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Striking Teachers Beat Back Neoliberalism’s War on Public Schools

Henry Giroux

Dr. Henry Giroux

Thousands of teachers and students are walking out of schools, marching in the streets, and raising their hands and signs in protest against the war on education. Most recently, South Carolina has joined the wave of teachers’ protests and strikes taking place across the nation. In the age of illiberal democracy and the growing fascism of the Trump administration, the unimaginable has once again become imaginable as teachers inspired and energized by a dynamic willingness to fight for their rights and the rights of their students are exercising bold expressions of political power. The power of collective resistance is being mounted in full force against a neoliberal logic that unabashedly insists that the rule of the market is more important than the needs of teachers, students, young people, the poor and those deemed disposable by those with power in our society. Teachers are tired of being relentless victims of a casino capitalism in which they and their students are treated with little respect, dignity and value. They have had enough with corrupt politicians, hedge fund managers and civically illiterate pundits seduced by the power of the corporate and political demagogues who are waging a war on critical teaching, critical pedagogy and the creativity and autonomy of classroom teachers.

Since the 1980s, an extreme form of capitalism — or what in the current moment I want to call neoliberal fascism — has waged a war against public education and all vestiges of the common good and social contract. In addition, this is a war rooted in class and gender discrimination — one that deskills teachers, exploits their labor and bears down particularly hard on women, who make up a dominant segment of the teaching force. In doing so, it not only undermines schooling as a public good, but also weaponizes and weakens the formative cultures, values and social relations that enable schools to create the conditions for students to become critical and engaged citizens.

Schools have been underfunded, increasingly privatized and turned into testing factories that deliver poor students of color to the violence of the school-to-prison pipeline. Moreover, they have also been restructured in order to weaken unions, subject teachers to horrendous working conditions and expose students to overcrowded classrooms. In some cases, the dire working environment and dilapidated conditions of schools and classrooms appear incomprehensible in the richest nation in the world. For instance, as South Carolina teachers go on strike, Hiram Lee reports:

The average salary stands at $10,000 below the national average, while the minimum starting salary is only $30,113 a year…. Working conditions are extremely poor. [In one instance] raw sewage mixed with worms and insects flowed into the hallways of Ridgeland Elementary in Jasper County, where it was tracked into classrooms by students. In other schools, holes in the floors of some classrooms allowed students to see into the classrooms below them. Teachers used old rags and sandbags to prevent a flood of rainwater coming in through cracks in the walls. Libraries were filled with shockingly few books, and those on hand were so outdated that one teacher recalled finding a book that predicted, «One day man will land on the moon.»

What the South Carolina mobilization and the other teacher walkouts across the nation suggest is that these expressions of collective resistance are about both the survival of democracy in Trump’s America and a challenge to the commanding institutions and organizing ideals and principles that make it possible.

The Reclamation of Education as a Public Good

Fortunately, teachers, students, progressive social movements and others are rising up, refusing to be written out of the script of a potentially radical democracy.

Yet, what has often been lost on those who have courageously charted this growing assault on democracy is perhaps its most debilitating legacy: the long-standing and mutually reinforcing attacks on both public education and young people. Such attacks are not new; rather, they have simply intensified under the Trump administration. As a war culture has started organizing all aspects of society, schools have transformed into zones of economic and political abandonment. Increasingly modeled after prisons, schools have become subject to pedagogies of oppression and purged of the experiences, values and creativity necessary for students to expand and deepen their knowledge, values and imagination. Moreover, as state and corporate violence engulfs the entire society, schools have been subject to forms of extreme violence that in the past existed exclusively outside of their doors. Under such circumstances, youth are increasingly viewed as suspects and are targeted both by a gun culture that places profits above student lives and by a neoliberal machinery of cruelty, misery and violence dedicated to widespread educational failure. Instead of imbibing students with a sense of ethical and social responsibility while preparing them for a life of social and economic mobility, public schools have been converted into high-tech security spheres whose defining principles are fear, uncertainty and anxiety. In this view, a corporate vision of the US has reduced the culture of schooling to the culture of business and an armed camp, and in doing so, imposed a real and symbolic threat of violence on schools, teachers and students. As such, thinking has become the enemy of freedom, and profits have become more important than human lives.

Today’s teachers and students are facing not only a crisis of schooling but also a crisis of education.

Public schools are at the center of the manufactured breakdown of the fabric of everyday life. They are under attack not because they are failing, but because they are public — a reminder of the centrality of the role they play in making good on the claim that critically literate citizens are indispensable to a vibrant democracy. Moreover, they symbolize the centrality of education as a right and public good whose mission is to enable young people to exercise those modes of leadership and governance in which «they can become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.»

Rejecting the idea that education is a commodity to be bought and sold, teachers and students across the country are reclaiming education as a public good and a human right, a protective space that should be free of violence, and open to critical teaching and learning. Not only is it a place to think, engage in critical dialogue, encourage human potential and contribute to the vibrancy of a democratic polity, it is also a place in which the social flourishes, in that students and teachers learn to think and act together.

Under the current era of neoliberal fascism, education is especially dangerous when it does the bridging work between schools and the wider society, between the self and others, and allows students to translate private troubles into broader systemic considerations. Schools are dangerous because they exemplify Richard J. Bernstein’s idea in The Abuse of Evil that «democracy is ‘a way of life,’ an ethical ideal that demands active and constant attention. And if we fail to work at creating and re-creating democracy, there is no guarantee that it will survive.»

How the Current Crisis in Education Emerged

Insisting on the right to teach, the right to learn and the right to view schools as a valued public good historically have been radical acts. How did we get to this present moment? Under the regime of neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the tax revolt of the 1970s, and the increasing attack on the social contract and welfare state imposed new burdens on public education at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries.

Schools were increasingly underfunded as inner cities descended into poverty, class sizes increased, poor students dropped out, and schools became more segregated by class and race. Teachers were increasingly deskilled and lost control over the conditions of their labor as lifeless accountability schemes and mind-numbing testing regimes were passed off as reform initiatives under the Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations.

Once the teachers realized that the terrible conditions under which they worked were commonplace they were ready to act regardless of whether they had the support of their unions.

These reforms, while allegedly appealing to educational ideals, especially the assumption that they would help economically underprivileged students, did just the opposite and turned schools largely into imagination-crushing citadels of boredom and conformity. President Bush’s educational policy, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which did a great deal to leave many children behind, was followed by Obama’s policy titled Race to the Top. Unfortunately, Obama simply provided more of the same dead-end approaches to education that had damaged public education for decades.

What is different under the Trump administration is that today’s teachers and students are facing not only a crisis of schooling but also a crisis of education. Trump is upfront in stating without apology that he loves both the uneducated and being uneducated. Not only does he disparage any display of critical intelligence — whether in the critical media, courts or online culture — he has made it clear with his education secretary choice, Betsy DeVos, the billionaire and utterly clueless charter school advocate, that he holds the very notion of public education as a crucial democratic public sphere in low regard.

In a meeting with 2018 teachers of the year, DeVos stuck to her anti-public school, anti-teacher script by stating that she hoped that teachers «would take their disagreements and solve them not at the expense of kids and their opportunity to go to school and learn.» In part, this is code for a broader narrative in which conservatives and liberals for years have been blaming teachers exclusively for students who drop out of school, end up in the criminal legal system, perform poorly academically and distrust authority, among other issues. As if such failures are entirely the fault of teachers, regardless of the defunding of schools, the rise of overcrowded classrooms, the increase in widespread poverty, the starving of the public sector, accelerated attacks on public servants, the transformation of cities into ghost towns, the smashing of teacher unions and the creation of labor conditions for teachers that are nothing short of deplorable. No surprises here. DeVos appears to have a penchant for reaching for the low-hanging rhetorical fruit when it comes to commenting on public schools, teachers and students.

The ideological assault against public schools, teachers and students is now in full force thanks to an alliance among big corporations, billionaires such as the Koch brothers, conservative foundations, business lobbying groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Trump administration. This alliance seeks to privatize public schools, increase tax breaks for the rich (depriving schools of essential revenue), substitute privately run charter schools for public schools, support voucher programs, cut public services, endorse online instruction and redefine public schools around issues of safety and security, further situating them as armed camps and extensions of the criminal legal system. The question here is why corporations, politicians, hedge fund managers and a horde of billionaires want to destroy public education and inflict irreparable harm on millions of children.

Gordon Lafer, a professor at the University of Oregon, has argued in his book, The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time that the US is a country in decline, characterized by a rise in economic inequality, families unable to support themselves, increased hardships for workers, the decline of social provisions, the evisceration of public goods, restricted voter rights, lowered employment standards, an ongoing attack on social safety nets and a dwindling middle-class. Lafer believes that the war on schools is rooted in a terrifying set of neoliberal policies and that big business is determined to dismantle public education. He argues that

big corporations are … worried … about how to protect themselves from the masses as they engineer rising economic inequality [and] they try to avoid a populist backlash … by lowering everybody’s expectations of what we have a right to demand as citizens…. When you think about what Americans think we have a right to, just by living here, it’s really pretty little. Most people don’t think you have a right to healthcare or a house. You don’t necessarily have a right to food and water. But people think you have a right to have your kids get a decent education.

Teachers Fight Back

Against the current frontal assault on public education and the rights of teachers and students, a new wave of opposition has developed around the nation’s schools that has provoked the public imagination and mobilized mass numbers of students, educators and the public at large. Teachers have been walking out, striking and demonstrating in states across the country. From the initial strike in West Virginia to demonstrations in Colorado, Kentucky, Arizona and North Carolina, and potentially other states including Louisiana, Nevada and South Carolina, teachers are protesting not only low salaries, but also related issues such as, school defunding (prompted by regressive tax measures designed to benefit the rich and corporations), overcrowded classrooms and rising health premiums.

The successful West Virginia strike was especially notable, Kate Aronoff argues, because it was one of the biggest «work actions in recent U.S. history, rebuffing austerity and, at points, even the wishes of their union leaders.» Teachers in West Virginia were under increasing attack by a GOP-controlled legislature and their Republican governor, billionaire coal baron Jim Justice, who colluded to force teachers to pay increasingly higher premiums for their health care, put up with large classes, and endure what Lynn Parramore has described as «increasingly unlivable conditions — including attempts to force them to record private details of their health daily on a wellness app … [while allowing] them no more than an annual 1% raise — effectively a pay cut considering inflation — in a state where teacher salaries ranked 48th lowest out of 50 states.»  At the end of a nine-day strike, they negotiated a 5 percent pay increase from the state.

Similar strikes followed in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and beyond. While all of these strikes addressed issues specific to their states, they shared a number of issues that revealed a broader attempt to undermine public education. In all of these states, teachers made paltry wages «nearly $13,077 below the nationwide average of $58,353 and well below the nationwide high of New York at $79,152.» Many teachers had to work two or three extra jobs simply to be able to survive. In a number of cases, their pension plans were being weakened. Growing pay inequities stretch across two decades for most teachers as they «are contributing more and more toward health care and retirement costs as their pay falls further behind. Teacher pay (accounting for inflation) actually fell by $30 per week from 1996 to 2015, while pay for other college graduates increased by $124.»

There is a direct line between spending cuts for schools and a decrease in taxes for the rich and big corporations. In Oklahoma, taxes had not been raised since 1990, and in 2010 the Republican governor passed «huge breaks for the oil and gas companies» and in 2015 reduced the tax rate to 2 percent with the «cost to the state … estimated at $300 to $400 million per year.» Schools were shockingly underfunded and the consequences for both teachers and students have been devastating. Eric Blanc observes that:

Since 2008, per-pupil instructional funding has been cut by 28 percent — by far the worst reduction in the whole country. As a result, a fifth of Oklahoma’s school districts have been forced to reduce the school week to four days. Textbooks are scarce and scandalously out of date. Innumerable arts, languages, and sports courses or programs have been eliminated. Class sizes are enormous…. Many of Oklahoma’s 695,000 students are obliged to sit on the floor in class.

Meanwhile, Mike Elk reports that the Oklahoma Education Association released a statement saying: «Over a decade of neglect by the legislature has given our students broken chairs in classrooms, outdated textbooks that are duct-taped together, four-day school weeks, classes that have exploded in size and teachers who have been forced to donate plasma, work multiple jobs and go to food pantries to provide for their families.»

All of the states engaged in wildcat strikes, demonstrations and protests have been subject to similar toxic austerity measures that have come to characterize a neoliberal economy. Once the teachers realized that the terrible conditions under which they worked were commonplace in other schools and states and that many other teachers had reached a boiling point, they were ready to act regardless of whether they had the support of their unions. This was another important thread running through demonstrations. The strikes were not initiated by the leadership in the unions, and when they did act, they were too slow to be consequential. As working conditions for teachers deteriorated and the assault on public schools reached fever pitch, teachers bypassed their unions while using social media to speak to other teachers, communicate across national boundaries and educate a wider public.

The striking teachers hopefully will make clear that there is no contradiction between the struggle for quality public schools and fighting other injustices.

In spite of a number of attacks by conservative politicians such as Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, who stated that teachers were displaying «a thug mentality,» the striking teachers gained broad popular support. It is hard to miss the irony here of the neoliberal apostles of austerity labeling teachers as losers, given that many teachers have extra jobs to support themselves and use their own money to provide books, basic resources and in some cases, even toilet paper for their students. Recent findings by the National Center of Educational Statistics show that 94 percent of teachers pay out of their own pockets for school supplies — such as notebooks, pens and paper — which amounts on average to $480 annually. The real losers are the politicians who defund public schools, deskill teachers, force students to put up with repressive test-taking pedagogies «while whittling away at [teacher] salaries, supplies, tenure arrangements, and other union protections … lengthening teaching hours, [and] reducing vital prep periods.» This is a neoliberal script for the social abandonment of public goods, the termination of the democratic ethos and the precondition for the rise of an American version of fascism. What is particularly promising about these widespread protest movements is that they have the potential to move public consciousness toward a wide-ranging recognition in which the assaults on public schooling will be understood as part of a larger war on schools, on youth, and on the very possibility of teaching and learning, and that these struggles cannot be separated.

The use of the social media by the teachers was particularly effective in getting their message out. Individual teachers talked publicly about having to donate blood, visit food pantries and teach with textbooks that were 10 years old. Images of broken chairs and desks, along with rodents infesting classrooms, and students complaining about books that were held together with tape offered a compelling visual archive of not only dilapidated schools, impoverished classrooms and overburdened students, but also a political system in which Republican governors and legislators were willing to implement economic policies that slashed the taxes of the rich and big corporations at the expense of public schools, teachers and students.

Arizona is another case in point: Not only does it have abysmal teacher pay, it is also a state that lacks collective bargaining rights. Debbie Weingarten offers a succinct summary of the effects of budget cuts on Arizona schools, teachers and students:

During the Recession, the Arizona state legislature cut $1.5 million from public schools, more than any other state, leaving Arizona schools more than $1 billion short of 2008 funding…. Arizona currently ranks 49th in the country for high school teacher pay and 50th for elementary school teacher pay. When adjusted for inflation, teacher wages have declined more than 10 percent since 2001. Per-student spending in Arizona amounts to $7,205, compared with the national average of $11,392. There are currently 3,400 classrooms in Arizona without trained or certified teachers, and the state has over 2,000 teacher vacancies.

Arizona teachers ended their strike after a six-day walkout, and while they did not get everything they demanded, the state gave them a «20 percent raise by 2020 and investing an additional $138 million in schools.» Most importantly, the Arizona teacher strike — along with other strikes and teacher walkouts — proved not only the power of organized labor prompted by the radical initiatives of teachers willing to fight for their rights even if the unions do not support them, but also the growing support of a public unwilling to allow neoliberal fascism destroy all vestiges of the public good, especially schools. As Jane McAlevey observes:

Remarkably, these strikes have garnered overwhelming support from the public, despite years of well-funded attacks on teachers’ unions. In a recent NPR/Ipsos poll, just one in four respondents said they think teachers are paid enough, and three-quarters said teachers have the right to strike. Remarkably, this support cut across party lines. «Two thirds of Republicans, three-quarters of independents and nearly 9 in 10 Democrats» support the teachers’ right to strike, the poll showed.

Protests against the gutting of teacher salaries, pensions and health care benefits are not simply about school budgets. They are also about a larger politics in which big corporations and the financial elite have waged a war on democracy and instituted polices that produce a massive redistribution of wealth upward into the hands of the ruling elite. Energized young people and teachers are creating a new optics for both change and the future.

A Mass Movement to Resist Neoliberalism

The teacher strikes and walkouts point to a grassroots movement that will no longer allow the apostles of neoliberalism, the Republican and Democratic parties, and the financial elite to ruthlessly take apart public education. Implicit in the current walkouts and strikes is the necessity of such groups to learn from each other, share power and work to create a mass-based social movement. This type of social formation is all the more crucial given that no one movement or group organized around singular issues can defeat the prevailing concentrated economic and political forces of casino capitalism. Given the public support the striking teachers have received, it is crucial that such a struggle connect the struggle over schools to a broader struggle that appeals to parents who still view public schooling as one of the few avenues their children have for economic and social mobility. At the same time, it is crucial for the striking teachers to make the case to a larger public that without a quality and accessible public education system, the protective and crucial public spaces provided by a real democracy are endangered and could be lost.

Teachers, young people and others are creating both a new and potentially radical language for politics and educational reform. Given the authoritarian times in which we live, this language is desperately needed by a society facing an impending crisis of memory, agency and democracy. If American society is to offset the deeply anti-democratic populist revolt that has put a fascist government in power in the United States, progressives and others need a new language that connects the crisis of schooling to the crisis of democracy while at the same time rejecting the equation of capitalism and democracy. The attack on public schooling is symptomatic of a more profound crisis that involves the extension of market principles to every facet of power, culture and everyday life. Public schooling is under siege along with the values and social relations that give viable meaning to the common good, economic justice and democracy itself.

Striking teachers have recognized that any radical call for educational reform demands more than a call for salary increases, adequate pensions and school resources. Demands for radical educational reforms also necessitate what Martin Luther King Jr. once called a «revolution of values.»

This would suggest a radical reworking of the language of freedom, autonomy, equality and justice that refused to be articulated with the neoliberal spheres of privatization, consumer culture, deregulation, and a politics of terminal exclusion, disposability and the acceleration of the unwanted. Schools can no longer be viewed as zones of political, economic and social abandonment. The striking teachers across the nation are making clear that everyone has the right to live in both an educated society and a democracy, and that you cannot have one without the other. Hopefully, they can learn from past historical battles while leading the struggle to merge a number of different movements for a radical democracy. One option in doing so is to build support for what Michael Lerner has called developing a global Marshall Plan in order to redistribute wealth, build infrastructures, expand public goods, create the conditions for environmental responsibility, and eliminate the capitalist structural and economic conditions that prevent such movements, policies and investments from taking place.

The striking teachers hopefully will turn a moment into a movement, and in doing so, make clear that there is no contradiction between the struggle for quality public schools and fighting other injustices such as poverty, mass incarceration, unchecked inequality, massive student debt, systemic violence, escalating militarization of society and the war on the planet. Across the nation, teachers, students and other educators have demonstrated that democratic ideals, even under conditions of neoliberal tyranny and a dystopian mode of education, can be recognized, embraced and struggled over. Education is a symptom of a deeper, dangerous and more fundamental crisis that demands analyses and actions aimed at root causes. The brutal neoliberal fascism of the moment can only be defeated if teachers, young people and grassroots activists develop alliances and develop new topographies for addressing the root causes of the current brutal despotism and loss of faith in democratic institutions — that means a strong anti-capitalist movement.

The struggle over public education has ignited new modes of criticism that contain the potential to build a mass movement from the bottom up and translate single-issue demands into wider expectations for social change and alternative visions for a democratically socialist United States. Hopefully, this movement will continue to be guided by the kind of energy and insight that Ursula K. Le Guin once articulated: «We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.»

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/44564-striking-teachers-beat-back-neoliberalism-s-war-on-public-schools

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New Zealand: Decile funding system changes in education will not be successful if made in isolation

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New Zealand/May 29, 2018/Source: https://www.nzherald.co.nz

Education is one of our most critical sectors, and it is hardly surprising, therefore, that education policies and practices are often among the most controversial.

Government ministers want to make their mark on the portfolio, research and other international developments offer continually evolving ways of looking at the way in which we teach and learn, societal changes mean schools increasingly take on a larger role in children’s lives – all of which can mean increased funding pressures and regular changes to systems, processes, learning models, curriculums, and measures of achievement.

Those changes, and increasing immigration and mobility, mean parents have often learnt in different places and ways to their children, which can make understanding new systems and supporting children in their learning difficult, too.

The overall result can be one of confusion and alienation, when parents should be able to rest assured their school is equipping their child with what they need in order to go confidently and competently out into the world.

Various reports over the past decades have highlighted increasing inequality in educational achievement. Alongside that, the egalitarian notion of a free state education is fast becoming a myth, as the cost of the basics, plus «voluntary» donations for all the extras, puts immense pressure on families.

Political parties, unions, school boards, teaching staff, parents and children may have very different ideas about various education policies, yet it seems, when it comes to the latest debate – over the school decile funding system – there is a consensus.

The 20-plus-year-old system was designed to allocate funding and staff to schools according to the socioeconomic demographic of the surrounding area, yet it has had the undesirable effect of being used by parents as a perceived measure of educational standard, leading to distorted rolls, zoning implementations, and the use of terms such as «educational apartheid» and «white flight» as middle-class parents snub local low-decile schools.

The previous National-led Government had planned a new funding system based on the risks of each student underachieving (draft factors included ethnicity, mother’s income and age when she gave birth, and whether the male caregiver was not the biological father), and the new Labour-led coalition Government still plans to adopt the system – although it will make some alterations and has just said it will defer the introduction for a couple of years while it sorts out funding. Education Minister Chris Hipkins is also anxious to ensure the new system does not simply end up transferring stigma from schools to individual children (even though the data to be used will be anonymised) and, in line with this thinking, he has also renamed National’s «risk index» an «equity index».

While change is clearly necessary, care and caution are essential for the sake of stability for the country’s educators and learners. It is vital to ensure there are no unintended negative consequences. It is also timely to examine whether a significant funding boost is required to help the sector cope with the diverse demands on it today.

An egalitarian education system remains an admirable and worthwhile aim, yet achieving that will be impossible in isolation. Until the yawning socio-economic disparities are addressed elsewhere, their effects will inevitably continue to be felt in the classroom – no matter how well-meaning any government or how dedicated the country’s teachers.

Source:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/education/news/article.cfm?c_id=35&objectid=12058502&ref=rss

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Inclusion vs. Mainstreaming: what you need to know before putting your child in a classroom program

Matthew Lynch

BY MATTHEW LYNCH

If your child has a learning disability, there are ways you can be involved and ensure your child continues to receive a proper education based on their needs. Through classroom programs, a teacher may need to differentiate the assignments or the delivery of instruction, to facilitate positive learning experiences for all students. Being aware and responsive also requires the discretion of teachers; disabilities and special education status are private information.

Students with mild disabilities are usually part of a general education classroom, and some may spend short periods of time each day in a resource room receiving specialized education. Inclusion has become a popular choice for students with special needs. With inclusion, the child is fully included in the general education class for the entire day. A special education teacher works with the special needs children in the classroom and brings all necessary resources to the general classroom. Inclusion has its share of naysayers, however, who voice concerns about these programs.

Some teachers of general education classes have concerns, including:
• A lack of support services for students when they are moved into a regular classroom
• Lack of training for even the most experienced teachers to support and work with disabled students
• Limited content and field experiences in teacher education programs focused on learning disabilities
• Limited involvement of regular teachers during creation of the IEP
• Concerns expressed by parents of general education students in the inclusive classroom that their children will not get the attention they need

Inclusion is directed at ensuring that students with disabilities can benefit from the best learning situations possible. Before a change made to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2003, the educational progress of children with disabilities was not tracked. In 2003 NCLB required states to include the achievement scores of 95% of all special education students in their annual progress reports.

So another level of inclusion was instituted: one designed to ensure that special needs students are progressing. States are allowed to include testing accommodations for students with special needs, such as extended test time, one-on-one testing, and helping students to write answers. Students with severe cognitive disabilities are also allowed to take alternative tests. Despite concerns expressed by some teachers about inclusion, evidence suggests that it works.
Teachers have testified to the benefits that their students with disabilities have received in terms of increased performance and comprehension. Before these students participated in testing, they fell by the wayside; there was no way to tell what they were learning or even if they were learning.

Mainstreaming and inclusion are often confused, primarily because they are very similar. But there are some large differences between the two terms, and they represent two different schools of thought. In mainstreaming, students with special needs are placed in the special education classroom and attend a general education classroom for specific academic classes (social studies, reading, etc.) or nonacademic classes (art, physical education, etc.). Supports may or may not be brought into the classroom.

To determine whether mainstreaming or inclusion would be the best possible placement for a special needs student, you should apply the concept of the least restrictive environment (LRE) to the situation. Least restrictive environment is a legal term applied in Public Law 94-142, The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which requires that students with disabilities must be placed in regular classrooms with their nondisabled peers, to the extent that their abilities allow.

When considering which classroom program to implement for your students with learning disabilities remember to assess the classroom and individual special needs of the students. Talk to your child’s teacher and school system to learn more about the specific programs they offer and how you can be involved.

Fuente: http://www.theedadvocate.org/inclusion-vs-mainstreaming-need-know-putting-child-classroom-program/?utm_source=ReviveOldPost&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ReviveOldPost

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Pakistan: Political parties commit to increase education spending to 4pc of GDP

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Pakistan/May 15, 2018/BY HAMID KHAN WAZIR/ Source: https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk

The leadership of almost all major political parties have signed reform agenda called “Charter for Education”, committing to increase the provincial and federal education spending to 4 per cent of the GDP, supported by substantial governance reforms to ensure that the allocated funds are spent effectively and transparently.

The leadership of almost all major political parties made the commitment in a landmark education conference titled Ailaan-e- Amal hosted by education campaign Alif Ailaan here on Monday.

All the parties have committed to ensuring that the agreed charter will be adopted into their respective election manifestos, besides committing to developing a plan of implementation within 100 days of the oath-taking of the future chief ministers after the upcoming elections.

Political parties including Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), National Party (NP), Awami National Party (ANP), Jamat-e- Islami (JI), Qaumi Watan Party (QWP), Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP), Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q), Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-F), PkMAP and BNP-M pledged to go beyond political differences and proceed with national reform agenda for education.

Punjab School Education Minister Rana Mashood, KP Education Minister Muhammad Atif Khan, ANP’s Afrasiab Khattak and Sardar Hussain Babak, PTI’s Chaudhry Muhammad Sarwar and PPP MNA Dr Azra Pechuho among others attended the conference.

The conference discussed improving learning outcomes in schools and delivering on the state’s obligation to provide compulsory and free education for all children between the ages of 5-16 and continue support for the provision of quality education to all Pakistani children. Besides that, all provinces were also asked to commit a minimum of 20 per cent of their budget for education annually.

The conference also agreed on a standard career plan for all recruited teachers and clear distinction between teaching paths and management paths, besides reaffirming merit-based recruitment.

Speaking on the occasion, Chaudhry Muhammad Sarwar stated that in a country like Pakistan, where 23 million children were still out of school, a national emergency must be declared after the general elections. “We will need to set strict targets to get them all in school and get them learning.”

Dr Azra Pechuho was of the view that there is a need for legislation extending beyond the provision of free and compulsory education to legislation on quality, teacher availability and budget utilization.

Punjab School Education Minister Rana Mashhood stated that it was heartening to see that all provincial governments have prioritized education since 2013 and Punjab, specifically, focused on providing quality education.

Speaking on the occasion, Ajmal Khan Wazir said that it was shocking to know that FATA was even not included in the draft despite having many out of school children. He added that the long-deprived area must be included and all political parties should play their part to develop the area.

Source:

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2018/05/14/political-parties-commit-to-increase-education-spending-to-4pc-of-gdp/

 

 

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Germany: Governor remakes Ky. Board of Education

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Germany/By: Ronnie Ellis CNHI Kentucky/ Source: http://www.dailyindependent.com

Hal Heiner, a charter school supporter and critic of the Kentucky Education Association, resigned Monday as Secretary of the Education and Workforce Development Cabinet to accept an appointment to the Kentucky Board of Education.

Gov. Matt Bevin also appointed his former communications director, Amanda Stamper, and five others to the board effectively remaking the board.

The appointments come after a tumultuous General Assembly which drew thousands of teachers to Frankfort protesting changes in their pension system and lobbying for more funding for public schools and a session during which the Republican-controlled legislature declined to provide funding for charter schools which they authorized last year.

Many teachers were still reeling Monday from comments Bevin made last Friday, saying children were likely — he used the word guarantee at one point — subjected to abuse and danger when some school systems closed to allow teachers to travel to Frankfort for the protests.

Stamper, who is now public relations director for Anthem, also commented on the school closings on Friday by posting on her Twitter account that: “Heavy on my heart are the children who’ve been left at home by themselves because their parents can’t afford the extra childcare expense due to school being cancelled.”

The appointments also come against the backdrop of a state audit of the school’s larges public school system in Jefferson County. That audit — prompted by reports of inappropriate restraints of some children and other problems — should be completed soon, according to Education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt.

Heiner has frequently criticized the Jefferson County system. He also was critical of KEA during the 2017 General Assembly during testimony before the education committee on behalf of charter school legislation.

“I am grateful for Sec. Heiner’s skilled and selfless leadership of the Education and Workforce Development Cabinet over these past two and a half years,” Bevin said in a press release announce Heiner’s resignation as cabinet secretary. “He has overseen a pivotal time of transformation as we strengthen Kentucky’s education system and modernize workforce training. I appreciate his willingness to continue serving Kentucky in a less time-intensive but very important role as a member of the state Board of Education. In his new role, I am confident he will work to ensure that every K-12 student in the commonwealth has the best possible opportunity for success.”

Heiner, a former member of the Louisville Metro Council, was one of four Republican contestants in the 2015 Republican gubernatorial primary won by Bevin who subsequently appointed him Secretary of the Education and Workforce Development Cabinet.

In the press release, Heiner said his time as cabinet secretary has been “the highlight of my career,” a time of progress in workforce readiness and education.

“There is, however, work still to be done, and I look forward to focusing my time and energy on students at the elementary and secondary levels as a member of the Board of Education,” Heiner said.

The seven new appointees join the 11-member Kentucky Board of Education who are appointed by the governor. The other five appointed Monday be Bevin are:

• Laura Timberlake of Ashland is chief operating officer for Big Sandy Distribution/Big Sandy Superstores, a furniture store chain. She serves on the boards of Ashland Alliance and Our Lady of Bellefonte Hospital and holds a bachelor’s degree in human resources from Park University.

• Kathy Gornik of Lexington is the retired co-founder and president of Thiel Audio and has served as chairwoman of the Consumer Electronics Association and on the board of the National Science and Technology Education Partnership. She holds a BA degree in education from the University of Dayton.

• Tracey Cusick of Union is mother to 10 children and has served as a parental advisor to the board with a background in home schooling, private and public schools. She holds an associate’s degree in applied science from State University of New York’s Health Science Center in Syracuse.

• Joe Papalia of Louisville is chief executive officer of Munich Welding and Deposition Technology Innovations. He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a non-voting member of the Council on Postsecondary Education.

• Ben Cundiff of Cadiz was initially appointed by Bevin to an unexpired term. He is owner and operator of Cundiff Farms, an attorney and former chairman and CEO of Trigg County Famers Bank. He holds a degree in chemical engineering from Vanderbilt University.

Ronnie Ellis writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com. Follow him on Twitter @cnhifrankfort.

Source:

http://www.dailyindependent.com/news/governor-remakes-ky-board-of-education/article_61106b5c-41a0-11e8-8754-238b72440f96.html

 

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Trump, guns and the warnings of history

Henry Giroux

By. Henry Giroux

The ongoing crisis of democracy has two markers: The erasure of memory and the politics of disposability.

In the age of Donald Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears.

This seems especially true regarding the current cult of violence, guns and domestic terrorism.

Such violence is not only evident in the horrors of early fascist and Nazi regimes, but also in the massacre of Vietnamese infants and children at My Lai , and in the guns turned repeatedly on children in the United States, most recently in Florida.

An estimated 188 shootings have occurred at U.S. schools and universities since 2000. There will be no escape from mass violence in the U.S. until it is placed within a broader historical, economic and political context to address the totality of forces that produce it.

Focusing merely on mass shootings or meaningless gun-control laws does not get to the root of the systemic forces that produce America’s love affair with violence and the ideologies and criminogenic institutions that produce it. Historical and social amnesia in fact facilitates America’s addiction to violence.

This is especially troubling when the “mobilizing passions” of a fascist past now emerge in a stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism that are endlessly circulated at the highest levels of the Trump administration and in powerful conservative media such as Fox News, Breitbart News and conservative talk radio stations.

These right-wing media stalwarts have been joined by newcomers like Clear Channel and Sinclair Broadcast Group.

And so the politics of disposability, in which the well-being of citizens, democratic ideals and the social contract are tossed away, is no longer the discourse of marginalized extremists. It’s now trumpeted daily by the conservative media machine and exists at the highest levels of government.

America is watching and listening, and so too is Trump himself. His tweets often make reference to actual fake news, and not just the stories he labels as such because they fail to fawn over him:

Donald J. Trump

 Thank you to @foxandfriends for the great timeline on all of the failures the Obama Administration had against Russia, including Crimea, Syria and so much more. We are now starting to win again!

The politics of disposability is increasingly evident not so much in rise of mass shootings in the United States but in the fact that they are getting deadlier, especially as they involve the maiming and killing of children.

Seventeen people, most of them teens, are now dead at the hands of a 19-year-old shooter armed with an AR-15 assault rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. They won’t be the last to die. The question is not if, but when, in a society that has turned malignant with violence.

Violence is indeed a cancer metastasizing through American society. The proliferation and sales of guns as both an industry and form of entertainment is at the heart of such violence. The profits from weapons of war and death are now a more important investment than investing in the safety, security and lives of young people.

The logic of disposability and the war culture it legitimates was on display recently as Trump listened to the impassioned testimony of parents and children who have seen their children and friends killed in gun shootings.

President Donald Trump listens to Florida high school students and one of their parents as they issue a plea for tougher gun laws at the White House on Feb. 21, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

He responded by advocating for teachers to be armed and trained to have concealed weapons. Instead of confronting the roots of violence in America, he followed the NRA line of addressing the epidemic of violence, mass shootings and the ongoing carnage with a call for more guns. He normalized the insane logic that mass violence can be met with more violence.

“A teacher would have shot the hell out of the gunman before he knew what happened,” Trump said at the annual CPAC conference.

Trump, who was the recipient of US$30 million in campaign funds from the NRA, channels its head, Wayne LaPierre, who calls for more armed teachers. LaPierre trades in fear-mongering, mistrust and even Cold War rhetoric, calling gun control advocates “socialists.”

Trump and LaPierre have no interest in preventing school shootings. On the contrary, they want to “prepare for shootings” by turning schools into war zones.

This logic is breathtaking in its moral depravity, its refusal to get to the root of the problem and its unwillingness even to advocate for the most minor reforms such as banning assault rifles, making illegal the sale of high-capacity ammunition magazines and expanding background checks.

There are 300 million guns in the United States and since the 2012 mass murder of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, hundreds more children have died of gun violence.

There is no defence for putting the policies of the NRA ahead of the lives of children.

Criminal acts often pass for legislative policies. How else to explain the Florida legislature voting to refuse to even debate outlawing assault weapons while students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School sat in the gallery and watched this wretched and irresponsible act take place?

How else to explain that the U.S. House of Representatives, seemingly reduced to an adjunct of the NRA, voted to pass a law that would allow individuals to carry concealed weapons across state lines?

These are the people who have the blood of thousands on their hands. The power of money in politics has morphed into a form of barbarism in which financial gain and power have become more important than protecting the lives of America’s children.

Children no longer have a safe space in America, a country saturated in violence as a spectacle sport, its citizens routinely brutalized by repeated deadly acts of domestic terrorism followed by the criminal inaction of their elected representatives.

Any defence for the proliferation of guns, especially those designed for war, is, in fact, criminal. It’s political corruption, a government in the hands of the gun lobby, and a country that trades in violence at every turn in order to accrue profits at the expense of the lives of innocent children.

This is how the logic of disposability works. This is how democracies die.

Children have more moral courage

And this debate is not simply about gun violence, it is about the rule of capital and how the architects of violence accrue enough power to turn the machinery of death and destruction into profits while selling violence as a commodity.

Violence is both a source of profits and a cherished national ideal. It is also the defining feature of a toxic masculinity so perfectly personified by Trump, pussy-grabber-in-chief.

Gun reform is no substitute for real justice and the necessary abolition of a death-dealing and cruel economic and political system that is the antithesis of democracy.

What are we to make of a society in which young children have a greater sense of moral courage and social responsibility than the zombie adults who make the laws that fail to invest in and protect the lives of present and future generations?

First step: Expose their lies, make their faces public, use the new media to organize across state lines, and work like hell to vote them out of office in 2018.

Hold these ruthless walking dead responsible and then banish them to the gutter where they belong. At the same time, imagine and fight not for a reform of American society but a restructuring along the lines of a truly democratic order.

Source:

https://theconversation.com/trump-guns-and-the-warnings-of-history-92027

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United States: Study findings aim to improve teacher preparedness strategies

Noticias

United States / March 24, 2018/By: Miranda García/Dailycampus

Resumen: Los hallazgos de un estudio de los Institutos Americanos de Investigación están orientados a mejorar las estrategias de preparación de los docentes y podrían aplicarse a programas de preenseñanza de pregrado y posgrado en todo el país para preparar mejor a las personas que desean convertirse en docentes, Jenny DeMonte y Jane Coggshall de AIR dijo.

 The findings of an American Institutes for Research (AIR) study are geared toward improving strategies for teacher preparedness and could be applied to undergraduate and graduate pre-teaching programs across the country to better prepare people who want to become teachers, Jenny DeMonte and Jane Coggshall of AIR said.

DeMonte and Coggshall said these findings include a push for specific and practice-driven research, which involves targeting a particular issue regarding teacher preparedness and then testing out new strategies in a real classroom. The study also calls for the use of observational feedback from students and researchers in classrooms and a strong emphasis on measurement and data collection to allow for repetition of successful practices.

“The report validates what the Neag faculty already have been doing.

— Dr. Suzanne Wilson

The findings of this large-scale study are consistent with other teacher preparedness studies across the country, Dr. Suzanne Wilson, Neag Endowed Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Connecticut and Chair of Curriculum and Instruction in the Neag School, said in an email.

“Teacher preparedness has been the focus of a great deal of (at times) impassioned debate in the last thirty years,” Wilson said. “The teacher workforce is the largest profession in the U.S.; preparing close to four million teachers to be high quality is challenging.”

The study involved participants from schools across the country, including Northern Arizona University, Indiana University and Drexel University, to bring together strategies on the usually divided topic of teacher preparedness approaches, DeMonte and Coggshall said.

“As one of our country’s most important social institutions, schools – and teachers – are a site for debate about U.S. values and priorities, and as a divided public, it is not surprising that we would be divided on the question of how teachers are prepared,” Wilson said. “The conference on which the report is based made a conscientious effort to collect both practitioners and researchers who have interests in teacher education in one place, and to provide structures to support collective work toward common ends, rather than debate.”

The study began in April 2017 when a panel of more than three dozen teacher-educators, school district leaders and researchers came together to plan an investigation into how to better prepare teachers, DeMonte and Coggshall said.

A new research design was utilized in the study in which the participants convened first to plan their investigation, tested their new strategies out in the classroom and then reconvened to discuss their findings, DeMonte and Coggshall said.

Wilson said Neag has already used some of these findings, from studies similar to this one in the past.

“The Neag teacher preparation program has embraced several of the cornerstones of these reforms, including strong partnerships with local schools in which prospective teachers have extensive clinical practice, a focus on high leverage practices and using data in ways that enable nimble and rapid changes when programmatic weaknesses are identified,” Wilson said. “So the report validates what the Neag faculty already have been doing.”

 Fuente: http://dailycampus.com/stories/2018/3/21/study-findings-aim-to-improve-teacher-preparedness-strategies
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