San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Education

Oakland is California’s Destroy Public Education Petri Dish

by

These are interesting times in Oakland, California. The public-school system is again teetering on the edge of financial collapse. The Destroy Public Education (DPE) movement has succeeded in privatizing more than a quarter of the district and has fomented financial turmoil. Concurrently, a dynamic young woman, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, has been selected as the new Superintendent of Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). On that news, Oakland Magazine’s headline blared, “Finally Some Stability.”

Mike Hutchinson, an education activist from Oakland, told Capital & Main that districts like OUSD are being used as a kind of policy Petri dish by charter supporters. It is how they are refining takeover strategies outlined for Los Angeles by the Broad charter expansion plan.   [Read more…]

Oklahoma Teacher Vents About Classroom Conditions to Reporter | Video Worth Watching

by

During MSNBC’s coverage of the Oklahoma teachers’ walkout, reporter Mariana Atencio interviewed teacher Ray Sanders. He gave an impassioned recounting of some of the classroom deficiencies that he is forced to contend with.

And in recognition of Poetry Month, here’s a bonus. This little gem from poet Taylor Mali —”What Teachers Make”— was presented in the 2000 National Poetry Slam in Providence, RI.   [Read more…]

Indiana’s Destroy-Public-Education Leader is Going National (Again)

by

Harris propagates the Koch-DeVos school privatization agenda

Last week, a press release from The Mind Trust announced that founder and CEO, David Harris was leaving. Writing for Chalkbeat, Dillon Peers McCoy reported:

“Now, Harris is moving on from the city he helped shape to the national stage, although he still plans to live in Indianapolis. The national group is in the early stages of development, said Harris, who declined to provide more details about his co-founders or their plans. A release from The Mind Trust said the new organization aims to “help cities around the country build the right conditions for education change.”

This is at least the third attempt Harris has made to take his brand to a national scale.   [Read more…]

DeVos Damages to Detroit Schools: A Crime in Progress

by

The destroy public education (DPE) movement’s most egregious outcome may be in Detroit and it is being driven by a virulent Christian ideology.

In 2001, Dick and Betsy DeVos answered questions for the Gathering. Dick DeVos opined that church has retreated from its central role in communities and has been replaced by the public school. He said it is our hope “churches will get more and more active and engaged in education.” Betsy noted “half of our giving is towards education.”   [Read more…]

Notes from the Class War: the West Virginia Strike Shows That Solidarity Wins

by

In the early days of the Trump administration, most savvy observers were quick to note that, populist bluster aside, Trump’s policies would be a disaster for America’s already historic level of economic inequality.  As economist Charles Ballard wrote in The Hill, “the main thrust of policy proposals from President Trump is to maintain, and even accelerate, the anti-egalitarian policies of recent decades.”

A year later, it’s now abundantly clear that the anti-egalitarian nature of this administration has only poured gasoline on the fire.  Thus, as Alex Henderson noted in an Alternet piece  last week, “The reality is the United States is now home to some of the worst income inequality in the developed world, and thanks to the recent passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, this wealth gap will grow exponentially wider.”  

Indeed, as Henderson outlines, the gap between Trump’s bogus populist rhetoric and this governing policy is breathtaking   [Read more…]

The Awful Plight of Washington D.C. Schools Reveals the Failure of Portfolio-Style Reform

by

Washington D.C. schools are classified as a portfolio district by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). CRPE is the Bill Gates-funded think tank on the campus of the University of Washington whose primary function is to promote portfolio district governance. Oligarchs and politicians call D.C. an education model. I agree. It is like when my mother held up Glenn Elmore as a model for me saying; “When you graduate from high school you’re not going to sponge off your parents the way that lazy freeloader, Glenn Elmore, sponges off his family.” [name changed]

Portfolio district management means closing some percentage of “failing schools” as determined by standardized testing and replacing them with innovation schools, charter schools, or voucher schools. In the same way a stock portfolio is managed, the continuous closing of “failing schools” and replacing them with “superior schools” is the path to education nirvana.

Only someone who has never worked with children and especially children living in poverty, could even remotely imagine this kind of disruption would lead to better schools and healthier children.   [Read more…]

West Virginia Teachers Show Why Unions Matter | Women’s History Month

by

It is illegal for public employees to strike in the state of West Virginia. The teachers have gone all-in anyway, and are currently in the eighth day of a wildcat strike that encompasses all of West Virginia’s fifty-five counties. The state’s legislators have rejected the agreement that Governor Jim Justice presented last week that would have returned students to their classrooms. It doesn’t appear that the strike will end any time soon. Nor will the striking teachers’ commitment to providing food to the one in five students who live in poverty in their districts end soon either.

Teacher salaries in the state rank forty-eighth in the US. One teacher noted that a manager at a fast food restaurant close to her school makes more money than she does. According to recent data from the Department of Education, “teachers tend to be white, female, and have nearly a decade and a half of experience in the classroom.”

Once again we see a female dominated profession pushed into penury while at the same time reaching into their own limited resources to continue helping their students.   [Read more…]

Marshall Tuck’s Dirty Secret: How Right-Wing Money Infiltrates Democratic Politics

by

Recently in the lead up to the Janus vs. AFSCME case that hit the Supreme Court last week, I wrote several columns focusing on the impact of the Koch brothers’ network’s attack on the union movement, the Democratic Party, and public education.  Thus, I was cheered to learn that the California Democratic Party overwhelmingly endorsed the stalwart progressive Tony Thurmond over Marshall Tuck for State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

While this is a low-profile affair as statewide races go, it is important because lots of moneyed interests see it as a way to push their agenda under the radar here in super blue California.  As I noted during Tuck’s last failed campaign for the same office, he is a stealth front man, “the pure embodiment of the reckless, unaccountable arrogance of corporate education reform”   [Read more…]

Can Schools Discipline Students for Protesting?

by

By Vera Eidelman / ACLU – Speak Freely

Students around the country are turning last week’s heartbreaking school shooting in Parkland, Florida, into an inspiring and exemplary push for legislative change. In the last few days, many people have asked whether schools can discipline students for speaking out. The short answer? It depends on when, where, and how the students decide to express themselves.   [Read more…]

Destroy Public Education (DPE) for Dummies

by

America’s public education system is being deliberately destroyed. If you graduated from high school in the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s or 80’s, it is such an unthinkable concept that it is difficult to even imagine. Not only is it possible, it is happening and a lot of damage has already occurred.

Recently I learned that a Republican legislator has proposed privatizing all the schools in Muncie, Indiana. Almost all the schools in New Orleans were privatized after hurricane Katrina. Half the schools in Washington DC and a quarter of the schools in Los Angeles are privatized. However, ninety percent of America’s K-12 students attend public schools.   [Read more…]

Teachers, Guns, and Money

by

The generalized rage and indiscriminate, spectacular violence that characterized the first year of the Trump era shows no sign of abating.  In the wake of yet another horrifying mass murder at a school in Florida, the President’s response is to meet senseless violence with the threat of more violence.  

Speaking to justify his breathtakingly stupid proposal to arm teachers as a defense against school shootings, Trump opined that if the educators at Stoneman Douglas High School had weapons they would have stopped the attack, “A teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened.”  

The logic of Trump’s cartoon Western version of the world is chilling.  As the New York Times reported, the key to Trump’s plan is to give teachers bonuses for packing heat on campus   [Read more…]

Standards-Based Education Reform is Toxic

by

In 1983, lawyers, business titans and famous scientists ushered in the era of standards-based reform with the infamous “A Nation at Risk.” This political polemic masquerading as a scholarly paper proclaimed a crisis in American education. It propelled us careening down a path of harm. Harm for children; harm for educators; harm for communities; harm for schools and harm for democracy.

During my first quarter at UCSD’s teacher education program, I was assigned many readings including Alfie Kohn’s The Schools Our Children Deserve. By 1999, the time of the books writing, Clinton’s Goals 2000 was in force and many states were already adopting high school exit exams and other standardized testing practices. Although not impressed by this theory of education improvement, Alfie was more focused on improving education practices in public schools.

He asked, “Is it possible that we are not really as well educated as we’d like to think? Might we have spent a good chunk of our childhoods doing stuff that was exactly as pointless as we suspected it was at the time?”   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry