If you're in Los Angeles this month, three education items to consider

These events and announcements are worthy of your consideration. Especially the event featuring Schools Matter's very own Dr. Stephen Krashen. I would love to attend all of these, but… law school.

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Student Empowerment through Culture and Language
Tuesday, January 31 at 4 PM - 8 PM

UTLA

3303 Wilshire Blvd Fl 10,

Los Angeles, California 90010

 Ethnic Studies, Dual and Mulitilingual Education. With the passage of Prop 58 the Multilingual Education Act and AB2016 Ethnic Studies we have a historic opportunity to advance issues and more. Join the UTLA Raza Ed. and Bilingual Education Commitee as we bring scholars, educators and community together for an engaging discussion. Best of all, this event is FREE!

Professors Solórzano and Krashen: Student Empowerment through Culture and Language by Robert D. Skeels on Scribd

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Los Angeles student groups to protest racism and other right-wing hate

A busy week will be upon us. As most of you know, CEJ's campaign-turned-movement for the Schools LA Students Deserve has really grown in the last few years. Many of our chapters (we have 14 now!!) are called Students Deserve and our students, parents and teachers often call us Students Deserve now, although we are still Coalition for Educational Justice as well (CEJ). We have chapters as far west as Venice HS, as far east as Garfield HS, in Hollywood, Koreatown, Silver Lake, North Hollywood and South LA. We're seeing our dream of organizing across our huge city come to life!!

We wanted to share an exciting event  that our students have planned on their own with some support from our two new paid Students Deserve organizers, Maricela (full-time student and parent organizer) and Alfredo (part-time, supports the student organizing piece).

We're very excited to announce:

• Weds, January 18th: Students United Against Hate, United for the Communities LA Students Deserve 
Event- MacArthur Park 4:30pm
 (PDF Flyer attached below) We want a safe space for students by students as we challenge Trump, his politics, his followers, the systems of oppression that have allowed him to exist, and the damage that he wants to do to us.
  
  
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  There will be music, art, spoken word and a panel discussion. Our students are AWESOME. Please come to MacArthur Park on Wednesday after school if you are available!! We know that UTLA Chapter Chairs have Area Meetings that afternoon. 

We also will be involved on Thursday: January 19th: UTLA/ROS LA Morning Action. You probably know about the action taking place at schools. Students Deserve students want to support whatever this looks like at your campus to show that we won’t let Trump mess with schools and our communities.

Stay involved. Stay strong. Stay united. We will not be bullied by the incoming president and his right-wing cabinet nominees. WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN!

See you on Wednesday standing strong at MacArthur Park and Thursday standing strong at our schools!!

SaveSave

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NPE Action endorses Alva and Petersen for the LAUSD Board of Education

The Network for Public Education Action is proud to endorse two candidates for the Los Angeles Board of Education District 2 primary election—Lisa Alva and Carl Petersen. 

Although it is very unusual for us to endorse two for the same position, both are well qualified and are committed to the ideals of NPE Action.

The third candidate in the race, the incumbent Monica Garcia, has clearly demonstrated by her record that she is not aligned with the pro-public education agenda of the Network for Public Education Action.

We therefore urge our supporters to vote for either Lisa or Carl.

Lisa Alva

Lisa has been a classroom teacher, school leader and a voice for teachers for 18 years. She told us that her first priority if elected “would be to redirect funding, resources and personnel to neighborhood public schools so that all children, especially at-risk youth, have enough variety in classes, and small enough classes, to benefit from a complete education that includes electives and vocational-technical training, from pre-K through Adult School. This means beginning and ending every conversation with the question, “How will this benefit students?”

She supports less standardized testing, and smaller class sizes. She also embraces charter school reform and transparency, and a return to democratically controlled schools.

According to Lisa, “Charter schools needlessly drain resources from neighborhood schools, weaken the teaching profession and leave more students behind than they serve.”

Carl Petersen

Carl is the father of five children, all of whom have attended public schools. Two of his daughters are on the autism spectrum so he is especially sensitive to the importance of funding for students with special needs.

Carl’s first priority is to stop Eli Broad’s Great Public Schools Now Initiative “to reach 50 percent charter market share.” According to Carl, “The LAUSD does not currently have the capacity, or the will, to oversee the 250 charters that already operate within the District. Doubling the number of these organizations will create opportunities for financial improprieties like those that have occurred at El Camino Real Charter High School, where public funds were used for expensive dinners, first class airfare and personal expenses. Charters are currently allowed to cherry pick students who are not English learners, do not have special education needs and do not have behavioral issues. The higher costs of serving these students are borne by the LAUSD schools that continue to serve these populations. Increasing the number of charters will shift these costs to an even lower base of students. The bankruptcy of the District is a likely result.”

Carl believes there should be less testing and he is opposed to the Common Core. He believes that there should be more accountability for the Los Angeles Board of Education.

The LAUSD school board election primary will take place on March 7.  We ask you to choose between these two fine candidates when you cast your vote. 

Thank you,

Carol Burris

Executive Director

You can share these endorsements using the following links:

http://npeaction.org/2017/01/14/npe-action-endorses-carl-petersen-lausd-school-board/

http://npeaction.org/2017/01/14/npe-action-endorses-lisa-alva-lausd-school-board/

Authentic reforms from Dr. Krashen. Address poverty, and ensure access to books to preempt summer learning loss!

Providing more access to interesting reading material by investing in public libraries and librarians is an excellent way to deal with summer learning loss. — Dr. Stephen D. Krashen

Yesterday morning at teacher sent me a Dr. Edward Haertel paper discussing the unreliability of Value Added Measures. I saw an interesting figure in the paper regarding "summer learning loss" that started me working on an infographic. After creating the graphic and posting the corresponding tweet, I noticed that Dr. Paul Thomas had tweeted a new post by Professor Krashen on essentially the same topic entitled: Arne Duncan suggests year-round school as a solution to the summer slide. I disagree. That post appears here on Schools Matter as Arne and the summer slide.

Krashen's Solutions Work!

Professor Stephen Krashen and colleagues have repeatedly proven that both access to books, and ameliorating the effects of poverty are critical in addressing so-called achievement gaps. Neoliberal corporate education reform's wrongheaded assertion that we need to lengthen the school year ignores these indisputable facts, as emphatically illustrated by differences in the table (Haertel 17) above:

References

Haertel, Edward. "Reliability and Validity of Inferences About Teachers Based on Student Test Scores." Educational Testing Service, 2013. Web. 6 June 2014 <http://j.mp/1kQw5kw>

Krashen, Stephen D. "Protecting Students against the Effects of Poverty: Libraries." New England Reading Association Journal. 46.2 (2011): 17-22. Web. 6 June 2014 <http://j.mp/1kIlgFV>

—————. The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. Print.

Shin, Fay H, and Stephen D. Krashen. Summer Reading: Program and Evidence. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 2008. Print.

Dr. @skrashen's proven reforms to preempt "summer learning loss." Address poverty, and ensure access to books! #LAUSD pic.twitter.com/d3oPORVZpF

— Robert D. Skeels (@rdsathene) June 6, 2014

Research proven: School Libraries and Free Voluntary Reading. Unproven and expensive: CCSS and iPads

Research proven: School Libraries & Free Voluntary Reading. Unproven and expensive: #CCSS & iPads. #LAUSD @skrashen pic.twitter.com/Cg2z5Z7uxM

— Robert D. Skeels (@rdsathene) September 26, 2013

The former means engaged critical thinking, but the latter leads to more corporate profits and increased market share for PSO, AAPL, MHGE, NWSA, and others.

• The Power of Reading : Insights from the Research
• Common Core [sic] Standards (Susan Ohanian Speaks Out)

More evidence corroborating Professor Krashen and exposing the contrived skills and STEM crises

"...the impending shortage of scientists and engineers is one of the longest running hoaxes in the country" — Gerald W. Bracey

Schools Matter's Professor Stephen Krashen has been a long time critic of the media promulgated mythology that there's a shortage of qualified workers, particularly those in the Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) fields. A quick survey of his posts here reveal his ongoing work to counter the skills/STEM propaganda that is most often used to justify some of the most pernicious corporate education reforms.

Whenever I see more evidence proving these skills/STEM myths wrong, I'm quick to forward them to Dr. Krashen for him to add to his burgeoning catalog of documentation. NPR's recent Are There Too Many Ph.D.s And Not Enough Jobs? is an example of the evidence contradicting all the outrageous lies by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, David Welch, Reed Hastings, Arne Duncan, et al. The NPR piece, which cites The Atlantic, contains gems such as:

"numbers released by the National Science Foundation show that people with doctoral degrees in those technical fields are struggling to find work in their industries."

and

"Worse yet, as of 2011, approximately one-third of people graduating with a doctoral degree in science, technology, math or engineering had no job or post-doctoral offer of any kind."

Krashen posted the above piece on his facebook page, and several of us commented. Still exhausted from the LAUSD election, I had forgotten what I wrote until I saw myself quoted by Peggy Robertson and Patsy Bain Wolf. Looking at the quote, I'm sure glad they preserved it, since it gets to the heart of the matter:

The manufactured STEM crisis. Robert D. Skeels states "The manufactured STEM 'crises' has from the onset been a means to drive down the salaries of those professionals who often don't see themselves as being working class. Starting with Bill Gates' drive to grant more H1B visas to certain workers under the guise of "not enough qualified candidates." What this really means is not enough candidates willing to work on the cheap. Ultimately the same market forces that allow the owners of the means of production drive wages down are at work. Sadly, since many professionals aren't class conscious, the only things that could reverse this trend — working class push-back and unionization — aren't being discussed."

Another recent article by In These Times entitled Study Demolishes the Myth That U.S. Workers Lack Skills further puts the lie to the notion that U.S. workers are lacking in the education or skills department. The piece, which discusses a paper by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Professor Marc Levine, contains powerful quotes like: "There are still three unemployed people for every possible job opening."

The article proper enumerates the points of Levine’s report, only the headings of which are reproduced here.

• False: The skills of the workforce somehow dropped sharply between 2007 and 2009.
• False: There is a vast pool of high-skilled jobs waiting to be filled.
• False: Employers are trying in vain to attract skilled workers.
• False: Understaffed employers must make do with the skilled workers they have.
• False: New high-skill jobs have been created.
• False: Workers with advanced degrees are more highly sought-after.
• False: The American job market will increasingly demand higher-skilled workers.

Globalization has allowed the ownership class to increasingly pit workers against each other in ways the Robber Barons could have only dreamed of. When workers compete, their boses win! A major part of the impetus behind corporate education reform is the same momentum that's created a job market were workers are increasingly expected to work harder and harder for less and less, while being required to have ever more education and training (at their own expense, of course). Nearly all of Silicon Valley's plutocratic elites' whining about a skills shortage is part and parcel a cry to drive down wages and squeeze ever more profit out of workers who are expected to "lean in."

This race to the bottom for workers is accelerated by those same forces turning teaching into an act of Taylorism as well. Race to the Top and Common Core State Standards are part of a corporate consensus intended to create compliant workers ready to accept ever more abject working conditions. The daily experience in schools today is a grim reminder of what student's adult life will most likely look like. Brian Jones' recent commentary looks at this in depth and provides inescapable analysis. The byline, which couldn't be more apropos, reads 'When Karl Marx described the despotism of the modern workplace, he could have been describing schools in the era of education "reform."' Jones' essay is replete with insights like:

"The bourgeoisie," Marx noted, "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society."

In those words, Marx put his finger on precisely what's happening in education--the relationship between teacher and student is being revolutionized. The student is, increasingly, evaluated not by the human being he or she speaks to every day, but by a harried, low-wage test scorer (sometimes hundreds of miles away) paid per test or worse, by a machine that scans the student's bubble sheet.

It's no small irony that the selfsame students whose tests are being graded by "harried, low-wage test scorer[s]" are being prepared for such futures as well.

The neoliberal project encroaches from every side and can only be defeated by collective resistance. My heart goes out to all those at the Occupy the Department of Education 2.0: The Battle for Public Schools event right now. I am there with you in spirit. We must continue organizing against these seemingly unstoppable forces, in hopes that eventually we can get our fellows in struggle to realize the meaning of Rosa Luxemburg's famous passage "those who do not move, do not notice their chains."

Debunking Common Core Curriculum's so-called Four C's

"When you go to doctors, they don’t take all your blood, they only take a sample." — Professor Stephen Krashen

Professor Diane Ravitch had a brief comment entitled The True Goals of Education? this morning where a reader suggested a sort of whole child approach based on virtues as opposed to tedious test preparation. That in itself wouldn't merit much attention, but oddly one of the readers posted a comment suggesting that those self-same virtues were the stated intent of Common Core State Standards. The following was my response to that assertion:

For the plutocrat sponsors* of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to suggest that it has any goals beyond imbuing corporate servitude, compliance, petty jingoism, and acceptance of austerity is nothing short of pernicious propaganda.

Certainly David Coleman and Co. coined their "four C's" well after the fact, and clearly this was in response to to cogent criticisms by actual educators including Susan Ohanian, Professor Stephen Krashen, and others.

• Common Core State [sic] Standards
• Stephen Krashen brings Common Core debate to pages of the Sunday New York Times in time for the testing debate at the AFT convention
• BOONDOGGLE!
• High Tech Testing on the Way: a 21st Century Boondoggle?

Everything in Corporate Core Curriculum is designed to discourage critical thinking skills, and this is why CCSS won't be required outside of public schools (eg. charters, parochial, and private schools). There definitely won't be any canned corporate curricula sponsored by the Gates Foundation inflicted on the children of privilege at schools like Sidwell Friends.

Like its fellow malignant projects "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top," CCSS has goals directly aligned to neoliberalism:

• Cause the appearance that the public school school system is broken, and that market solutions (charters/vouchers) would fare better.
• Control the curriculum and combat any chance that "dangerous" curricula that might cause people to resist neoliberalism or question corporate dominance is taught.
• Further sort students by race and class, and further subject them to endless mind numbing test preparation. Ultimately discouraging any critical thinking skills in any class outside those running society.
• Serve as the perfect excuse for union busting and the total deprofessionalization of teaching. Ultimately leading to low cost, but highly profitable delivery of necessary information (informational texts anyone?) to those not deemed as needing critical thinking. Real teaching will continue to exist in the hallowed halls of elite private schools for scion of the ruling class.
• Obscene profits for charlatans like Pearson, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Gideon Stein, and everyone else associated with the diverse markets connected to school privatization, real estate, and the standardized-testing-industrial-complex.

We must resist Corporate Core by every means posible. Paris 1968 is a good model for us to follow. If we don't, we may as well begin writing our eulogies for public education today.

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* I'm not saying Mr. Mindlin is working for one of them. He did, after all, say the so-called "four C's" were "allegedly" at the heart of CCSS.

Refocusing LAUSD on reading and learning instead of testing

First published on Robert D. Skeels for School Board on November 24, 2012.

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It's difficult to explain exactly what being poor is all about, or why access to books and ideas might be as important as a free breakfast. — Walter Dean Myers

Hope Is an Open Book, an op-ed piece by author Walter Dean Myers, was tweeted this morning by educator Susan Ohanian. While written in 2005, Myers' message about access to books is profound and even more urgent today with canned corporate education solutions that narrow curriculum dominating policy. Sadly, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is run by a Superintendent who neither values books, nor libraries. This has to change, and change quickly. We need to shutdown LAUSD's testing-industrial-complex and reopen both our school and classroom libraries. Reopening libraries also means rehiring credentialed librarian-educators. We can pay for that by ditching discredited and expensive attempts to tie teacher evaluations to test scores (VAM/AGT) and use the millions of squandered dollars associated with them. Read with your children, read in front of your children, and let them choose their own reading materials. It's a proven formula for fostering authentic life-long learning.

Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) is a well researched methodology in which students are allowed to choose their own reading materials. Professor Stephen Krashen and his colleagues have found that "[r]ecreational reading or reading for pleasure is the major source of our reading competence, our vocabulary, and our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions." The Power of Reading, Second Edition: Insights from the Research is an excellent text to familiarize oneself with the concepts and research behind FVR.