Monday, August 31, 2015
Prison Education & WUSTL.... Public Event/McLeod Lecture September 24th at 4 PM....
Rebecca Ginsburg, Associate Professor, Departments of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership and Landscape Architecture; Co-founder and Director, Education Justice Project, University of Illinois
September 24, 4 pm
Washington University, Hillman Hall, Clark-Fox Forum
(new Social Work building near Forsyth & Skinker)
Rebecca Ginsburg is director of the Education Justice Project (EJP), a college-in-prison program based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. EJP offers for-credit courses and other educational activities to men incarcerated in a medium-security state prison. In this lecture she’ll describe EJP, share stories of its students and make a case for other institutions of higher education working within prisons. Her position is that such engagement not only serves incarcerated individuals and the broader society, but also the university, its students and faculty.
After the lecture, please join us for a reception and additional programming, the opening of the conference "From Mass Incarceration to Effective and Sustainable Decarceration":
5:30 pm - Remarks by Mark Wrighton, Chancellor, Washington University in St. Louis
6:15 pm - Welcoming remarks
Maxine Clark, Founder, Build-A-Bear Workshop & CEO, Clark-Fox Family Foundation
Bob Fox, Founder and Chairman, Newspace & Founder, Casa de Salud
6:30 pm - Keynote speakers
Glenn E. Martin, JustLeadershipUSA
Vivian Nixon, College and Community Fellowship
St Louis: Educators for Social Justice
Join the Educators for Social Justice Group at our upcoming events! We encourage you to invite your colleagues as well!
Conference Planning Meeting: Sunday, September 20 from 2:00-3:00p.m. at Maplewood Richmond Heights Elementary School (1800 Princeton Place). Please join us for our second planning meeting for our 2016 Educating for Change Conference. All are welcome!
Conference Planning Meeting: Sunday, September 20 from 2:00-3:00p.m. at Maplewood Richmond Heights Elementary School (1800 Princeton Place). Please join us for our second planning meeting for our 2016 Educating for Change Conference. All are welcome!
11th Annual Educating for Change Conference: Saturday, February 27, 2016 at Maplewood Richmond Heights Elementary School. Our 2016 Conference theme will be: “Powerful Educators, Powerful Classrooms, Powerful Schools.”
Inquiry to Action Groups (ItAGS) Coming this Fall: Inquiry to Action Groups (ItAGs) are study groups for educators to come together to learn more about a topic and take action. Past ESJ ItAGs have focused on topics including: Race & Education, Social Justice Children’s Literature, Culturally Relevant Teaching, Art & Democracy, Media & Education, Social Studies for Social Justice, and more! We are currently looking for facilitators to lead ItAGs this fall- facilitators choose their own topic and meeting dates. See the attached flyer for more info. Please visit our website to learn more and submit your proposal to facilitate an ItAG- proposal deadline extended until September 18: http://www.educatorsforsocialjustice.org/itags.html
Read about the hunger strike for Dyett school in Chicago
The outcome of years of corporate-style education reform and the dismantling of the public neighborhood school. Read more at: http://www.teachersforjustice.org/p/hunger-strike-to-save-dyett-high-school.html
Thursday, August 27, 2015
St Louis: Women Leading Local Struggle for the Environment
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Why it's hard to judge charter schools on MAP test numbers
Why it's hard to judge charter schools on MAP test numbers
Brutal spinning of poor performance by charter school supporters, when it is clear that charters are no better, and often worse, than neighborhood schools. And, their other implicit effects (resegregation, skimming of students, taking resources from the public schools) are ignored. This is another sign of media capture by the corporate agenda, with interviews only done with pro-charter advocates. Dale Singer and KWMU, you can do better than this.
Brutal spinning of poor performance by charter school supporters, when it is clear that charters are no better, and often worse, than neighborhood schools. And, their other implicit effects (resegregation, skimming of students, taking resources from the public schools) are ignored. This is another sign of media capture by the corporate agenda, with interviews only done with pro-charter advocates. Dale Singer and KWMU, you can do better than this.
St Louis Public Schools: Give Retired Teachers a Cost of Living Adjustment. Don't give away their future to the hedge fund managers
Along with the state takeover of the SLPS, those who now control the teachers' pension fund are spending heavily on advisors, trips, and a portfolio that is way too complex, while refusing to grant cost-of-living adjustments to elder and retired teachers. Inform yourself.
|
.
__,_._,___
Monday, August 24, 2015
Do State Takeovers of Public School Systems (like St. Louis) lead to disenfranchisement of African American and Latino Communities? New Report
New Report Finds Link Between School Takeovers and Disenfranchisement of African American and Latino Communities
** Read the report here: http://bit.ly/1KCu88L **
Today, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), a coalition of nine national organizations that together represent more than seven million parents, students, educators and community members, released a report arguing that state takeovers of public schools and districts are systematically targeting African Americans and Latinos and denying them the right to run their schools.
Read the report here: http://www.reclaimourschools.org/sites/default/files/out-of-control-takeover-report.pdf
The report, launched as students across the country go back to school, critiques what AROS calls an intentional effort to remove local control so that schools can be privatized without the opportunity for communities to voice their public opposition. The report examines some of the most prevalent state takeovers of schools and school districts.
Key takeaways from the report:
- Recovery School District, LA: Created in 2003 but used in 2005 to seize virtually all public schools in New Orleans, the state-run RSD has now converted to charters, or closed all of the 107 schools it seized.
- Achievement School District, TN: Modeled after the RSD, the Tennessee ASD has removed 29 schools from the Memphis and Nashville school districts. All but one of those schools has been handed over to a private charter operator.
- Education Achievement Authority, MI: After decades of disinvestment and under-funding, the State of Michigan seized control of the Detroit Public Schools in 1999. In 2009, after a brief return to local control, the State again installed an Emergency Manager with control over the district. In 2012, the state created the Education Achievement Authority and removed 15 schools from the already-state controlled district. The results of these takeovers have included massive financial deficits, plummeting enrollment, school closures, high teacher turnover and more. Student academic performance is unimproved.
Despite the failure of these “achievement districts” to achieve much of anything for the students and families who lose control of their local public schools, legislation to create more of these state-run districts has been aggressively pursued across the country this year. In the past six months, three additional states have created state-run districts: Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Similar bills have been proposed in a half-dozen other states.
In conjunction with the report launch, AROS groups across the country will be taking actions on the ground in their local communities.
“Districts that have been weakened by years of disinvestment are now being declared ‘failures’ and seized by the State,” said Keron Blair, Director at AROS. “Communities are being inundated with a flood of failing charter schools that suck resources from their public schools and cut off community access and democratic engagement.
“It's one thing for states to take over schools and provide high-quality institutions, but it is quite another to highjack schools from communities and hand them over to private interests that don’t have the best interest of children and communities at heart.
“Each and every student should get a chance at a more equitable quality of education regardless of where they live. It’s time for local and state officials to put a stop to the takeovers.”
The coalition’s recommended model for sustainable community schools includes:
- Curriculum that is engaging, culturally relevant and challenging, with a broad selection of classes and after-school programs in the arts, languages, and ethnic studies, as well as AP and honors courses, services for English Language Learners, special education, GED preparation and job training;
- An emphasis on high quality teaching, not high stakes testing;
- Wrap-around supports such as health care, eye care and social and emotional services available before, during and after school and provided year-round to the full community;
- Positive discipline practices such as restorative justice and social and emotional learning supports, and
- Transformational parent and community engagement in planning and decision-making. This process recognizes the link between the success of the school and the development of the community as a whole.
AROS demands that the rights of parents and communities to make decisions about their schools be returned to them and that they are provided with the resources necessary to establish sustainable community schools, that the ability of citizens to use their civic engagement capacity to impact their schools and communities be expanded.
###
The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS) is a national community/labor table of organizations of parents, students, teachers and community members who are fighting for the public schools our children deserve.
Sunday, August 23, 2015
The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover
The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover
Privatization hurts the poorest of the poor, and charter schools are part of the problem.
Privatization hurts the poorest of the poor, and charter schools are part of the problem.
District-by-district MAP results show continued struggles in some area schools
District-by-district MAP results show continued struggles in some area schools
The real story here: Charters are underperforming public schools, despite the fact they have more political, and often financial, support.
The real story here: Charters are underperforming public schools, despite the fact they have more political, and often financial, support.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)