Where Will John King Stand On Student Suspensions?
THIS WEEK: Arne Duncan Business Hero … Gentrification Stops At Schools … Charter School Real Estate Game … Spending For Prisons Not Colleges … Costs Of Child Care Exceed College
TOP STORY
Where Will John King Stand On Student Suspensions?
By Jeff Bryant
“With [US Education Secretary Arne] Duncan we have a leader who makes claims about doing ‘what’s right’ for kids, but who actually never directly oversaw children in an organized education setting … That’s not true for his replacement, [Acting Secretary John] King, who has a track record of teaching in schools and eventually founding and leading a school and overseeing a chain of charter schools. With King, there is ample evidence of how he treats children when he has direct control of them. And it’s not altogether a pretty sight to behold.”
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NEWS AND VIEWS
The Legacy Of Arne Duncan, ‘A Hero In The Education Business’
The Nation
Zoë Carpenter writes, “Outgoing US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proved himself a champion for those who saw a money-making opportunity in America’s beleaguered public school system … Pushing a market-based vision of reform, Duncan oversaw mass school closures and a deepening obsession with standardized tests … Test scores have risen nationally under Duncan’s tenure, but that data is only as strong as your faith in the ability of standardized tests to measure quality of education. It’s hardly surprising that scores have gone up, since schools are now spending considerably more hours and money… drilling students in preparation. But the obsession with data comes at the expense of types of learning … The gulf between what poor and rich school districts are able to offer their students has not closed under Duncan … Though Duncan leveraged federal funding to press states into adopting certain policies … he was far more reluctant to create incentives for state to address these resource inequities or resegregation.”
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When Neighborhoods Gentrify, Why Aren’t Their Public Schools Improving?
The Atlantic
“Gentrification … usually stops at the schoolhouse door. Because newcomers tend to send their kids outside of the local system, often to private or charter schools, gentrification tends to have a neutral or even negative effect on neighborhood schools … A report on underperforming San Francisco public schools … notes that many if not most urban institutions are ‘left to flounder,’ remaining segregated, low-quality ‘Apartheid schools’ … The exceptions … seem to be those that compete with charter and private schools by becoming magnet schools or starting gifted-and-talented programs … Economic and racial integration works: It is what has been shown to help higher-need students without hurting others … The best way to have gentrification help local schools may be to invest in more and larger magnet schools and bring more diverse students into gifted-and-talented programs.”
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Charter-School Movement Grows – For Real-Estate Investors
The Wall Street Journal
“Almost all charter schools are operated by nonprofit organizations. But these groups often rent and buy their buildings from private real-estate developers, and that is creating a new niche asset for some investors … Established players in the business are seeing volume increases on chart school developments … Some states are beginning to make financing tools available to charter schools that had been limited to traditional public schools … reducing their capital costs when acquiring facilities … Critics say charter schools are in danger of cutting costly deals with developers who are more concerned with investment return than educating children.”
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These States Spend More On Prisons Than Colleges
The Washington Post
“State spending on corrections has outpaced funding for public education over the last three decades, with 11 states pouring more money into their prison systems than into public universities … Public higher education is perceived as a flexible budget item and has suffered relative to other state priorities, including corrections. Funding for prisons has grown 141% between 1986 and 2013, but funding has only crept up 5.6% for public colleges and universities … Although states began dialing back their higher education spending a decade ago, the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 led to deeper cuts … Legislatures responded by slashing higher education funding by 23% per student.”
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Hard To Believe: In Most States, Child Care Is Now More Expensive Than College Tuition
Alternet
“The price of child care places it out of reach for millions of families … In 33 states including the District of Columbia, child care is now more expensive than four-year public university tuition … Families with particularly young children have it worst … Child care ranges from 19.3% to 28.7% of total family budgets … The situation is particularly rough for minimum wage workers, especially in the northeast and Washington, DC.’”
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