***UPDATE SEA & SPS have reached a tentative agreement*** Seattle Teachers Poised to Strike Draw Solidarity from Their Brothers and Sisters In Puerto Rico - Progressive.org

Seattle Teachers Poised to Strike Draw Solidarity from Their Brothers and Sisters In Puerto Rico - Progressive.org

***UPDATE SEA & SPS have reached a tentative agreement***

SPS and SEA Negotiations 2018 - Seattle Public Schools - http://www.seattleschools.org/district/calendars/news/what_s_new/sps_and_sea_negotiations_2018

Seattle Teachers Poised to Strike Draw Solidarity from Their Brothers and Sisters In Puerto Rico
To prepare for what we are likely to face in our struggle for a just contract, Seattle educators recently organized a panel that included a representative from the Puerto Rico Federation of Teachers.

Seattle teachers and staff have authorized a strike unless negotiations with Seattle Public Schools don’t result in a tentative contract by the first day of school, September 5. Our vote to strike is part of a unified labor action across Washington to protest the lack of adequate and equitable funding for schools and teachers in this state.

Seattle teachers are hardly alone in the struggle for fair working conditions for educators and better learning conditions for students. The wave of teacher walkouts and protests that swept through West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and other states this spring brought to the fore the need for teachers to receive competitive pay raises and improved learning resources and smaller class sizes.

To prepare for what we are likely to face in our struggle for a just contract, Seattle educators recently organized a panel that included a representative from a community of educators that’s been hit hardest by financial austerity and the privatization movement: Mercedes Martinez, president of the Puerto Rico Federation of Teachers.

These teachers have been leading courageous struggles not only for their own pay, but to defend public education and create the schools Puerto Rican students deserve.

Their fight has escalated since the devastation of Hurricane Maria brought disaster capitalists flocking to the island in an effort to profit off the island’s vulnerability.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, Julia Keleher, Puerto Rico’s secretary of education, echoed former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s comment that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans schools. She called New Orleans a “point of reference” for the reorganization of schools in Puerto Rico into charter schools, and an “opportunity” to remake education according to a vision of outsiders.

Using what Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine” playbook for privatizing Continue reading: Seattle Teachers Poised to Strike Draw Solidarity from Their Brothers and Sisters In Puerto Rico - Progressive.org

Connecting School Quality Dots: Money, Race, Suspension, and Safety Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog

Connecting School Quality Dots: Money, Race, Suspension, and Safety

School quality and school discipline are intertwined.  As I explain in Reforming School Discipline, "[s]ocial science increasingly demonstrates that while student misbehavior is a function of individual choices that students make, individual student misbehavior is also a function of the school environment in which they learn and act. Quality schools and orderly environments consistently produce higher student achievement and less misbehavior. Low quality schools with disorderly, hostile, and punitive environments produce lower student achievement and higher rates of suspension and expulsion."  And as Bruce Baker, Kirabo Jackson, and official government reports establish, there is a direct link between school funding and school quality and student outcomes.

If we take these two basic insights about money and school discipline and throw some basic data points together, a pretty stark image emerges. This week, the ACLU and UCLA Civil Rights Project issued a new report on race, discipline, and school safety that gave me the tools to do just that.  They issued heat maps that show on a district-by-district basis how many students are suspended, whether there is a shortage of school counselors.  And earlier this year, Bruce Baker and his colleagues issued a report that measured school spending levels against what it would take for students in each district to achieve at average levels.

Side by side these maps nearly look like mirror images, even though they are measuring two seemingly different things.

The bright spots in the image on the left show districts with high rates of school suspension.  The yellow, orange and red spots in the image on the right show districts that are the most underfunded.  The dark blue on the left image and the green on the right image show the other end of the spectrum--schools with low discipline rates and high funding levels.  There are, of course, exceptions.  Texas, for instance, has a serious school funding problem, but relatively low discipline rates.  Although you can still see that within Texas, there are discipline problems in the southern and eastern part of the state, where underfunding is also a problem.

Trying to draw an even more vivid picture, this morning I decided to do it the new, old-fashioned way--cutting and Continue reading: Education Law Prof Blog