"It think this is a great country. In some countries I might be actually locked up for teaching the way I have, but in this country, I'm just banned from doing it." — Curtis Acosta (TUSD Teacher)
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Tucson's Mexican-American Studies Ban | ||||
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Tucson's Mexican-American Studies Ban is the Daily Show's humorous, but poignent look at the racist reactionary ban of ethnic studies in Arizona.
Professor Christopher Bonastia's Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed is perhaps the best work I've read on the modern segregation and eugenics movements that are cloaked in the rhetoric of school choice. Packed with historical precedents and an honest assessment of today's empirical data, the essay is a powerful antidote to the nonstop stream of privatization propaganda pumped out by the deep pocketed charter industry. The following excerpt provides an idea of why everyone must read the whole piece:The driving assumption for the pro-charter side, of course, is that market competition in education will be like that for toothpaste -- providing an array of appealing options. But education, like healthcare, is not a typical consumer market. Providers in these fields have a disincentive to accept or retain "clients" who require intensive interventions to maintain desired outcomes--in the case of education, high standardized test scores that will allow charters to stay in business. The result? A segmented marketplace in which providers compete for the "good risks," while the undesirables get triage. By design, markets produce winners, losers and unintended or hidden consequences.
I'm not sure if all of you have heard, but the Superintendent is presenting a draconian budget to the LAUSD Board of Trustees to vote on today. Even though the alleged budget shortfall is only 10%, Deasy (a former Gates Foundation executive and a graduate of the Broad Superintendent's academy) has crafted a budget that will eliminate education for 35% of the district's students and eliminate 100% of Elementary Arts and after-school services. Garcia and Deasy are threatening to lay off nearly 10,000 people in this round, meanwhile charters are sucking up resources and real estate.Improving mothers' literacy skills may be best way to boost children's achievement
Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health concluded that programs to boost the academic achievement of children from low income neighborhoods might be more successful if they also provided adult literacy education to parents.
The researchers based this conclusion on their finding that a mother's reading skill is the greatest determinant of her children’s future academic success, outweighing other factors, such as neighborhood and family income.
The analysis, performed by Narayan Sastry, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan, and Anne R. Pebley, Ph.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles, examined data on more than 3,000 families.
The study, appearing in Demography, was supported by NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
"The findings indicate that programs to improve maternal literacy skills may provide an effective means to overcome the disparity in academic achievement between children in poor and affluent neighborhoods," said Rebecca Clark, Ph.D., chief of the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute that funded the study.
After mother's reading level, neighborhood income level was the largest determinant of children's academic achievement.
The researchers undertook the study to isolate factors contributing to the disparity in academic achievement that other studies have found between children in low income and affluent neighborhoods.
Sastry and Pebley's analysis was based on data collected between April 2000 and December 2001 as part of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, an ongoing examination of families in 65 LA county communities. The information included the results of reading and math assessments of 2,350 children ages 3 to 17, their mothers' education level, census records of neighborhood income, and family income and assets. The participants in the study were representative of the larger Los Angeles community.
Sastry and Pebley noted that neighborhood income had the largest impact on achievement for children ages 8 to 17, who are at the middle and higher end of the age range. This is consistent with the idea that the environment outside the home becomes more important as children grow older, they said.
"This analysis gives us a chance to isolate the different factors that affect children’s achievement," Dr. Sastry said. "Policy measures to encourage mixed-income neighborhoods, improve early childhood education, and build mothers’ reading skills each could have positive effects on children’s achievement scores."
The NICHD sponsors research on development, before and after birth; maternal, child, and family health; reproductive biology and population issues; and medical rehabilitation. For more information, visit the Institute’s Web site at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
Dear Silver Lake Neighborhood Council:
Join hundreds of community members, students, teachers and parents are going to City Hall in force to protect West LA from the effects of that the relocation of New West Charter could cause, namely:February 22, 2012
Re: CPC-2011-1923-CU-SPR
ENV-2011-1924-MND
To:
Councilman Ed Reyes
Councilman Jose Huizar
Councilman Mitch Englander
Councilman Bill Rosendahl
Cc: Len Nguyen
As a member of the WLA Neighborhood Council’s PLUM committee, I have consistently voted to oppose New West Charter School’s expansion into the site at 1905 S. Armacost in our modest, already-congested, West Los Angeles neighborhood. I live six blocks away, and not only will this project destroy the livability in the immediate vicinity of this location, but it will have severe ramifications for the entire, surrounding community.
You have to ask yourselves why the administrators and parents are so gung-ho about sending their kids to school in a WAREHOUSE…with no lawn, no cafeteria, no gymnasium. Why do they want to transport them to OUR neighborhood from various parts of the greater Los Angeles area?
Is it because they have a sweetheart deal whereby the state (we taxpayers) will subsidize most of their rent at this boxy, brick, shell of a building? Is it because it’s a block away from OUR neighborhood park which is already at capacity with daily, private school activities? Is it because it’s not far from our LAUSD high school, University High, and they feel entitled to muscle onto their campus to use THEIR gymnasium and THEIR other facilities?
Quimby funds that compensate us for the overdevelopment of our community’s up-zoned areas have gone into Stoner Park to enhance it for OUR local residents…not for a bunch of interlopers who eye it as a commodity they can come in and usurp.
From the first time the New West representatives came to a neighborhood council meeting, the administrators and parents have painted a rosy picture about high-performing students having a quality education while turning a blind eye to the negative impact they would impose on the surrounding community. We want ALL our neighborhood children to have a high-quality education. This issue before you is not a referendum on private schools. This is about the inappropriate use of a warehouse which is directly across the street from very modest R-1 houses, some occupied by elderly people who’ve lived in our neighborhood since the early 1950s.
We have an abundance of private schools occupying industrial space within a quarter mile of this location. We already deal with their traffic and cut-through traffic from businesses in Santa Monica that pass through WLA in huge, sluggish numbers. At least the other private schools were obligated to implement significant mitigation measures to ease the burden on our community, most importantly…school busing. New West Charter School’s answer to the question about busing is, “We can’t afford it.” Their answer to whether they could cut down the size of their student body has always been, “We can’t afford it.” Their answer to the proposal to divide their student body between two different sites is, “We can’t afford it.” New West at this Armacost location??? WE can’t afford it!
They SAY they will carpool and give bus passes to their students and have them ride bikes, but we know that’s not practical for parents and kids from all over town. There is no viable way for them to mitigate the impact of 875 students coming into this peaceful neighborhood and no way to mitigate the impact of morning drop-offs and afternoon pick-ups in this already-burdened community.
The enforcement measures they propose are tied to contracts between the parents and the school. Theoretically, if a student is not car-pooling, he can be expelled. Do you really think they’re going to expel high-performing students who help keep their API up, just because they don’t follow the transportation guidelines? Of course not!
Their proposed car-pooling figures are so unrealistic as to be laughable. Their plans for queuing cars in our neighborhood are absurd and are presented as if they’re happening in a vacuum instead of in a heavily-trafficked neighborhood.
The fact is, the City has no mechanism for enforcement which could hold New West Charter School’s feet to the fire if and when they were to violate the conditions they say they’d agree to. Their demeanor at our neighborhood meetings demonstrates that they won’t even care if they’re abusing the privilege of situating THEIR school in OUR neighborhood. New West Middle School, at its present location on Pico Blvd., with a smaller-size student body has a history of hostility toward nearby businesspeople. And the best indication of future behavior is past behavior. They are not good neighbors now, and there is no reason to believe that they will be respectful, considerate, compliant or fair with the members of our local community. If you allow New West to set up shop in our residential area on Armacost, there will be no recourse for the residents and nearby business owners who will suffer from the congestion, the dangerous pedestrian and traffic conflicts, the noise, the parking on our streets…
What would our WLA neighborhood GET out of putting New West Charter School at 1905 S. Armacost Ave.? Nothing but headaches, inconvenience and ongoing dangerous situations.
Our residents wouldn’t be fighting a school that served our local community. They’d be more sympathetic if an under-enrolled, local, public school which was the “victim” of changing demographics, needed to bus public school children from other Los Angeles neighborhoods. But this project serves OTHER people’s children who live in OTHER communities and seeks to stuff them and their commuter traffic and their noise and their trash and their parents’ cars on back-to-school nights in the middle of a neighborhood that gets not ONE OUNCE of benefit from their intrusion.
I implore you to vote “NO” on this proposal. There may be a good location for New West Charter School’s proposed expansion, but it is not at the site they currently have their eye on.
Marilyn Noyes
WLANC PLUM Committee member
Social Justice Schools Conference Report Back
by Rosa Jimenez
Dear Educational Justice Community,
THANK YOU so much to those of you who were able to attend CEJ's and PEAC's Social Justice Schools Conference on February 10 and 11. Over 200 people attended this historic convening. This was more than a one-time event, it was a critical moment to regroup and redefine a new strategy for meaningful educational reform. The entire conference was volunteer-led and volunteer-driven. Registration, childcare, and lunch were all free. We hope that the event reminds all of us that we can continue to create the spaces that we need in order to move forward our work and our communities' rights!
Students, UTLA teachers, parents, community-members, and a few charter school teachers discussed the attacks our schools and communities face. We also focused on education policies, our vision for how we want schools to be, and specific pedagogical practices that support genuine student learning.
On Friday evening, civil rights and labor leader, Bill Fletcher challenged the audience to shift UTLA into a Social Justice Union — one that aligns itself with students, parents and community in the fight for real education justice. He described how the public sector is under attack and that unions must be committed to democracy, organizing and aggressively challenging ineffective education policy. Students, parents and teachers then engaged with each other about his speech, in small groups, and then posed questions to him about the connections between rebuilding the union movement in this country and the occupy movement, and how to get unions to be committed to issues beyond pay and other narrow trade union issues, but aligned more with what students and parents are fighting for such as economic and racial justice.
On Saturday morning, conference attendees heard panelists speak to a broad set of issues we must address as we build social justice schools. John Rogers, Director of UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Equity and Access, spoke about how neo-liberalism, education policy and the economy are structured so that there are fewer jobs, higher incarceration rates and less money going toward education than in decades past. He then offered up ideas on what unions and community orgs can do to put out a vision for real change and the need to organize around it. CEJ student leader Taylor Broom, CEJ parent leader Kahllid Al-Alim, and I then spoke about on the ground organizing we have done at our schools through CEJ, PEAC or independently to challenge the attacks on education and promote real change. Additionally, Taylor spoke about how schools should be focused on more than just test scores — that schools should also be focused on what students need — like providing college counselors, small class sizes, electives like Black and Chicano/Latino history and literature, and other electives that students want to take. Students asked critical questions like "How do we help students and teachers to stop blaming ourselves and each other and start working together to change the system?"
The conference then moved into workshops. Many of the workshops showcased working examples of how we can create the education that students, teachers, and parents want and need. There were workshops on developing critical literacy skills and a love for learning, community-based education programs that engage students in deep thinking and action, alternatives to the school-to-prison pipeline and the need to stop truancy ticketing, dual-language immersion programs and more. While this conversation has been happening separately for many years, this conference brought together union members and community members in an important step towards growing our ability to work together. As a 5th year teacher who has been RIF'd four years in a row and as a young Chicana and mother, I found the dialogue inspiring — it gives me hope in a time when the attacks keep growing. It reminded me that I am not alone in thinking that what we need is movement!
Photo by Ronni Solmon. The sign at this CEJ student workshop said: 'Who are the 1% and what do they have to do with public education?'
While the adults were in workshops, students from ten different schools participated in a student-led section of the conference. This was a space for youth to discuss with each other the systemic problems of public school funding, how the 1% influence education policy (and what to do about it), racism and inequity, and what kind of changes students feel need to be made in schools so that schools better meet their needs.
The conference ended with a lively and theatrical action at Chase Bank, a few blocks away. It was a fun way to end the weekend and make connections between the underfunding of our schools, the 1%, and our willingness to take things into our own hands...
We were thrilled to have the Raza Ed Committee, Latino Caucus, Women's Progressive Caucus and United Valley Caucus endorse this conference and it was great to see rank and file and union leaders from other unions come out to support as well. We know that it will take all of us together (and many many more) to transform our own union and to work more systematically in the long-term to organize for educational justice with our communities.
These are crucial conversations in era where elite education "reformers" are the ones shaping and promoting educational policies for our schools. These reformers include Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Richard Riordan who represent the 1% that the Occupy movement critiques. Their policies and strategies coming from the 1% for educational reform ignore the reality that our schools and our communities do not have what they need and deserve. This conference set us on a course to define our own educational reform needs together. We cannot and will not have elite business people who have their own interests in mind determining the future or our public schools which are supposed to be for everyone.
It would be great to hear from others who were in attendance about what you experienced and got out of the conference!
Thanks again to everyone for participating in this important and inspiring process of creating social justice schools.
Rosa Jimenez
UCLA-CS Social Studies Teacher
Coalition for Educational Justice Steering Committee Member
Progressive Educators for Action Member
Parent
Conference Coordinator
The Progressive has been compiling the responses of authors whose books were banned by Arizona bigots and arch-reactionaries Tom Horne and John Huppenthal's racist HB 2281, which, among other things, banned Ethnic Studies in Arizona schools. Of course Huppenthal and Horne's vicious legislative colonization didn't actually ban ethnic studies, it just limited Arizona's curriculum to the oppressive historical narrative of "wealthy white male studies."Let's get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I'm pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.
Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and filmmaker. His book "The Lone Ranger and Tonto's Fist Fight in Heaven," was on the banned curriculum of the Mexican American Studies Program.
The consequences of decades of regressive tax injustice combined with the economic crash engineered by Wall Street mortgage derivative malefactors, have allowed for the neoliberal dream of carving public education to the bone.
It's no secret that the malicious types running Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) hold the same ideological positions as the furthest-right think-tanks around. Starting with their founder Whitney Tilson, [2] who channels American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) Andy Smarick at every opportunity, DFER is a bastion of right-wing thought that amounts to an enormous serving of Milton Freidman's free market fantasies finished with a healthy dollop of Ayn Rand's infantile insistence that "Big Business" is "America’s Persecuted Minority."
From regular high school students in need of credit recovery, to students working to obtain their diplomas after life circumstance altered their ability to obtain it in four years, to English Language Learners, to immigrants working on their citizenship, to students wanting access to career programs now that community college tuitions have skyrocketed, Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) Adult Education programs represent a literal lifeline for tens of thousands of Angelenos and their families.AALA has been informed that LAUSD leadership is seeking Board approval to close the District's Division of Adult and Career Education (DACE) programs next year and redirect tens of millions of dollars in funding to offset General Fund shortfalls. Can the District afford to prevent high school students from participating in adult education classes to earn credit for graduation? Can the District afford to eliminate educational opportunities for thousands of parents and community members who depend upon adult education to learn English and earn American citizenship? Can the District afford to cut high-quality apprenticeship programs that lead to decent jobs?
We believe that such an ill-conceived plan should be scrapped to avert a political and educational debacle. The District needs to recognize that DACE programs, in fact, do not encroach on the General Fund. While providing critically needed basic education and career training for the community at large, Adult and Career Education pays its own way through both direct and indirect assessments levied by the District against their severely limited resources. Additionally, the District sweeps every dollar left in Adult and Career Education accounts at the end of each year.
DACE administrators carefully manage their programs including the successful AEWC dropout recovery program and labor union-supported apprenticeship programs and have a long history of successes on a shoestring, including:
- More than 10% of last year's high school dropouts were enrolled in Adult and Career Education courses on norm day 2011, thus reducing the District's 2010-2011 dropout rate by 10%. The previous year's reduction was also 10%, and nearly 9% the year before that. Clearly, LAUSD's dropout rate would increase dramatically if DACE programs were not available to these students.
- Approximately 1,500 former dropouts were graduated from DACE programs in 2010-2011. These graduates were reported in ISIS, further reducing the District's dropout rate.
- In 2010-2011, 88,200 high school students took Adult and Career Education courses to make up credits and keep up with their cohorts. Reducing accessibility for these students would simply transfer educational costs to the General Fund at a higher per-capita cost.
- In 2010-2011, 51,844 high school students took courses at occupational centers and in ROP. Reducing accessibility to these programs would cause students to be transferred back to their home schools and would increase costs to the General Fund, again at a higher per-capita cost.
- In 2010-2011, 58,147 parents took DACE courses.
- AALA fully understands LAUSD's budget problems. We strongly believe, however, that the District cannot afford to shut down the District's Adult and Career Education programs. Doing so would have the unintended consequence of increasing General Fund costs, increasing dropout rates and eliminating valuable educational services to tens of thousands of needy parents and community members District-wide.
I take on Huffington Post censorship and charter charlatan Ben Austin's unconscionable gall to compare educators to billionaire bankers and Near East dictators, while casting his charter school public relations outfit as one of the occupy movements in my latest Schools Matter piece: On Huffington Post censorship and Parent Revolution puff pieces.Parent Revolution's sister organization, the racist reactionaries at The Heartland Institute, hail Austin's "trigger" thusly: "This might just be the most powerful education reform policy since Milton Friedman advocated the school voucher. Begun in California, the Parent Trigger allows a majority of parents to petition to have their local school reorganized or transformed into a charter, or even to receive vouchers to choose private schools."
When organizations ideologically right of the teabaggers cheerlead your policies and compare your agenda to that of arch-reactionary Milton Friedman, you can be sure it has nothing to do with putting "kids-first."
First published on OccupyLAUSD.org
"By what logic does United Way engage in an activity that is shunned by all the other charities?"—Professor Ralph E. Shaffer
United Way of Greater Los Angeles' CEO Elise Buik's total compensation in 2010 was $286,985. Entering that figure on http://www.globalrichlist.com/ provides the following insights:
With that in mind, is it any wonder that United Way of Greater Los Angeles' policies to help the homeless consist of criminalization and marginalization? Buik works with the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to find homeless "solutions" that are wildly popular with downtown developers gentrifying everything in sight.
Is it any wonder that Buik personally argued to kill the PSC parent and community vote? Advocates privatized charter-voucher schools at every opportunity? Laundered Gates Foundation money to pay for the discredited NCTQ LAUSD report? Co-founded the right-wing Don't Hold Us Back Coalition to attempt and dictate terms to UTLA in the midst of labor contract negotiations? Is it any wonder that the Don't Hold Us Back Coalition hasn't uttered a single word about trying to save School Readiness Language Development Program (SRLDP), Adult Education, and Busing in LAUSD, but wants the district to spend more to give public schools away to private corporations?
No, it's no wonder at all.
A campaign to divest and discontinue all donations to the United Way is a must. Join Occupy United Way and OccupyLAUSD to fight for social justice!
