REALLY CHARTER SCHOOL BOUNTY HUNTERS: Arizona charter school paying publicly funded commission to poach students

Arizona charter school paying publicly funded commission to poach students

Why are charter schools paying a bounty (with public funds) to get students?

Opinion: An Arizona charter school is paying a finder’s fee for delivering a student – and the thousands of dollars in public funding that go with that child -- to its door. This, with your money.

It’s bad enough that the No. 2 guy at the Arizona Charter Schools Association is using his position to throw business to the company he co-owns with his wife.

Bad enough that some charter school operators are getting rich by “winning” lucrative contracts for services that never are put out to bid.

Now, we learn that at least one charter school is treating kids like shoes.

Just as a department store shoe salesman earns a commission if he can sell you a pair of loafers, at least one consultant is earning a commission if she can sell parents on enrolling their child in a certain charter school.

A commission paid for with your money.

It seems our kids are no longer just students to be educated, they're commodities to be sold. Valuable ones, for which at least one charter school will pay a finder’s fee for delivering a kid – and the thousands of dollars in public funding that go with that child -- to its door.

The Republic's Craig Harris reported this week that Self Development Academy is paying $550 a head for kids. The central Phoenix charter school  actually has a contract with a "student recruiter", Paola Leyton Salas, who runs Enrollment Experts.

Last week, when another charter school closed due to low enrollment, Arizona Charter Schools Association Chief Operating Officer Robert Di Bacco contacted the closing school to get contact information for its 32 displaced students.

He then passed along that information to Leyton Salas, the recuiter, who also happens Continue reading: Arizona charter school paying publicly funded commission to poach students

For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment - POLITICO Magazine

For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment - POLITICO Magazine

For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten says that union members haven’t just cooled on Trump—they’ve turned on him.

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Randi Weingarten says there’s an upside of being a year and a half into the most anti-organized labor administration in modern history and just two months removed a Supreme Court decision which socked union power and finances: clarity.

Union leaders and members now “know who the bad guys are,” says Weingarten, the longtime head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — President Donald Trump and the five justices who signed on to the court’s Janus decision in June.

Early on, Trump’s support among organized labor was at astronomical levels for a modern-day Republican, with November 2016 exit polls showing him with the support of more than 40 percent of union households. A March 2017 Reuters-Ipsos poll gave him a 62 percent approval rating among union members, but by spring 2018, it had dropped to 47 percent. The union members who ruled out voting for Hillary Clinton don’t appear to be sticking around as the president actually moves forward on his trade war and economic agenda.

The combination of an antagonistic administration and hostile high court has driven union members to the barricades, Weingarten says. And though she acknowledges that the AFT and its allies may now be in a fight for their existence, at least they’re in the fight.

To Weingarten, that’s a key difference between now and the past 20 years, which labor leaders spent distracted from the basics of organizing and engaging members while instead focused on incremental fights that were harder to activate around. The result was unions that either atrophied or saw their members drift toward the politics like Trump’s.

She hates that Trump is president, but she clings to the silver lining.

“We’re seeing, in terms of our membership, that things are holding because people are talking about values, and they’re engaged with each other,” Weingarten told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “But we’re also seeing huge activism against this kind of cruelty that you see from the Trump administration, against the kind of faux populism.”

Weingarten’s proof is in last week’s lopsided defeat of Missouri’s proposed “Right to Work” law in a statewide referendum. Pushed too far, she says, unions, union members and union supporters have started to actually fight back — even in a state under heavy Republican control, and where Sen. Claire McCaskill is a top GOP target for defeat.

Weingarten is a committed Democrat, so deeply involved in the party that she was seriously considered for the appointment to Clinton’s New York Senate seat in 2009. Still, she says the opposition to Trump has moved far beyond the usual partisanship, and other labor leaders —including AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who earlier this month floated an Continue reading: For Unions, A ‘Which Side Are You On’ Moment - POLITICO Magazine

The invisible signs to look for on the first day of school - The Hechinger Report

The invisible signs to look for on the first day of school - The Hechinger Report

The invisible signs to look for on the first day of school
Hunger and homelessness hamper kids’ ability to learn

Last week, when many students were beginning the new academic year in some public schools in the United States, my family and I took a cruise to Cuba. My 7-year-old-son Roby could barely wait to get off the ship to enjoy the sights and sounds of Havana. This was not his first vacation abroad. In past trips, he had gawked at Big Ben in London, strolled through the United Nations in Geneva and fallen down a set of stair in the Eiffel Tower. (He always tells people, “Daddy let me fall!” to embarrass me.)

After docking in Old Havana, we strolled through the center of town, and the sight of classic automobiles cruising through the streets, carrying photo-happy tourists, delighted Roby. His eyes bounced between the horse-driven carriages, timeworn buildings and buskers singing folk songs. He saw women gyrating to the rhythms thumping from a standing bass and congas, reminiscent of the dancing he knew from his hometown of New Orleans.

Then something else caught his eye: the signs of poverty all around us. There were the feral cats that sat at our feet in restaurants, panhandlers on the roads, and ragged clothing worn by children at his eye level. At one point, Roby looked up to me and asked plainly, “Is this a poor country?”

Cuba is a communist country, and the government owns all the property and distributes goods and services meant to maintain equity among the populace. Our escort told all of us on tour that everyone had free health care, a good education and a home. “That’s good,” my son responded seriously.

Related: LeBron is dishing out assists to a local school district in Ohio

As we begin the school year, let’s not ignore the signs of poverty in the United States. Some families can afford to spend their August on vacation, learning from new places. Travel is an excellent teacher. However, there will be some children who will need to start school, not to get a better education, but to have a nutritious meal and shelter during the day. Many of those students will enter the school year with obvious signs of poverty: old, dirty uniforms, worn-down shoes and teeth that need a dentist’s chair. But we should not ignore the things we can’t see: low-quality health care, persistent hunger and housing insecurity.

When I look at public schools in the U.S., like my son, I ask, “Is this a poor country?”

The United States Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as a household condition of low or limited access to sufficient amounts of food, resulting in hunger. According to a 2016 report by the No Kid Hungry campaign, run by the nonprofit Share Our Continue Reading: The invisible signs to look for on the first day of school - The Hechinger Report