Chances are you’ve witnessed a teacher at work. They taught you in your childhood and adolescence; they graded your tests and essays. Perhaps they also served as your high school soccer coach or drove the bus you took to school each day. They may now be shepherding your children through the same educational system, helping them strengthen basic skills and uncover their passions.

But as a student — or even a parent — you’ve probably only observed the basics. “People think they know what it’s about because they went to school,” says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a union that represents more than 1 million teachers nationwide. “But going to school and being a school teacher are the difference of night and day.”

Over the last year, educators in a number of states have launched protests, strikes, and walkouts to draw attention to what they say is unfair pay and work conditions. Teachers have detailed the financial difficulties that come as the result of years-long pay freezes and growing pensions that dig deeper into their paychecks. Many of them work second or third jobs to make ends meet and pick up extra responsibilities in the school district for extra cash.

And that long-sought-after summer break, which corporate employees can only dream of? A lot of educators work then, too — teaching summer school, picking up more restaurant shifts than during the school year, or spending weeks in training and preparing new lessons plans.

Teaching in America now appears to have reached a tipping point. Low wages have driven some teachers out of the profession entirely, and fewer people want to become educators — heightening a teacher shortage crisis as class sizes grow larger and educators take on extra roles. Educators who spoke with MONEY believe they are undervalued, underpaid and underappreciated. They cited countless stories of peers who denigrated their careers and friends who misunderstood all that it takes to be a teacher.

“It’s an extreme amount of pressure. It’s like running a sprint that’s the length of a marathon; it’s just constant,” says Emily James, a high school English teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y. “You can’t mess up because you have kids right in front of you. You can’t mess up because they’ll break down. You have to be there physically, emotionally and academically at all times.”

MONEY asked more than 10 current and former teachers from around the country what they wished Americans understood about their jobs, their work conditions, and their pay. Here’s what we learned.

Teachers have faced stifled wages and pay freezes for years. And a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning organization, found that Continue reading: Teacher Pay: What Teachers Want Americans to Understand | Money

The New Jersey state education department has refused to release public documents that might  shed light on former Gov. Chris Christie’s loan of $10 million in state funds to a failing Newark charter school and its partner, a private, for-profit real estate developer that was receiving more than $800,000 in public funds as annual rent from the school.

The state’s  action, in response to a demand filed under the Open Public Records Act (OPRA), contributes to a stifling veil of silence covering up the details of the unusual $10 million loan—a loan granted by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) despite the lack of any collateral that could be used to repay the loan if the school defaulted.

The school, Lady Liberty Academy Charter School, did close and no longer receives the state aid it needs  to pay its rent to the developer, BWP School Partners, LLC.  Under the unusual terms of the loan agreement between the NJEDA and BWP,  the state has limited its ability to recoup the loan from the developer  to finding a new charter school to take the place of Lady Liberty. The school is now boarded up and so, this year at least, that won’t happen.

The existence of the unusual $10 million loan was first disclosed by this site last month but the continued refusal by the NJEDA, the state education department, the Newark school district and private sources to discuss details has added to the mystery of why the state would loan $10 million to a charter school that faced problems since 2003, when it was opened as part of Newark’s New Community Corporation’s social outreach efforts. Lady Liberty was placed on probation by the state three times and finally closed this year after  Christie left office.

So that’s the first question that no one at the  state or elsewhere wants to answer:

Why would the NJEDA invest $10 million in a school that its state Continue reading: LADY LIBERTY: Why is Murphy covering up Christie’s $10 million loan to failing charter school?

Quality Counts 2018: Grading the States

Big Education Ape: NPE and Schott Issue a 50 State Report Card on School Privatization - Network For Public Education - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/06/npe-and-schott-issue-50-state-report.html

THE TEACHERS'

MOVEMENT

ARIZONA LAWMAKERS CUT

EDUCATION BUDGETS.

THEN TEACHERS GOT

ANGRY 

Privatization Report Card - Network For Public Education - https://wp.me/P3bR9v-2IA via @Network4pubEd

The 9.9.18 Issue - The New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/issue/magazine/2018/09/06/the-9918-issue

Above photo: Jalijah Jones, 16, poses for a portrait at his home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on July 22, 2018. In December 2017, Jones was Tasered at school by a police officer while already being restrained by four school security guards following an altercation with another student. At the time, Jones was 15 years old and weighed about 120 pounds. The other student walked away. Casey Sykes.

Jones, who loves to run track and play football, had never been in a physical fight at school before. It was just a teenage drama. He owed another kid a small amount of money. Angry words were thrown back and forth, then a push and a shove and some swinging. But no one had been hurt until a school police officer Tasered the teen.

The police officer who stunned Jones is one of over 80,000 currently stationed in public schools around the country, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education, covering the 2015-16 school Continue reading: The Other Side Of School Safety | PopularResistance.Org

WASHINGTON – Education Secretary Betsy DeVos came to Washington, to promote the cause of her life – school choice. Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. President Donald Trump had promised a $20 billion program.

But more than a year and a half later, the federal push is all but dead.

That's partly because DeVos herself emerged badly damaged from a brutal confirmation process, with few people – even in her own party – interested in taking up her pet cause.

She's also been stymied by division among Republicans over the idea of federal incentives for school choice. And Democrats are united against her.

“She's certainly not a very effective lobbyist” for her cause, said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “She has enthusiastically pushed it, and arguably the politics of choice are more complicated than they were two years ago, and the choice community is more split.”

That has left DeVos with the bully pulpit. She uses it to promote alternatives to traditional public schools, typically plans that allow tax dollars to follow children when they leave for private schools. She may have won some converts, but she's alienated many others.

Congress already has said no to her budget proposals. A proposed tax credit supporting voucher-like scholarships has died. A new spending bill again offers little for school choice enthusiasts.

And if Democrats gain power after this fall's midterm elections, chances for action would fall even further. For all practical purposes, the fight is over, and she lost. School choice has become the latest ambitious policy plan to arrive in Washington with great hope, only to die a quiet death.

Opposition has come from lawmakers who represent rural states and see little benefit in school choice programs when so few alternatives to traditional public schools exist in their communities. As structured, critics say, a grant plan proposed by DeVos would have amounted to a windfall for states that already have these programs.

That concern arose as early as DeVos' confirmation hearing, when Republican Sen. Mike Enzi questioned whether school choice would offer much for rural places such as his home state of Wyoming.

DeVos also ran into trouble with libertarian-minded conservatives who complain that a new federal program will bring new federal regulations.

Her aides reply that she doesn't want a large federal program, either. They point to states enacting or expanding school choice, and they claim success with a heightened public debate.

“The focus of the education debate is on school choice now in a way it never has been,” said Nathan Bailey, an Education Department spokesman. He added: “Secretary DeVos has been clear from Day One that school choice should be driven from the local level.”

And there has been movement at that level. In Illinois, a new program creates a backdoor voucher, giving corporations a tax credit if they donate money for private school scholarships. Georgia expanded a similar program. And North Carolina created publicly funded educational savings accounts to help families of children with disabilities pay private school tuition and other expenses.

Tommy Schultz, spokesman for the American Federation for Children, the group DeVos founded and Continue reading: DeVos' advocacy - high profile to under radar | Opinion | The Journal Gazette

Stop kidding yourself.

Charter schools are a bad deal.

It doesn’t matter if they’re for-profit or nonprofit.

It doesn’t matter if they’re cyber or brick-and-mortar institutions.

It doesn’t matter if they have a history of scandal or success.

Every single charter school in the United States of America is either a disaster or a disaster waiting to happen.

The details get complicated, but the idea is really quite simple.

It goes like this.

Imagine you left a blank check on the street.

Anyone could pick it up, write it out for whatever amount your bank account could support and rob you blind.

Chances are you’d never know who cashed it, you’d never get that money back, and you might even be ruined.

That’s what a charter school is—a blank check.

It’s literally a privately operated school funded with public tax dollars.

Operators can take almost whatever amount they want, spend it with impunity, and never have to submit to any real kind of transparency or accountability.

Compare that to a traditional public school—an institution invariably operated by duly elected members of the community with full transparency and accountability in an open forum where taxpayers have access to internal documents, can have their voices heard and even seek an administrative position.

THAT’S a responsible way to handle public money!

Not forking over our checkbook to virtual strangers!

Sure, they might not steal our every red cent. But an interloper who finds a blank check Continue reading: There Is Virtually No Difference Between Nonprofit and For-Profit Charter Schools

Stop Corporate Surveillance in Schools: A Movement Supporting People-Powered Classrooms Without Corporate Data Mined Students. 

Our mission is the same—to build a community-based movement to dismantle the corporate-driven policies and practices in schools that lead to violations of student privacy, surveillance of children and teachers, and corporate profiteering (we call this Education Reform 2.0).

You can check out the first call here:

We will be holding our second webinar on Sept 11 from 8:00-9:00pm EST.

This webinar will cover these three points:
1) Provide a brief overview of what Education Reform 2.0 is
2) How the SCSS campaign is working to eliminate corporate surveillance
3) How teachers, students, parents and members of communities can coordinate locally to be part of the campaign effort.

Our two-part strategy is to inform and then to develop sustainable, empowering actions centered on local community agency and control.

Who we are:
Morna McDermott is the SCSS campaign coordinator
Peggy Robertson is the SCSS information and communications coordinator
Michael Ippolito is the technical organizer and outreach
Alison McDowell is the lead researcher
Popular Resistance is the “parent” platform

To register click here.

Since the anonymous New York Times Opinon piece claiming there’s a critic in the White House, at least one comedian has referenced the 2006 remake horror movie When a Stranger Calls. The babysitter contacts the police to get threatening phone calls traced. The bad guy turns out to be in the house!

On a similar, but slightly different note, those who seek to destroy democratic public education are also working within the system. They’re inside the schoolhouse, and there’s an attempt to dupe us into thinking they’re seeing the light when it comes to the right way of thinking about public schools.

It revolves around the word, “local.” We like that word. It makes us feel like we belong. But that’s not the case here. That’s why it is dangerous for public education.

In “School Reformers Switch Gears,” we read that the Gates Foundation is backing off.

Now, the foundation seems to be stepping back from sweeping national initiatives in its bid to remake education. In the coming years, its K-12 philanthropy will concentrate on supporting what it calls “locally driven solutions” that originate among networks of 20 to 40 schools, according to Allan Golston, who leads the foundation’s U.S. operations, because they have “the power to improve outcomes for black, Latino, and low-income students and drive social and economic mobility.”

The reality is, the Gates Foundation and other corporate school reformers are aggressively moving forward with their privatization plans. Helping the poor has always Continue reading: Those Who Seek to Privatize Public Schools are Working WITHIN the System!

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