In a district like mine where three separate gunmen went on sprees within 5 miles of each other during the last few years, this sort of training is becoming more frequent.
It’s up to the children to watch out for themselves.
I can tell you as a teacher with more than 15 years experience in the classroom, I have never seen kids so quiet as they were in that auditorium.
It makes me sick.
When I was their age I was playing with Luke Skywalker action figures and building space ships out of Legos. I wasn’t discussing with police how to avoid a bullet to the brain. I wasn’t advised to wear my backpack on my chest to help protect against being gut shot.
And now they were being told that safety was just another one of their responsibilities – like doing their homework and picking up after themselves in the cafeteria.
However, when Booker gave the keynote address at the “Project LIVE & Achieve” Rally for Excellence today, he made it clear whose side he’s on. And it’s not parents, children or communities.
Organizers estimate 5,000 students from more than 20 city charter schools attended the rally instead of attending their classes.
Traditional public schools aren’t allowed to spend tax dollars or waste class time by forcing students to attend political rallies. But since charter schools like all of New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina don’t have to follow the same rules, this is your tax dollars at work.
The rally was hosted by InspireNOLA Charter Schools and U.S. Representative Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana Democrat.
The charter network’s Website describes the rally as part of InspireNOLA’s celebration of Martin Luther King weekend.
“While it seeks to claim the mantle of the [civil rights] movement and Dr. King’s legacy, corporate education reform is rooted in fear, fired by competition and driven by division,” says Williams. “It seeks to undermine community rather than build it and, for this reason, it is the ultimate betrayal of the goals and values of the movement.”
“To save man from the morass of propaganda is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.”
Forcing children to go to a political rally and then pretending their mandatory presence is somehow a show of support is exactly the kind of propaganda King was railing against.
“The function of education,” King explained in 1947, “is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”
Booker, who clearly has ambitions of a Presidential run, has violated those principles time and again.
Before he became a U.S. Senator, he was Newark mayor. In that position he accepted a $100 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to implement a series of drastic reforms in city schools.
The people of Newark only found out about it on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show when Booker was a guest and announce the grant. Almost all of that money went to charter schools, according to the New Republic.
And Devos isn’t the only radical right privatization-monger in Booker’s circle. Michelle Rhee, the former DC schools chancellor known for union busting and a series of reforms that resulted in a citywide cheating scandal, is someone Booker calls “a friend of mine”
“When it comes to my record of supporting what I believe that any child born in any zip code in America should have a high quality school and I don’t care if that’s a charter school or a traditional district school. If it’s a bad school I’m going to fight against it just like I supported charter school closures in Newark that weren’t serving the genius of my kids. So I haven’t changed one iota.”
Yet his record flies in the face of his rhetoric.
As Newark Mayor he privileged charter schools and helped them spread throughout the city while underfunding traditional public schools. And though he continually brings up the “amazing” academic record of Newark’s charter schools, he strangely omits the a cheating scandal they experienced similar to Rhee’s.
According to a report by the state Department of Education’s Office of Fiscal Accountability and Compliance, testing documents were not secured at these schools. State investigators flagged at least 15 charter schools for further inquiry because some tests had unusually high rates of wrong-to-right erasure marks. One school had rates more than three times greater than the state average.
In LA, administrators like Buetner – who has no experience with education but is a millionaire investor in school privatization – actually sabotage the public schools in order to feed the profit-making machine of charters.
And now the opposition to these shenanigans is spilling into the streets in both red and blue states. There have been seven major teacher protests in the last year in states like Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and now California.
It’s past time for Democrats to take a stand along with them and oppose school privatization in all of its forms.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. have made no bones about the connection. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., also expressed support for striking teachers, even tweeting a link to a Jacobin article about school privatization. Though didn’t mention charter’s directly, he has spoken out about school privatization before, including last year when Puerto Rico announced its plans to open charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
The problem is that many Democrats won’t go that far. They’ll say they support LA Teachers but won’t admit that school privatization is the cause of their woes. They refuse to take a stand against the billionaire backers of the industry and side with the grassroots parents and children fighting for fully public schools.
However, few go as far as Booker to openly champion the industry.
There is a special place in Hell for strikebreakers.
Some people kill. Some steal.
But only a filthy, disgusting scab can do all of that in one.
When you take someone else’s job, you’re stealing their bargaining power and killing the community’s chances for their kids.
This week as 30,000 teachers at Los Angeles Unified School District walked out demanding support for their students and their professions, a few slimy worms have crossed the picket line to keep some of the district’s 900 schools open.
Most parents have kept their children home, but some don’t have that choice. And the district is trying to use that opportunity to justify larger class sizes and fewer resources. While sitting on $2 billion in the bank, they pull out their pockets and play dumb. In the richest state in the country, they want you to believe there isn’t enough money to waste on children.
At least not on these black and brown children!
And whether they mean to or not, the craven, no account, flatulent scabs back them up 100%.
According to the LA Times, the district has students cloistered in holding areas while administrators tell them to fill in workbooks or go on their cell phones or iPads to learn via app.
Among these yes-men, you’ll find a handful of substitute teachers who put their own yellow bellies over solidarity with their fellows.
Not only is this sniveling, groveling behavior suitable only to strip the self-respect from the most base criminal, they aren’t even getting thirty pieces of silver for it.
According to the Times, at one school scabs are only being paid $160 a day – less than subs normally make. Yet for each of these fill-ins, the district is paying the Charter Substitute Teacher Network – an outside agency providing these miserable miscreants – $250 a day, which is in fact more than the usual sub rate!
How transparent! The district doesn’t even value its scabs! It would rather pay the corporation that provides these amoral dupes than the dupes, themselves!
How low a weasel do you have to be to take such a job? What kind of dung beetle? What piece of excrement could stoop so low?
No. Wait. That’s an insult to weasels, dung beetles and excrement!
When you rob a person of the right to withhold that labor, you take away her power. You turn her into little more than a slave whose only choice is take it or leave it.
But when people are given the dignity to join together as one, to unify as one solid whole, they can equal the power of the wealthy and privileged.
They can stand together on their own two feet and demand a fair share.
“After God finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab … When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of Hell to keep him out. No man has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with.”
THAT’S why class sizes have ballooned to more than 45 students in secondary schools; 35 students in upper elementary grades; and 25 students in lower elementary grades.
THAT’S why the district does not have nearly enough counselors, psychologists or librarians to give students the support they need.
THAT’S why 80% of schools don’t have full-time nurses.
The second largest district in the country has more charter schools than any other. The overwhelming majority of them are operated by corporate chains and have expanded by 287% over the last 10 years.
These are publicly funded but privately run schools. They don’t have to meet the same standards of accountability or transparency about how they spend taxpayer dollars – all while gobbling up $600 million a year!
That’s not Democracy. No self-respecting Democrat should support such a thing – but you’ll find luminaries from Obama to the Clintons to Cory Booker who will tell you what a great idea it is. Along with DeVos, Trump, Jeb Bush and the Koch Brothers.
LA Superintendent Austin Beutner is a Democrat, but he’s also a multimillionaire with experience in corporate downsizing and none in education.
“…Beutner has moved ahead with what we believe is his agenda to dismantle the district. Through an outside foundation, he has brought on firms that have led public school closures and charter expansion in some districts where they have worked, from New Orleans to Washington, D.C. This approach, drawn from Wall Street, is called the “portfolio” model, and it has been criticized for having a negative effect on student equity and parent inclusion.”
These are policies in direct opposition to the progressive ideals at the heart of the Democratic Party. They are, in fact, bedrock Republican ideology and demonstrate the vast divide among Democrats.
New Democrats oppose them. Grassroots Democrats oppose them. Democratic voters oppose them. And it will be telling whether the policymakers in our halls of power will follow the lead of the people or try to shepherd the power behind the party into doing what the patricians think best.
That’s why this strike is important way beyond California. Whatever happens will send echoes throughout the country, because school districts from sea to shining sea are facing similar issues.
In the meantime, the LA Unified District has a $1.8 Billion budget surplus it can use to help meet these needs. But the solutions to the district’s woes require a long-term commitment to public education.
This would help the district raise teacher salaries to match those of surrounding districts.
But the root problem is a lack of ideological support among policymakers.
Too many Democrats inside and outside the district don’t support the very idea of public schools. They’d rather boost privatization.
Too many Democrats support unnecessary and harmful high stakes standardized testing which not only unfairly paints the district as a failure for the poverty of its students but forces out things of real education value like the arts and ethnic studies.
Too many Democrats have no problem doing this in a district that serves a majority of students of color while providing only the best for middle class white kids.
That’s why today the American people stand with the UTLA as they go on strike.
It’s why we always stand with educators – You can’t put students first if you put teachers last.
Democrats need to get their priorities straight.
It’s time to decide if they’re going to continue being Trump lite or reclaim their progressive heritage and rejoin the rest of the nation.
It’s another way marketing and advertising is forced down our throats and into our leisure hours.
Not only do the multi-billion dollar corporations who fund these entertainments want to convince us we need this pill, that appliance, those technological doo-hickeys — they need to cajole and inveigle us that we need school privatization, too.
And what better way to do that than to give us heroes that – what-do-you-know – just happen to go to charter, voucher and private schools?
It’s refreshing to see the iconic Spideysuite worn by a character of color, but why change his alma mater, too?
The original webslinger, Peter Parker, was an everyperson teen who went to a public school. But Morales goes to a private school in the movie and a charter school in the comic books on which the film is loosely based.
Then we have “The Kid Who Would Be King” a modern day retelling of the King Arthur legend. In the film, Alex finds Excalibur and becomes king – while attending a British academy, the U.K.’s version of an American charter school.
And let’s not forget “The Hate U Give.” In both the book and the movie, the protagonist, 16-year-old African American Starr Carter, deals with a white police officer murdering her black friend. And her struggle is worsened by the incomprehension she meets at her mostly white, privileged private school.
Why are all these stories taking place where a tiny sliver of kids are educated?
What happened to all the public school students?
It’s not like privatized education has ever been starving for representation in the mass media.
If anything, private schools have historically been overrepresented – Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace, Dead Poets Society, Catcher in the Rye, etc.
At least in the past you could count on the default setting for kids to be public school. Unless it was an integral part of the plot, it was just assumed that everyday kids went to everyday public schools.
John Travolta and Olivia Newton John dreamed of those summer nights, but they went to Rydell High.
Molly Ringwald and the rest of the Breakfast Club attended Saturday detention, but during the week they were in class at Shermer High.
Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy and co. fought off vampires, but they had homework at Sunnydale High.
Even Bella Swann navigated her vampire-werewolf love triangle at Forks High!
But today’s fictional teens wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those traditional institutions.
It’s not about representation for the 10 percent enrolled in privatized schools. It’s about expanding the market to get more children and families to abandon public schools and pony up the dough (or siphon off the taxes) to enroll in these institutions, too.
Or at least TRY to enroll.
MILES MORALES
Back in 2011, when writer Brian Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli created Morales for Marvel comics, he was a reaction to the election of Barack Obama. As such, even his schooling had to reflect that.
Speaking of which, let’s examine the strange case of “The Kid Who Would be King.” The movie is technically not out yet, so it’s hard to see if it will make much use of its apparent Academy setting.
However, the trailer includes lots of shots of kids in traditional prep school dress with a stylized formal crest on blazers and pants. It almost seems like the setting is little more than an excuse to embrace a certain aesthetic in the costumes more than a plot point.
Or perhaps the marketing department just wants moviegoers to associate the film with the Harry Potter movies.
After all, Hogwarts is the ultimate in quasi-privatization. Special kids go to a special school where they are taught special classes. It’s never quite clear how it’s all paid for, though the kids do have to buy their own supplies.
Would “The Kid Who Would Be King” be any better if the kids in it went to public schools? They certainly would be more relatable to the average child.
First conceived in the early 2000s, British academies are not bound by national rules for staffing and curriculum, and receive more money from the government for administration while reducing funding to the traditional schools nearby. However, according to a new peer-reviewed study by the London School of Economics, primary academies have not been able to meet the promise of increasing test scores.
The authors conclude:
“The English government has radically restructured its school system under an assumption that academisation delivers benefits to schools and students. There is neither any sign of a positive effect nor any suggestion that benefits might be increasing with years of exposure. If anything, the opposite is the case.”
Oh whatever! The blazers look nice!
THE HATE U GIVE
And that brings me to “The Hate U Give.”
Starr’s private school does at least seem to be important to the plot. After her best friend is gunned down by a gangbanger, a 10-year-old Starr is sent to Williamson Prep, a private school in the white suburbs. The family remains in the neighborhood and even takes great pride in living among other black people. But for some reason the idea of public school and the trauma of this event are entwined in their minds. They want more for Starr than just a public school experience.
Consider this bit of narration:
“The high school is where you go to get jumped, high or pregnant. We don’t go there. Williamson is another world. So when I’m here, I’m Starr version 2. Basically Williamson Starr doesn’t give anyone a reason to call her ghetto. And I hate myself for doing it.”
Years later, she’s one of very few African American students at the private school. When another black friend is subsequently murdered by the police before her eyes during a traffic stop, her white privileged classmates don’t understand what she’s going through.
I wonder if things would have been different at a public school. I wonder if by enrolling her in private school her parents hadn’t taken away the kind of support system she could have used to help deal with the tragedy.
Starr overcomes it all, and symbolically pulls a “Rest in Peace Khalil” T-shirt over her school uniform signaling her refusal to be a divided person any longer. It might have been even stronger had she re-enrolled in her public school, too.
Let me be clear: I’m not saying these are bad movies, books or comics. I actually quite like most of them. But I wonder if most people realize that when they consume this stuff they’re getting something a little extra with their entertainment – corporate propaganda.
It doesn’t seem to be an accident that so few schools are being so overrepresented in the mass media.
The global conglomerates are always looking for a way to make a buck, and product placement has always been a surefire way to do it.
Unfortunately, such underhand tricks can have a large impact on the cultural landscape.
If we continue to be bombarded by unsubstantiated images of public schools not being good enough and privatized education as the savior for our children, we will lose our system of public education.
Schools will no longer be funded by tax dollars. Parents will have to pay for them out of their own pockets.
But it’s taken an incredible toll on the activist community.
We have had to be out there fighting this ridiculous crap day-in-day-out 365 days a year.
And even then, we’ve suffered devastating losses – family separations at the border, children dying in detention, an increase in hate crimes and gun deaths, all while climate change runs rapidly out of control.
I wish I felt more hopeful. But as I cast my eyes back on the year that was, I’m struck with a sense of bone-deep despair.
I am confident Trump will go down and he will take so many with him.
But the forces of regression, prejudice and stupidity that forced him upon us don’t appear to be going anywhere.
Behind Donald is another Trump waiting to take his place. And behind him another one – like an infinite set of Russian Matryoshka dolls.
Oh, many of them look more appealing than Donald. They dress better, are more articulate and can remember all the words to the National Anthem. But they are just as committed to serving themselves at our expense.
So with that in mind, I invite you to join me on a brief look back at the year that was.
Also, I got to check another item off my bucket list with the invitation to film a TED Talk at Central Connecticut State University. My topic was “The Plot to Destroy Public Education.” It’s been viewed almost 1,000 times. I invite you to watch it here.
As to the blog, itself, I’ve been writing now for four and a half years. This year, I’ve had more than 211,000 hits. To be honest, that’s quite a drop. In 2017, I had 366,000 hits. But I’m hearing about similar dips all over the blogosphere. Facebook changed its algorithm this year making it much harder for people to see the work of amateurs like me. Zuckerberg’s multi-billion dollar corporation doesn’t refuse to spread the written word – it just charges a fee that I can’t afford. Moreover, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed Net Neutrality at about this time last year making things even more dodgy.
In addition, about 500 more people followed me this year for a total of 13,361.
That should do it for an overview.
One final item before I get to the look back. I’m making a slight change this year to how I do things. Instead of publishing two separate articles – a Top 10 list and a List of Honorable Mentions – I’m combing the two into this one.
I’ll begin with three pieces that didn’t necessarily get the number of hits I thought they were worth. Then I’ll count down my 10 most popular pieces of 2018.
So without further ado, here’s what’s kept Gadfly buzzing this year:
Description: There’s an increasing (unspoken) insistence that schools do away with teachers and replace them with technology, apps, algorithms and other edtech marvels with more strings attached than your standard marionette. This is my attempt to prove how and why real, live teachers are important.
Fun Fact: How sad this article was and remains necessary.
Description: You often hear privatization cheerleaders defend charter schools by making a distinction between the good ones and the bad ones. This usually just means those that are for-profit and those that are not-for-profit. But in this article, I show that this distinction is bogus.
Fun Fact: This may be one of the most important facts you can share with someone who’s had a big gulp of the charter school Kool-aide.
Description: Policy makers don’t talk about it as much these days, but there are still plenty of laws on the books requiring states to evaluate teachers on student test scores. It’s called VAM or Value Added Measures. Here’s why it’s totally unfair.
Fun Fact: I’m not sure if anyone else has ever put together all these arguments against VAM. Hopefully, it can serve as a good go-to article when a corporate shill starts rhapsodizing on the benefits of this farce.
Description: Ask a Common Core propagandizer why their canned academic standards haven’t resulted in an increase in test scores and you’ll get this whooper: ‘It’s the students’ fault. They need more grit.’ Here’s why that’s a steaming pile of something that rhymes with grit.
Fun Fact: Some folks hated this article simply because of my potty mouth. But a whole lot of people were as fed up with this particular suit of the Emperor’s new clothes as I am.
Description: During Betsy Devos’ 60 Minutes interview, the billionaire heiress turned Education Secretary just couldn’t figure out why people hated her so much. It thought I’d send her a clue – or 21.
Fun Fact: The biggest criticism I got on this article was that I stopped at only 21 reasons. I should have gone on – but then I might still be writing…
Description: A question I often get is this: Why do you think Charter Schools are always a bad thing? Here is my answer.
Fun Fact: This article shocked a lot of progressives who backed Obama and Clinton. But it had to be said. Democracy is always better than tyranny just as public schools are always better than charter schools.
Description: If all students the world over had to pass America’s Common Core tests, they wouldn’t be able to do it. You’d think that would have implications for how we assess learning in the USA. But nope. Standardized tests are big business. Wouldn’t want to kill that cash cow just because we’re hurting our children, now would we?
Fun Fact: This should have been a bigger story, but we already rewrote our federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which enshrines standardized testing in most states. So nothing can be done until it comes up for another revision in a few years where lawmakers will again drag their feet and somehow rediscover their love of standardized testing all over again!
Description: A Louisiana school resource officer threw a school teacher to the ground and arrested her for asking a question at a school board meeting. This was my analysis of what such actions were teaching students.
Description: A lot of folks in education think that everything in our schools should be data driven. Here’s why they’re wrong. It should be data-informed but student driven.
Fun Fact: A lot of educators, parents and students were as sick of hearing about “date-driven” instruction as I was. Feel free to use this article on the next fool who brings out this stale chestnut.
Description: Standardized testing is terrible in so many ways. It hurts students. It hurts schools. But we often forget how it stops teachers from effectively doing their jobs.
Fun Fact: This one brought a lot of memories to educators – memories of how things are supposed to be and how they’ve changed for the worst. We need to continue asking questions about the purpose of education and how our school policies are betraying that purpose.
Description: Poor Betsy. She and her family spent a lot of money on this election on regressive candidates who had no intention of working in your best interest. And many of them lost!
Fun Fact: Wouldn’t it be great if everyone got one vote? Wouldn’t it be great if money couldn’t buy elections?
Description: In the Pittsburgh area, we were asked to vote on a referendum to increase spending on children. It sounded like a great idea until you looked at the details. It was just a power grab by the forces of privatization.
Fun Fact: The referendum lost by about as many votes as this article received. I can’t prove my writing changed anyone’s mind, but it was hugely popular here in the ‘Burgh. I’d see people passing around printed copies at council meetings. It was reposted everywhere. I feel like this one made a real difference and helped us stop a bad law. Too bad it couldn’t help us enact a good one.
Description: I start with a basic fact about native born African Americans vs. foreign born African Immigrants. Then I try to account for the difference.
Fun Fact: This seems like an important question to me. But it was a controversial one. Some folks were furious I even asked the question. But more people were interested in this piece than anything else I wrote all year.
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 2018) 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:
Of course! Children should be seen and not heard. Speaking out for yourself is a definite faux pas.
So is detaining minors without a lawyer, which the officers did and which is illegal in France.
But C’est la vie!
Unfortunately such scenes have been repeated throughout the country since November. Despite police opposition, high school students from a number of French schools have joined the Yellow Vests to protest French President Emmanuel Macron’s education policies – inaccurately dubbed “reforms” – among other austerity measures resulting in stagnant wages and a high cost of living.
Macron was elected in 2017 on a neoliberal platform much like that of Barack Obama. And though he was praised for his demeanor, especially in comparison to the boorish Donald Trump, his policies at first met with criticism and then outright protests in the streets.
Citizens took issue with new labor laws, the rail system and taxes. You can’t save the environment by cutting taxes for the wealthy and raising them for the poor to discourage them from driving. You can’t stomp on workers rights in order to create more low-paying jobs.
Protestors repurposed the yellow vests they are required to keep in their cars in case of an emergency into an iconic image of resistance to the gas tax. Hundreds of thousands demanded not just a repeal of Macron’s policies but a new platform to bolster social services and the economy.
The Macron administration has met these demands by at first violently stifling them and then agreeing to individual points before returning to suppression.
Perhaps it is the administration’s insistence that it is beset by violent “hooligans” while most protestors do no more than block traffic that has resulted in a continued rejection of Macron. Protestors even spray-painted a demand that Macron resign on the Arc de Triomphe, the arch on the Champs-Elysées.
Though the American media has mostly ignored the situation, critics blame widespread police brutality including the use of tear gas and clubs for at least four deaths and 700 people wounded in weeks of political challenges that some have compared to the French Revolution.
In particular, students take issue with at least three components of Macron’s plan: (1) changes to the high school graduation exam, (2) changes to college admissions and (3) a new requirement that all students participate in a lengthy volunteer national service project.
Much like Common Core did in the United States, the exams would be revised and rewritten. Instead of being tested on broad subjects such as science, literature or social sciences, students would be assessed on much narrower content.
The new assessments would push students toward specific degrees sooner. Before their final undergraduate year, high school students would have to choose two specific majors and two specific minors alongside the standard curriculum – similar to American colleges.
Students are against this because of what they call “hyper-specialization.” They say these changes would deprive them of exposure to a wide range of disciplines and force them to make life-long choices too early. This would be especially harmful for poor students because, as Liberation editorialist Laurent Joffrin put it, “Those who have more, know more.” In other words, wealthier students would probably be better prepared to navigate the choices open to them than those in poorer areas.
Next, students also want the repeal of stricter selection criteria to universities – a law passed just last year – which they say increases economic inequality between rich and poor schools.
The government provides free college to any student who passes the high school exit exams. However, just like in the US, corporate interests complain that college students struggle with the increased workload and pressures at universities. The new measure solves this by ensuring that fewer students are admitted.
Students say Macron has it backwards. The government shouldn’t be undermining free access to higher education. It should be investing more in the country’s universities and helping students succeed.
French youths would have to volunteer in fields like defense, environment, tutoring or culture. During the long school breaks, they would have to undergo a one-month placement, consisting of two weeks in collective housing to promote a “social mix,” and then another two weeks in smaller, more “personalized” groups.
The measure doesn’t go as far as Macron wanted. He originally proposed mandatory military service.
Students object to the plan because they say it’s unnecessary and extremely expensive. The program is estimated to cost $1.8 billion ($1.6 billion Euros) with a $1.98 billion ($1.75 Euro) investment up front.
In addition to these demands, some have included limits on class size. Protestors have demanded no more than 25 students per class from nursery school through high school. Low class size ensures each student gets more personal attention from the teacher and a better chance to ask questions and learn.
What we’re seeing in France is extremely important for those living in the US.
It shows that as terrible as the Trump administration is, there are many flavors of bad government. When your representatives are more interested in seeing to corporate whims than the will of the people, chaos can ensue.
Perhaps the US media has been so adverse to reporting on the Yellow Vests because of corporate fear that protests will jump the pond and land on our shores, as well. We have many similar neoliberal and neofascist policies in the US of A, some passed by Republicans and others passed by Democrats.
Here’s hoping that we all can establish legitimate governments that seek to further the ends of liberty, equality and fraternity.
So if your classroom is typical, 25% of your students have witnessed violence or been subject to a deeply distressing experience.
That could be drug or alcohol abuse, food insecurity, severe beatings, absent caregivers or neglect.
These figures, provided by Neena McConnico, Director of Boston Medical Center’s Child Witness to Violence Project, are indicative of a truth about this country that we don’t want to see.
Our Darwinian public policies leave many children to suffer the effects of poverty – and our society doesn’t want to deal with it.
The Center for Disease Control’s comprehensive Adverse Childhood Experiences study links the toxic stress of unaddressed trauma to heart disease, liver disease, and mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders.
Young children exposed to more than five adverse experiences in the first three years of life face a 75 percent likelihood of having delays in language, emotional, or brain development, according to McConnico.
This translates directly to negative behaviors in the classroom.
Children who witness violence often have trouble in school because they suffer from post-traumatic stress, which can manifest as inattention, distractibility, hyperactivity, insomnia, aggression, and emotional outbursts.
Or, alternately, these children can sometimes withdraw and appear to be unfazed by their experiences. In some ways, that’s even more dangerous because while they avoid negative attention, they often get no attention at all.
It’s bad enough in the everyday. But it gets worse around the holidays.
Some of it is due to the structure and safety of school being removed. During holiday breaks, children are left to the mercy of sometimes chaotic and uncertain home lives.
Some of it is due to unrealistic expectations inevitably conjured up by the holiday season, itself. Even grown adults have trouble with depression around this time of year. But when you’re a troubled child, the unrealistic expectations and disappointments can be doubly impactful.
Loved ones are missing due to incarceration, divorce, abandonment, health issues, or death. Talk of family gatherings or a special meal can trigger hurt feelings for children who know their caregivers can’t or won’t provide them.
And it’s not always neglect. Sometimes there just isn’t the money for these things. We live in a gig economy where many people work multiple jobs just to survive. All it takes is missing one paycheck or one illness to disrupt holiday celebrations.
Even when parents have enough money, some just don’t bother to buy their kids anything. Sometimes families get to a better financial point but children have had to live through a period of food insecurity and are haunted by it. So even though the household is stable now, kids eat all their treats on the way to school because they always are fearful that the food will run out.
When kids have these sorts of fears, the ubiquitous holiday movies, TV shows, Christmas songs and commercials can set them off further.
It’s the most wonderful time of year for some, but not for all. For many students, the holidays are a time of dread and resentment.
For the quarter of American children who experience trauma at home, school may be their only safe harbor in a world of storms. Teachers may be the only people they see all day who offer a safe place, a stable environment and a friendly word.
For some kids, teachers are the only adults in their lives who make them feel valuable and supported.
We offer our students so much more than reading, writing and math. We’re allies, mentors, protectors and role models.
I wish we could save them from all the terrors of this world, but we can’t.
Let your kids know you care. The student-teacher relationship is sacred. Nourish it. Be reliable, honest, and dependable.
As Teddy Roosevelt famously said, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”
2) Listen to Them
Sometimes the best thing a teacher can do is just listen to students’ problems. You don’t always have to offer a solution. Our kids are dealing with so many adult pressures. Offering them the ability to get it all out in the presence of a caring adult can be a treasured gift.
“It’s really that simple,” McConnico says. “Listen, reflect back to them that they have been heard, validate the child’s feelings without judgment, and thank the child for sharing with you.”
This is extremely narrow-minded. When you get to know your students, you can offer them tasks in which you expect they’ll succeed. It’s the kind of thing we do all the time – differentiating instruction and offering choice so that students can achieve the goal in the manner best suited to them.
Sometimes you really have to work at it. If a child has extreme behavior issues, you can observe closely to find the one thing he or she does right and then praise them for it. This doesn’t always work, but when it does, it pays off tremendously!
Positive experiences lead to more positive experiences. It’s like putting training wheels on a bike. It scaffolds learning by supporting kids emotional needs before their academic ones.
4) Routines
I am a huge fan of routine. Kids know exactly what we’re going to do in my class everyday – or at least they have a clear conception of the normal outline of what happens there.
I try to have very clear expectations, timelines and consequences. For kids who live in chaotic homes, this is especially comforting. It’s just another way of creating a safe place where all can learn.
5) There’s Nothing Wrong With Downtime
I know. Teachers are under enormous pressure from administrators to fill every second of the day. But sometimes the best use of class time is giving students a break.
Let students finish assignments in class, read for pleasure, draw, even just daydream and relax. You can overdo it, but everyone can benefit from a little R & R.
This is especially true for traumatized children. Give them time to regroup from the mental and emotional stress. I find that it actually helps motivate kids to work harder when assignments are given.
The holidays can be a stressful time in school.
Kids get overexcited, they can’t concentrate, they’re torn left and right by the various emotions of the season.
As teachers, it’s our job to understand the full scope of what’s going on with our kids and make our classes as nourishing and safe as possible.
After a fiercely contested election, we have finally begun to turn the tide back toward progressive politics.
Midterms usually are sparsely attended, but this year we had an unprecedented turnout. A total of 23 states had double-digit percentage-point increases compared with their 1982-2014 midterm election averages.
And the result is one of the largest and most diverse groups of freshman Congresspeople ever!
We got rid of a ton of incumbents – 104 lawmakers won’t be returning to Washington, DC, in January, making this the third-highest turnover since 1974.
And those taking their place will be largely female. Out of 256 women who ran for U.S. House or Senate seats, 114 have won so far (Some races are still too close to call), according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. That makes the 116th Congress the largest class of female lawmakers ever.
We have Jahana Hayes, a nationally-recognized teacher, who will be the first Black Congresswoman from Connecticut. Ayanna Presley, the first black Congresswoman from Massachusetts.
Angie Craig will be the first out LGBTQ Congresswoman from Minnesota. Chris Pappas, the first openly gay Congressman from New Hampshire.
Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland from Kansas and New Mexico will be the first Native American women elected to Congress – ever. And Davids will also be the first openly LGBTQ Congresswoman from the Sunflower State.
Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib will be the first-ever Muslim women in Congress. Omar, a former refugee, will also be the first Somali-American and Tlaib will be the first Palestinian-American woman in Congress. This is especially noteworthy because there have only been two other Muslims to serve in the legislative branch, both men: Rep. Keith Ellison and Rep. André Carson.
And let’s not forget New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Not only is she a Democratic Socialist, but the 29-year-old will be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress!
With so many new faces and so much more representation, is it too much to ask for a change in the way things are done in Washington?
Many progressives are hoping not.
After all, it was people power that propelled these new lawmakers into government.
So, incoming lawmakers, that’s why I’m writing to you.
As a public school teacher, a father of a school-age child, an education activist and a concerned citizen, it really matters to me what happens to our schools.
Yet so many politicians – Republicans and Democrats – have turned a blind eye to our concerns for years.
In many cases this is because of the poor quality of education aides on Capital Hill.
Several years ago, I went to DC with other education advocates to ask our representatives to change course. Though we made reservations to speak with our duly-elected lawmakers months in advance, very few of them had the guts to see us face-to-face. We were almost always sent to education aides – well meaning and fresh faced kids only a few years out of college – who wrote down our concerns and sent us on our way with rarely any follow up from the people we’d come to see.
And more often than not, these eager young go-getters were Teach for America (TFA) alumni.
Often these rookies have only a few weeks training and just hours of experience before taking over their own classrooms. And unlike education majors, they only need to commit to the job for two years.
This not only does our children a disservice, it does very little to make these former teaching temps into education experts.
But that’s how they’re treated on Capital Hill.
Through programs like TFA’s Capitol Hill Fellows Program, alumni are placed in full-time, paid staff positions with legislators so they can “gain insights into the legislative process by working in a Congressional office” and work “on projects that impact education and opportunities for youth.”
Why do so many lawmakers hire them? Because they don’t cost anything.
It’s about selling school privatization, high stakes testing and ed-tech solutions.
As Ocasio-Cortez said on a recent call with Justice Democrats, “I don’t think people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies should be drafting health care legislation. I don’t think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting our climate legislation.”
I’d like to add the following: people taking money from the testing and school privatization industry shouldn’t be drafting education policy. People who worked as temps in order to give themselves a veneer of credibility should not be treated the same as bona fide experts who dedicate their lives to kids in the classroom.
But that’s what many lawmakers of both parties have been enabling.
It’s not hard to find authentic experts on education.
There are 3.2 million public school teachers working in this country.
There are still 116,000 fewer public education jobs than there were before the recession of 2007, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive nonprofit think tank.
So that’s hundreds of thousands of laid off and retired teachers out there – a huge brain trust, a plethora of professionals who know – really know – what goes on in our schools, what they need to succeed and what policies could fix them.
THAT’S where you should go to find your educational aides – not TFA.
And these experts are not hard to find. You can contact the teachers unions – the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. Or, better yet, contact the various education activist groups focused on policy – the Badass Teachers Association or the Network for Public Education. And if you want experts at the crossroads of education and equity, you can contact civil rights groups who focus on our schools like Journey for Justice, a nationwide collective of more than 38 organizations of Black and Brown parents and students in several cities.
Even after making gains in the election, Democrats did not get control of either the state House or Senate from Republicans, but kept control of the Governor’s mansion.
New leadership positions will last for two years, but have many scratching their heads.
Both Harris and McClinton are staunch supporters of charter schools over and above traditional public schools just like DeVos, a Republican megadonor before being selected for Trump’s cabinet.
In fact, McClinton will make state history as the first woman of color in her leadership position. Harris will be the first black whip since Rep. K. Leroy Irvis in the 1970s.
Even so, their views put them in direct opposition with many civil rights leaders.
“Who are these bankers and why are they concerned about my school? Isolation is defeat. Privatizers are not reformers. They are colonizers and settlers. We do not negotiate with our executioner. We need to kill the privatization movement. We have worked in silos and adopted the values of our oppressors. You want a seat at the table, but you are on the menu too. We have more in common with each other than any of us do with our oppressors. People will vote against their interest with hatred that they learned centuries ago – but we need to be different. We cannot adopt the language of our oppressors. We don’t have failing schools, we have been failed.”
Perhaps Harris and McClinton’s support has something to do with campaign finance. Both have accepted large sums from the charter school industry.
McClinton has taken $5,250 from Excellent Schools PA and $1,000 from Students First PAC. However, she also received $3,000 from the public school friendly Pennsylvania Federation of Teachers.
Harris was an intern for Williams and McClinton was Williams’ chief counsel.
Even in Harrisburg, some question the two state reps ties to the far right billionaires bankrolling the school privatization industry. After all, these are the same people whose candidates just lost the midterms – and now fresh from an electoral victory Dems are elevating those of their own who are taking money from the same well!?
Student First PAC wasn’t just a main contributor to Harris and McClinton. It contributed $1 million to Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner before he was defeated by Democrat Tom Wolf. It also contributed boatloads of money to numerous GOP candidates in the Commonwealth running against Democrats just this last election cycle.
So why would the Democratic caucus vote for Harris and McClinton as new faces of party leadership?
Part of the reason seems to be a power struggle inside the party between the two halves of the state.
Leadership had been over-represented by lawmakers from the west – the Pittsburgh region and thereabouts. Harris and McClinton’s new positions go further to balancing the power with the east – the Philadelphia region.
Moreover, there was a legitimate concern that party leadership was too white and male.
However, there were other eastern Democrats, other women and people of color in the chamber who didn’t come with the baggage of Harris and McClinton.
Harris was asked point blank if he’d stop taking charter school money if elected to a leadership position, according to anonymous sources. He gave no indication that he would.
In his role as whip, Harris will have the greater opportunity to work for the charter school industry.
The whip is responsible for making sure that Democratic members attend sessions and generally understand the specifics of legislation and procedural votes in the House.
However, his comments on education policy are extremely biased.
“I think it’s unfair to take all of the traditional public schools in the state and all of the charter schools in the state and compare them to each other.”
Really? Yet you propose we increase the number of charter schools BECAUSE they allegedly produce better academic outcomes. How can you know that if you’re unwilling to compare them? Or are you only unwilling to compare them when the results don’t support the policy positions you’re being paid to promote?
Almost a third of the state’s most struggling schools — 95, according to PA Department of Education — are located in Philadelphia. Taylor and Harris’s proposal was called the Educational Opportunity and Accountability Act.
“People have told me that I’ve been trying to dismantle public education,” said Harris. “No! I just know what it’s like to grow up in a neighborhood without options.”
Payments to charter schools represent one of the fastest growing portions of the School District of Philadelphia’s budget. These costs are pushing the district toward fiscal uncertainty. Yet Harris and McClinton are pushing for a similar model throughout the Commonwealth.
Harris calls the push for more charter schools a “righteous movement.”
I’m sure Betsy DeVos would agree.
Education advocates in the Keystone state find themselves in a precarious position.
Though many of our candidates won in this midterm election, we will have to keep a close eye on Harrisburg.
Where will Harris and McClinton lead the party?
Will they encourage their colleagues to take money from the school privatization industry – the same industry bankrolling their opponents?
Or will they keep their biases to themselves and work for the betterment of the party and the communities it is sworn to represent?
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