NYCoRE Political Education Resources

"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."

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."

The biggest problem that the education system faces today is a preoccupation with, and the application of, the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of "the system", to which the students, the teachers, the parents and the administrators have to adjust. "The system" grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.

"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.) "

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Charter schools in the US: Wall Street's education model By Nancy Hanover 11 July 2011 Last month a new for-profit investment fund was created, the first of its kind, to finance the construction of charter schools across the United States. Jointly managed by Canyon Capital Realty Advisors ($20 billion in assets) and Agassi Ventures, LLC, owned by Andre Agassi, it plans to buy up undervalued urban land and jumpstart the construction of 75 new charter schools.[1] The Canyon-Agassi Charter School Fund announcement states, "The fund will provide investors with current income and capital appreciation by responding to the growing demand for quality charter school facilities in the nation's burgeoning urban centers and by capturing the opportunities arising out of the current dislocation in the real estate market." In other words, it will buy inner-city land cheaply, develop it and then sell the facilities to charter operations. The firm expects to raise $300 million in equity and invest up to $750 million."

"The Education of Jose Pedraza: Why Fixing Schools Isn't Simple Math Jose Pedraza (center) stands with his parents in the front yard of their East L.A. home. All photos by Jorge Rivas by Julianne Hing ShareThis | Print | Comment (6) Tuesday, May 10 2011, 10:02 AM EST Tags: education reform, los angeles 248Share video_thumb_education_50911.jpg infographic_thumb_education_50911.jpg Watch Julianne Hing's reporter's notebook video of her time with Jose Pedraza's family. Last year in East LA, Jose Pedraza was struggling mightily in his classes and drifting listlessly through his days. It was worrying enough to his teachers at Oscar De La Hoya Animo Charter School, where he was then a junior, that the principal called his mother Pascuala Jaramillo and asked for an urgent meeting. Jaramillo, a seasoned education activist who had organized other parents and made it a point to get to know her kids' teachers, grabbed what she calls her "bible" and ran straight to the school. It's actually not a holy book, but rather a binder of her kids' education documents and information about her own parental rights-"everything I need to defend myself," she explains. Her years of organizing other parents taught her that teachers and administrators are often too burdened by their work to be effective advocates for their students. She went ready to fight, if she had to. "When I got to the school, I got notes telling me that my son wasn't really working," Jaramillo says. "The principal said, 'His body is here, but his brain is not in the room.' " Jaramillo immediately understood what was going on. She told the principal what their family had been dealing with at home. Her husband, Guadalupe Pedraza, had been abruptly laid off from his maintenance job recently. After 12 years working there, he was told on a Wednesday that his last day would be that Friday. Jose took it hard. He had always been a quiet kid, but he started pulling away from his par

Education The State budget reduced education funding to the City for FY 2012 by $1.2 billion. This was the largest single-year reduction in education funding to New York City and came at the same time as the City lost $850 million in Federal stimulus dollars used to support teacher salaries. To prevent catastrophic personnel losses in the City's school system, the Executive Budget provides a major increase in City funds dedicated to education, with an increase of $2 billion of City funds compared to the prior year. The State continues to disinvest in education in New York City. In FY 2002, State and City funding comprised a nearly equal portion of non-Federal spending on education. In FY 2012, City funding will comprise 61 percent of non-Federal spending and State funding will only comprise 39 percent of non-Federal spending. If the State had continued to share education costs equally with the City, the State would be providing $2.2 billion more in education funding for FY 2012. City-funded spending on education has increased from $5.9 billion in FY 2002 to $13.6 billion in FY 2012. Description of Bloomberg's Budget Proposal from News From the Blue Room NYC.gov "Despite the City's continued, strong financial commitment to education, historic State education cuts and the need to balance the budget mean that reductions in the size of the City's teaching force are still required. More than 6,000 teaching positions will be eliminated through attrition and layoffs.

The lessons of this fiasco are clear: being a successful business executive is no guarantee that one can become a successful school leader. These are different worlds, which require different skills and training. To have a chance of success running one of the country's largest school systems, one needs a deep understanding of federal and state education policies, of curriculum and assessment, of teaching and learning, and of what teachers and schools need.

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.

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.

video footage of over 250,000 out in London to protest cuts to pubic services

space promised fo new public school in Washington heights started by Central Park East Principal Julie Zuckerman yanked at last minute and given to KIPP

This article has been around for a few years but continues to be relevant. Kozol contextualizes provides a good summary of the push to privatize public education. The most striking part of the article is the quote from where the title is taken, "The larger developing opportunity is in the K-12 EMO market, led by private elementary school providers", which, they emphasize, "are well positioned to exploit potential political reforms such as school vouchers". From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, "the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada". Kozol has shedding light on educational inequities for years. With this piece he warns of the dangers of ignoring just how motivated corporate interests are to move beyond "nibbling at the edges" of public schools and devour the whole system.