November 16, 2018

Title IX, Pension Problems, Integration, School Safety Overload, Talking With Teachers, More! (This Post Has Not Been ‘Quietly Edited’)

By Bellwether

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People think of teacher pensions as being an enormous progressive achievement. And at one point most public retirement schemes were. But now they often function in a regressive way and are overdue to be updated for today’s labor market. Chad Aldeman with more.

Lauren Schwartze on stakeholder engagement.

Bellwether interns. 

Newsom hiring education talent. But might be more evidence of a shift away from K-12 toward early ed as a policy emphasis.

A refuge for bullied youth.

This is completely nuts. School safety is important but this is not the way to address it. Most of this money would be better spent on school counselors, just to start.

CAP on school finance litigation.

Standardized tests, not as bad as you heard!

Paul Hill on why we can’t have nice things. Also see this invertebrate nonsense.

There is plenty to criticize about Betsy DeVos’ tenure as Ed Secretary, but assuming her security needs are legitimate – and there is no public evidence there is not – then stuff like this is sort of a clickbait cheap shot. Public officials deserve safety and we’re in a bad place if that’s even debatable.

Speaking of DeVos, her Title IX sexual assault policy idea was unveiled today.

The enrichment gap.

The debate about integration tends to be cast as pro-con along racial lines and if you’re not pro then you’re simply not an ally or worse. But it’s more complicated than that:

“Where North is now is part of a conscious effort to sabotage black education,” [Howard] Fuller says. He acknowledges that there are “well-meaning people in the building … teachers and administrators who have the kids’ best interests at heart.” But he also sees in the school’s decline a long history of white leaders, conservative and liberal, repeatedly asking black families to accept failure for their children.

As racial separation in U.S. schools becomes more pronounced in many places, and as hate crimes against minorities increase in schools and communities and the U.S. president defends white supremacists, Fuller takes issue with other education advocates and black leaders who say racial integration is the solution. “No matter what kind of [integration] plan you come up with, people with money are going to figure out how to take care of their kids,” he says. “What do you do in places like Milwaukee where white people simply aren’t going to opt in?”

Plenty of room for disagreement among people of good intentions, but Fuller is hardly the only African-American leader making this case.

Conversations with teachers. Why did the fish cross the road?

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