Network For Public Education Report: Trump’s budget slashes funding for disadvantaged students while giving 1.4 billion for privatization

Donald Trump’s education budget is a declaration of war on public education and our nation’s neediest children. Send a message to Congress today.

Donald Trump’s education budget is a declaration of war on public education and our nation’s neediest children. It was surely designed by Betsy DeVos.

Trump’s budget would axe after-school programs known as the 21st Century Community Learning Centers which help school districts, churches and nonprofit groups serve more than 1.6 million American children, most of whom are poor. In defending the cuts to such programs, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said after-school programs don’t “show results.” He went on to say that feeding children after-school has never been proven to get them better jobs, so we cannot afford to do it anymore. A full stomach for a hungry child is not good enough–but there is 1.4 billion to send them to voucher schools and for for-profit online learning.

The budget also slashes programs that prepare disadvantaged middle and high school students for college. College assistance for first-generation students is also reduced. And if disadvantaged students are still able to get to college, it will be harder for them to stay–Trump’s budget cuts funding for federal work study programs.

And yet there is ample funding for the school privatization agenda–$1.4 billion in all.

Trump’s budget contains:

·     a 50% increase for charter school funding.

·     a $250 million private school “choice” program.

·     $1 billion for a fund portability program–which is nothing more than a disguised voucher system. Portability could bankrupt some public schools and slash funding for the rest.

The Network for Public Education will not stand by and allow Trump to break our public school system and crush the dreams of millions of children. We believe in the promise and hope of an equitable education for every children. A shot-gun system of segregated private schools, charters, virtual and home-schools is a recipe for disaster.

But we cannot fight without your help.

Send your email to your senators and representative today.

Then post this link on Facebook.

https://networkforpubliceducation.org/2017/03/9048/

Let’s barrage Congress with our emails and let our representatives know where we stand.

Click here.

This is our first step. In the coming weeks we will provide you with one page informational sheets to help you teach others about the threats that charters, vouchers, and tax credits for private schools pose. We will begin call campaigns, flooding the White House and Congress. We will give you tools for social media.

Commit to the fight today.

Send your email, then post this link, tweet it and send it to friends.

Join the Network for Public Education in stopping the privatization agenda of Trump, Pence and DeVos. If our public education system is dismantled, we will never get it back. And that is a tragedy that our nation truly cannot afford.

Here is a link to this newsletter to share:

https://networkforpubliceducation.org/2017/03/trumps-budget-slashes-funding-disadvantaged-students-giving-1-4-billion-privatization/

Thank you for all you do,

Carol Burris, Executive Director

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.Source: Trump’s budget slashes funding for disadvantaged students while giving 1.4 billion for privatization – Network For Public Education

Daylight saving time: Research on health, car accidents and energy usage – Journalist’s Resource Journalist’s Resource

2016 research roundup on how daylight saving time impacts our health, energy consumption and propensity for accidents.

“Spring forward, fall back.” Like clockwork, we follow this humble command twice a year. But what is it doing to our health and well-being?

Source: Daylight saving time: Research on health, car accidents and energy usage – Journalist’s Resource Journalist’s Resource

The Basic Unit of Writing

The slightly-cranky voice navigating the world of educational “reform” while trying to still pursue the mission of providing quality education.

Source: CURMUDGUCATION

If you are of a Certain Age, this how you were taught writing–

1) Learn the parts of speech, sentence parts, and the rest of grammar.
2) Learn how to construct a sentence.
3) Learn how to write several sentences to make a paragraph.
4) Learn how to write several paragraphs to make an essay.

That’s how we were taught to write. Mind you, it is not how anybody actually learned to write– okay, I can’t say nobody learned that way because the first rule of actual writing is that everybody uses their own methods and one person’s Functional Approach To Writing is another person’s Unspeakably Awful Idea. But the number of people who actually learned to write by the above traditional method is tiny, like the number of people who learned how to play jazz trombone by watching Led Zeppelin videos.

The persistence of traditional grammar instruction in the English teaching world is an ongoing mystery, like the number of people who think vouchers would improve education. Some teachers do it because well, of course, that’s what English teachers do. Some teachers do it because it’s easier than taking calls from parents that include the phrase, “Well, back in my day…”

Grammar instruction has its place. It’s a lot easier to fix things, and a lot a lot easier to talk about fixing things, if you can call those things something other than “things.” It’s hard to talk about the nuts and bolts of improving a piece of writing if we don’t have the words “nuts” or “bolts.”

But we know– have known for years– that simple instruction of grammar with grammar exercises and grammar drills and all the traditional things does not improve writing. You can read a good recap of the research here, and while I’m highly dubious about any research that claims it has measured the quality of student writing, the fancy big-time research matches what I’ve learned in my own class-sized laboratory over the past may decades. Drilling students all day on nouns and verbs and participials and dependent adverb clauses will not make them better writer, and bombarding their writing with the Red Pen of Doom deployed over every grammatical misstep (not to mention all the usage “mistakes” which are not grammatical issues at all no matter how many people insist on conflating the two
) will probably make them worse writers. Not that I’m an advocate for the loose anything-goes technique of just letting any kind of mess hit the page– but if your basic foundation for writing is a bunch of grammar rules, your students are probably not getting any better at writing.
This truth is sometimes masked by volume. The best way to get better at writing is to write, and if you have your students writing regularly, that will help– maybe even if you give them lousy feedback. God save us all from the “We only do writing for three weeks in April” approach.

But the basic unit of any piece of writing is not a word or a sentence or a paragraph or a rhetorical technique. The basic unit of writing is an idea.

The vast majority of writing problems are actually thinking problems. If you don’t know what you want to say, you will have a hard time saying it. And in the modern test-centered education era, we have compounded the problem by teaching students that their central question should be “What am I supposed to write for this?”

Not “what do I want to say” or even “what idea could I construct a good essay out of” but “what am I supposed to write.”

That question shifts the foundation of writing to a new skill set– psychic powers. Can you discern what the teacher or the test manufacturer wants you to say? Try to say that. In this model of writing, what should be central to the writing process– the ideas in the student’s head– actually becomes an obstacle– in your search for the essay you’re supposed to write, don’t be distracted by your own individual ideas.

Messing up that first question of writing automatically interfered with the second question– after you know what you want to say, you must next figure out how to say it. But test-centered standardized writing has a required set of “how” before you even get to what. In real writing, however, the “how” flows directly out of the “what.” For emerging writers, we may provide a pre-fab “how,” (looking at you, five paragraph essay) so that they can focus on their “what” and not freak out about how to express it. But once the “how” is coming before the “what,” we’re in trouble, because now we’re not asking “what do I want to say,” but “what could I say to fill in these five paragraphs.”

There is another level to this problem with assigned student writing– finding an answer for the student whose answer to “what do I want to say” is “I want to say that I don’t care about this topic and have nothing to say about it.” That is where a teacher’s heavy lifting comes in, with discussion and conversation and maybe research and sometimes a song and dance. It can be a hard bridge to build, but that doesn’t change the writing fundamentals-

The center of every piece of writing should be the what, the idea, the thing that the writer wants to say. Any other foundation results in a building that is shaky and unstable, a house in which nothing useful can live.

Posted by Peter Greene

 

Detroit schools board votes to sue Michigan over closures

The Detroit Public Schools Community District is suing to prevent the state from closing any of its struggling schools.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District is suing to prevent the state from closing any of its struggling schools.

The board of education voted unanimously — late into a more than five-hour meeting — to sue the state School Reform Office, the state of Michigan and Natasha Baker, the school reform officer.

The lawsuit likely will be filed this week. The board in February had voted to hire the Miller Canfield law firm to pursue possible litigation against the state.

READ MORE HERE: Detroit schools board votes to sue Michigan over closures

Trump Budget Would Make Massive Cuts to Ed. Dept., But Boost School Choice – Politics K-12 – Education Week

The Education Department’s nearly $70 billion budget would be slashed by $9 billion, or 13 percent in the coming fiscal year under the spending plan proposed by President Donald Trump.

Read more here: Trump Budget Would Make Massive Cuts to Ed. Dept., But Boost School Choice – Politics K-12 – Education Week

CURMUDGUCATION

The slightly-cranky voice navigating the world of educational “reform” while trying to still pursue the mission of providing quality education.

Source: CURMUDGUCATION

The Basic Unit of Writing

If you are of a Certain Age, this how you were taught writing–

1) Learn the parts of speech, sentence parts, and the rest of grammar.
2) Learn how to construct a sentence.
3) Learn how to write several sentences to make a paragraph.
4) Learn how to write several paragraphs to make an essay.

That’s how we were taught to write. Mind you, it is not how anybody actually learned to write– okay, I can’t say nobody learned that way because the first rule of actual writing is that everybody uses their own methods and one person’s Functional Approach To Writing is another person’s Unspeakably Awful Idea. But the number of people who actually learned to write by the above traditional method is tiny, like the number of people who learned how to play jazz trombone by watching Led Zeppelin videos.

The persistence of traditional grammar instruction in the English teaching world is an ongoing mystery, like the number of people who think vouchers would improve education. Some teachers do it because well, of course, that’s what English teachers do. Some teachers do it because it’s easier than taking calls from parents that include the phrase, “Well, back in my day…”

Grammar instruction has its place. It’s a lot easier to fix things, and a lot a lot easier to talk about fixing things, if you can call those things something other than “things.” It’s hard to talk about the nuts and bolts of improving a piece of writing if we don’t have the words “nuts” or “bolts.”

But we know– have known for years– that simple instruction of grammar with grammar exercises and grammar drills and all the traditional things does not improve writing. You can read a good recap of the research here, and while I’m highly dubious about any research that claims it has measured the quality of student writing, the fancy big-time research matches what I’ve learned in my own class-sized laboratory over the past may decades. Drilling students all day on nouns and verbs and participials and dependent adverb clauses will not make them better writer, and bombarding their writing with the Red Pen of Doom deployed over every grammatical misstep (not to mention all the usage “mistakes” which are not grammatical issues at all no matter how many people insist on conflating the two
) will probably make them worse writers. Not that I’m an advocate for the loose anything-goes technique of just letting any kind of mess hit the page– but if your basic foundation for writing is a bunch of grammar rules, your students are probably not getting any better at writing.
This truth is sometimes masked by volume. The best way to get better at writing is to write, and if you have your students writing regularly, that will help– maybe even if you give them lousy feedback. God save us all from the “We only do writing for three weeks in April” approach.

But the basic unit of any piece of writing is not a word or a sentence or a paragraph or a rhetorical technique. The basic unit of writing is an idea.

The vast majority of writing problems are actually thinking problems. If you don’t know what you want to say, you will have a hard time saying it. And in the modern test-centered education era, we have compounded the problem by teaching students that their central question should be “What am I supposed to write for this?”

Not “what do I want to say” or even “what idea could I construct a good essay out of” but “what am I supposed to write.”

That question shifts the foundation of writing to a new skill set– psychic powers. Can you discern what the teacher or the test manufacturer wants you to say? Try to say that. In this model of writing, what should be central to the writing process– the ideas in the student’s head– actually becomes an obstacle– in your search for the essay you’re supposed to write, don’t be distracted by your own individual ideas.

Messing up that first question of writing automatically interfered with the second question– after you know what you want to say, you must next figure out how to say it. But test-centered standardized writing has a required set of “how” before you even get to what. In real writing, however, the “how” flows directly out of the “what.” For emerging writers, we may provide a pre-fab “how,” (looking at you, five paragraph essay) so that they can focus on their “what” and not freak out about how to express it. But once the “how” is coming before the “what,” we’re in trouble, because now we’re not asking “what do I want to say,” but “what could I say to fill in these five paragraphs.”

There is another level to this problem with assigned student writing– finding an answer for the student whose answer to “what do I want to say” is “I want to say that I don’t care about this topic and have nothing to say about it.” That is where a teacher’s heavy lifting comes in, with discussion and conversation and maybe research and sometimes a song and dance. It can be a hard bridge to build, but that doesn’t change the writing fundamentals-

The center of every piece of writing should be the what, the idea, the thing that the writer wants to say. Any other foundation results in a building that is shaky and unstable, a house in which nothing useful can live.

Posted by Peter Greene

How To Close the Gender Pay Gap in 27 Years – The Catalysts for Change

How To Close the Gender Pay Gap in 27 Years by thecatalystsforchange

By The Aspen Institute on TIME

1. Here’s how to close the gender pay gap — in 27 years.

By Kathryn Vasel in CNN

2. We can end child marriage. This is how.

By Sajeda Amin, M Niaz Asadullah, Sara Hossain, and Zaki Wahhaj in Project Syndicate

3. Once this chatbot helped people beat parking fines. Now it’s helping refugees seek asylum.

By Elena Cresci in the Guardian…

Read the rest here: How To Close the Gender Pay Gap in 27 Years – The Catalysts for Change