The fog around early March meetings dealing with the Equity Audit lifted a bit: the district released the recording of the Board meeting on March 8. The recording is still incomplete, but it has sound (so generous)! There exists also, somewhere in the ether, a recording of the preceding Equity Task Force meeting on March […]
disruptors’ dilemma Read More »
This is a guest post: a lightly edited letter that was emailed to the Board of Education of the Urbana School District 116 on 3.8.22 by Ruth In several meetings, members of the Board and the Equity task force discussed the importance of qualitative data in the equity audits. The members talked about how information
letter to the board (3.8) Read More »
The whole Equity Audit saga is descending deeper into Veep territory. We last wrote about it a month ago, when a group of Urbana School District employees cast as the Equity Task Force (assisted by a parent or two) announced that they needed to carefully rethink the inscrutable problem of the Equity Audit provider. The
Past week saw a lot of action on the equity audit front. First, the Board of Education of Urbana School District 116 met on 2.1 to examine, inter alia, two new contenders to provide this critical service to the district. That was followed by the meeting of the Equity Task Force, on 2.3, to discuss
the latest Politburo news Read More »
If you interested in a model of what is going on with all these equity audits in Urbana School District 116, here’s one. Imagine a group of social manipulators aiming to address a need: a thing that the schemers pretend they can deliver. They start with claiming that the thing, – no, the Thing, –
Emperor’s New Audit Read More »
The Board is moving ahead with their equity audit process: USD116’s DEI Director Dr. Caffey selected two more players, Educational Innovations and Solutions and The Equity Imperative – to add to the mix. We didn’t have time for a deep investigation (thanks to the district tortured maneuvering – the sad story of which is related
more board meetings: SEE LLC got competition Read More »
Finally we found out what the USD116 administrators care about. In the beginning we were just trying to talk to them about closing the performance gap, about finding the weak spots in addressing illiteracy, about principled resource optimization… they didn’t reply to our emails, as if we didn’t exist. But as soon as we touched
board of education meeting and a bit of foia Read More »
This thread of posts was triggered by the investigation of (as we discovered, quite opportunistic and useless) “equity audits” providers that Urbana School District 116 (USD116) was planning to hire. As is common, the research forced us to consider the broader context, in particular to study comparative performance of three school districts in metro areas
systems of inequalities Read More »
The initiative by Urbana School District 116 to retain a questionable company, Systemic Educational Equity LLC (further, SEE LLC) which we described in the previous post stalled, for now. (TL;DR: the company sells lazy copy-paste concoctions called Equity Audits, to school districts eager to put Paid in the rubric scoring their efforts on overcoming educational
educational equity and hegemony Read More »
Urbana, IL is the home of the Illinois premier public university, a famed powerhouse of research and education. Yet, the town itself struggles to teach its kids to read, write, analyze. By any educational metric, the school district, USD116, is lagging compared to demographically or economically similar districts in the state. And the disadvantaged kids
systemic educational equity and predatory capitalism Read More »