Schools

Ed Reform vs. Democracy

August 10, 2019 Staff, Curmudgucation.blogspot.com Educate! Education, Reform, Schools

It was not that long ago that I wrote a piece about how school choice, by shifting the locus of control for the education purse strings, tends to undermine democractic processes. After all, if only parents of school age children, or only rich folks who contribute to tax credit scholarships, get to decide which schools get paid, then the non-parent taxpayers who are footing the bills don't really have much say, and the duly-elected school board has nothing much to do or say, either. School choice is, often...

Lead-Based Paint Found In Half Of All Inspected Schools

July 29, 2019 Marilynne R Wood, Theconversation.com Educate! Contamination, Lead Poisoning, Schools, Water

With all the emphasis that has been placed on making sure children are safe from the hazards of lead-based paint at home, similar efforts would seem just as important for America’s schools. After all, outside of the home, young children spend the majority of their day – 6.8 hours a day – at school. Yet a new federal report found that an estimated 15.2 million children in the U.S. go to schools in school districts that found lead-based paint. This is happening more than 40 years after the United States’ 1978 ban on the use of lead-based paint in housing.

Manila’s New Mayor Wants Solar Panels, Rainwater Collectors For City’s Schools

July 11, 2019 Olivia Rosane, Ecowatch.com Create! Electoral Politics, Philippines, Schools, Sustainability

Manila's new mayor wants to turn the city's public schools into a living lesson in sustainability. Mayor Francisco "Isko" Moreno Domagoso unveiled a plan Tuesday to install solar panels and rainwater collectors on the roofs of primary and secondary schools in the Philippines' capital city, the Manila Bulletin reported. He said the initiative would raise environmental awareness in students. "If they are seeing these types of facilities, and it can be done since it's not even rocket science, they will know how to care for the environment," Domagoso told reporters, according to the Manila Bulletin.

School Board Drops Bid To Obtain Rockwool Property By Eminent Domain

July 10, 2019 By Anne Meador, Dcmediagroup.us Educate! Education, eminent domain, Schools, West Virginia

Ranson, W.Va.–The Jefferson County Board of Education will no longer pursue condemnation of Rockwool’s property to build a educational center to provide services for student with special needs. The school board abandoned its bid to obtain the Rockwool site via eminent domain in a settlement agreement announced today by the two parties. Rockwool in turn dropped its lawsuit against the Board of Education which sought to block the condemnation. The Board of Education proposed to build a Regional Student Support Center on the Rockwool site across from North Jefferson Elementary to provide services for special needs students.

Computers In The Classroom May Do More Harm Than Good

June 15, 2019 Tom Jacobs, Pacific Standard Mag. Educate! Computers, Education, Schools, Technology

Initiatives to provide every schoolchild with a laptop or tablet computer have, to date, been well-publicized failures. And perhaps they were bad ideas to begin with. Computers can certainly be effective tools for teaching children of certain ages specific subjects. But a large new study suggests their presence in the classroom is far from universally positive. "Students worldwide appear to perform best on tests when they report a low-to-moderate use of school computers," Helen Lee Bouygues, president of the Paris-based Reboot Foundation, argues in a just-released report. "When students report having access to classroom computers and using these devices on an infrequent basis, they show better performance," Bouygues writes. "But when students report using these devices every day, and for several hours during the school day, performance lowers dramatically."

Thousands Of Charter Schools Perform Poorly

May 29, 2019 Shawgi Tell, Dissidentvoice.org Educate! Charter Schools, Education, Privatization, Schools

“Performance-based accountability” is a hackneyed, Skinnerian, neoliberal buzz-phrase often repeated dogmatically by charter school promoters in order to falsely claim that privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are more accountable and higher-performing than public schools. But it is becoming clearer to everyone with each passing day that charter school promoters have long vastly over-promised and under-delivered, while rapidly enriching themselves at the expense of students, parents, the public, the economy, and the national interest.

Court Stops School Board Move To Condemn Rockwool Property, For Now

May 2, 2019 Anne Meador, Dcmediagroup.us Resist! Courts, Schools

A federal court judge granted Rockwool’s motion for a preliminary injunction, halting the Jefferson County Board of Education’s efforts to obtain the Rockwool site by eminent domain. The judge’s order means that the BOE may not pursue condemnation of the property in state court. The injunction will be in effect while proceedings continue in U.S. District Court. Judge Gina Groh found that Rockwool was likely to succeed on the merits of its case, and furthermore, that evidence indicates that a jury would likely find in its favor.

Pentagon Claims 1,100 High Schools Bar Recruiters; Peace Activists Offer $1,000 Award If Any Such School Can Be Found

April 23, 2019 David Swanson and Pat Elder, Davidswanson.org Resist! Military, Pentagon, Schools

According to statements in February by the Secretary of the Army, various U.S. high schools are barring military recruiters from access to students. The Secretary of the Navy this past December said that public school boards are keeping military recruiters out of 1,100 high schools. The two of us are offering a $1,000 prize (details below) to any public U.S. high school that can identify itself as fitting this description. Peace activists who struggle to gain admittance to high schools to present the case against military enlistment have not in recent years encountered a school that barred admittance to the military.

Public Schools Should Offer More Vegan Menus

February 25, 2019 Staff, Pe.com Create! California, Food and Agriculture, Los Angeles, New Economy, Schools

LOS ANGELES – Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian, D-Van Nuys, announced proposed legislation Wednesday that he said would provide incentives for public schools across the state to offer students a plant-based entree and plant-based milk at meals. Under AB 479, the Healthy Climate-Friendly School Lunch Act, schools would receive additional state funding for serving the vegan options, which Nazarian said would be healthier and more climate-friendly. The bill would also provide state support for staff training, engagement, recipe development, and other technical assistance needed to help boost participation rates, according to Nazarian’s office.

Teacher Strikes Expose The Corrupt Privatization Of Schools

January 19, 2019 By Jeff Bryant, IndependentMediaInstitute.org Educate! Education, Los Angeles, Privatization, Schools, Strikes, Teachers

This week, Republican lawmakers held a press conference on Capitol Hill to kick off National School Choice Week, an annual event that began in 2011 under President Obama who proclaimed it as a time to “recognize the role public charter schools play in providing America’s daughters and sons with a chance to reach their fullest potential.” This year, Democratic lawmakers took a pass on the celebration. You can thank striking teachers for that. In the latest teacher strike in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school system, some 30,000 teachers walked off the job saying unchecked growth of charter schools and charters’ lack of transparency and accountability have become an unsustainable drain on the public system’s financials.

L.A. School Board Member Breaks Ranks To Support Striking Teachers, Blames Beutner As District Losses Mount

January 18, 2019 Erick Galindo, Lataco.com Resist! Class Struggle, Education, Los Angeles, Schools, Strikes, Teachers

The teachers strike is happening because of Superintendent Austin Beutner and School Board policy of not contradicting him publicly during the negotiations, according to L.A. Unified School Board Member Scott M. Schmerelson. “I believe that there are resources available to end this strike,” Schmerelson said in a statement. “What I do not see from Austin Beutner, and his supporters, is the political will to substitute constructive negotiations for the fear mongering, expensive taxpayer funded ads, slanted editorials, and endless press conferences.” Schmerelson’s statement comes on the heels of news that school attendance dropped 22 percent from already tiny numbers the previous two days.

Want To Improve Education? Empower The Students.

January 11, 2019 Shari Davis and Dylan Welch, Medium.com Create! Budgets, Education, Participatory budgeting, Schools, Students

Autumn is here — and with it, a renewed conversation about how educators, parents, and communities improve their students’ education. Often in this discussion, solutions come down from on high through public officials or people within the educational system. This fall, visionary school leaders will be challenging that top-down norm by showing that empowering students and families to directly decide what their schools need, through participatory budgeting (PB), can drastically improve the quality of their schooling. What is PB? Instead of government and school officials making every budgetary decision, PB gives real people real power over budget decisions in their schools and communities.

Charter Schools And Race In New Orleans

December 24, 2018 Michael David Raso, Bigeasymagazine.com Educate! Charter Schools, Education, New Orleans, Race, Schools

Thursday night, New Orleans public schools as we knew them ended. With a 5-2 vote by the Orleans Parish School Board, the last remaining public high school in New Orleans became its latest charter school. In a room filled to capacity, replete with security, protesters, placards, chants, and shouts of dissatisfaction, McDonogh 35 Senior High School’s future was turned over to charter school group InspireNOLA. Many were outraged, some were left in tears, but it changed nothing. With the 5-2 decision, New Orleans became the first city in the United States to turn its entire school system over to an all-charter system.

Schools Broke? Corporate Subsidies Cost Schools at Least $1.8 Billion Last Year

December 6, 2018 Staff, Good Jobs First Educate! Corporations, Education, Schools, Subsidies

School districts in ten states, led by South Carolina, New York and Louisiana, collectively lost $1.6 billion. If this money were instead reinvested in hiring new teachers and reducing class size, these ten states alone could add more than 28,000 teachers. Nearly 250 school districts lost at least $1 million each, and in four districts, tax abatements reduced classroom resources by more than $50 million. Hillsboro, Oregon schools lost $96.7 million as a result of extremely generous tax breaks to Intel. The report, entitled The New Math on School Finance, was enabled by a new accounting standard adopted by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), the body that sets accounting rules followed by all states and most localities.

Rescuing Our Schools From The Corporate Goliaths: Lessons From Indianapolis

November 23, 2018 John Thompson, Livingindialogue.com Strategize! Corporations, Education, Reform, Schools

The theme of my previous post on the 2018 Network for Public Education conference was: How Was I Wrong? Let Me Count Some Ways. As I explained, the 2014 NPE conference in Austin hit a nice balance in terms of messaging and research that allowed us Davids to defeat the corporate reform Goliath. I was slow in facing hard facts about privatizers and mostly focused on civil ways to confront opponents in the search for truth. Previously, I overestimated how much of Goliath’s failure was due to the arrogance of power. Today’s Silicon Valley Robber Barons’ hubris can match that of their 19th century counterparts, but their control of data makes them uniquely dangerous.

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