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NYC Teachers

Dissent Magazine - Winter 2011 Issue - Got Dough? How Billion... - 0 views

  • THE COST of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy—where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision—investing in education yields great bang for the buck.
  • Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field.
  • Other foundations—Ford, Hewlett, Annenberg, Milken, to name just a few—often join in funding one project or another, but the education reform movement’s success so far has depended on the size and clout of the Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate.
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  • Given all this, I want to explore three questions: How do these foundations operate on the ground? How do they leverage their money into control over public policy? And how do they construct consensus?
  • In 2009 the Gates Foundation and Viacom (the world’s fourth largest media conglomerate, which includes MTV Networks, BET Networks, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and hundreds of other media properties) made a groundbreaking deal for entertainment programming. For the first time, a foundation wouldn’t merely advise or prod a media company about an issue; Gates would be directly involved in writing and producing programs.
  • Among its initiatives, Get Schooled lists Waiting for Superman, which is produced by Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of Viacom.
  • Gates, Broad, and Walton answer to no one. Tax payers still fund more than 99 percent of the cost of K–12 education. Private foundations should not be setting public policy for them. Private money should not be producing what amounts to false advertising for a faulty product. The imperious overreaching of the Big Three undermines democracy just as surely as it damages public education.
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    THE COST of K-12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy-where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision-investing in education yields great bang for the buck.
NYC Teachers

Needed: A national teachers movement | SocialistWorker.org - 0 views

  • The teachers who led the occupation of Wisconsin's Capitol in February captured the spirit of educators who are fed up with being blamed for society's problems. The sick-in by teachers in the city of Madison soon spread statewide--and teachers from across the U.S. came to the Wisconsin capital to show their solidarity.
sethrader

UNHCR | Refworld | 2010 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor - Uganda - 0 views

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    Unuted Nations Report on Child Labor in Uganda
NYC Teachers

Who's Bashing Teachers and Public Schools and What Can We Do About It? - 0 views

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    I've spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed institutions and policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist, and a policy advocate. But these days I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, sometimes literally, it should be blown up. Because the increasingly polarized national debate around education policy is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of budget cuts in a society that has its priorities seriously upside down.
NYC Teachers

Why I Love Unions, But Not Always Their Leadership | GothamSchools - 0 views

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    Unions, as a collective representation of working people, can be an incredibly powerful counter-force to corporate interests. Individual working people can have very little impact on policy because they do not have the financial prowess on their own to affect national policy the way those with a good deal of money at their disposal can. I am proud to be a member of a union, and I am very proud of my fellow UFT members. But when union leadership becomes too far-removed from the lived reality of their rank-and-file members and spends a significant amount of their time with the very people who are pushing the policies they should be fighting, they run the risk of losing sight of their mission.
NYC Teachers

For Detroit Schools, Hope for the Hopeless - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Nor have charters been the answer. Charter school students score about the same on state tests as Detroit district students, even though charters have fewer special education students (8 percent versus 17 percent in the district) and fewer poor children (65 percent get subsidized lunches versus 82 percent at district schools). It’s hard to know whether children are better off under these “reforms” or they’re just being moved around more.
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    "Nor have charters been the answer. Charter school students score about the same on state tests as Detroit district students, even though charters have fewer special education students (8 percent versus 17 percent in the district) and fewer poor children (65 percent get subsidized lunches versus 82 percent at district schools). It's hard to know whether children are better off under these "reforms" or they're just being moved around more."
NYC Teachers

Why America's teachers are enraged - CNN.com - 1 views

  • Actually, the states with the highest performance on national tests are Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire, where teachers belong to unions that bargain collectively for their members.
    • NYC Teachers
       
      This fact is conveniently left out of the public discourse.
  • Unions actively lobby to increase education funding and reduce class size, so conservative governors who want to slash education spending feel the need to reduce their clout. This silences the best organized opposition to education cuts.
    • NYC Teachers
       
      It is clear here that the attack on teachers unions is an attack on schools
  • As the attacks on teachers increase and as layoffs grow, there are likely to be more protests like the one that has mobilized teachers and their allies and immobilized the Wisconsin Legislature.
NYC Teachers

Anatomy of a Protest: From a Simple March to a National Fight | Common Dreams - 0 views

  • Walker held up a photo of President Ronald Reagan, who had famously fired striking air-traffic controllers, and said his plan to sweep away decades of protections for state public employees in a stop-gap budget bill represented "our time to change the course of history." "It was kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb," he said. The budget-repair bill, which would strip most collective-bargaining rights from 175,000 public-sector workers while imposing immediate benefits concessions, went public four days later. Walker, a Republican, called for passage in the GOP-controlled Legislature within a week. Word of the bill's union provisions started to trickle out in press reports Thursday night, which for union chiefs and organizers began what one described as "a freakout of a long weekend."
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    Walker held up a photo of President Ronald Reagan, who had famously fired striking air-traffic controllers, and said his plan to sweep away decades of protections for state public employees in a stop-gap budget bill represented "our time to change the course of history." "It was kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb," he said. The budget-repair bill, which would strip most collective-bargaining rights from 175,000 public-sector workers while imposing immediate benefits concessions, went public four days later. Walker, a Republican, called for passage in the GOP-controlled Legislature within a week. Word of the bill's union provisions started to trickle out in press reports Thursday night, which for union chiefs and organizers began what one described as "a freakout of a long weekend."
sethrader

'Class Warfare' Ignites Class Debate - SchoolBook - 0 views

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    "On Monday, Michael Winerip, education columnist for The New York Times, weighed in on what has become the back-to-school book of the year: "Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools," a 400-plus page tome by Steven Brill, the founder of Court TV and the American Lawyer site. Mr. Winerip said Mr. Brill "has little positive to say about teachers," adding that the villains of his story "are bad teachers coddled by unions." (Mr. Brill posted a comment on nytimes.com expressing surprise at the "anger" in the column, and saying it distorted his work; Mr. Winerip responded: Read their debate and other comments here.) "
sethrader

Education Week: The Minority Teacher Shortage: Fact or Fable? - 0 views

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    "For several decades, shortages of minority teachers have been a big issue for the nation's schools. Policy makers and recent presidents have agreed that our elementary and secondary teaching force "should look like America." But the conventional wisdom is that as the nation's population and students have grown more diverse, the teaching force has done the opposite-grown more white and less diverse."
sethrader

"Poverty Is the Problem": Efforts to Cut Education Funding, Expand Standardized Testing... - 0 views

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    As millions of students prepare to go back to school, budget cuts are resulting in teacher layoffs and larger classes across the country. This comes as the drive toward more standardized testing increases despite a string of cheating scandals in New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also recently unveiled a controversial plan to use waivers to rewrite parts of the nation's signature federal education law, No Child Left Behind. We speak to New York City public school teacher Brian Jones and Diane Ravitch, the former assistant secretary of education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H. W. Bush, who has since this post dramatically changed her position on education policy. She is the author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."
sethrader

Education Week: K-12 Technology, Data Firms Thrive, Study Says - 0 views

  • “Schools are realizing that they need to treat their schools like businesses,” he said. “What they’re looking for are enhanced analytics.”
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    While producers of print-based curriculum and instructional materials are struggling, companies that are focused on technology-based instruction and tools for data collection and analysis are thriving in the K-12 market, says a new report by Berkery Noyes, an independent investment bank. An emphasis on accountability and data-driven decision-making in education is part of what's behind that trend, said Vivek Kamath, a managing director at the New York City-based bank who specializes in the education market. "Schools are realizing that they need to treat their schools like businesses," he said. "What they're looking for are enhanced analytics."
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