase being among English learners at 3.8 percentage points. The graduation rate for socioeconomically disadvantaged students climbed nearly 2 percentage points, from 68.1 to 70 percent.

"Every graduate represents a success story in one of the most effective job and anti-poverty programs ever conceived, our public schools," Torlakson said. "These numbers are a testament to the hard work of teachers and administrators, of parents and, most of all, of the students themselves. While they are a great illustration of all that is going right in California schools, they should also remind us that schools need our support to continue to improve so that every student graduates prepared for college, a career, and to contribute to our state's future."

Beyond the 76.3 percent graduation rate and the 14.4 percent dropout rate, the remaining 9.3 percent are students who are neither graduates nor dropouts. Some are still enrolled in school (8.6 percent). Others are non-diploma special education students (0.4 percent), and some elected to pass a high school equivalency exam.

http://www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr12/yr12rel65.asp

Randi Weingarten, Netroots Nation

It takes a couple of minutes for her to get to the issue, but it is worth the wait. She talks about teacher led school improvement. 

Are charter schools public? Diane Ravitch

Are charter schools public?

I noted in my blog last week that the visionaries of the charter school idea—Raymond Budde of the University of Massachusetts and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers—never intended that charter schools would compete with public schools.

Budde saw charters as a way to reorganize public school districts and to provide more freedom for teachers. He envisioned teams of teachers asking for a charter for three to five years, during which time they would operate with full autonomy over curriculum and instruction, with no interference from the superintendent or the principal.

Shanker thought that charter schools should be created by teams of teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decisionmaking and participatory governance. He imagined schools that taught by coaching rather than lecturing, that strived for creativity and problem-solving rather than mastery of standardized tests or regurgitation of facts. He never thought of charters as non-union schools where teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students.

Today, charter schools are very far from the original visions of Budde and Shanker. Few are run by teams of teachers. Most are managed by for-profit corporations or by nonprofit corporations with private boards of directors. The charter reflects the aims of the corporation, not the aims of its teachers. Most charters are non-union and rely on young teachers who work long hours and leave after a few years, thus keeping costs low. Many have high executive compensation. Charters have a high rate of teacher and principal turnover. Clearly, charters do not "belong" to the professionals who work in them, but to the corporation and its directors, who hold the charter.

Which raises the question of this blog: Are charter schools public schools? They say they are. But what we now see is that they are public when it comes to collecting tax money, but not in most other respects.

In New York state, the charters went to court to fight audits by the state comptroller; they argued that they are nonprofit educational institutions, not public agencies. They said that only their authorizers had the power to audit them, not public officials. The state law was amended to give the comptroller the authority to audit their use of public monies.

In Chicago and in Philadelphia, charter schools fought efforts by their teachers to unionize on grounds that they were not public schools and thus were not subject to state labor laws. The charter school in Chicago argued in court that it was a private school, not a public school, and thus not subject to the same laws as public schools.

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a charter school in Arizona was a private nonprofit corporation, not a state agency, when it was sued by an employee who had been discharged. In this case, a federal court agreed with the charter school that charters are not public schools when it comes to the rights of their employees.

Bruce Baker at Rutgers University, who has written thoughtfully about charters, recently considered whether charters are public or private or neither. Charters, he points out, can limit their total enrollment; can admit students only on an annual basis and not accept any mid-year; and "can set academic, behavior, and cultural standards that promote exclusion of students via attrition."

Baker writes:

"Imagine a community park, for example, that is paid for with tax dollars collected by all taxpayers in the community, and managed by a private board of directors. That board has determined that the park may reasonably serve only 100 of the community's 1,000 residents. The amount of tax levied is adjusted for the park's capacity. To determine who gets to use the park annually, interested residents subscribe to a lottery, where 100 are chosen each year. Others continue to pay the tax whether chosen for park access or not. The park has a big fence around it, and only those granted access through the lottery may gain entrance. Imagine also that each of the 100 lottery winners must sign a code of conduct to be unilaterally enforced by the private manager of the park. That management firm can establish its own procedures (or essentially have none) for determining who has or has not abided by the code of conduct and revoke access privileges unilaterally."


Today, charters say that they are public when it suits their purpose (getting the same amount of money as public schools), and they say they are not really public when they want to escape the accountability and transparency that accompany the receipt of public funding. Some have a large budget to market their wares. (Regular public schools have no money for marketing.) Some use marketing to create demand so that they can get more charters.

Charters are typically more segregated than the district in which they are located. Some are all-black; some are Muslim-themed; some are centered on other specific cultural groups. Some charters are not for minorities or the poor. Wealthy parents in Los Altos, Calif., opened a charter for their children, which takes space and money away from the remaining public schools of the community. Parents at that charter school are expected to make a gift of $5,000 annually for each child.

The issue is complicated. But I find it hard to refer to charter schools—as they have evolved—as public schools. If they are for-profit, they should not be called public schools. There is simply no precedent in American history for a profit-making public school with stockholders. All public money allotted to a public school should be spent by the school and in the school on teaching and learning, on bringing the students to school, and on maintenance of the facility.

If charters are nonprofit but subcontract the management of the school to a for-profit corporation, they are not (in my view) a public school. This is a dodge that some entrepreneurs have come up with to make money from tax receipts.

If a charter sponsor is involved in complicated real-estate transactions that profit the sponsor, then the school is an accessory to private profit-making and not a public school.

I am also concerned about the selectivity and attrition rates in many charters, which suggests that they pick and choose in ways that enable them to be competitive, but lessens their "publicness." There are selective institutions within public education, but their selective nature is in the open.

I will think about this more. I have met some thoughtful charter leaders who are trying to serve the needs of children, not corporate sponsors; who do not skim the best and forget the rest; who do not push out low-performing kids. But my sense is that they are not typical.

Like Bruce Baker, I think we need to develop a typology. Just because some group says its school is a public school doesn't make it one. Just because it gets public tax dollars doesn't make it a public school. We need to think more about what we mean by "public."

What concerns me most is the possibility that policymakers are promoting dual school systems: a privileged group of schools called charters that can select their students and exclude the ones that are hardest to educate; and the remaining schools composed of students who couldn't get into the charters or got kicked out. I wonder also whether it is wise in the long run to create one set of schools that is free from regulation and a competing set of schools that is subject to ever tighter regulation. What is the endgame? Is it our goal to undermine public education so thoroughly that teachers and students alike turn away from it?

It's been almost 60 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Have charters become a quiet way of reversing the Brown decision of 1954? I worry that we are slipping back into deeply ingrained patterns, based sometimes on race, sometimes on class, sometimes on ethnicity. We must think long-term and ask where we are heading.

Diane

- Diane Ravitch

California Schools Under More Stress | California Progress Report

California Schools Under More Stress | California Progress Report

Common Core School Standards

Backer of Common Core School Curriculum Is Chosen to Lead College Board

By Tamar Lewin : New York Times

David Coleman, an architect of the common core curriculum standards that are being adopted in nearly all 50 states, will become the president of the College Board, starting in October.

Editors note: Common core standards is what the politicians talk about while cutting school budgets.  Such standards do not teach a single student.

“There’s no reason on earth for common core standards and these tests that we’re wasting billions of dollars on,” said Stephen Krashen, an emeritus education professor at the University of Southern California. “The problem is poverty, poverty, poverty. Middle-class children who go to well-funded schools do very well, but even the best tests, the most inspiring teachers, won’t mean anything if the kids don’t have enough to eat.”

Proposal to close 25% of Philadelphia Schools

Reposted from Rethinking Schools.

by Jody Sokolower
Philadelphia teachers and parents—and educators throughout the country—were horrified a few weeks ago when Thomas Knudsen, the School District of Philadelphia’s chief recovery officer, unveiled a five-year plan to close 64 schools (25 percent of the system), move 40 percent of students into charters, slash the central office to 20 percent of its former capacity, and divide the rest of the district into “achievement networks” run by third-party operators.
Mayor Michael Nutter said the district faced near “collapse” and that the plan was something Philadelphians needed to “grow up and deal with.” Can you believe that city officials later admitted that the charters and achievement networks wouldn’t actually save the district any money?
We are proud that one of the voices of sanity and resistance came from Helen Gym, a Rethinking Schools editorial associate and longtime parent activist in Philly. We are reposting her open letter to Knudsen here—not only because it analyzes so articulately what is happening and what is at stake in Philly—but also because Philly is not alone. Similar “saving the district from collapse” scenarios have already played out or are in progress in cities as widespread as New Orleans, Detroit, and Chicago.

Commentary: You’re not speaking to me, Mr. Knudsen

by Helen Gym
I am the mother of three children in District and charter schools in this city. I have been actively involved in stopping good schools from decline and helping low-performing, violent schools turn around. I believe in the essential role that a high-quality public school system plays and have fought for that vision. My 7th grade son will soon have outlasted four superintendencies, including yours. And I’m here to tell you that you’re not speaking to me.
You’re not speaking to me with this brand of disaster capitalism that tries to shock a besieged public with unproven, untested, and drastic action couched as “solutions.” You’re not speaking to me when you invoke language like “achievement networks,” “portfolio management,” and “rightsizing” our schools – and say not a word about lower class sizes or increasing the presence of loving support personnel or enriching our curriculum.
You’re not speaking to me when you plan to close 25 percent of our schools before my son graduates high school. You’re not speaking to me when you equate closing down 64 schools – many of them community anchors – as “streamlining operations,” yet you’ll expand charter populations willy-nilly despite a national studyshowing two-thirds of Philly charters are no better or worse than District-managed schools.

What you need to know about ALEC

by Diane Ravitch

ear Deborah,
Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.
This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.
ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the "Stand Your Ground" legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald's, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy's, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there's still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.

Teacher "Performance" Assessment, PACT

There is a New York Times article today about Resistance to Outsourcing Teacher Licensing.  Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest

... Student teachers at the University of Massachusetts are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by the education ...

May 6, 2012 - By MICHAEL WINERIP - Education - Article - Print Headline: "Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest"

A group of faculty and students at UMASS Amherst are resisting the assessment system developed and used in California, known as PACT. In the article Prof. Raymond Pecheone of Stanford and others claim there is no organized resistance to this testing.

To the contrary.  A group of faculty and students in the CSU have consistently resisted this testing as invalid and not reliable.  Here is a record of some of this resistance.

https://sites.google.com/site/assessingpact/

Duane Campbell.  Democracy and Education Institute. 

CSU Faculty vote to authorize state wide strike

Faculty Union in California votes to authorize a strike. Would be the first system wide strike in state history.

California State University faculty voted to  approved a measure to give their union leaders the power to authorize a strike next fall that could delay the beginning of school for thousands of students across the 23-campus university system.  The CSU is the 23 campus system of California.  The University of California does not have a faculty union with collective bargaining recognition although some of its staff and employees belong to unions.

A powerful 95% of the  faculty voters agreed that the CSU’s instructional faculty, should initiate rolling walkouts if the CSU administration continues to demand concessions.

Equally as impressive was the turnout, with 70% of CFA members voting to send an unmistakable message to Chancellor Charles B. Reed – state austerity is killing higher education in California.

Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association, said, “Today, the faculty has spoken loud and clear – we have had enough of the way in which they are being treated by the CSU administration.”

Worried About School Funding, Most Favor Tax Increase—For the Rich | California Progress Report

Worried About School Funding, Most Favor Tax Increase—For the Rich | California Progress Report

Save Our Schools: SOS

By Deborah Meier,
Dear Diane,
HELP!!! SOS!!! "Reformed" schools are literally becoming reform schools for the poor. It's a sign of "the future" as some people envision it. Although, of course, these are not the schools for the reformers' kids.
Mitt Romney "declared that this century must be an American century," and President Barack Obama insists that "anyone who tells you that America is in decline ... doesn't know what they are talking about." Well, it's hard to argue with Romney since his "must" is a preference, not a prediction. But I do worry about Obama's statement because it contains truth, and it covers up a potential falsehood. (See "America's Place in the New World," by Charles A. Kupchan in The New York Times.)
But why should we care if we're first? (See last week's letter!) If the first is a nation we respect, being second is just fine. What we care about is the health and welfare of our nation's people and their future prospects both economically and politically, not our place in somebody's ranking system. We might also like a president who hopes for the best for other nations' people, too. And, while American business may not be in decline, it has the advantage of transferring its own future health and welfare to almost any nation it chooses. The American people have a harder time following suit. Indeed, global business has no country. Our inventiveness won't help if we off-shore the production of the inventions "made in America"—to nations that operate with 19th century sweat-shop wages and working conditions.
Under our unequal circumstances (99/1) it seems hard to envision how we will once again have an economy that works for everyone, not just the top 1 percent. And given the options of who might replace us, democracy doesn't seem likely to be the winner either way. Our own democracy is fast crumbling—and for the very same reason: the inequality of power in our society run amok ... and fueled by fear.
So, Kupchan may be right that "the democratic, secular, and free-market model" challenged by state capitalism and religious fundamentalism will succeed in dominating the 2lst century.
As Henry A. Giroux writes in the Truthout blog:

"Under such circumstances, all bets are off regarding the future of democracy. Besides a growing inability to translate private matters into public concerns, what is also being lost in the current historical conjuncture is the very idea of the public good, the notion of connecting learning to social change and developing modes of civic courage infused by the principles of social justice. Under the regime of a ruthless economic Darwinism which emphasizes a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, concepts and practices of community and solidarity have been replaced by a world of cutthroat politics, financial greed, media spectacles, and a rabid consumerism."

Is there another way?
Yes. That's why I'm stuck trying to both hold onto the idea of "public space" and a public to go with it! Public education is one of several much besieged institutions that may soon disappear—think about replacing post offices and our local letter-carriers. Consider, too, an army made up of mercenaries, and who knows? Private police? Firefighters? Libraries? Highways? Where can "we" go to "hang out" together?
In schools (that) we trust *—that "belong" in some direct form to "we the people"—is part of my answer. So go read the book by that name, especially Chapters 9 and 10 on scaling up reform for democracy. Do you have a suggestion on a book laying out why we need public police, firefighters, libraries, et al?
Of course, the present system is not all it should be, re. democracy, especially for minority groups, and in our much too large urban districts with their tendency to become centralized in the hands of the local elite. Few are the mayors or appointed school board members who send their own kids to their local schools.
See also Will Standards Save Public Education? which I wrote in 2000 (foreword by Jonathan Kozol). I agree with virtually everything I said there, except that I was oblivious to the attack on the idea of a public system itself. I wasn't yet noticing what lay ahead, and now that it's so front and center, could it be too late?
The future is not yet written—when it is, there will still be those of us fighting for the next future. Which reminds me, read No Citizen Left Behind by Meira Levinson—a forthright defense of schools as institutions for teaching about democracy and justice. Democracy was never a foregone conclusion. It's perhaps amazing that it remains a lively option, if not a foregone conclusion.
Many of us will be in Washington, D.C., from Aug. 3-5 (thanks to Save Our Schools) to once again show our support for public education and to produce an education agenda that we can share at both upcoming conventions. Over the coming months I'll try to keep folks informed about how it's shaping up, with input, we hope, from one and all. Will you be joining us?
Can we build a response that doesn't rest on fear, but rather on hope?
Deb

Hired Guns on Astroturf- Fake School reform ...

Dissent Magazine - Spring 2012 Issue - Hired Guns on Astroturf..

Dissent Magazine - Spring 2012 Issue - Hired Guns on Astrotur...

Joan Barkan

If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled “education reform movement.” As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They’ve gone political as never before—like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers’ unions. 

Devolution of a Movement

For the last decade or so, this generation of ed reformers has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools: establishing nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, hiring business executives to run school districts, and calculating a teacher’s worth based on student test scores. Along the way, the reformers recognized the value of public promotion and persuasion (called “advocacy”) for their agenda, and they started pouring more money into media outlets, friendly think tanks, and the work of well-disposed researchers. By 2010 critics of the movement saw “reform-think” dominating national discourse about education, but key reform players judged the pace of change too slow.

Read the detailed analysis of Michelle Rhee and other "reformers" who are making millions off of "school reform." 

Flunking the Test | American Journalism Review

Flunking the Test  | American Journalism Review
How the media fails on school coverage.

Dreams Are For Everyone

Public Education is about score manipulation

by Paul Karrer. Teacher. Monterrey.
http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2012/03/public-education-is-too-much-about.html

Chicago School Reform

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has produced a remarkable document describing a vision for schooling that is truly equitable and high-quality.  The plan addresses, head-on, the historic inequality in education and refuses to compromise on quality. 

The Chicago Teachers Union argues for proven educational reforms to dramatically improve education of more than 400,000 students in a district of 675 schools. These reforms are desperately needed and can head Chicago towards the world-class educational system its students deserve.

The following are essential:

1.     Recognize That Class Size Matters. Drastically reduce class size. We currently have one of the largest class sizes in the state. This greatly inhibits the ability of our students to learn and thrive.

2.     Educate The Whole Child. Invest to ensure that all schools have recess and physical education equipment, healthy food offerings, and classes in art, theater, dance, and music in every school. Offer world languages and a variety of subject choices. Provide every school with a library and assign the commensurate number of librarians to staff them.

3.     Create More Robust Wrap-around Services. The Chicago Public Schools system (CPS) is far behind recommended staffing levels suggested by national professional associations. The number of school counselors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists must increase dramatically to serve Chicago’s population of low-income students. Additionally, students who cannot afford transportation costs need free fares.

He’s looked at life from both sides now – or has he? Arne Duncan claims the high ground, but school clinics still face needless obstacles | Economic Policy Institute

He’s looked at life from both sides now – or has he? Arne Duncan claims the high ground, but school clinics still face needless obstacles | Economic Policy Institute