Income inequality is growing in the U.S., and the problem is much worse than most people believe. For children, growing up poor hinders brain development and leads to poorer performance in schools, according to a study published this week in JAMA Pediatrics.

It has long been known that low socioeconomic status is linked to poorer performance in school, and recent research has linked poverty to smaller brain surface area. The current study bridges these converging lines of evidence by revealing that up to 20 percent of the achievement gap between high- and low-income children may be explained by differences in brain development.   (Read more) 

US Education Reform and the Maintenance of White Supremacy Through Structural Violence  by By Tim Scott and Deborah Keisch  on the Truthout site

U.S public schools are more segregated today than they have been since before the desegregation efforts that followed the 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. Coinciding with this segregation are vast racial inequities and stratification, which are being intensified through the policies known as corporate education reform. In this article, we share the voices and stories of scholars and education activists who have documented the racism and segregation of U.S. public schooling over the rise of corporate education reform. We start with the current state of our segregated schools, before stepping back and looking at the historical and ideological context of U.S. schooling under industrial capitalism, white supremacy and neoliberalism, all creating the perfect storm for the punitive and dehumanizing conditions within 21st century public education. We will then explore the formula of corporate education reform through an examination of specific instruments used to enact these policies: school choice and charters, high-stakes testing, and the disciplining and criminalizing of black and brown bodies. We also examine the delivery of these policies via the discourse used to justify them and the intentions behind them.  (Read more)

 Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers  on the Center for Media and Democracy site

Through ALEC, corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers' unions by:

1. Promoting voucher programs that drain public schools of resources .
2. Offering private school vouchers with "universal eligibility." 
3. Giving tax credits to parents who send their kids to private schools.
4. Creating a scheme to deem public schools "educationally bankrupt" to rationalize giving taxpayer dollars to almost completely unregulated private schools, rather than addressing any problems.
5. Back-dooring privatization by creating voucher programs to subsidize unregulated, for-profit schools or religious schools for specific subsets of students, such as foster children, or children of military families.   (Read more)

Closing schools for two to three months of the year leaves many poor and special needs children in limbo.  

In well over half of all households with young school-age children, there is no longer a parent at home to dole out snacks and keep an eye on kids while school is out, and for the growing numbers of children with learning challenges, taking a two- to three-month break from school and its supportive structure can be a disaster. Many poor children miss out on the subsidized nutrition they need, and parents of all children now worry about "summer slide," the loss of skills over the summer that forces the first couple of months of the next school year to be spent on review.

It seems to me that among the many things we need to address about education in America is just what summer vacation means for kids these days - particularly our most vulnerable kids. Here are three complications to summer break that I believe are worthy of our attention, and a few suggestions for how we might begin to address them.  (Read more)

  

Virtual Schools Remain Unproven  on the National Education Policy Center

The third edition of the National Education Policy Center's annual report on virtual schools finds that while online schools continue to proliferate, there continues to be little evidence of their effectiveness. The limited evidence in hand indicates that virtual schools lag behind traditional public schools.

Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2015: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence, published today, edited by University of Colorado Boulder professor Alex Molnar, consists of three major sections on policy issues, research findings and descriptive information on the nation's virtual schools. 

"The NEPC reports contribute to the existing evidence and discourse on virtual education by providing an objective analysis of the evolution and performance of full-time, publicly funded K-12 virtual schools," Molnar points out.

As previous editions of the report have found, the 2015 analysis concludes that "Claims made in support of expanding virtual education are largely unsupported by high quality research evidence." While lawmakers in some states have made attempts to provide greater oversight on the virtual school industry, those efforts have not been especially successful. Moreover, the report observes, such actions as policymakers have attempted do not appear to be well informed by research evidence.  (Read more) 

 

 My Review of the documentary 'Heal Our Schools'  by Marie Corfield

Hear Our Teachers 2 Minute Trailer

Pick up a newspaper or turn on the television and reporters and other talking heads describe the grand experiment that is corporate education 'reform' with buzz words like 'accountability', 'data', 'innovation', 'testing', 'rigor', 'choice' and 'transformation'. A few words you won't hear too often are 'research', 'proof', 'access', 'stress', 'burnout' and 'anxiety'. That's because those words don't fit into the reformy one-size-fits-all plan of education. Education 'reform'-like climate and vaccine denial-is a faith-based movement in that they believe in their cause rather than rely on empirical studies and peer-reviewed research by actual educators, and they have the money to make you believe it, too. See, facts are messy. They point straight to poverty, and you can't make a profit fighting poverty the way you can by flipping a school to a charter and firing veteran teachers.   (Read more)

 

NY Education Policy is for Sale to the Highest Bidder: A Tale of How Money Talks by David Green on the Doing the Right Thing site

  StudentsFirstNY and Families for Excellent Schools, have basically written Governor Cuomo's policies, specifically tying teacher evaluations to standardized test scores, creating new hurdles to achieving tenure, and increasing the number of charter schools in the state. Although they would make it seem that these are "for the children" in fact they are right up Cuomo's vengeance alley to get back at the unions who have not supported him and his election.  (Read more)

 

Arizona Facing Shortage Of Public-School Superintendents

by  Al Macias, Keerthi Vedantam on the KJZZ site

In the upcoming school year, 47 of the state's 225 public school districts will have new superintendents. For many of them it will be their first time on the job.

This year's superintendent turnover rate is the highest in five years. 

Steve Highlen, a search consultant, connected 15 superintendent candidates with school districts this year. He said the biggest problem is finding superintendents that fit the school districts' varying needs.

"They need someone real strong in curriculum, for instance, or someone really strong in budget. Each district is different in terms of what they're looking for," Highlen said.  (Read more)

 

Counterpoint: End annual testing for public school students  by Cassie Creswell on the Chicago Sun-Times site 

After eight years of delay, Congress finally has made progress on reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now known as the No Child Left Behind Act. Both houses passed versions that would fix some of the worst excesses of NCLB. In particular, the federal government would no longer require states to use test scores to punish schools or evaluate teachers.

Unfortunately, both retain a key policy started under the 2002 NCLB law: testing every child in public school every year from third to eighth grade....  (Read more)

  

The Argument: Should the state put a three-year moratorium on high stakes testing?  by Gina Garro (Yes) and Heather McCarthy (no) on the Boston Globe site.

Yes: Data and assessment are important, but teachers need a say in what assessments we find beneficial and appropriate. The current testing system doesn't meet those standards.

Students come to us with an enormous range of abilities and experiences. Our job is to differentiate instruction in order to meet their needs. It is a contradiction to ask us to individualize instruction and then administer a single standardized test that will be used to evaluate and rate entire school systems, as well as individual teachers and students.

No: As a third-grade teacher, I have analyzed the Common Core State Standards and implemented them in my classroom. I've adapted resources and co-planned with colleagues to ensure that my students are achieving the thinking and skills that the standards address. The standards are just starting to take hold in our state. Shouldn't we have some data to show us how well they are working?  (Read more)

  

Deadbeat corporations: How schools suffer when big companies don't pay their fair share of state taxes  by Paul Buchheit on the Salon. Com site 

Corporations have reaped trillion-dollar benefits from 60 years of public education in the U.S., but they're skipping out on the taxes meant to sustain the educational system. Children suffer from repeated school cutbacks. And parents subsidize the deadbeat corporations through increases in property taxes and sales taxes.

Big Companies Pay about a Third of their Required State Taxes 

Without Corporate Taxes, K-12 Public Education Keeps Getting Cut 

Overall spending on K-12 public school students fell in 2011 for the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping records over three decades ago. The cuts have continued to the present day, with the majority of states spending less per student than before the 2008 recession.  (Read more)

  

Comedy Duo Key and Peele: Why Not Treat Teachers Like Pro Athletes?    By Ross Brenneman on the EDWeek site

In advance of their newest episode Wednesday, the stars of the Comedy Central sketch show "Key & Peele" have released a video asking an important question: Why don't teachers get the same level of glory as professional athletes?

  

The beauty of "Key & Peele," starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, comes in how every sketch crescendos from smartly funny to hilariously absurd, which is just a way of saying you should watch this all the way to the end.  (See more)

  

 New York Drops Controversial Test-Maker Pearson  by  Geoff Decker on the AlterNet site

The company has faced intense criticism for missteps and errors included in its New York tests.   New York is ditching Pearson as its test-maker after years of high-profile missteps, switching to a smaller vendor that will cost more but comes with less baggage, the State Education Department announced Thursday.

The state awarded a new five-year deal to Questar Assessment Inc., a Minneapolis-based company that has emerged in recent years as a smaller competitor to Pearson, the dominant vendor in the country's lucrative standardized testing market. The switch allows the state to distance itself from Pearson, which has faced intense criticism for missteps and errors included in its New York tests and become symbolic of broader concerns about the privatization of public education.  (Read more)

  

STATES OF SIEGE: The Assault on Education

by 

Alan A. Block on the Journal of the American Association of the Advancement of Curriculum Studies

  The standards-based movement, most recently given national support by the administrative, educational mandates of the Bush administrations's No Child Left Behind (NCLB), serves a similar purpose as the platform used by the Romans to overrun Masada: to aid the assault and capture of not only the schools of education, but even the destruction of public education itself. Government assumption of educational mandates, the privatization of public schools, the establishment of a prescribed and standardized curriculum, the profound control over teacher initiative and possibility, and the ascendency of accrediting bodies which will monitor the behaviors and curricula of schools of education portend the end of public education in the United States and the evisceration of meaningful learning in the schools. (Read more)  

 

THE NEED FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION IN OUR NATION  by 

M. Donald Thomas pon the HML Blog

Our nation has always been seen as a place where anyone can make it. It is believed that  the "American Dream" is possible for all children. Studies for the past 65 years, however, 

have shown that for many of our children an equal opportunity to achieve that dream has been denied to them by their family circumstances. Beginning with the 1966 "Coleman Report," and hundreds of studies since then, it has been conclusively demonstrated that most children who live under adverse conditions do not do well in school. As adults they rarely live successful and satisfying lives. Therefore, a large number of child advocates and medical personnel are supporting the expansion of early education for three and four year old children. Comprehensive early education programs have already been enacted into law by several states, including Pennsylvania, Vermont, Florida, Colorado and Minnesota. National exemplars are: Sweden, Finland and Denmark.  (Read more)

  

   The Horace Mann League  on the The Horace Mann league site