Public schools

The Struggle For No Police In Los Angeles Schools: Victory In Sight

July 12, 2020 Eric Mann, Counterpunch. Create! Los Angeles, Police, Public schools, Rebellion2020

On Tuesday, June 23, in Los Angeles, the decade’s long struggle for No Police in the Schools had a major breakthrough. Los Angeles School Board member Monica Garcia introduced the most structural and hopeful motion to make “defund the police” a reality. Her motion, expressing gratitude to the national Black uprising, called for cutting the $70 million budget of the Los Angeles School Police Department—with 350 armed officers—by 50% in 2021, 75% in 2022, and 90% in 2023—essentially phasing out the entire department. We think “50%, 75%, 90%” is a model for the “Defund the Police” movement nationally. Any movement that gets to 100% first wins. Her Civil Rights motion did not pass but neither did any of the toxic compromises.

Schools Are Feeding Millions Of Children

May 27, 2020 By Chuck Abbott, The Fern. Educate! Austerity, COVID-19, Food and Agriculture, Public schools

Public schools served tens of millions of emergency meals in April to low-income children after coronavirus closures ended cafeteria service, said a survey released on Monday. But with roughly half of the 1,894 districts taking part in the School Nutrition Association survey reporting a drop-off of at least 50 percent in meals served, losses are expected to balloon this year. School food directors put the median loss at $200,000, meaning half of all schools will lose more money, and half less. Among large districts, the median loss could be $2.5 million. SNA president Gay Anderson said schools would be hobbled in feeding students in the new school year if they lose large amounts of money during this school year, which ends in a few weeks.

Number Of Homeless Students In The US Surges 15%, Now Topping 1.5 Million

March 8, 2020 the National Center for Homeless Education. Educate! Children, Homelessness, Public schools, Students

The number of homeless students enrolled in public school districts and reported by state educational agencies (SEAs) during school year (SY) 2017-18 was 1,508,265. This number does not reflect the totality of children and youth experiencing homelessness, as it only includes those students who are enrolled in public school districts or local educational agencies (LEAs.) It does not capture school-aged children and youth who experience homelessness during the summer only, those who dropped out of school, or young children who are not enrolled in preschool programs administered by LEAs. Key findings of this report include the following: • The number of identified, enrolled students reported as experiencing homelessness at some point during the last three school years increased 15 percent, from 1,307,656 students in SY 2015-16 to 1,508,265 students in SY 2017-18.

The Other Side Of School Safety

September 9, 2018 Rebecca Klein, HuffPost. Educate! health, Police abuse, Public schools, Violence

Jalijah Jones, then a freshman at Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan, remembers the punch of thousands of volts hitting his slight frame. At 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighing 120 pounds, he was small for his age. He remembers four school security guards officers pushing him up against a hallway wall before a school police officer arrived and Tasered him. He remembers a feeling of intense cold as if his high school hallway had just turned into a walk-in freezer. He remembers falling to the ground, his muscles betraying his mind’s desire to stand.

Striking Teachers Beat Back Neoliberalism’s War On Public Schools

May 25, 2018 By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout.org Educate! Class Struggle, Education, Public schools, Strikes, Teachers

Thousands of teachers and students are walking out of schools, marching in the streets, and raising their hands and signs in protest against the war on education. Most recently, South Carolina has joined the wave of teachers' protests and strikes taking place across the nation. In the age of illiberal democracy and the growing fascism of the Trump administration, the unimaginable has once again become imaginable as teachers inspired and energized by a dynamic willingness to fight for their rights and the rights of their students are exercising bold expressions of political power.

The Corporate Plan To Groom U.S. Kids For Servitude By Wiping Out Public Schools

April 17, 2018 By Lynn Stuart Parramore, Alternet.org Educate! Corporations, Public schools

West Virginia’s public school teachers had endured years of low pay, inadequate insurance, giant class sizes, and increasingly unlivable conditions—including attempts to force them to record private details of their health daily on a wellness app. Their governor, billionaire coal baron Jim Justice, pledged to allow them no more than an annual 1% raise—effectively a pay cut considering inflation—in a state where teacher salaries ranked 48th lowest out of 50 states. In February 2018, they finally revolted: In a tense, four-day work stoppage, they managed to wrest a 5% pay increase from the state. Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky have now revolted in similar protests. It’s the latest battle in a contest between two countervailing forces: one bent on reengineering America for the benefit of the wealthy, the other struggling to preserve dignity and security for ordinary people.

To Save Chicago Public Schools, We Need A New Education Summit

March 6, 2018 C Tocci, Medium.com Organize! Chicago, Education, Public schools

Imagine 500 parents and educators in the UIC Forum cheering on the mayor as he announces a new future for Chicago Public Schools. I can’t. I am the parent of a CPS student as well as an education professor at Loyola, and it’s beyond me to picture any parents and teachers celebrating the district’s current leadership. It got even more difficult this week after the CPS Board voted to close multiple schools and phase out three high schools in Englewood. But thirty years ago, Chicagoans did pack into the Forum and raucously applaud Harold Washington as he kicked off a year-long “Education Summit.”On the heels of a 19-day teacher strike stoking fears about that CPS would implode, the Summit was Washington’s last great initiative.

Myths About Teachers: We Need More Police In Our Public Schools

February 16, 2018 By Bill Ayers, Crystal Laura, and Rick Ayers, Kzoo.edu Educate! Police, Public schools, Teachers

Public schools are plagued by gangs and ﬁghting, assault and battery, drug dealing, and other criminal behavior, including, in extreme instances, actual shoot-outs between students. All of these hard realities demand an active and alert police presence to maintain safety, order, and discipline. Schools must be safe havens for all kids, as well as for all school personnel. The good kids who want to learn and feel secure must be shielded from the actions of a minority of bad kids who get no discipline at home and have no respect for their classmates, the teacher, or learning itself. Suspending kids for bad behavior and sending them home may have made sense decades ago, but it’s no longer an adequate control: too often parents don’t believe in strong management and probably aren’t home anyway because the mother may be working two jobs, and in many cases the father isn’t home because he has left or is in prison.

Baltimore’s Apartheid Schools: Students Forced To Sit In 40 Degree Classrooms

January 7, 2018 By Thandisizwe Chimurenga, MintPress News Educate! Baltimore, Education, Public schools

Baltimore, MD - Usually people – especially children – look forward to snowy days. In addition to building snow creatures and throwing snowballs, it sometimes means no school. Usually. But not in Baltimore; in Baltimore, during one of the coldest winter storms on record, children were in school. They were shivering, wearing coats, hats and gloves, in classrooms that reached highs of 40 degrees. Only after being lambasted by both parents and a teachers union did officials send the children home. According to a school spokesperson, outdoor temperatures of 20 degrees and lower put a strain on an already-taxed school heating system.

Christmas Angels

December 24, 2017 Michelle Gunderson, livingindialogue.com Resist! Education, Public schools, Teachers

Ten years ago I was teaching music in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. Many of our children were impoverished and over 30 languages were spoken in our school. I had 847 students. I did not round the number to 850 for a purpose – it is the moral of the story. The day before our winter break I produced a performance that included every student. We had to give our concert three times that day because only 350 people could fit in the auditorium. There was a choir with 60 students, a bell choir, recorder consort, and a guitar ensemble. All of the instruments had been donated by the Chicago Bar Association Young Lawyers.

How Closing Public Schools Undermines Democracy

November 8, 2017 Jennifer Berkshire, alternet.org Educate! Democracy, Education, Public schools

By Jennifer Berkshire for AlterNet - Jennifer Berkshire: There's been a lot of attention paid to how students who attended the schools Chicago closed down in 2013 are faring now. But you've been measuring a different kind of impact: what's happened to those communities in terms of voter turnout and democratic participation. What are you finding? Sally Nuamah: We’re basically finding that support among the African American community for the Democratic Party, specifically in areas where closures occurred, decreased in a really substantial way. You actually see lower levels of participation, higher levels of negative attitudes toward people who are in the same parties in which most of these people identify, which is the Democratic Party. Beyond that, you see these communities are further losing population. There’s less will, or less faith, in the traditional public school system across this population, because they are afraid they’re going to be betrayed again, they’re going to have to move schools again, and that’s a very volatile situation. Then there is the economic piece, and the fact that the number of African American teachers in Chicago has declined by 40%.

Meeting Needs Of Homeless Youth: Public Schools vs. Government

July 1, 2017 Eleanor J. Bader, www.truth-out.org Create! Government, Homelessness, Public schools, Youth

By Eleanor J. Bader for Truthout - Dr. Art McCoy, superintendent of schools in Jennings, Missouri, is a humble man. But when he speaks of his school district as "a lighthouse for informed practices that respond to the needs of homeless and low-income kids," his pride is obvious. As a leader of the movement pushing public schools to address the overlapping emotional and material needs of impoverished students, Jennings is a model -- stepping in to provide food, shelter, health care and consolation to students who need it. Not surprisingly, school districts throughout the US are looking to Jennings for inspiration, especially since federal and state governments have done very little to assist this population. Jennings is adjacent to Ferguson, the small city that was catapulted to prominence in August 2014 after police murdered 18-year-old Michael Brown. Each of Jennings' eight public schools -- with an enrollment of 2,600 students, most of them poor and 160 of them homeless -- have "comfort rooms": private spaces where students can meet with counselors and address the obstacles they're facing. "The biggest issues for our students are domestic violence and the death of a loved one," McCoy states. "About 2,000 of our 2,600 enrolled students see school-based therapists each academic year to address the multiple traumas in their lives."

Despite Evidence They Hurt Children, Trump Touts School Vouchers

March 5, 2017 Nadia Prupis, Educate! Education, Public schools, Vouchers

By Nadia Prupis for Common Dreams. Trump's visit comes amid a growing body of evidence that vouchers harm the students who receive them. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a report this week which found that the risks to school systems outweigh the "insignificant gains in test scores and limited gains in graduation rates," and that cases where individual schools or districts improved were more likely driven by increased public accountability rather than private school competition. The risks include increased segregation; the loss of a "common, secular" educational experience; and unfair treatment of teachers. "If we want to give parents a real 'choice' of quality schools, we should invest in neighborhood public schools with a menu of proven policies," said Stanford professor and EPI research associate Martin Carnoy. "All of these yield much higher returns than the minor gains that have been estimated for voucher students."

Detroit Public Schools Shut With Teachers In ‘Sickout’ Over Pay

May 3, 2016 Barbara Goldberg, www.reuters.com Resist! Detroit, Protests, Public schools, Teachers

By Barbara Goldberg for Reuters - Detroit Public Schools closed nearly all of its 97 schools on Monday as hundreds of teachers called in sick to protest the cash-strapped city’s revelation that it will soon run out of money to pay employees. The shutdown due to “teacher sickouts” was announced on the website for Michigan’s largest public school system with 45,786 students, which has been under state control since 2009. Detroit Federation of Teachers Interim President Ivy Bailey said in a statement on Sunday that the district was “effectively locking our members out of the classrooms”

Lead Discovery Forces Water Ban In Newark Public Schools

March 11, 2016 Nika Knight, www.commondreams.org Educate! Lead, Newark, Public schools, Water

By Nika Knight for Common Dreams - Public schools in Newark, New Jersey, were forced to shut off water fountains on Wednesday after test results showed high levels of lead in the water supply. "Officials say they do not know how long students at nearly half of the Newark's schools may have been drinking water with elevated levels of lead," reported Dan Ivers atNJ.com. The water supply at a total of 30 Newark schools tested higher for lead than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s "action level," 15 parts per billion, at which point the agency requires "additional testing, monitoring, and remediation," accordingto ABC.

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