Former US Senator Mary Landrieu Works for the Walton Foundation | deutsch29

Former US Senator Mary Landrieu Works for the Walton Foundation | deutsch29:

Former US Senator Mary Landrieu Works for the Walton Foundation

In December 2014, “the last Deep South Democrat in the US Senate,” Senator Mary Landrieu, lost a runoff election to Republican challenger, Bill Cassidy. It was the first time in 138 years that Louisiana did not have a Democrat in the US Senate.

Landrieu had held the Senate seat for 18 years and was particularly influential over the oil and gas industry in her role as chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. However, Landrieu had “become the Beltway”; she no longer kept a residence in Louisiana and and used her parents’ residence to qualify for her latest Louisiana run. It turns out her primary residence is in Washington, DC.

Moreover, from her almost-two-decade Beltway vantage point, Landrieu had become a powerful promoter of charter schools and the test-score-based reform. As National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) CEO Nina Rees wrote in the following excerpt regarding Landrieu’s December 2014 Senate loss:

“A Real Loss for Charter Schools” (Originally entitled, “Sen. Mary Landrieu’s Loss: A Real Blow for Charter Schools”)

The recent defeat of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu by Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy means the Senate is losing one of its strongest supporters of education reform, and of charter schools in particular.

Soon after entering the Senate in 1997, Landrieu joined with Democratic colleagues such as Joseph Lieberman, Evan Bayh and John Breaux to reimagine the federal role in education. Their fundamental objective was granting states more freedom and flexibility in exchange for results, a concept that led to the bipartisan passage of what is now known as the No Child Left Behind Act. Landrieu also seized the mantle of public charter schools like no 

Former US Senator Mary Landrieu Works for the Walton Foundation | deutsch29:

Clinton Turns Against Charters - WSJ

Clinton Turns Against Charters - WSJ:
Clinton Turns Against Charters

Randi Weingarten got what her union’s endorsement paid for.

Hillary Clinton has moved to the left of President Obama on trade, energy, immigration, student loans, health care and entitlements. But even we’re surprised by her latest move, which is to turn against charter schools as an engine of education opportunity.

“Most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation,” Mrs. Clinton said last weekend in South Carolina. She also acknowledged that “for many years now” she has “supported the idea of charter schools,” though “not as a substitute for the public schools.”

Well, as Mrs. Clinton used to appreciate, charter schools are public schools—albeit freed from bureaucracy and union work rules. In her 1996 memoir, “It Takes a Village,” she wrote that “I favor promoting choice among public schools, much as the President’s Charter Schools Initiative encourages.” In 2007 she told a teachers-union conference in New York that “I actually do believe in charter schools.”

Why the sudden change? Her press assistant explained to Politico that “Hillary Clinton looks at the evidence. That’s what she did here.” Sorry, that quote is from Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.6 million-member American Federation of Teachers thatendorsed Mrs. Clinton in July, 16 months before Election Day. The National Education Association followed. Unions loathe charter competition, and Mrs. Clinton is returning the favor of these early endorsements.

If Mrs. Clinton had looked at the evidence, she’d have seen a different story about charters and “the hardest-to-teach kids.” Charters don’t exclude difficult students. Like other public schools, they aren’t allowed to discriminate. Nearly every state requires a random lottery to choose students if there are more applicants than openings. The reason some charters turn away students is that they lack the resources to accommodate every desperate family trapped in a teachers-union compound.

Charters serve some of the most troubled students, including a higher percentage in poverty than all public schools, according to Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes. In urban centers in particular, charters serve mostly minority students and include more who are learning English than do public schools as a whole.

Mrs. Clinton knows these basic facts, so she may be tapping into the recent political Clinton Turns Against Charters - WSJ:

Jersey Jazzman: Charter Schools, An Exchange: Part VI (Final)

Jersey Jazzman: Charter Schools, An Exchange: Part VI (Final):

Charter Schools, An Exchange: Part VI (Final)

This is the last installment of an exchange about charter schools between myself and Dmitri Mehlhorn. 

Part I: Mehlhorn's opener.

Part II: My reply.

Part III: Mehlhorn's response.

Part IV: My second reply.

Part V: Mehlhorn's second response.

Part VI (this post): My final reply.

I hope everyone has found this enlightening. My sincere thanks to Dmitri Mehlhorn for engaging me in this debate.

* * *

In his final installment in this debate, Dmitri Mehlhorn posed five questions to me. Here are my responses.

Q: "Jazzman, why don’t TPS (traditional public schools) test results go down as charters expand?"

A: We don't really know that they don't. But even if they don't, there are other pernicious effects for district schools when charters expand. 

As I explained in Part II, the evidence we have about the effects of charterization on neighboring public district schools is quite limited. The Texas study Mehlhorn cited earlier (Booker et. al, 2008) shows a small positive effect for hosting districts; however, the proliferation rate of charters was quite small. In that study, most districts had well under 5 percent of their students in charters, so it's reasonable to think any "cream skimming" -- the process where charters take only those students who are more likely to thrive under a "no excuses" model -- had only a small influence on the district schools.

What happens when the charter enrollments get up to 40 percent, as they are in

- See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/11/charter-schools-exchange-part-vi-final.html#sthash.MH27JVjh.dpuf

Special Nite Cap: Catch Up on Today's Post 11/11/15

CORPORATE ED REFORM

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YESTERDAY

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Special Nite Cap: Catch Up on Today's Post 11/10/15

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