Group items tagged

While the bullying can be witnessed in the discourse coming from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former-chancellor Michelle Rhee, and billionaire-reformer Bill Gates, one of the most corrosive and powerful dynamics embracing bully politics is the rise of self-appointed think-tank entities claiming to evaluate and rank teacher education programs. A key player in bully politics is the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). NCTQ represents, first, the rise of think tanks and the ability of those think tanks to mask their ideologies while receiving disproportionate and unchallenged support from the media. Think tanks have adopted the format and pose of scholarship, producing well crafted documents filled with citations and language that frame ideology as "fair and balanced" conclusions drawn from the evidence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

New York State's heralded anti-bullying law is about to go into effect July 1. But the state Board of Regents recently took some teeth out of the law, known as the Dignity Act, when it said that charter schools don't have to provide in-class instruction to schoolchildren about the dangers of discrimination and harassment, leaving their students without a key protection from bullying.

In Silicon Valley, Bullis elementary school accepts one in six kindergarten applicants, offers Chinese and asks families to donate $5,000 per child each year. Parents include Ken Moore, son of Intel Corp.'s co-founder, and Steven Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse. Bullis isn't a high-end private school. It's a taxpayer- funded, privately run public school, part of the charter-school movement that educates 1.8 million U.S. children. While charters are heralded for offering underprivileged kids an alternative to failing U.S. districts, Bullis gives an admissions edge to residents of parts of Los Altos Hills, where the median home is worth $1 million and household income is $219,000, four times the state average.

"Our study suggests that a bullying climate may play an important role in student test performance," said Dewey Cornell, PhD, a clinical psychologist and professor of education at the University of Virginia. "This research underscores the importance of treating bullying as a schoolwide problem rather than just an individual problem."

Students with disabilities or health problems are more likely to be the target of bullies than their classmates, according to a study published this month in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The 2012 "Education Reformers" - They bully, they're arrogant and they appear to believe that the law applies to others but not them. As Michelle Rhee and the other out-of-state "Education Reformers" pour into Connecticut to join their allies in the effort to Governor Malloy's ill-conceived "Education Reform" bill you'd think they'd recognize the importance of following Connecticut's laws. But apparently these "Education Reformers" either believe they are above the law on simply don't care if they get fined for violating the lobbyist rules we have in place.

Now our small community is faced with the unthinkable - we may be forced to close a highly performing public school to hand that school lock, stock and barrel over to a Charter School.  Shocking, isn't it?  How could this happen?  Charter school law was intended to help children who are under-served and falling through the cracks of traditional education systems.  Unfortunately, across the country there are more and more charter schools popping up which are taking advantage of loopholes to create pseudo-private schools with questionable admissions practices, high "suggested donation" requirements from parents and low representation of truly underprivileged children.

"The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers-typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)-and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points. This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction. Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the "ends-justify-the-means" assumptions and practices-the broader "no excuses" ideology-underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP. Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools)."

Congratulations to the 6000-plus teachers who achieved National Board Certification recently. In this Era of Bad Feelings about teacher effectiveness, National Board-Certified teachers are the real deal. A significant slice of them will receive some kind of annual bonus, from a modest $1K to a percentage salary increase, for their recognition as exemplary practitioners--and I say bully for them. They deserve it for demonstrating, via the best available standards-based measure, their commitment to student learning and a willingness to critically examine and fine-tune their own practice.

When I see the most powerful, and wealthiest people in this country, representing both major parties, attack public school teachers, it makes my blood boil.

Attorney and whistleblower Kathleen Carroll was fired by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing CTC in September 2010 after she began to expose the systemic corruption and cronyism at the agency. The commission plays a critical role in education in California certifying teachers and also approving education training programs. Carroll discovered that Agency officials and the board members were also involved in planning the systemic destruction of public education in California and how this agency operated to carry out this role. They were involved in spending millions of dollars on private charter schools that some staff had personal interests in. The commission managers also bullied the staff and created a reign of terror at the agency. This commission is also under the direct control of the Executive and Governor Jerry Brown but he has remained silent about the scandal.

It wasn't the tests that made the Atlanta teachers and principals go insane with cheating. But they did go insane.

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis Thursday rejected an offer of a 2 percent raise for working a 90-minute-longer school day, saying teachers would not be "bullied" by public attempts to push through a slapdash plan.

Most governors are fond of talking about education-why it needs to be improved, how they're going to improve it, the consequences of not improving it, and so on. But when governors attempt to use the bully pulpit to sell their ideas about education to the public, what are their favored rhetorical themes? A new analysis examines that question, and finds that governors overwhelmingly choose to frame education as important for economic reasons, rather than for the development of individual abilities, or as a matter of civic responsibility. And that political strategy has implications for society and its schools, the researchers say.