BREAKING NEWS: Ref Rodriguez pleads guilty to conspiracy and resigns from L.A. school board

Ref Rodriguez pleads guilty to conspiracy and resigns from L.A. school board

Ref Rodriguez pleads guilty to conspiracy and resigns from L.A. school board

Dogged by accusations of political money laundering, Los Angeles school board member Ref Rodriguez pleaded guilty Monday to a felony count of conspiracy and resigned from office.

Rodriguez, 47, who had no previous criminal record, will avoid jail time. Instead, he will get three years’ probation and 60 days of community service. His resignation was effective immediately.

As part of an agreement with prosecutors, Rodriguez also pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts of assumed-name contribution.

Rodriguez had faced three felony charges and 25 misdemeanor counts and could have received several years in prison if convicted.

The deal ends a strange and stormy saga for Rodriguez, a widely admired educator who became the first charter school executive elected to the governing board of the nation’s second-largest school system.

Just over a year ago, Rodriguez was selected school board president by a narrow 4-to-3 margin, which included Rodriguez’s vote on the seven-member Board of Education. He became board president as a result of a first-ever majority elected with substantial financial support from charter school backers.

Charter schools are independently operated and compete with L.A. Unified for students — and for the government funds that follow them. Los Angeles has more charters and more charter students — about 18% of district enrollment — than any other school system.

Many charter enthusiasts had long believed that the district treated their schools unfairly in terms of sharing campuses and other resources. They saw the rise of Rodriguez as the herald of a new day.

But the campaign finance problems surfaced within months of his becoming board president. Rodriguez had known about the investigation for as long as two years but had kept the Continue reading: Ref Rodriguez pleads guilty to conspiracy and resigns from L.A. school board

Will He Still Be Running His Charter School?

Big Education Ape: OMG: CCSA's Ref Rodriguez's PUC Lakeview Charter Academy Audit - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2015/04/ccsas-ref-rodriguezs-puc-lakeview.html

End of Public Schools in Milwaukee? | tultican

End of Public Schools in Milwaukee? | tultican

End of Public Schools in Milwaukee?

This past school year, Wisconsin taxpayers sent $250,000,000 to religious schools. Catholics received the largest slice, but protestants, evangelicals and Jews got their cuts. Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) reveals that private Islamic schools took in $6,350,000. Of the 212 schools collecting voucher money, 197 were religious schools.

The Wisconsin voucher program was expanded before the 2014-2015 school year. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “Seventy-five percent of eligible students who applied for taxpayer-funded subsidies to attend private and religious schools this fall in the statewide voucher program already attend private schools, ….”

Money taken from the public schools attended by the vast majority of Milwaukee’s students is sent to private religious schools. Public schools must adjust for stranded costs while paying to serve a higher percentage of special education students because private schools won’t take them. Forcing public schools to increase class sizes, reduce offerings such as music and lay off staff.

A mounting social division like those faced after the civil war is developing. Katherine Stewart shared that history in her stunning book, The Good News Club:

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, Lutherans as well as Catholics had developed extensive systems of parochial education. For many Protestants, however, the loss of students from those denominations was not a welcome development. It was feared that the combined force of the Lutheran and Catholic electorate would endanger the existence of public education altogether. The tensions between those who wanted universal public education and those who wanted their schools to look like their churches continued to grow. In 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant declared that if a new civil war were to erupt, it would be fought not across the Mason-Dixon Line but at the door of the common schoolhouse. In an 1876 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, he articulated the conclusion many people had already drawn concerning the continuing struggles over religion in the public schools: “Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions,” he said. “Keep the church and state forever separate. With these safeguards I believe the battles which created the Army of Tennessee will not have been fought in vain.” (pages 73-74) (emphasis added)

Privatizing Public Schools Not Achieving Predictions

John E. Chubb was a cofounder of the for-profit Edison Schools and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. Terry M. Moe was a professor of political Continue reading: End of Public Schools in Milwaukee? | tultican

New Study: The Genetics of Staying in School - The Atlantic

New Study: The Genetics of Staying in School - The Atlantic

Why Study the Genetics of Staying in School?

Researchers have found 1,271 gene variants associated with years of formal schooling. That’s important, but not for the obvious reasons.

When scientists publish their research, it’s rare for them to write an accompanying FAQ that explains what they found and what it means. It’s especially rare for that FAQ to be three times longer than the research paper itself. But Daniel Benjamin and his colleagues felt the need to do so, because they work on a topic that is frequently and easily misunderstood: the genetics of education.

Over the past five years, Benjamin has been part of an international team of researchers identifying variations in the human genome that are associated with how many years of education people get. In 2013, after analyzing the DNA of 101,000 people, the team found just three of these genetic variants. In 2016, they identified 71 more after tripling the size of their study.

Now, after scanning the genomes of 1,100,000 people of European descent—one of the largest studies of this kind—they have a much bigger list of 1,271 education-associated genetic variants. The team—which includes Peter Visscher, David Cesarini, James Lee, Robbee Wedow, and Aysu Okbay—also identified hundreds of variants that are associated with math skills and performances on tests of mental abilities.

The team hasn’t discovered “genes for education.” Instead, many of these variants affect genes that are active in the brains of fetuses and newborns. These genes influence the creation of neurons and other brain cells, the chemicals these cells secrete, the way they react to new information, and the way they connect with each other. This biology affects our psychology, which in Continue reading: New Study: The Genetics of Staying in School - The Atlantic