The Educated Guess Bricks and clicks: a new hybrid school

The Educated Guess

Bricks and clicks: a new hybrid school

Posted in Uncategorized

There are more than 10,000 traditional public and 800-plus charter schools in California, and there are a handful of virtual or online charter schools, serving primarily home-schooled students.
Soon, there will be a blend of the two: a hybrid school where students will go every day for seminars and labs led by teacher coaches, but will do most of their learning online, at their own pace.
Flex Public Schools, a California nonprofit corporation with ties to K12 Inc., a growing for-profit provider of online education, will open two “bricks and clicks” schools in the Bay Area within the next 15 months.
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By John Fensterwald on May 11th, 2010

Breaking down Meg’s ed numbers

Posted in 2010 elections

Meg Whitman’s gubernatorial campaign never got back to me to explain the candidate’s continued assertion that 40 percent of education dollars are squandered on “administration and overhead.” But a K-12 expert at the Legislative Analyst’s office did pass along a url that’s the likely basis of the claim. Sure enough, it’s in the ed-data section of the Dept. of Education’s website.
So call it up, and let’s go over what it says. Go midway down to “General Fund Expenditures by Activity.” What Whitman is calling money in the classroom is the 50 percent – $26 billion – spent on Instruction (defined as including teacher salaries and benefits, aides and books) and 12 percent on Special Education ($6 billion).
That leaves 38 percent.
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By John Fensterwald on May 11th, 2010

Commercial properties finagle out of property taxes

Posted in Adequacy suit, Revenue and taxes, Student spending

With state funding of K-12 schools stuck on empty for at least several more years, school districts and teachers unions are starting to sound the call for more local authority to raise taxes.
That’s not likely to happen, however, until the Legislature has the fortitude to confront the distortions caused by Proposition 13’s stranglehold on the state’s tax system. A new study by the California Tax Reform Association and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment adds evidence to begin that discussion.
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By John Fensterwald on May 10th, 2010