What’s the Buzz? A Crown of Gadflies! Top 10 Articles (by Me) in 2017

December 26, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Badass Teachers Association, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, Campbell Brown, capitalism, Charter Schools, church and state, Civil Rights, Common Core, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Data Mining, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Facebook, Journalism, Media, Pennsylvania, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, protest, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Technology, Toxic Testing, White Privilege education, end of the year, Gadfly on the Wall, schools, teachers, teaching

We made it, Readers.

Somehow we survived 2017 – the first year of the Trump Presidency.

What a monstrosity that has been so far!

Republicans have stolen more than $1 trillion from our pockets to give to their mega-wealthy donors in the form of tax cuts. A 3-2 GOP majority on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed Net Neutrality. And the party of Lincoln endorsed and funded a child molester for US Senate – though he thankfully lost.

We’re in new territory. Politics has always appealed to the best and worst of our natures: Good people who really want to make a difference and sniveling cowards willing to do whatever their sugar daddies tell them. But unfortunately our world has increasingly rewarded the latter and almost extinguished the former.

However, don’t lose heart. The cockroaches are all out in the open. They’ve become so emboldened by the words “President” and “Trump” voiced together that they no longer feel the need to hug a wall.

All it would take is a good boot and a series of stomps to crush them forever.

Someone get me my shoes.

In the meantime, I sit here at my kitchen table recovering from a turkey coma preparing for a nostalgic look back at everything that’s happened here at Gadfly on the Wall in the past year.

It was quite a 365 days! Most amazing was the publication of my book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform” from Garn Press. It’s a thorough reworking and “Best Of” this blog over the last three years.

Sales have been strong and reviews are starting to come in. I am absolutely floored when I get messages from people I admire telling me they got the book and appreciate this or that. It’s been my lifelong dream to publish a book, and now I’ve done it. The New Year will involve lots of promotion – hopefully I can get decision makers to read it!

Other than that, it’s been a busy year blogging. I wrote 118 articles! That’s about one every three days!

And people have been reading them.

I’ve had more than 364,000 hits – about the same as in 2016. This puts the total views over the 1 million mark at more than 1,216,000! That’s quite a landmark for a blog that’s only been around since July, 2014. And it doesn’t count all the readers I get from articles reposted on the Badass Teachers Association Blog, Huffington Post, Commondreams.org, the LA Progressive, Alternet, BillMoyers.com or other sites.

I’ve also gotten 1,510 more people to follow me for a total of 12,845.

I’m so honored that readers still like coming to this site for news and commentary. As long as you care to enter those virtual doors, I’ll be here, hunched over my computer, pounding away at the keys.

So without further ado, let’s take a look back at the top 10 articles from this blog that got the Inter-webs humming:

10) Teacher Appreciation Week is a Pathetic Joke!

Published: May 10, 2017

Views: 4,320

Description: At the end of every school year we get Teacher Appreciation Week. It’s nice. Educators get free donuts and cookies, a pat on the head and then the rest of the year we get all the blame for society’s problems without any additional funding, repealing terrible policies or even acknowledgement of what the real issues are in our schools. It’s a sham. Someone had to say it, so I did. Thanks for the snack, but it takes a village, folks! Get off your butts and take some responsibility!

Fun Fact: Some people, even teachers, were really upset by this article. They thought it was ungrateful. Don’t get me wrong, I am truly appreciative for any crumb the public wants to give us, teachers, but I’m not going to let it pass as if that counts as true support. Salving your conscience isn’t enough. We need true allies to get down in the mud and fight with us. Otherwise, it’s just an empty gesture.

9) White Privilege, Public Schools and Ugly Christmas Sweaters

Published: Dec 22

Views: 4,324

Description: This one’s hot off the press! It describes a situation at one of the schools were I’ve taught over the years and how dress code policies can support white privilege. They’re the broken windows policing of academia, and we need to put much more thought into them before laying down blanket restrictions.

Fun Fact: Some readers took exception to this piece because they thought I didn’t do enough to stop a wayward administrator despite the fact that I never said what I did or didn’t do. Some even complained that it was dumb to simply acknowledge racism and racist policies and actions. I don’t know what world they’re living in. White folks voted for Donald J. Trump to be President. We’ve got a long way to go, and acknowledging everyday prejudice seems a worthy goal to me.

8) America’s Founding Fathers Were Against School Choice

Published: Feb 16

Views: 4,483

Description: The entire premise of school privatization goes against the founding principles of our nation. We were born out of the Enlightenment, not the profit motive. Our founders would look on in horror at charter and voucher schools. Though they aren’t perfect, only truly public schools embody the ideals of the Revolution. True conservatives and true patriots would support that system, not strive to blow it up for personal financial gain.

Fun Fact: Some people took issue with an appeal to the founders who were not exactly perfect. It’s true. In practice many of them did not live up to their own high ideals. However, who does? It is the ideal that matters, not the clay feet of our forebears.

7) Middle School Suicides Double As Common Core Testing Intensifies

Published: July 24

Views: 5,800

Description: Teen suicides are up – especially among middle school age children. At the same time, we’ve been testing these kids into the ground. More standardized assessments – and these are unnecessarily more difficult to pass Common Core assessments. This is exactly what happens in countries that put such emphasis on testing – they have a higher suicide rate. It’s no wonder that this is happening here, too. Policymakers want us to be more like Asian countries? Be careful what you wish for!

Fun Fact: This article infuriated the good folks at the Education Post. Peter Cunningham had his flunkies attack me on Twitter complaining that I was an angry white dude making undue correlations. Yet every other explanation for the fact of increased middle school suicides was merely a correlation, too. Proving causation is almost impossible. It is just as reasonable – even more so – to conclude that testing is having an impact on the suicide rate as to intuit the cause being increased reliance on social media. The big money folks don’t want us making the connection I made here. All the more reason to believe there is truth behind it.

6) School Choice is a Lie. It Does Not Mean More Options. It Means Less.

Published: Oct. 6

Views: 7,880

Description: School choice is a misnomer. It’s school privatization. It has very little to do with providing more options for parents or students. It’s about allowing big corporations to avoid public school regulations and profit off your child swiping your tax dollars. School choice is merely a marketing term.

Fun Fact: I must have really pissed someone off when I wrote this one because it caused Facebook to block me for a week. No matter. Readers liked this one so much they shared it for me all over. Why was I targeted? It could be personal since charter school cheerleader Campbell Brown is literally the arbiter of truth at Facebook. Or it could be the social media site’s attempt to bully me into spending money on advertising. Either way, their attempted censorship didn’t work.

5) Dear Teachers, Don’t Be Good Soldiers for the EdTech Industry

Published: Sept 3

Views: 8,358

Description: As teachers, we’re often expected to use new technology in our classrooms. However, we’re rarely involved in the decision making process. We’re rarely allowed to decide which technology to use and sometimes even how to use it. Software packages are just handed down from administration or school board. However, the EdTech Industry is not our friend. More often than not it is unscrupulous in the ways it is willing to profit off of our students through data mining, competency based learning and a variety of privacy threatening schemes. It’s up to us to be brave enough to say, “No.”

Fun Fact: I was surprised by how much the piece resonated with readers. So many other educators said they felt they were being bullied into using apps or programs that they thought were of low quality or downright harmful. Sure, there were some who called me a luddite, but the fact remains: we shouldn’t be using technology for technology’s sake. We should be doing so only to help students learn. That requires us to use our best judgment, not follow orders like good soldiers.

4) Teachers Don’t Want All This Useless Data

Published: June 23

Views: 12,459

Description: Administrators love to gift teachers with tons and tons of data. They bury us under reams of standardized test results and expect us to somehow use that nonsense to inform our teaching. It’s crazy. We already collect authentic data on our students for 180 days a year in the classroom in the course of our teaching. Yet they think these mass produced corporate evaluated snap shots are going to somehow change everything? That’s not how you help educators. It’s how you abdicate any responsibility yourself.

Fun Fact: This one really took off especially on the Huffington Post. Many readers seemed to be truly surprised that teachers felt this way. No authentic educator gives in to being data driven. We’re data informed but student driven. And if you want us to do something else, you don’t have the best interests of the kids at heart.

3) PA Legislature Plans Taking Away Teachers’ Sick Days

Published: Feb 2

Views: 17,702

Description: This was another tone deaf proclamation from the Republican majority in Harrisburg. It was pure meat for the regressive base in gerrymandered districts that if passed they knew would never be signed by our Democratic Governor Tom Wolf. It turns out the backlash was such that they didn’t even have the courage to put it to a vote.

Fun Fact: I never expected this one to be nearly as popular as it was. Usually articles about Pennsylvania get a few hundred local readers and that’s it. But this one infuriated everyone. How dare lawmakers propose this! Don’t they know how many bacteria teachers are exposed to!? Do they want us to come to school sick and spread the disease to our students!? I’d like to think that the article had something to do with this terrible piece of legislation disappearing, but I have no evidence to support it. However, I can say that it will probably be back when they think no one is looking, and it will still make me sick.

2) U.S. Public Schools Are NOT Failing. They’re Among the Best in the World

Published: Jan 29

Views: 23,841

Description: Everyone says public schools are failing. I call bullshit. It depends on how you’re evaluating them, and – frankly – we’re not being fair to our American education system. Sure. There are plenty of ways we can improve, but there’s a lot we’re doing right, too. In fact, many of the things we get right, few other systems do around the world. We excel in our ideals. If we just had the courage of our convictions, our system would be beyond the moon! Even as it is, we have much to celebrate. And other nations would do well to emulate us in these ways.

Fun Fact: I’m quite proud of this one. It’s the only article in the Top 10 here that was included in my book. For the definitive version, you’ll have to go there. Some sections received major rewrites and clarifications. I think the published version is much better. But no matter which version you choose, I’m proud to have an answer for all those out there spreading the myth that our education system is an irredeemable mess. They want us to get rid of the good and replace it with more bad. I say we keep the good and build on it.

1) Ignorance and Arrogance – the Defining Characteristics of the Betsy DeVos Hearing

Published: Jan 18

Views: 28,670

Description: Betsy DeVos’ confirmation hearing was an absolute horror show. It’s even worse when you consider she was confirmed by the Republican majority in a tie vote that was broken by Vice President Mike Pence (that still sends shivers down my spine). Here was someone who knows next to nothing about public education except that she wants to destroy it. She wouldn’t commit to protecting students rights even those under the umbrella of special education. There’s more I could say but I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Excuse me.

Fun Fact: I’m honored that so many readers turned to my blog for commentary about this. It was a moment of shared horror that hasn’t weakened much in the subsequent months. We’re all just waiting for sanity to return but at least we can do so together. We’re all in this side-by-side and hand-in-hand. We can defeat the Betsy DeVos’ and the Donald Trump’s of the world if we stay strong. It could happen any day now.

Gadfly’s Other Year End Round Ups

This wasn’t the first year I’ve done a countdown of the year’s greatest hits. I usually write one counting down my most popular articles (like the one you just read from 2017) and one listing articles that I thought deserved a second look. Here are all my end of the year articles since I began this crazy journey in 2014:

2016

Worse Than Fake News – Ignored News. Top 5 Education Stories You May Have Missed in 2016

Goodbye, 2016, and Good Riddance – Top 10 Blog Post by Me From a Crappy Year

2015

Gadfly’s Choice – Top 5 Blogs (By Me) You May Have Missed from 2015

Who’s Your Favorite Gadfly? Top 10 Blog Posts (By Me) That Enlightened, Entertained and Enraged in 2015

2014

Off the Beaten Gadfly – the Best Education Blog Pieces You Never Read in 2014

There Has Never Been a Better Chance to Defeat Neoliberals and Neofascists: Hopes for 2018

December 18, 2017December 18, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Charter Schools, church and state, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Journalism, Media, Obama, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, protest, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Teachers, voting 2017, 2018, charter schools, Democracy, Democrat, Democrats, Donald Trump, neofascist, neoliberal, net neutrality, New Year, plutocracy, Politics, Republican, Republicans, school vouchers, tax scam bill

As 2017 chugs and sputters to a well-deserved end, I find myself surprised at the pessimism around me.

Yes, I know. Donald Trump is still President.

The plutocrats have stolen trillions of dollars from the majority in unnecessary tax cuts that threaten our ability to function as a nation.

A slim majority of their sniveling creatures at the FCC have repealed Net Neutrality gifting our free expression to huge corporations.

And big business continues to sack and burn our public schools only to replace them with charter and voucher swindles.

This is all true.

But it does not make me lose heart.

These defeats may be fleeting, momentary as political and legal challenges mount against them. As far as the tide has pulled back, a wave is gathering strength at sea, such a prodigious burst of water as to create a new ocean once it hits land.

Yes, we endured many scars from the year that was. But we have gained something truly amazing – something that we probably could not have grasped without our sexual predator in chief, a reality TV show conman posing as a political leader.

People.

Are.

Awake.

They see the undeniable destruction, the naked power grabs, how our lawmakers are owned by the super-rich and the outright denial of democratic principles.

They see and they understand.

It is no longer debatable that we have lost control of our government.

It is no longer a question whether our lawmakers have our best interests at heart.

It is no longer at all uncertain that business interests and public interests are not the same.

Everyone knows.

Everyone sees.

The question is “What will we do about it?”

I’m reminded of the ending of John Carpenter’s cult classic “They Live.”

In the movie, Earth is conquered by aliens but no one noticed. The aliens took over the media and government using a transmitter to hide their ugly faces so that people couldn’t see what they truly look like. These intergalactic shepherds used the media and advertising to herd us human sheep to focus on naked consumerism and ignore how we’re being consumed by the powers that be.

At the end of the movie, the hero – played by Roddy Piper – sacrifices himself to destroy the transmitter so everyone finally can see the hideous aliens among us.

I remember watching the film the first time back in the ‘80s and wondering what people would do once they could see the truth.

Would they fight? Or would they try to convince themselves that they weren’t seeing the evidence of their own eyes?

(WARNING: The video below is NSFW, contains nudity and sexual situations.)

We’re in a similar situation today.

Trump did not cause all of this. He certainly made it worse, but the groundwork was laid by years of neoliberals from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama.

Reagan and both Bushes started us rolling down into the pit, but it was the Clintons and the Obamas who convinced so many of us that we weren’t headed into oblivion, it was merely a trick of the mind, this was the direction we wanted to go and that if anyone got left behind it was merely their own darn fault.

But now the truth is right there before our faces.

And that’s thanks to the blunt, unrepentant greed of Donald J. Trump.

He steals from us and doesn’t even pretend he’s doing anything else.

He hordes our money. He destroys our laws and disregards our values. He raises racists and bigots to respectability while appointing unqualified sycophants with the expressed purpose to run our government into the ground. And if anyone dares proclaim the emperor has no clothes, all he can say is “Fake News.”

And though I thoroughly despise him for everything he’s done and continues to do bringing our world to the brink of annihilation – I also have to thank him.

There is no longer any denying the truth.

It is merely a question of how we fight.

Opportunities abound for victory, and on a scale we could not previously have dreamed.

It would take such a little push to topple this pathetic toy dictator’s regime.

Merely a whisper out of all our mouths could bring it down.

The slightest flick of the smallest finger on all our hands could send a shock wave causing this pitiful empire to crumble.

If we merely took to the streets at the same time, these dollar store monsters would dissolve in our wake.

And in their place – imagine the world we could create.

All the socialist ideals of Roosevelt’s New Deal could be realized. We could enact a NEW New Deal where everyone truly had a fair shot at flourishing.

As the Rev William Barber says, we could bring about a Third Reconstruction so that our future was firmly built on the foundation of equity and understanding for people of all races, genders, nationalities, religions and creeds.

We could forever banish money from the halls of power and force the plutocrats to pay for all they have stolen from us – with interest.

We could do all this with the merest flexing of our muscles. Because the conquering power is so weak, so disorganized, so pathetic.

And the status quo false flag opposition is just as weak and powerless.

There is but one puissant force left in this country of ours, and it is us. The people.

We were there at the beginning and we are here still at what might be our end.

We, the People.

We can take this country back from the sick and stunted and powerful.

We can take this country back from the frail and the deranged and prejudiced.

We can make America great – if not again then perhaps for the first time. We can make America truly great.

That is the promise of the future.

As our darkest hour dawns, our brightest light may yet shine.

Here’s to igniting that spark.

Here’s to a brighter tomorrow.

Will the U.S. Follow New Zealand’s Lead and Repeal National Academic Standards?

December 14, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, National Academic Standards, New Zealand, Obama, Parents, Politics, Poverty, President, Republican, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, standards, Students, Teachers, Toxic Testing America, common core, Democrats, education, International Reading Literacy Study, international test scores, Labour Party, National Party, national standards, New Zealand, parents, PIRLS, Politics, Republicans, standardized testing, Students, teachers, test-based accountability, United States

Kiwis don’t like corporations telling them what to do.

Especially when it comes to educating their children.

That’s why this week, New Zealand’s Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced that schools in the pacific island nation would no longer need to use the national academic standards mandated by the government for the last decade.

“I don’t think anyone will be surprised that we are ditching a failed experiment,” he said.

“We want teachers focused on less testing and more teaching because that’s the way we’re going to improve students’ progress.”

I pause at this point for American readers to catch their breath.

Yes, a national government just reversed course on standardized, canned, one-size-fits-all academic standards for all students in its public schools.

Yes, they had spent millions of dollars to create, roll out and enforce the standards.

But now they see the results have been less than expected and they’re changing their collective minds.

Shocking, I know.

If only we still did things like that in THIS country.

But wait, there’s more.

Why exactly did New Zealand turn against its national standards?

Did parents hate them?

Yes.

Did kids hate them?

Yes.

Did teachers hate them?

Yes.

All things that could be said of our own Common Core. But was there more to it?

Yes.

In short, New Zealand’s national standards weren’t helping kids learn. In fact, they appeared to have the exact opposite effect.

New Zealand children’s performance on international tests dropped significantly since the standards were introduced in 2010.

And publication of these results showing 10-year-old’s reading achievement taking a nosedive since the standards adoption ignited an already smoldering public outcry.

New Zealand’s average score on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) had been steady for 15 years, but fell dramatically at the end of 2015. In short, New Zealand went from 23rd to 33rd out of 50 countries.

Funny.

The US has had a strikingly similar result on the same test with the same age children since the mandate to use the Common Core.

The PIRLS is an assessment given to fourth-graders in schools around the world every five years. In 2016, the average score for US students dropped from fifth in the world in 2011 to 13^th. And the drop wasn’t merely perfunctory. It was “statistically significant” according to test organizers.

The biggest drop was for the lowest-performing students, what the organizers considered a sign that we’re providing much greater support for economically advantaged children than for underprivileged ones.

Why is this important?

Because Common Core was introduced across the nation in 2010-11. These fourth grade students were the first to be educated using the Core since Kindergarten, and far from creating a boost in achievement, it opened a chasm.

Reading scores went down just as they consistently have done time-and-time-again since we started using the standards.

Scores go down on state tests. National tests. International tests.

Meanwhile the test makers and their proxies keep telling us the problem is that the standards are simply more rigorous and it just will take time for our children to get up to speed. Meanwhile their publishing and software subsidiaries sell us hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new text books, new computer programs, new devices, new apps, new “specialists” and consultants offering professional developments, etc.

Choo! Choo! The gravy train is rolling. We can’t let something like international test scores derail the money train!

Keep in mind, this is the same international test and the same age group of children that caused a revolution in New Zealand.

Will our response be the same?

Probably not.

New Zealand’s authentic reform resulted from a political change. The National Party was replaced by the Labour Party, and repealing national academic standards was part of their platform.

It marked a sharp divide between the philosophies of both groups.

The National Party wanted more testing, more data, more standardization, more holding funding hostage to test scores – just like both Republicans and Democrats in the US.

However, the New Zealand Labour Party ran on significant reductions to standardized education, substantial cuts to standardized testing, repealing national standards and considerable investment in students, schools and teachers.

We in the US simply have no political equivalent.

There is no political party – right, left or centrist – that puts the needs of children, parents, teachers and working people at the center of its platform.

Both the left and right take billions of dollars in campaign contributions from the testing and privatization industries and thus support policies that serve the interest of their donors over their constituents.

There is a tremendous political opportunity here for one party to change course and support a winning strategy.

Republicans tried it in 2016 by lambasting Common Core and then quietly forgetting they could do a thing about it at the state level every day since.

Including today.

Admittedly their education policy is incoherent since they support every standardization and privatization initiative on record so long as a black President didn’t touch it. And even then their opposition melts away when they have the power to do something about it but no one’s looking because the President is too busy playing nuclear chicken with North Korea on Twitter.

Imagine if politicians promised to fix something and then had the courage to actually do it!

It worked in New Zealand.

It’s worked in many places all over the world.

Why can’t it work here?

Two Theories Why Facebook Keeps Blocking Me When I Write About School Privatization

December 8, 2017December 8, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Campbell Brown, capitalism, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Competency Based Education, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Donald Trump, Education, Facebook, Journalism, Media, Politics, privatization, School Choice, Schools, Standardized Testing, Teachers, union busting, Unions, Value Added Measures, VAM bloggers, Campbell Brown, Censorship, charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, education, Facebook, Facebook Jail, Mark Zuckerberg, Politics, public schools, teachers, Twitter

Facebook blocked me.

Again.

What did I do?

Did I post Russian-sponsored propaganda?

Nyet.

Did I post Nazi or racist memes?

Nein.

Did I post fraudulent or debunked accounts of factual events?

No.

So what did I do?

I had an opinion.

I took that opinion and wrote about it. I backed it up with facts, analogies, literary references and examples from my own experience as a classroom teacher in public school.

I took all that, wrote it up in a blog called “The False Paradise of School Privatization,” and posted it on Facebook.

It was the same kind of thing I do several times a week.

Write a blog. Post it on various Facebook pages and on Twitter.

And wait to see if anyone reads it.

But this time – BOOM!

I hadn’t even posted it to a handful of pages before the cyber arm of Mike Zuckerberg’s robo-security came down on me.

The same thing happened in October when I wrote an article called “School Choice is a Lie. It Does Not Mean More Options. It Means Less.”

I had hoped that that first time was just a fluke or that by now I had since sufficiently proven myself to be a human being and not some nefarious bot.

But no such luck.

After posting my latest article a few times on Monday, I got this message:

“ACTION BLOCKED

You have been temporarily blocked from performing this action.”

And I got a choice of clicking on:

“This is a mistake”

“OK”

So I clicked on “This is a mistake,” and got the following:

“Thanks for letting us know.”

My only choice was to click “OK.”

At some point I got a message telling me that I was blocked until Dec. 11 – a full week from my offense.

And now I have limited use of the social media platform.

I can still see posts.

I can like posts.

For some reason, I can even post and comment on my own page. But I can’t comment or post on other pages without getting the same error message.

At least I can’t do it consistently.

I’ve experimented and found that sometimes I can share posts to different pages. Sometimes I can’t.

It’s a bizarre, wonky system.

And it gets in the way of my work as an education blogger.

Facebook has more than 1.5 billion accounts. That includes more than 80% of all Americans.

Sharing my blog on the site gets me more readers than anywhere else.

Twitter is great and certainly more free. But when you push out a tweet, no one sees it unless they’re looking at their feed at that exact moment. Unless it gets retweeted – or you’re a famous unhinged former reality TV star turned President, then people seek out your own personal brand of nuclear-apocalypse-threatening madness.

So why does this keep happening to me?

I have two theories.

1) I am being purposefully censored by Facebook.

2) Facebook algorithms are targeting me because of how I post.

Let’s look at the first theory.

Could someone be actively censoring me?

Yes.

The proposal has a certain plausibility because the powers that be at Facebook undoubtedly disagree with what I have to say.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, is a huge supporter of edtech, standardized testing and school privatization. He’s spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make public schools rely more heavily on high stakes tests, evaluating teachers on their students’ scores and pushing Personalized Education software packages on public schools. And when that doesn’t pan out, he’s even backed his own charter schools to do the same.

But that’s not all.

Since early January of this year, he’s had Campbell Brown on the job as the arbiter of truth for his on-line platform.

That’s right.

Brown, a school privatization lobbyist and former NBC and CNN personality, heads Facebook’s News Partnership Team.

The newly created position was part of Zuckerberg’s attempt to limit fake news on his social media platform while prioritizing information in the mainstream media.

What exactly is fake news? Whatever Campbell Brown says it is.

This is quite a lot of power to give one person, especially someone who has a reputation for partisanship.

Brown, after all, co-founded a charter school propaganda network called The 74, funded – unsurprisingly – by Betsy DeVos, Republican mega-donor and current Secretary of Education.

After leaving the anchor’s desk, Brown has had a second career helping corporations destroy public schools and public school teachers.

And she does. Not. Like. Me.

Let’s just say we’ve gotten into a few Twitter skirmishes.

When she became the face of a New York lawsuit attacking teacher tenure in 2014, she received a tidal wave of public backlash. So she went on the Colbert Report to complain about how those fighting for workplace protections for themselves and their students were “silencing the debate” on how best to reform public education.

I responded with a blog called “Shhh! Who’s Silencing the Debate on Real Education Reform” claiming that Brown was actually doing the very thing she claimed to be decrying in shutting out teachers’ voices and rights.

She responded by cherry picking her rudest critics and tweeting “Sorry Steve but sadly this is not what I characterize as debate,” as if I had had anything to do with these comments.

As if any movement should be judged by its most extreme elements.

As if attacking someone’s job, someone’s kids and their future was fine so long as you did so with a smile and a polite comeback.

I don’t condone personal attacks, but I certainly understand them. In any case, Brown used the extreme fringes of her critics to condemn us all and conveniently refused to engage us – even those who had been unceasingly polite.

That lawsuit eventually failed, but Brown somehow landed on her feet.

Now she’s the one who gets to choose truth and falsity on Facebook.

Could she be actively working against people like me?

Yes.

Could she be directing Facebook’s programmers to select against posts that are negative to her pet projects?

Yes.

But there’s no way to know if she’s actually doing it.

Which brings me to my second theory.

Perhaps mindless Facebook algorithms are targeting me because of how I post.

I do, after all, try to post my articles on as many pages as I can.

They’re mostly pages focused on education and education policy with a few political and anti-racism sites thrown in, too.

Maybe I’m posting too quickly.

I might be triggering one of Zuckerberg’s bots to think I’m a bot, too, spamming up the works with advertising.

However, there’s a few problems with this theory.

Let’s say it’s true.

Why would that, alone, be reason to block me?

I’m not posting advertisements. I’m not asking for money. My blog doesn’t sell adds other than those WordPress puts on there, itself, so I can keep the page for free.

If an algorithm is stopping me because it thinks I’m unfairly selling something, it’s the result of some badly written code, indeed.

When programmers write code, that’s not impartial. It betrays their values. It betrays certain decisions about what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

For instance, I keep getting advertisements from Facebook asking me to pay money to the social media network so that they’ll post my articles on other people’s site for me.

I get reminders like “Boost this post for $3 to reach up to 580 people.”

Oh, really?

So I’m blocked because I posted my own writing to sites that have accepted me as a member and whose membership includes many I consider friends and colleagues. But for a fee, Facebook will post that same article to various sites filled with people I’d consider to be complete strangers.

Somehow that doesn’t “violate community standards” – the reason they said they blocked me in October.

This is very telling.

It seems to indicate that there is nothing wrong with what I’m doing, per se. It’s just that Facebook wants to encourage me to let them do it for me – so they can monetize my account.

They’re stopping me from doing this on my own, because they think I’m a sucker who should pay them for the right to communicate with others.

And that’s a very real possibility.

These blockages may not be political. They may be a simple marketing strategy.

So what can I do about it?

Well, first I need to wait a week until my account is unfrozen and I get back all the features Facebook users usually enjoy.

Then I can try to go back to the way things were posting my articles at all my favorite virtual watering holes.

Only slowly.

Much more slowly.

I figure if I only post once every five minutes or so, I can have my article at all the places that seem to like having them in about the course of an evening.

But I have a life, damn it!

I can’t spend the twilight hours posting and waiting and posting and waiting.

I guess another alternative is to rely on friends to post for me.

Spread the love.

Have others circulate my articles far and wide.

And that’s a great strategy. It’s very hard for Facebook to do anything about it.

But it requires me to impose on others. I don’t like doing it.

My readers, friends and supporters have lives, too.

They have more important things to do than post my writing all over the Internet.

So where does that leave me?

I’m not sure.

If I continue as I have, I’m bound to be blocked and thrown in Facebook Jail again.

Even if I don’t, I’m at the mercy of the wealthy elites who control the network.

And if the FCC does away with Net Neutrality, as they’re threatening to do in a matter of days, it may not even matter.

Regardless of where I post on Facebook, my blog site will probably be slow to the point of molasses and maybe even shut down entirely.

This is the brave new world of the plutocracy unrestrained.

This is American fascism triumphant.

I am only a single point of the resistance.

My voice is only as powerful as those who share it.

If Facebook, Twitter or WordPress somehow takes me down, I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

The False Paradise of School Privatization

December 4, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, church and state, Civil Rights, Competency Based Education, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, literature, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, school vouchers, Schools, Students, Teachers charter schools, dystopia, Lois Lowery, Politics, Privatize, public schools, School Choice, school vouchers, teachers, The Giver, utopia

Create a perfect world!

Go ahead! Don’t be shy!

What kind of government would you like? Republic, Monarchy, Dictatorship, Anarchy? Some combination or original system?

It’s all up to you.

How would you structure the economy? Capitalistic, Socialistic, Communistic? Something else?

You decide.

What would a family look like in your perfect world? How would careers be prepared for and chosen? What level of technology would you choose?

All these and more must be answered when creating the ideal community for you and I to live in.

It’s what Sir Thomas Moore famously did in his 1516 novel “Utopia” about an impossible “best state” for civil society.

And it’s what I had my 7^th grade students do last week in preparation for reading Lois Lowery’s contemporary science fiction novel, “The Giver.”

In small groups, my little ones clustered together at their tables and gave social planning a go.

It was stunning the variety of societies they created.

A group of kids with a history of confronting authority designed a nominal anarchy with an inherited monarchy controlling the military. Those with the highest grades decided all the decisions should be made by people like them in an oligarchy while the underachievers just played video games.

One of my favorites though was a group equally divided between boys and girls that decided to let women make all the rules except who could marry whom. That was decided only by the men, but women got to decide when to have kids and how many to have.

It was fascinating to see how their little minds worked. And even more so how their ideal societies reflected their wants and values.

But it was all a preview to Lowery’s novel of a futuristic society where utopia soon descends into its opposite – dystopia.

As it often does. In fact, the word coined by Moore literally means “nowhere.”

So it made me wonder about the most utopian thinking we find in modern life – education policy.

The economists, think tank partisans and lobbyists love to denigrate the public school system and pine for an alternative where corporate interests and business people make all the rules.

Sure they have literally billions of dollars behind them and a gallery of famous faces to give them legitimacy.

But they’re really just engaged in a more high stakes version of Moore’s novel or the assignment my kids did this week.

After all, what is a charter school but some naïve person’s ideal of the perfect educational institution? What’s a voucher school but a theocracy elevated to the normative secular level?

In each case, these world builders do the same as my middle schoolers – they build a system that would be perfect – from their own individual point of views and biases.

In his book, “Utopian Studies: A Guide,” Prof. Gregory Eck writes:

Because… utopia is rooted in theory, it will not always work. In fact, more is written about the failure and impossibility of utopia than of its success, probably because the ideal has never been reached.

And why is that ideal never reached? Margaret Atwood, the author of more than a few dystopian novels, has an answer.

“Every utopia,” she says, “…faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?”

One person’s paradise is another person’s Hell.

So the idea of designing one system that fits all is essentially bound to fail.

But doesn’t that support the charter and voucher school ideal? They are marketed, after all, as “school choice.” They allegedly give parents and children a choice about which schools to attend.

Unfortunately, this is just a marketing term.

Charter and voucher schools don’t actually provide more choice. They provide less.

Think about it.

Who gets to choose whether you attend one of these schools? Not you.

Certainly you have to apply, but it’s totally up to the charter or voucher school operators whether they want to accept you.

It is the public school system that gives you choice. You decide to live in a certain community – you get to go to that community’s schools. Period.

Certainly some communities are more accessible than others, and they are more accessible for some people – whether that be for economic, social, racial or religious reasons.

But you have much more choice here than you do from a bunch of nameless bureaucrats making decisions in secret that they never have to justify and for which they will never be held accountable.

What about curriculum? Don’t charter and voucher schools offer choice of curriculum?

No. They have one way of doing things. They have one curriculum. Either accept it or get out.

This is how we do things at KIPP. This is how we do things at Success Academy. You don’t like it, there’s the door.

By contrast, public schools tailor their curriculum to meet the needs of individual students. Each teacher does something different for every child in his or her charge whether those children are in special education, regular education, Emotional Support, the English as a Second Language Program, the academic or honors track.

Charter and voucher schools are naive utopias.

They propose one ideal way to teach all children and they expect parents to jump at their cultish schemes. All students will wear these sorts of uniforms and chant these sorts of phrases in response to these orders, etc. All children will be expected to provide marketing research to corporations on competency based learning programs and let their data be mined by these advertisers.

Because at these schools the emphasis is not on the curriculum. It’s on the system, itself.

These are privatized schools. They are schools run by private industry – not the public.

Decisions are not made by duly-elected representatives of the community in the light of day. They are made behind closed doors by corporate stooges.

THAT is the great innovation behind these schools. Everything else is mere window dressing.

If one of these schools found a better way to teach, public schools could pick it up and do it even better because the teachers and principals would be accountable for doing it correctly.

Funny how that’s never happened.

These so-called lab schools have never produced a single repeatable, verifiable innovation that works for all students without cherry picking the best and brightest.

Not once.

That’s because the utopia these policy wonks are interested in building isn’t for the students or parents. It’s for the investors.

They want to maximize return on investment. They want to decrease costs and increase profits. And whatever happens to the students is purely secondary.

It may be the ideal situation for the moneymen, but it’s often pure torture for the students. Charter schools are closed without notice, the money stolen under cloak of night. Voucher schools fool kids into thinking creationism is science and then are no where to be found when reputable colleges want nothing to do with their graduates.

Let me be the first to say that public school is no utopia.

We have real problems.

We need adequate, equitable and sustainable funding. We need integration. We need autonomy, respect and competitive pay for teachers. We need protection from corporate vultures in the standardized testing, publishing, edtech and school privatization industries.

But at heart, public schools are a much better choice because they don’t pretend to be perfect.

They are constantly changing. Teachers are constantly innovating.

A handful of years ago, I never had students design their own utopias before reading “The Giver.” But a colleague came up with the idea, I modified it for my students and we were off.

If I teach the same course next year, I’d modify it again based on what worked and what didn’t work this year.

I’m not expecting to be perfect.

I’m just doing the best I can.

Or as Jack Carroll puts it:

Perhaps the greatest utopia would be if we could all realize that no utopia is possible; no place to run, no place to hide, just take care of business here and now.

NOTE: A version of this article originally was published under the title “Creating a Charter or Voucher School is Like Designing a Utopia – Biases Prevail.” I reworked some of it, including the title, because I thought readers were confused by my intent and may have passed it over under a mistaken assumption about its contents.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

“We Want Our Money Back!” – The Rallying Cry of the 99% After GOP Tax Scam Passes Senate

December 2, 2017December 3, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Campaign Donations, capitalism, Civil Rights, Compassion, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Politics, Poverty, President, protest, Republican, Schools, Taxation Democrats, Donald Trump, plutocracy, Politics, Republicans, Senate, tax cuts, tax scam bill, Taxation

We want our money back!

Every penny!

With interest!

Do you hear us, Republican Senators?

Early this morning while most of us slept, you passed a $1.5 trillion tax giveaway to the wealthiest people in America!

And you did it 51-49 with only one Republican, Bob Corker of Tennessee, joining all Democrats against it.

This was a 500 page piece of lobbyist-written legislation hastily put together – in some cases scribbled in pen across type written pages – that no one had a chance to read before voting.

I am no fan of the corporate Democrats who have taken over what used to be a progressive party. But we can’t blame them for this one.

This scandal belongs entirely on the shoulders of Republicans.

The Dems even offered a resolution to delay the vote so that legislators had a chance to read it. All 52 Republicans voted against it!

This is what happens when the people lose control of their government.

This is what happens when the rich control lawmakers with their money.

There is no longer any doubt that we no longer live in a Republic. We no longer have any form of representative Democracy. We live in a pure plutocracy.

The rich pay the representatives and the representatives do what the rich want.

The wealthy are their real constituents. We are merely patsies told polite falsehoods to keep us in line.

You have no political power.

None.

Governments get their legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

You did not give your consent to give away more than a trillion dollars to rich douchebags who don’t need it. But Republicans gave it to them anyway.

Therefore, our government has no legitimacy.

We are an occupied people.

We are the victims of a palace coup.

The question remains if there is even a semblance of democratic principles left to allow us to regain what has been stolen.

The present plutocracy is weak. It has not had time enough to consolidate its power.

The old plan of gradually stealing control under cover of neoliberal policies has been abandoned. This is a naked power grab.

Perhaps it will be the jolt we need to snap us all awake.

Perhaps it will be enough to move the 99% to grab what little remains of the system set up by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and the other founders.

We must rise up and demand these crooks pay us back.

“We want our money back!” should be our rallying cry.

If there are any lawmakers left in the halls of power that want to represent us, they should take a page from the GOP handbook.

How many times did Republicans propose overturning Obamacare regardless of whether they had the votes or the power to do so?

We must do the same with this tax scam bill.

At every turn, we should propose repealing the bill and forcing the wealthy to pay back every red cent they stole! With interest!

It doesn’t matter if it won’t pass. Do it.

Clog the wheels of power with our cries. Don’t let them do a single thing more to make the lives of the majority of the population worse.

Democrats, now is your last chance to show us where you really stand.

You and I both know that if the Republicans had offered even the slightest concessions, many Dems would have voted for almost the same tax scam bill. It would have been a terrible piece of legislation that stole banks full of money from you and me. But it wouldn’t have been quite as terrible.

Frankly, that’s not enough, Democrats.

You aren’t to blame for what just happened, but you haven’t proven yourselves to be part of the solution.

If you want our continued support, you need to move to the left. HARD!

The masses have been stoked and stirred by this scandal. The political landscape has never been more primed for a landslide against the ruling class.

Democrats could take advantage of this and earn a blue wave next year.

But this will only happen if you run candidates that are willing to fight on our side in the class war that has already begun.

Bernie Sanders is great, but let’s be honest. He’s kinda elderly, and he’s a moderate.

That’s right. “Crazy” Bernie with his “kooky” socialist ideas is in the middle of any sane political spectrum. He only seems like a radical because of how far to the right the spectrum has shifted in this country.

We need real progressives who aren’t afraid to take on the establishment and fight inequality, police brutality, white supremacy, school privatization and a host of ills that – frankly – Democrats have historically championed almost as much as Republicans.

The pieces are all lined up. The board is ready to play.

We will support anyone who supports us.

We are coming for Republicans.

They will be repealed and replaced.

We will get back every penny they just stole last night. And we will grab every Richy Rich plutocrat by the heels, turn them upside down and shake until we get back every penny they took – with interest.

We will wring every last drop of Democracy we can from this government.

And if we find that there is not enough left…

History has an answer for what comes next.

Americans don’t take kindly to taxation without representation.

And that’s exactly what Republicans gave us this morning.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Check it out!

Creating a Charter or Voucher School is Like Designing a Utopia – Biases Prevail

December 1, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Charter Schools, church and state, Civil Rights, Competency Based Education, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Education, Parents, Politics, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Teachers, video games charter schools, dystopia, Lois Lowery, Margaret Atwood, Privatize, public schools, school vouchers, teachers, The Giver, utopia

Create your own Utopia!

Go ahead! Don’t be shy!

What kind of government would you like? Republic, Monarchy, Dictatorship, Anarchy? Some combination or original system?

It’s all up to you.

How would you structure the economy? Capitalistic, Socialistic, Communistic? Something else?

You decide.

What would a family look like in your perfect society? How would careers be prepared for and chosen? What level of technology would you choose?

All these and more must be answered when creating the ideal community for you and I to live in.

And that’s exactly what I had my 7^th grade students do this week in preparation for reading Lois Lowery’s science fiction novel, “The Giver.”

In small groups, my little ones clustered together at their tables and gave social planning a go.

It was stunning the variety of societies they created.

One group had a nominal anarchy with an inherited monarchy controlling the military. Another had an oligarchy of the smartest people who got the best grades to make all the decisions while everyone else played video games.

One of my favorites though was a group who decided to let women make all the rules except who could marry whom. That was decided only by the men, but women got to decide when to have kids and how many to have.

It was fascinating to see how their little minds worked.

But it was all a preview to Lowery’s novel of a futuristic society where utopia soon descends into dystopia.

As it often does.

So it made me wonder about the most utopian thinking we find in modern life – education policy.

The economists, think tank partisans and lobbyists love to denigrate the public school system and pine for an alternative where corporate interests and business people make all the rules.

Sure they have literally billions of dollars behind them and a gallery of famous faces to give them legitimacy.

But they’re really just engaged in a more high stakes version of the assignment my kids did this week.

After all, what is a charter school but some naïve person’s ideal of the perfect educational institution? What’s a voucher school but a theocracy elevated to the normative secular level?

In each case, these world builders do the same as my middle schoolers – they build a system that would be perfect – from their own individual point of view.

In his book, “Utopian Studies: A Guide,” Prof. Gregory Eck writes:

Because… utopia is rooted in theory, it will not always work. In fact, more is written about the failure and impossibility of utopia than of its success, probably because the ideal has never been reached.

And why is that ideal never reached? Margaret Atwood, the author of more than a few dystopian novels, has an answer.

“Every utopia,” she says, “…faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?”

One person’s paradise is another person’s Hell.

So the idea of designing one system that fits all is essentially bound to fail.

But doesn’t that support the charter and voucher school ideal? They are marketed, after all, as “school choice.” They allegedly give parents and children a choice about which schools to attend.

Unfortunately, this is just a marketing term.

Charter and voucher schools don’t actually provide more choice. They provide less.

Think about it.

Who get to choose whether you attend one of these schools? Not you.

Certainly you have to apply, but it’s totally up to the charter or voucher school operators whether they want to accept you.

It is the public school system that gives you choice. You decide to live in a certain community, you get to go to that community’s schools. Period.

Certainly some communities are more accessible than others, and they are more accessible for some people than others – whether that be for economic, social, racial or religious reasons.

But you have much more choice here than you do from a bunch of nameless bureaucrats making decisions in secret that they never have to justify and for which they will never be held accountable.

What about curriculum? Don’t charter and voucher schools offer choice of curriculum?

No. They have one way of doing things. They have one curriculum. Either accept it or get out.

This is how we do things at KIPP. This is how we do things at Success Academy. You don’t like it, there’s the door.

Charter and voucher schools are naive utopias.

Because at these schools the emphasis is not on the curriculum. It’s on the system, itself.

These are privatized schools. They are schools run by private industry – not the public.

Decisions are not made by duly-elected representatives of the community in the light of day. They are made behind closed doors by corporate stooges.

THAT is the great innovation behind these schools. Everything else is mere window dressing.

If one of these schools found a better way to teach, public schools could pick it up and do it even better because the teachers and principals would be accountable for doing it correctly.

Funny how that’s never happened.

These so-called lab schools have never produced a single repeatable, verifiable innovation that works for all students without cherry picking the best and brightest.

Not once.

That’s because the utopia these policy wonks are interested in building isn’t for the students or parents. It’s for the investors.

They want to maximize return on investment. They want to decrease costs and increase profits. And whatever happens to the students is purely secondary.

It may be the ideal situation for the moneymen, but it’s often pure dystopia for the students. Charter schools are closed without notice, the money stolen under cloak of night. Voucher schools fool kids into thinking creationism is science and then are no where to be found when reputable colleges want nothing to do with their graduates.

Let me be the first to say that public school is no utopia.

We have real problems.

But at heart, public schools are a much better choice because they don’t pretend to be perfect.

They are constantly changing. Teachers are constantly innovating.

A handful of years ago, I never had students design their own utopias before reading “The Giver.” But a colleague came up with the idea, I modified it for my students and we were off.

If I teach the same course next year, I’d modify it again based on what worked and what didn’t work this year.

I’m not expecting to be perfect.

I’m just doing the best I can.

Or as Jack Carroll puts it:

Perhaps the greatest utopia would be if we could all realize that no utopia is possible; no place to run, no place to hide, just take care of business here and now.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Check it out!

Public School Teachers Are Absent Too Much, Says Charter School Think Tank

November 21, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Campaign Donations, Campbell Brown, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Donald Trump, Education, Healthcare, Journalism, Junk science, Labor, Media, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Schools, small class size, Teachers, union busting, Unions charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, Fordham Institute, neoliberal, propaganda, public schools, School Choice, teachers, think tank

Have you ever heard of media bias?

I don’t think many so-called journalists have.

At least their editors haven’t or perhaps they just don’t care.

Otherwise, why would self-respecting hard news purveyors publish the results of a study by charter school cheerleaders that pretends to “prove” how public school teachers are worse than charter school teachers?

That’s like publishing a study denigrating apples written by the national pear council.

Breaking news: Pepsi says, “Coke sucks!”

In a related story McDonalds has startling evidence against the Burger King!

THIS IS NOT NEWS!

THIS IS PROPAGANDA!

I know it’s become trendy to defend the media when our lame-ass President attacks every factually-based report that puts him in a bad light as “fake news.” But the giant media conglomerates aren’t doing themselves any favors with lazy reporting like this.

And I know what many journalists are thinking when they do it, because I used to be one:

I’ll publish the report and include dissenting opinions and that will be okay because I will have shown both sides and readers can make up their own minds.

But what’s the headline? What’s the spin? Who is David in this story and who is Goliath? When multiple stories like this appear all over the news cycle, what impression is made on your readers?

It’s the same thing with climate science. Ninety seven percent of climate scientists say global climate change is man-made and happening. Yet the news gives us one scientist and one crank climate denier and pretends like that’s fair and balanced.

And here we get one biased neoliberal think tank vs. millions of public school teachers all across the country and since you’ve given us an equal number to represent each side, you pretend THAT’S fair and balanced.

It isn’t.

But who’s paying your advertising revenue?

Who owns the media conglomerates that publish your articles?

Often the same people publishing bullshit reports like this one. That’s who.

No wonder they get so much coverage!

So here’s the deal.

The Fordham Institute wrote a report called “Teacher Absenteeism in Charter and Traditional Public Schools.” They concluded that 28.3 percent of teachers in traditional public schools miss eleven or more days of school versus 10.3 percent of teachers at charter schools.

To come up with these figures they used data from Betsy Devos’ Department of Education.

So let the hand-wringing begin!

Look how bad public school teachers are and how much more dedicated is the charter school variety! Look at how much money is being lost! Look at the damage to student academic outcomes!

Won’t someone think of the children!?

WHY WON’T SOMEONE PLEEEEAAASSSEEE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!??

This report brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the College Board, Education Reform Now, the Walton Family Foundation and a host of other idle rich philanthrocapitalists who are drooling over the prospect of privatizing public schools and hoovering up public money as private profit.

Oh. If that’s not enough, Fordham actually runs a series of charter schools in Ohio.

Biased much?

So what’s wrong with the report?

First of all, it’s not news.

Neoliberal think tanks have been publishing propaganda like this for at least a decade. Play with the numbers here, look only at this data and we can paint a picture of “failing” schools, “failing” teachers and therefore justify the “need” for school privatization.

Second, look at all the important data Fordham conveniently leaves out.

Look at the number of hours public school teachers work in the United States vs. those in other comparable countries, say those included in The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In fact, the OECD (which is not biased one way or another about American school privatization) released a mountain of statistics about how many hours teachers work in various countries.

The result: in the United States teachers on average spend more time teaching and receive less pay than those in other countries.

American teachers spend on average 1,080 hours teaching each year. Across the O.E.C.D., the average for most countries is 794 hours on primary education, 709 hours on lower secondary education, and 653 hours on upper secondary education general programs.

Yet American teachers start at lower salaries and even after 15 years in the profession, earn less money than their international counterparts.

So – assuming Fordham’s absenteeism statistics are accurate – why do public school teachers miss so much school? They’re exhausted from the hours we demand they keep!

But what about charter school teachers? Aren’t they exhausted, too?

Some certainly are.

Working in a charter school often requires grueling hours and fewer benefits. That’s why charters have a higher turnover than public schools.

Since they’re often not unionized, charter schools usually have younger, less experienced staff who don’t stay in the profession long. In fact, they rely on a constant turnover of staff. At many of the largest charter chains such as Success Academy and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), teachers average only 4 years before moving on to another career, according to the New York Times. And this is typical of most charter chains.

So why don’t charter school teachers take as many sick days as traditional public school teachers? Maybe because when they check out, they often don’t check back in.

Moreover, there is a significant difference in the student population at both kinds of school – privatized vs. public.

As their marketing departments will tell you, the students in a charter school choose to be there. The charter schools often weed out the students with behavior problems, special needs or those who are otherwise more difficult to teach. As a result, the strain on teachers may not be as severe. When you’re only serving kids who want to be there and who are easy to teach, maybe you don’t need as much downtime.

Public school teachers, on the other hand, face real dangers from burnout.

According to a study by Scholastic (that actually goes counter to its pro-privatization bias), we work 53 hours a week on average. That comes out to 7.5 hours a day in the classroom teaching. In addition, we spend 90 minutes before and/or after school mentoring, tutoring, attending staff meetings and collaborating with peers. Plus 95 additional minutes at home grading papers, preparing classroom activities and other job-related tasks.

And for teachers who oversee extracurricular clubs, that’s even more work – 11-20 additional hours a week, on average.

Add to that the additional trauma public school children have experienced over the last decade. More than half of public school students now live below the poverty line. That means increased behavior issues, increased emotional disturbances, increased special needs, increased malnutrition, increased drug use – you name it.

Public school teachers deal with that every day. And you seriously wonder that some of us need some downtime during the year to deal with it.

Moreover, let’s not forget the issue of disease.

Working in a public school is to immerse yourself in a petri dish of bacteria and viruses. My first year teaching, I got so sick I was out for weeks until I developed immunities to strains of illnesses I had never been exposed to before.

Kids are constantly asking for tissues and blowing their noses and sometimes not even washing their hands. This is why teachers often purchase the tissues and hand sanitizers that school districts can’t or won’t – we’re trying to stop the spread of infection.

When teachers get sick (and often bring these delightful little maladies home to their spouses, children and families) what do you expect them to do? Continue going to work and further spreading the sickness around to healthy children?

And speaking of illness, let’s talk stress.

Stress is a killer. Do you think pushing the responsibility for the entire school system on to teachers while cutting their autonomy has an effect on teachers individual stress levels?

I can tell you from my own personal experience I had two heart attacks last year. And in the 15 years I’ve been a teacher, my health has suffered in innumerable ways. I’m actually on medication for one malady that makes me immunosuppressed and more susceptible to other illnesses.

So, yeah, sometimes I need to take a sick day. But if you ask most teachers, they’d rather stay in the class and work through it.

Having the day off is often more trouble than it’s worth. You have to plan an entire lesson that can be conducted in your absence, you have to give the students an assignment to do and you have to grade it. Even with the day off, you have a mountain of work waiting for you when you return.

So as a practicing public school teacher, I dispute the findings of the Fordham Institute.

They don’t know what they’re talking about.

They have focused in on data to make their chosen targets, public school teachers, look bad while extolling the virtues of those who work in privatized systems.

There is a manufactured shortage of teachers across the country. We’ve got 250,000 fewer teachers in the classroom than we did before the great recession of 08-09. Yet class enrollment has increased by 800,000 students.

So if we wanted today’s students to have the same experience as those of only a decade ago, we’d need to hire at least 400,000 more teachers.

I wonder why college undergraduates aren’t racing to become education majors. I wonder why there aren’t more incentives to get more teachers in the classroom and why there isn’t a boom of more teaching jobs.

And I wonder why reports like this are talked about as if they were anything but what they are – school privatization propaganda.

The Completely Avoidable Teacher Shortage and What To Do About It

November 19, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Competency Based Education, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Healthcare, Labor, Media, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Propaganda, protest, Racism, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Seniority, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teacher Tenure, Teachers, Unions charter schools, class size, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, Music, Privatize, school vouchers, seniority, Teacher Evaluation, teacher shortage, teachers

Hello?

Lo-lo-lo-lo…

Is anybody here?

Ere-ere-ere-ere…

Is anyone else left? Am I the only one still employed here?

Somedays it feels like it.

Somedays teaching in a public school is kind of like trying to run a resort hotel – ALL BY YOURSELF.

You’ve got to teach the classes and watch the lunch periods and cover the absences and monitor the halls and buy the pencils and tissues and fill out the lesson plans and conduct the staff meetings and…

Wouldn’t it be better if there were more people here?

I mean seriously. Why do we put the entire responsibility for everything – almost everything – involved in public education and put it all on the shoulders of school teachers?

And since we’re asking questions, why do we ALSO challenge their right to a fair wage, decent healthcare, benefits, reasonable hours, overtime, sick leave, training, collective bargaining… just about ANYTHING to encourage them to stay in the profession and to get the next generation interested in replacing them when they retire?

Why?

Well, that’s part of the design.

You see today’s public schools employ 250,000 fewer people than they did before the recession of 2008–09. Meanwhile enrollment has increased by 800,000 students.

So if we wanted today’s children to have the same quality of service kids received in this country only a decade ago, we’d need to hire almost 400,000 more teachers!

Instead, our children are packed into classes of 25, 30 even 40 students!

There’s no way a single teacher can give all those children her undivided attention at all times. There’s no way she can provide them with the kind of individualized instruction we know kids need in order to fulfill their potentials.

So why did we let this happen? Why do we continue to let this happen?

First, you have to understand that there are two very different kinds of public school experience. There is the kind provided by the rich schools where the local tax base has enough money to give kids everything they need including small class sizes and hiring enough teachers to get things done efficiently. And there’s the poor schools where the majority of our kids get educated by the most dedicated put upon teachers who give 110% everyday but somehow can’t manage to keep all those plates spinning in the air at the same time so the media swoops in, wags its finger and proclaims them a “failure.”

Bull.

It’s not teachers who are failing. It’s a system that stacks the deck against them and anxiously anticipates them being unable to meet unfair and impossible expectations.

Why do we let THAT happen?

Mainly because the people with money don’t care about poor and middle class children.

But also because they see the supposed failure of public schools as a business opportunity.

This is a chance to open a new market and scoop up buckets of juicy profit all for themselves and their donors.

It’s called privatized education. You know – charter schools and vouchers schools. Educational institutions not run by the public, not beholden to elected officials, but instead by bureaucrats who have the freedom to act in the shadows, cut student services and pocket the savings.

THAT’S why there’s a teacher shortage.

They want to deprofessionalize the job of teaching.

They don’t want it to be a lifelong career for highly trained, creative and caring individuals.

Why?

Those are people they have to pay a living wage. Those are people who know a thing or two and might complain about how the corporate scheme adversely affects the children in their care.

That’s why!

So these business people would rather teaching become a minimum wage stepping stone for young adults before they move on to something that pays them enough to actually support themselves and their families.

And to do that, the powers that be need to get rid of professional teachers.

People like me – folks with national board certification and a masters degree – they need to go.

THAT’S why class sizes are so large. That’s why so few young people are picking teaching as a major in college.

It’s exactly what the super-rich want.

And it doesn’t have to be some half mad Mr. Burns who makes the decisions. In my own district, the school board just decided to save money by cutting middle school math and language arts teachers – the core educators who teach the most important subjects on the standardized tests they pretend to value so much!

I’m under no illusions that my neighborhood school directors are in bed with the privatization industry. Some are clueless and some know the score. But the decision was prompted mostly by need. We’re losing too many kids to the local charter school despite its terrible academic track record, despite that an army of kids slowly trickle back to us each year after they get the boot from the privatizers, our district coffers are suffering because marketing is winning over common sense.

So number crunching administrators had a choice – straighten their backbones and fight, or suggest cutting flesh and bone to make the budget.

They chose the easier path.

As a result, middle school classes are noticeably larger, teachers have been moved to areas where they aren’t necessarily most prepared to teach and administrators actually have the gall to hold out their clipboards, show us the state test scores and cluck their tongues.

I actually heard an administrator this week claim that my subject, language arts, counts for double points on the state achievement rubric. I responded that this information should be presented to the school board as a reason to hire another language arts teacher, reduce class sizes and increase the chances of boosting test scores!

That went over like a lead balloon.

But it demonstrates why we’ve lost so much ground.

Everyone knows larger class sizes are bad – especially in core subjects, especially for younger students, especially for struggling students. Yet no one wants to do anything to cut class sizes.

If the state and federal government were really committed to increasing test scores, that’s the reform they would mandate when scores drop. Your kids aren’t doing as well in math and reading. Here’s some money to hire more teachers.

But NO.

Instead we’re warned that if we don’t somehow pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, they’ll close our school and give it to a private company to run – as if there were any evidence at all that this would help.

But, the school privatization cheerleader rebuts, why should we reward failing schools with more money?

The same reason you reward a starving stomach with more food. So the hungry person will survive!

Right now you’re doing the same thing with the testing corporations. They make the tests and grade the tests. So if students fail, the testing corporations get more money because then students have to take — MORE TESTS! And they are forced to take testing remediation classes that have to buy testing remediation materials produced by – wait for it – the same companies that make and grade the tests!

It’s a scam, ladies and gentlemen! And anyone who looks can see it.

But when you bring this up to administrators, they usually just nod and say that there’s nothing we can do about it. All we can do is keep trying to win the game – a game that’s rigged against us.

That’s exactly the attitude that’s gotten us where we are.

We can’t just keep doing it, keep appeasing the testing and privatization industry and their patsies in the media and government.

We must fight the system, itself, not go along with it.

We need to get on a bus and go to the state capital and Washington, DC, as a staff and protest. We need our school boards to pass resolutions against the unfair system. We need class action lawsuits. We need to tell everyone in the media what we know and repeat it again and again until it becomes a refrain.

And when we get these unfair evaluations of our under-resourced impoverished and multicultural districts, we need to cry foul. “Oh look! Pearson’s tests failed another group of mostly brown and black kids! I wonder what they have against children of color!”

Force them to change. Provide adequate, equitable and sustainable funding so we can hire the number of teachers necessary to actually get the job done. Make the profession attractive to the next generation by increasing teacher pay, autonomy, resources and respect. And stop evaluating educators with unproven, disproven and debunked evaluation schemes like value-added measures and standardized test scores. Judge them on what they do and not a trussed up series of expected outcomes designed by people who either have no idea what they’re talking about or actively work to stack the deck against students and teachers.

But most of all — No more going along.

No more taking the path most traveled.

Because we’ve seen where it leads.

It leads to our destruction.

Making Puerto Rico the New New Orleans – Steal the Schools and Give Them to Big Business to Run For Profit

November 9, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Education, Labor, New Orleans, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, protest, Puerto Rico, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, Unions charter schools, disaster capitalism, Federacion de Maestros de Puerto Rico, Mercedes Martines, New Orleans, Privatize, Puerto Rico

Charter school backers can’t help it.

They see a bunch of black or brown kids displaced by a natural disaster and they have to swoop in to help…

Help themselves, that is.

They did it in 2005 to New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina. Now they want to do it again in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

“This is a real opportunity to press the reset button,” said Puerto Rican Secretary of Education Julia Keleher.

“…this [is a] transformational opportunity for us to start to think fundamentally differently about what it is to be in school, and how one goes about getting an education.”

A dozen years ago in Louisiana, that meant stealing almost the entire New Orleans public school system in the aftermath of Katrina. About 90 percent of the city’s 126 schools were given to the Louisiana Recovery School District, which turned them all into charter schools.

In effect, Louisiana state officials elected by the white majority stole control from local school boards elected by the city’s black majority. More than 7,000 teachers most of whom were people of color and had been displaced by the hurricane found themselves replaced by mostly white teachers brought in from other parts of the country.

Now, more than 10 years later, the New Orleans experiment has been shown to be a failure. Scores on standardized tests have improved (kinda), but the curriculum has narrowed, teacher turnover has doubled, disadvantaged and special education students have even fewer resources while schools fight over high achieving children, students spend hours being bused to schools far from their homes, communities have been erased, and parents have less control over how their own tax dollars are spent.

That is what Keleher and others want to repeat in Puerto Rico – wrest control away from the public and give it to big business all wrapped up in a bow.

Why?

Public schools come with expensive perks like local control, transparent budgets and regulations to ensure all the money is being spent on students. It’s much cheaper to run these districts with unelected bureaucrats, closed-door budgets and the ability to grab as much of the cash as possible and stuff it into their own pockets.

It ’s not like anyone’s going to complain. These schools aren’t for rich white kids. They’re for poor brown ones.

It’s just colonialism, 2017 style!

Jeanne Allen thinks that’s a great idea.

The founder and CEO of school privatization lobbying group, the Center For Education Reform, said that charterization is the best thing that could happen to Puerto Rican schools.

After dealing with the immediate effects of the hurricane, reformers “should be thinking about how to recreate the public education system in Puerto Rico.” And she should know. Allen was also involved in the New Orleans fiasco turning that system over to big business.

She added that charter school operators across the nation, including cyber charter school managers (whose schools often have even more wretched academic results), should be thinking about how to get involved in Puerto Rico post-Maria.

Keleher has already begun laying the groundwork.

Even though many Puerto Rican schools are only operational because of the work of teachers who have cleaned them up and have opened them despite being told not to by Keleher’s administration, the Education Secretary has pledged to lay off massive amounts of teachers and permanently close more schools – even schools that are structurally sound.

“Consolidating schools makes sense,” Keleher said in October. “They can go out and protest in the streets, but that doesn’t change the fact that we can’t go back to life being the same as it was before the hurricane.”

Puerto Rican teachers aren’t letting the vultures swoop in without protest.

Just this week twenty-one teachers in the capitol of San Juan were arrested during a rally at the Education Department headquarters. They were demanding all structurally sound schools be opened immediately.

“Our schools have served students well and although we recognize that it can be expensive to repair some schools, what we are asking is that schools that are ready be opened,” said social worker Alba Toro just before the arrests.

Administration officials are claiming the teachers were taken into custody because they physically attacked the civil servants, but witnesses say the protest was entirely peaceful.

According to Education Safety Commissioner César González, the protesters assaulted at least three security employees and a public relations employee while inside the building.
However, protestors dispute this version of events. Eulalia Centeno, who was part of the group that went inside the building, but left before the arrests began, said that no violent acts were committed and that the protesters only demanded to see the secretary to request the opening of public schools.

Seven weeks after the hurricane, less than half of the island’s nearly 1,200 public schools are open in any capacity. Though many schools endured severe storm and flood damage, others were repaired and cleaned to shelter hurricane victims and are ready to take in students.

“Keleher is using the crisis as an opportunity to close hundreds of public schools, lay off senior teachers and privatize public education,” says Mercedes Martinez, President of the Federacion de Maestros of Puerto Rico, an island teachers union.

Martinez was one of the teachers arrested during the protest.

When she was taken out of the building in handcuffs, her son was photographed leaning over a railing and patting his mother on the shoulder.

This is what real heroes do.

They refuse to back down despite the forces of prejudice and commerce stacked against them.

Will we let the charter school vampires suck Puerto Rico dry?

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