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Sunday, July 27, 2014

In Support of Public Education: Examining Privatization, Common Core and High Stakes Testing - UNITED OPT OUT

In Support of Public Education: Examining Privatization, Common Core and High Stakes Testing - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:



In Support of Public Education: Examining Privatization, Common Core and High Stakes Testing

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A special thanks to Becky Smith (Opt Out Orlando and SOS) who crafted a large portion of this document, which was shared with and edited by United Opt Out to share here
Our opposition to the Common Core and high stakes testing-HST (which go hand in hand) is not grounded in or allied with any particular political ideology.
Although some groups are against the same issues they do not share the same core beliefs regarding the cause of these reforms, or the solutions. United Opt Out would like to clarify our stance.
Our work is driven by the facts as we see them. First, Common Core is not a “leftist conspiracy.” The facts do not support this assumption. While we concede that many prominent “liberals” and “progressives” (such as Arne, some Union leaders, and Gates who proclaim themselves to be) have sold public education up the river with a false narrative of “equity” or “civil rights” as justification for reform, it is also true that the origins of the Common Core and HST concurrently emerged from conservative-dominated business and corporate leadership with membership in ALEC . We need to call on the carpet ALL perpetrators of destructive reform, not just those whose political ideology differs from our own.
This leads to the second point. We agree that Common Core and HST are harmful intrusions into public education foisted  upon us from the federal government via Race to the Top. Data mining and “big brother” oversight of classrooms and children must end. But the story does not end here. Big government is in partnership with big business (through private-public partnerships), and the template which created Common Core and HST mandates emanate from a privatization model for education. In this corporate model, Common Core is used as a “one size fits all” framework of education which yields private business profits at the expense of quality learning. It was crafted by corporate think tanks and entities with leadership from individuals in the CORPORATE world, such as (but not limited to) Lou Gerstner (IBM and Achieve), David Coleman (Student Achievement Partners and College Board) and Sir Michael Barber (Minster of Education to Tony Blair and CEO of Pearson). They see public education as a profitable venture to be tapped by private interests. The US Dept. of Education got its playbook from the corporate world (see the list of whose who at thispolicy meeting in 2008).

Teacher group rallies in Washington to protest Common Core, Arne Duncan | NJ.com

Teacher group rallies in Washington to protest Common Core, Arne Duncan | NJ.com:



Teacher group rallies in Washington to protest Common Core, Arne Duncan



Last fall, Melissa Tomlinson took on Gov. Chris Christie and his educational policies in a heated exchange that received national attention.
Tomorrow, Tomlinson and other BATs – short for Badass Teachers – take their campaign to Washington, D.C. for a day-long rally on the Department of Education’s plaza.
The BATs, a national organization of some 48,000 teachers, will demand the government end its support of the Common Core State Standards and high-stakes testing. And they will call for Education Secretary Arne Duncan to be fired and replaced with a career educator.
Tomlinson, a middle school teacher in Buena in Atlantic County, said they don’t expect Duncan to get sacked, but they believe their calls for change are being heard.
“It has put him on notice, yes? I think his eyes have been opened a little bit,” she said.
The BATs are hosting a day of activism and advocacy training in the nation’s capital today. It will be followed by tomorrow’s rally.
“We’re trying to bring attention to what is happening in education,” she said. “A lot of what the public is reading puts teachers in a bad light, puts public education in a bad light.”
The BATs promise a different kind of rally, with performances and speakers that highlight the success of public education, she said.
“It’s not going to be your typical angry march, but more of a celebration,” she said.Teacher group rallies in Washington to protest Common Core, Arne Duncan | NJ.com:

Borderland Deaths of Migrants Quietly Reach Crisis Numbers | Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!

Borderland Deaths of Migrants Quietly Reach Crisis Numbers | Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!:



Borderland Deaths of Migrants Quietly Reach Crisis Numbers

Filed under: Immigration — millerlf @ 9:08 pm 
Sunday, 27 July 2014 09:23 By Bethania Palma Markus, Truthout
Undocumented migrants pass a boy between two cars on a moving northbound freight train known as "The Beast," because of rampant accidents and violent crime, as it passes through Tenosique, Mexico, July 2, 2014. (Photo: Meridith Kohut / The New York Times)Undocumented migrants pass a boy between two cars on a moving northbound freight train known as “The Beast,” because of rampant accidents and violent crime, as it passes through Tenosique, Mexico, July 2, 2014. (Photo: Meridith Kohut / The New York Times)
The sun-bleached bones of a human skeleton lay in disarray: the skull rolled on its crown, an S-curved spinal column about two feet away. Leg bones were in a haphazard pile. There were personal items too – a wallet, pair of walking shoes and a dirt-caked T-shirt.
They belonged to a man, most likely a migrant who had faced off with the Sonoran Desert in an attempt to come north. While most attention on immigration has been directed recently at the human drama unfolding around a surge of children fleeing from Central American countries, the immigrant death toll on the US-Mexico border has quietly exploded, even as undocumented migration overall has plummeted.
The bones were found by Aguilas del Desierto (Eagles of the Desert), an all-volunteer search-and-rescue organization, in the blistering Arizona desert heat of the Organ Pipe Cactus national park just south of Ajo, a sparsely populated region of Pima County that neighbors the Mexican border. As many were hunkering over barbecues or lighting off fireworks, these men rolled out of California on a 300-mile trek across Interstate 8. I rode shotgun in long-time volunteer and Marine Corps veteran Vicente Rodriguez’s old red Forerunner.
Roughly once a month, they leave their families and personal lives to take these trips and plunge into some of the country’s most inhospitable landscapes. They hail from different walks of life – a roofer, a photographer, a medical supply importer, a gardening business owner, a water technician. But their common goal is finding at least some of the hundreds who die every year traversing the borderlands.
According to US Border Patrol statistics, 477 people died crossing in 2012, and 445 died crossing in 2013. The numbers have steadily shot up since 1998, when 263 died, according to the agency’s statistics. A total of almost 7,000 people have died between 1998 and 2013. But the true number is likely higher, considering many are never found.
Throttling along the hot pavement with no air conditioner to speak of, Vicente was blunt about the search prospects.
“Most of the time we are looking for a dead person – cadavers,” he said. “By the time [the migrant group] makes it out of the desert, several days have passed. Lack of water and heat is usually what kills them.”
As we drove with hot air roaring through open windows and volunteers Danny Morales and Ricardo Equivias passing time cracking jokes in the backseat, the border fence came into view and snaked along to my right. Vicente started pointing out seemingly innocuous geographical features that form a killer gauntlet for migrants. Enough people drowned in drinking water Borderland Deaths of Migrants Quietly Reach Crisis Numbers | Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!:

Colonialism, Not Reform: New Orleans Schools Since Katrina • An Interview with Karran Harper Royal

Colonialism, Not Reform: New Orleans Schools Since Katrina • An Interview with Karran Harper Royal:



Colonialism, Not Reform

New Orleans Schools Since Katrina

An Interview with community activist Karran Harper Royal
BY STAN KARP AND JODY SOKOLOWER





Karran Harper Royal
By next fall, New Orleans will have only five public schools—those operated by the Orleans Parish School Board. Everything else will be charters. The post-Katrina path to almost 100 percent charter education began with the post-storm shutdown of the city’s struggling public schools and the firing (recently declared illegal) of some 7,500 unionized teachers and other school employees, predominantly African American women. The assault was accelerated by a massive infusion of foundation and entrepreneurial investment in new charter schools, and years of state and federally supported deregulation and privatization.
Today the city has tens of thousands fewer children than before Katrina and significantly fewer African American residents, but the school-age population of 44,000 remains mostly poor and black. Parents and families must navigate a maze of selective charters, each operating as an independent district with little oversight. Special-needs students have particular problems finding appropriate placements. One 2010 study found 4,000 teens, about 10 percent of the city’s student population, not enrolled in school at all. New Orleans has also been a spawning ground for authoritarian “no excuses” pedagogy, inexperienced Teach For America corps members, and “zero tolerance” discipline policies.
Throughout this transformation, Karran Harper Royal has been a passionate voice for parents and an articulate witness, sounding the alarm to the rest of the nation about the on-the-ground realities behind the New Orleans “miracle.” Rethinking Schools editors Stan Karp and Jody Sokolower spoke with Harper Royal in several sessions over the past year.
Rethinking Schools: What was your experience as a parent in the New Orleans public schools before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005?
Karran Harper Royal: My start was 22 years ago, in 1992, when my son Khris was in kindergarten and he couldn’t sit still. I worked in the French Quarter, right at the corner of Royal and Toulouse. There was a little school down the street called McDonogh 15 Creative Arts Magnet School [now a KIPP school]. I wanted Khris to go to school near where I worked. So I just went down the street and asked, “Can I enroll my child here?” and they took him. He didn’t have to take a test or audition to get in, but it was a school of choice focused on the arts. It was such a special place, an amazing public school, very child-centered. The founder was Lucianne Carmichael. She’s retired now, but she has an artist retreat across the river called A Studio in the Woods.
RS: Khris was your oldest child?
KHR: My first child. And I was not who you see today. I was a very meek—if you can believe that—quiet mother who just wanted her son to be successful in school, because otherwise he was going to end up like my brother who at that time was in and out of jail. He was on drugs, he was a car thief—the best car thief in New Orleans, but a car thief. And, in my mind, there was a straight line from kindergarten to the prison cell. So I started visiting my son’s school. By the spring of his kindergarten year, I had quit my job and started going to school every day to find out why he was always in trouble. In trouble at that school was not the same as in trouble at a school today. In trouble meant he was asked to sit outside the classroom in the hallway or he was sent up to the librarian. Sometimes his teacher’s husband, a 70-year-Colonialism, Not Reform: New Orleans Schools Since Katrina • An Interview with Karran Harper Royal:

Ira Shor: Opt Out – The Real Parent Revolution - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform

Ira Shor: Opt Out – The Real Parent Revolution - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:



Ira Shor: Opt Out – The Real Parent Revolution

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First posted at Diane Ravitch‘s blog.
ira uooIra Shor is a professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches composition and rhetoric. Shor understands that standardized testing is the foundation on which the entire “reform” project rests. Take away the test scores, and the data-driven teacher evaluation collapses, along with the ambitious plans for privatization.
Shor writes:
We parents can stop the destruction of our public schools. We can stop the looting of school budgets by private charters and testing vendors. We can stop the abuse of our children by the relentless hours of testing. We can stop the closings, the co-locations, the mass firings, the replacement of veteran teachers with short-term Teach for America newbies, the shameful indignity of public schools told they have 24 hours to clear out so a charter can seize their classrooms. To do this, we have to opt-out our kids from the new testing regimes—refuse to let the schools test our kids with PARCC or Smarter Balanced, boycott the pointless and punitive tests which make the best years of our kids’ lives into a digital hell.
I opted-out my 10-year-old son from all state tests this year and will continue to do so when the useless and costly PARCC tests arrive next year. I will encourage other parents to join me in boycotting such standardized tests, which Diane Ravitch has rightly called “junk science” because they cannot accurately report a student’s achievement, learning process, or academic needs, or a teacher’s competence. For commercial and political reasons, it pleases Duncan, Gates and Co. to spread such tools from coast to coast, but they offer no evidence that such tools can do the job they claim, despite the constant promotion financed by Gates’s Ira Shor: Opt Out – The Real Parent Revolution - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:

Nite Cap 7-27-14 #BATsACT #RealEdTalk #EDCHAT



James Baldwin said it best: 

"For these are all our children, and we will profit by or pay for whatever they become."


A BIG EDUCATION APE NITE CAP



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YESTERDAY

Jennifer Rogers Goes From Queens to Georgia southbronxschool
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Nite Cap 7-26-14 #BATsACT #RealEdTalk #EDCHAT
James Baldwin said it best: "For these are all our children, and we will profit by or pay for whatever they become."A BIG EDUCATION APE NITE CAPCan’t be in DC with PAA? Join us anyway! | Parents Across AmericaCan’t be in DC with PAA? Join us anyway! | Parents Across America: Can’t be in DC with PAA? Join us anyway!We know that most of our PAA chapter and affiliate members are not able to