Tuesday Open Thread

Good story from NPR - How Hydroponic School Gardens Can Cultivate Food Justice, Year-Round

The students provide weekly produce for their cafeteria's salad bar and other dishes. Later that same day, for the first time, Quigley and several of her schoolmates also sold some of their harvest — at a discount from market rates — to community members. It's part of a new weekly "food box" service set up in the school's foyer. Each of 34 customers receive an allotment of fresh produce intended to feed two people for a week.

School-based urban farms are one part of the food justice solution, Easterling says. A 2015 U.S. Department of Agriculture census of about 18,000 public, private and charter school districts found 7,101 gardens based in schools. 

One summer activity you might consider helping your child with - have them write a letter (not a tweet, Instagram or email) to their favorite person.  Politician, artist, author, mayor, neighbor - anyone.  You can generally find a snail mail address.  Many of these people will respond to a hard copy letter as they don't get many of those compared to electronic messages.  This story from the Charles Schultz museum is a good example of what might happen.  I wrote a letter to former President Carter about 10 years ago and he was good enough to write a line on it, sign it and have it sent back to me.

From Politico's Morning Education:

A day after applauding Sen. Bernie Sanders' call to pause charter school expansion, the union voted against making such opposition a condition of its endorsement.

Union members also applauded when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said “no federal funding for charter schools.” See our takeaways from the forum.

Members of the National Education Association, after hosting 10 Democratic presidential candidates at an annual conference, voted against demanding that any 2020 candidates seeking the union's endorsement publicly oppose all charter school expansion.

Another significant development: The nation’s largest labor union, already, is saying it’s open to new members, and they don’t have to be educators. “Community ally” memberships will be open to anyone “interested in advancing the cause of public education” and who supports the NEA mission.

I'll have more to say about this one but it appears most of the candidates are willing to come out against for-profit charter schools.  Candidates who have been solidly for charter schools are Cory Booker and Beto O'Rourke.  I'll have a deeper dive on all their answers to different education questions in a separate post.

Also from Politico:

EDUCATION GROUPS WEIGH IN ON CENSUS DISPUTE: They are pushing back against President Donald Trump’s continued call for a citizenship question on the 2020 census — possibly by executive order — even after the Supreme Court ruled in late June that the administration’s rationale for the move was legally inadequate.

—“However the Administration responds, the [Council of the] Great City Schools will continue to use every resource to block their efforts,” Michael Casserly, the group’s executive director, said in a Sunday statement to POLITICO.

— The National School Boards Association’s chief legal officer, Francisco M. Negrón, Jr., told POLITICO in a Sunday statement: "Given the widespread adverse impact such a question will have on our children, we urge the administration to refrain from extraordinary executive measures that circumvent the necessary judicial review preserved by the Supreme Court."

Good story from the Seattle Times on reading and dyslexia.

Washington teachers lack “a common language and common theory of practice of how to teach reading,” said Aira Jackson, director of English language arts for the state Superintendent of Public Instruction.

A year ago, Washington lawmakers passed a bill that requires districts to screen children for signs of dyslexia. That bill was aimed at helping kids with a specific learning disability. But it will usher in major changes in the way all kids are taught to read in this state, Jackson said.

Washington’s new law specifically calls on teachers to emphasize four reading skills: phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify and manipulate the smallest unit of sound, or phoneme, in a word; phonological awareness, the ability to recognize and work with sounds; letter-sound knowledge, the ability to identify the unique sounds that every letter makes; and rapid automatized naming, the ability to quickly name aloud a series of familiar items.

Screening must start by fall 2021, Jackson said. However, some districts have started early, and others are already changing up their reading curriculum to emphasize phonics.

Elsewhere in the country, that dispute has been settled.

What's on your mind?