Voices Against Privatizing Public Education

2 weeks ago

Highlands Charter schools should be banned from operating after taking $180 million of taxpayer money that they weren't entitled to and haven't paid back a cent of that money!!! Zero prosecutions, why???? Where is the oversight to shut them down for good?? And Broad alum Jonathan Raymond as the new superintendent. This must stop ASAP!!!!!

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Yuba City Unified denies Highlands charter petition; school turns to Sutter County

www.abc10.com

The adult charter school plans to appeal to the Sutter County Office of Education after Yuba City Unified rejected its petition.

Voices Against Privatizing Public Education

2 weeks ago

www.educationprogress.org/p/were-suing-the-makers-of-i-ready?fbclid=IwY2xjawTmBItwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWV… … See MoreSee Less

We're Suing the Makers of i-Ready

www.educationprogress.org

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Voices Against Privatizing Public Education

3 weeks ago

www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/results-in-common-core-bust-22367198.php … See MoreSee Less

The results are in: Common Core was a bust

www.timesunion.com

SUNY reports that many incoming students are not ready for college math or English. It’s the latest sign that New York’s learning standards need an overhaul.

Voices Against Privatizing Public Education

3 weeks ago

Oakland approved a $105 million teachers deal. One board member’s dual role could threaten it
www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/oakland-teachers-contract-ethics-22371973.php
By Jill Tucker,
Staff Writer
Aug 6, 2026

The Oakland Unified School District Board of Directors voted on a new teachers’ contract earlier this year. Some experts are concerned one of the board members should have abstained from the vote due to a conflict of interest.
The Oakland Unified School District Board of Directors voted on a new teachers’ contract earlier this year. Some experts are concerned one of the board members should have abstained from the vote due to a conflict of interest.
Nathan Weyland/For the S.F. Chronicle

Oakland’s costly teachers contract is on shaky legal ground, according to conflict of interest experts, with a school board member’s ties to the state teachers union threatening the deal — despite millions of dollars in retroactive raises already paid to district educators.
The ethical dilemma concerns Trustee VanCedric Williams, who voted for the $105 million contract in June despite serving on the board of directors of the California Teachers Association, which is financially and politically tied to the deal. He declined to abstain from voting, closed-session meetings and public discussion about the contract.
If Williams violated conflict of interest laws, a court could overturn the board’s decision, effectively voiding the contract.

The legal question adds to the debate generated by the agreement, including whether the district can afford it even as teachers questioned a long delay in getting their retroactive raises.
Williams did not respond to requests for comment.
Some experts are concerned that Oakland Unified School District Board member VanCedric Williams cast a vote despite having an ethical conflict.
Some experts are concerned that Oakland Unified School District Board member VanCedric Williams cast a vote despite having an ethical conflict.
Nathan Weyland/For the S.F. Chronicle
The district and labor leaders agreed to the deal in late February, narrowly avoiding a teacher strike. The union’s members ratified it days later. But district officials sat on it for months, waiting until late June to produce a required cost analysis.
The board voted 5-0, with one abstention, on June 24 to approve the contract, which delayed the retroactive raises until after the start of the new fiscal year on July 1.

Williams, first elected to the school board in 2021, has also voted over the years on other teachers’ union agreements. His current term expires in 2029. He was elected as a CTA director in 2022.
The legal questions surrounding Williams’ vote center on his position as one of 23 directors of the California Teachers Association (CTA), a role that includes overseeing the labor organization’s policies, budget and fiscal health.
Its 310,000 members pay into the CTA’s coffers, their annual fees based on the statewide average teacher salary.
That means, the legal experts said, Williams sits on two boards that can have competing interests.
While public officials in dual roles can bring important expertise that can benefit both institutions, it’s also a red flag that results in “ethical problems waiting to happen,” said Davina Hurt, director of government ethics at the Santa Clara University Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
“Having a foot in both rooms isn’t a problem per se,” she said. “It’s the voting. The conflict lives in having to make a decision.”
The CTA board of directors, which included Williams, was responsible for overseeing the CTA’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign, launched in February 2025 to coordinate contract negotiations of 32 school districts, including Oakland.
The goal was to align the local teachers unions to focus on the same issues, including smaller class sizes, opposition to closures and layoffs, and better pay and benefits. Oakland teachers achieved most of those goals in their contract.
According to the CTA’s February edition of the California Educator magazine, the campaign meant local teachers unions were “maximizing their power, moving from isolated fights to a coordinated campaign.”
That meant Williams was both supporting the CTA’s effort to ensure coordinated wins for local unions and sitting on the other side of the bargaining table as a school board member with a fiduciary duty to serve the public and well-being of the district.
Recusing oneself from discussions and votes when there’s a potential conflict maintains the fairness and transparency of the process, Hurt said.
“The rule of law matters and protecting our institutions is even more important,” she said.
Williams voted for the contract — as well as other agreements in the past with the Oakland teachers union — even after fellow board member Mike Hutchinson questioned whether there was a conflict of interest, especially if Williams was paid in any way by the CTA.
The district’s legal counsel told Hutchinson immediately before the vote that, since Williams was not paid for his CTA role, there was no conflict — a decision reflecting the state’s Political Reform Act, which addresses the need for public officials to abstain from voting if they have a financial interest in the decision.
Violations of those laws are enforced by the Fair Political Practices Commission.
It’s unlikely Williams’ situation would be the subject of an investigation by the commission, said Steve Churchwell, a government affairs and regulatory law attorney.
But those aren’t the only laws that could apply. Public officials need to adhere to common law, which is based on precedents from judicial decisions in court cases and address nonfinancial conflicts of interest, he said.
Those court rulings focus on the appearance of or actual impropriety based on personal or private interest, said Churchwell, a former general counsel for the state commission.
Conflict of interest common law dates to the earliest days of California and continues to the present day, Churchwell said.
A “public officer is impliedly bound to exercise the powers conferred on him with disinterested skill, zeal and diligence and primarily for the benefit of the public,” according to a 1928 ruling. “Actual injury is not the principle the law proceeds on.”
If public officials do not recuse themselves amid competing interests, they risk a challenge in court, with potential penalties for the elected official as well as the nullification of the vote.
“This has that,” Churchwell said of the Oakland contract and Williams’ vote. “You have to give your allegiance to the public agency.”
It doesn’t matter if the individual’s vote was critical to the outcome, he added.
“I would be concerned a judge could invalidate the decision based on common law conflicts of interest,” he said, noting that he advises clients to abstain from voting in such situations to ensure that doesn’t happen. “The risk is so great.”
Common law offers a clear rationale for such court intervention.
“When public officials are influenced in the performance of their public duties by base and improper considerations of personal advantage, they violate their oath of office and vitiate the trust reposed in them,” according to a 1956 precedent. “And the public is injured by being deprived of their loyal and honest services.”
Ultimately, public officials have an ethical imperative to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, Hurt said.
Recusal, she said, provides the public with an assurance that their elected representatives are serving with fairness and transparency while in office. … See MoreSee Less

Oakland approved a $105 million teachers deal. One board member’s dual role could threaten it

www.sfchronicle.com

The ethical dilemma is related to the vote of one school board member who declined to abstain from a vote despite what some consider a conflict of interest.

Voices Against Privatizing Public Education

3 weeks ago

What elementary schools are slowly learning about screens
Technology came to “optimize” education. Young children pay a heavy price.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/03/screens-change-elementary-school-education/
August 3, 2026 at 7:00 a.m. EDTToday at 7:00 a.m. EDT

A photo illustration of a girl with a backpack standing in front of an ipad and on the screen of the ipad is an image of an elementary school. All on blue background.
(Illustration by Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post; iStock)
By Sarah Schneider Kavanagh and Katie A. Danielson
Sarah Schneider Kavanagh is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Katie A. Danielson is an associate professor at the University of Portland School of Education.
What will happen in the 2026 midterms? Sign up for Margin of Victory

Walk into a second-grade classroom today and it may seem like little has changed over the past few decades: Teachers still greet students at the door. Classrooms still have colorful rugs and educational posters on the walls.
But the picture book the children are listening to isn’t being read by the teacher sitting beside them on the rug — it’s playing on an interactive whiteboard. The book itself isn’t even physically in the room. Instead, its pages (with added animations) are projected on a screen while audio narrates the text. Later, children wear headphones while clicking through individualized reading lessons. After lunch, they each complete their own adaptive math activities on Chromebooks instead of gathering at tiny tables to solve problems together.

These changes happened so gradually (and then so suddenly during the pandemic) that many parents don’t realize how different many aspects of elementary school have become. And it all happened with little public debate. Today, nearly 80 percent of school districts issue kindergarteners, first-graders and second-graders devices or allow them to bring them from home.
Screens are no longer occasional classroom tools. They organize the school day. This isn’t simply a story about technology. It’s a story about what happens when the medium through which children learn reshapes learning itself.
Elementary school always taught more than reading and mathematics. Children learned how to wait for someone else’s idea to be expressed before sharing their own, to negotiate disagreements and explain their thinking. This was an essential aspect of growing up, it wasn’t just a nice byproduct of being in a classroom. When the relational aspect of learning is removed, the conditions that allow these skills to grow are also removed.
Developmental psychologists have spent decades showing that children’s thinking matures through interaction with other people, not just through exposure to information. In many classrooms today, however, children learn individually through personalized software designed to maximize efficiency, and the individualized data it generates is shared with the teachers.

These technological changes in elementary classrooms might look like progress. Classrooms are quieter. Adaptive software promises individualized instruction at exactly the right level. To many, these are real benefits. But every decision involves trade-offs.
When stories are delivered through videos instead of being read aloud by the teacher, something changes about storytelling itself. When mathematics becomes a sequence of individual clicks rather than collective problem-solving, children lose opportunities to hear different ways of thinking.

Even if some technologies improve some learning outcomes under some conditions, is this the type of education young Americans need? Do we want classrooms organized by continuous digital engagement? Or do we want schools where children spend substantial portions of the day interacting and creating?
The skills that will matter most in an artificial-intelligence-powered future may be the ones computers can’t cultivate: attention span, curiosity, judgment, empathy and collaboration. Attention span in particular is weakened when schools prioritize constant stimulation over intellectual endurance. As technology becomes more powerful, distinctly human capacities become more valuable, not less.

Norway, a country that gave all students iPads in 2016, has begun reversing course, following a decline in reading scores. Some U.S. school districts and states are doing the same. Adults are realizing that schools that don’t give devices to children in early grades give them experiences they cannot obtain elsewhere.
Children don’t need school to become more like the digital world. They are already immersed in that world for much of the time outside school hours. They need a place designed for other aims, such as conversation instead of consumption and collaboration instead of personalization. That isn’t resisting the future; it’s preparing children to be fully human in it. … See MoreSee Less

Opinion | What elementary schools are slowly learning about screens

www.washingtonpost.com

Technology came to “optimize” education. Young children pay a heavy price.

Voices Against Privatizing Public Education

4 weeks ago

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/27/new-york-school-humanoid-robot-plan-paused?fbclid=IwY2xja… … See MoreSee Less

New York school district halts plan to use humanoid robot amid backlash

www.theguardian.com

Salamanca City Central says it is pausing project with Realbotix as it addresses concerns including data privacy

Voices Against Privatizing Public Education

4 weeks ago

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/25/new-york-humanoid-robot-teachers-school?CMP=fb_gu&utm_med… … See MoreSee Less

‘Really inappropriate’: teachers decry plan for humanoid robot in New York high school

www.theguardian.com

Robot from company that acquired sex doll maker to be introduced in school with large Native American population

Voices Against Privatizing Public Education

1 month ago

CA Teachers Demand That CalSTIRS Dump Israeli Bonds Financing Genocide
youtu.be/SnrloquW4wU
California teachers locals representing 200,000 teachers have called for the California State Teachers Retirement System CalSTIRS to divest their investments in Israeli bonds
financing the genocide in Gaza.
Teachers from throughout the state rallied on July 23, 2026 in Millbrae where the CalSTIRS board was meeting to call on it to divest of the fund's investments.
They rallied across the street next to the SFO airport and then marched over to the
meeting to speak out.
For More Info:
www.calstirsdivest.org
Production Of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net … See MoreSee Less

Labor Media – Labor Media

www.labormedia.net

The Rise of Fascism, Racism & General Strikes laborfest.net/2026/event/the-rise-of-fascism-racism-general-strikes/ July 12 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm PDT The fascist racist agenda to re-segregate t…