AG opines: charters must comply with sunshine laws
(Calif.) A new legal opinion from the state’s Department of Justice paves the way for lawmakers to finally impose clear mandates on California charter schools to comply with good governance laws.
After more than a decade of debate and dispute, Attorney General Xavier Becerra issued what might be the most definitive answer to date as to whether charter schools should be allowed to operate outside fundamental protections the public has to records and meetings of virtually all other government bodies.
In short that answer is, no, charters must comply too.
“The Charter Schools Act was intended to give charter schools ‘substantial freedom to achieve academic results free of interference by the public educational bureaucracy,’” the opinion states. “In our view, that goal is entirely consistent with allowing structured public access to the meetings and documents of these public educational institutions.
“Indeed, the Charter Schools Act itself identifies as its constituency community members as well as parents, teachers, and pupils associated with a specific charter school,” Becerra said in the 23-page analysis.
The findings come at a pivotal conjure for charters in California which, until this week, had enjoyed solid support from the state’s chief executives dating back to 1992, when Republican Gov. Pete Wilson signed the charter authorization bill.
After being pummeled by millions of dollars in attack ads during the June primary that was paid for by wealthy charter proponents, Gov. Gavin Newsom is likely to be far less sympathetic.
In the past, efforts to impose open government requirements on charters have either died in committee or drew the governor’s veto.
Tacos for Teachers: GoFundMe's Try to Feed Students, Teachers During Strike
With thousands of Los Angeles teachers threatening to go on strike Thursday, several GoFundMe campaigns have popped up aimed at helping feed both educators and students during the work stoppage.
The strike would impact around 600,000 students, although Los Angeles Unified School District officials said they intend to keep all of their schools open while also serving meals.
The Feed LA Students during Teacher Strike GoFundMe campaign says 68 percent of the students at Thomas Starr King Middle School in Los Feliz are on the free and reduced lunch program, and it is estimated that at least half of all students may not attend school during the strike. The campaign, which appears to be organized by teachers, set out to raise $1,500 to make bagged lunches for families to pick up in front of the school in the morning or at lunchtime, and has already exceeded the goal, with more than $1,675 donated.
"The teachers want to make sure that students have healthy food available to them during this teacher action,'' the campaign's page says.
The Tacos for Teachers GoFundMe campaign wants to raise at least $5,000 to send taco trucks to the picket lines, and has received over $2,600 so far.
"Help support striking Los Angeles teachers and their fight for public education by donating to Tacos for Teachers, the fund that brings taco trucks to the picket lines,'' the campaign's site says.
Privatizing forces have appropriated the language of civil rights and social justice movements, while simultaneously gutting our schools of resources and selling our schools away to corporate-run charter companies.”
– Reclaim Our Schools LA
As noted by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) School Board members in their joint statement dated August 21, 2018, “students and their families will bear the brunt of a strike action.” Many parents of the hundreds of thousands of students who attend District schools are scrambling to make arrangements for their children knowing that if schools remain open, LAUSD lawyers have admitted that “the health and safety of students” would be threatened and a normal academic program will be impossible to maintain. Students who depend on meals delivered by the schools are especially vulnerable as the district has not stated how these programs would be handled if schools are forced to close.
With this massive disruption at the doorstep of the District, our elected leaders have been mostly silent. Board Members seem content to let Superintendent Austin Beutner do their speaking for them. That is, with the exception of Nick Melvoin, who has been eager to express his disdain for people who would actually teach as a profession instead of using the classroom as a bridge to law school. Given Beutner’s lack of experience in education and his desire to CONTINUE READING: Where Do the LAUSD Board Members Stand?
The Serious Implications of the New Report of the Federal Commission on School Safety
On December 18, buried in the pre-holiday news was the release of a report from Betsy DeVos’s Federal Commission on School Safety. This blog reported last week on its most troubling recommendation—the one that was immediately enacted when DeVos’s department rescinded Obama-era guidance designed to reduce racial disparities in school discipline. It is worth exploring more broadly the implications of what was in the Commission’s report.
For the Washington Post, Laura Meckler reported: “President Trump’s Federal Commission on School Safety, formed after a mass shooting at a Florida high school, recommended… that school systems consider arming personnel and advised against increasing the minimum age requirement for gun purchases.”
For Politico, Kimberly Hefling wrote: “A Trump administration school safety panel hardly touched on the role of guns in deadly school shootings in its wrap-up…. But the panel instead encouraged more coordination between schools and law enforcement that could include programs that arm highly trained school personnel. It said local communities should consider incentives that encourage military veterans and those with a law enforcement background to work in schools. It also endorsed the adoption by states of ‘extreme risk protection orders’ designed to temporarily restrict access to firearms by individuals found to be a danger to themselves or others and encouraged Congress to modernize privacy laws.”
Sweetwater Schools Financial Problems Became Political Cudgel
The newly hired Chief Financial Officer of Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD), Jenny Salkeld, discovered a significant problem with the budget she inherited. She presented her findings to the Sweetwater leadership team in early September which forwarded her report onto the County Office of Education (COE). The SUHSD board also called in all bargaining units to suspend contract negotiations and inform them of the budgetary uncertainties. Sensationalism and subterfuge became the new reality in Chula Vista, California.
“On June 25, the school board approved a budget for this school year that assumed the district had spent $328 million in unrestricted funding last school year and had $17 million in reserves going into this school year. In September, Salkeld presented a report showing that the district actually had spent $20 million more than that and started this school year with a negative reserve balance of $4 million.
“On top of spending more than previously estimated, the district received $6 million less in one-time state funding than it had expected.”
After receiving Sweetwater’s alert about the accounting errors, the COE officially disapproved the 2018-19 budget the district had submitted. The reasons for disapproving the budget were the reasons Salkeld had reported. The county’s CONTINUE READING: Sweetwater Schools Financial Problems Became Political Cudgel | tultican
The Network for Public Education welcomes four outstanding leaders to our NPE Board
Network for Public Education President, Diane Ravitch, is proud to announce that four accomplished leaders and supporters of public education have been elected to three year terms on the NPE Board of Directors.
Lavelle Jones was born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey where she attended public schools. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley College and her Juris Doctorate from Seton Hall Law School. She is retired from the New Jersey Bar.
Lavelle worked for Colgate-Palmolive Company where she developed the company’s minority and women-owned business program, created global strategies for professional services and led global teams. The National Network Journal listed Lavelle as one of the most influential black women in business. She was also a two-time recipient of the Harlem YMCA Black Achievers in Industry award.
Since her retirement, Lavelle has applied her skills, as a volunteer, in support of her favorite causes: the well-being of older Americans, the education and safety of children and the preservation of wildlife. She joined AARP as a volunteer in 2007 and currently serves as AARP New Jersey State President. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Allen-Shaw Foundation, a private charity devoted to the education of children in the nation of Jamaica. Since 2014, Lavelle has served NPE as the volunteer national conference coordinator.
Denisha Jones is the Director of Teacher Education and an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Trinity Washington University. Dr. Jones began her career in education as a kindergarten teacher in D.C. after earning her Bachelor of Arts in early childhood education from the University of the District of Columbia. She also worked as a preschool director before spending the last 14 years in teacher education.
Determined to be a more effective advocate in the fight against school privatization, she began law school and graduated with her J.D. in May 2018. She has been a board member and administrator for the Badass Teachers Association (BATs), Inc., and currently, she is the interim Assistant Executive Director for BATs; she is chairwoman of the National Advisory Board for the Public Education Defense Fund and she serves on the advisory board of Defending the Early Years.
Her research interests include developing critical consciousness in pre-service teachers, organizing activist research projects that challenge the privatization of public education, and leveraging the intersection of public policy, social movement lawyering, and critical social justice education to dismantle the neoliberal assault on public education.
James Harvey has served as the executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable since 2007. The Roundtable, an invitational membership organization, is dedicated to progressive leadership in support of just and humane schools.
A native of Ireland, Harvey attended elementary and secondary schools in Ireland and London and completed his high school education at a public school in Pennsylvania. He is the author or co-author of dozens of articles and five books on education and education policy. He served in the Carter administration as an education lobbyist and on the staff of the Committee on Education and Labor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
His doctoral work at Seattle University examined both the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and American school performance in an international context and was published by the Roundtable and the Horace Mann League in 2015 and 2018 as The Iceberg Effect and How High the Bar? He serves on the Steering Committee of the Urban Superintendents Academy sponsored by AASA and Howard University and on the board of the Horace Mann League.
Roxana Marachi is Education Chair of the San José / Silicon Valley NAACP and an Associate Professor of Education at San José State University where she teaches courses in Educational Psychology and Educational Leadership. She received her PhD in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan in 2003, where she studied the impacts of learning environments on student motivation and behavior in schools.
Marachi served as co-chair of the Safe Schools and Communities Subcommittee of the American Educational Research Association from 2009-2012, and is currently investigating research-to-practice gaps in the implementation of policies related to high-stakes testing, privatization, and the technologization of teaching and learning. Marachi was the recipient of the 2015 Justice Award from Californians for Justice and the 2015 Freedom Fighter Award from the San José / Silicon Valley NAACP, and is actively involved in local, state, and national efforts to strengthen and protect public education.
These four outstanding leaders and friends of public schools join Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, Phyllis Bush, Yohuru Williams, Leonie Haimson and Julian Vasquez Heilig as members of the Board of Directors of NPE.
The teachers of Los Angeles are poised to strike for better public schools for their city’s children
It is likely that the teachers of Los Angeles, California represented by UTLA will strike beginning tomorrow. If they do, it will be about more than salaries. Teacher demands include smaller class sizes, as well as more counselors, librarians and nurses in schools. They are demanding funding for community schools and less testing. They are demanding an end to disruptive and humiliating random searches of students in their schools.
You can show your support for the teachers of Los Angeles by wearing red on Thursday, January 10. Take your picture and then post it on social media. The Alliance to Reclaim our Schools, Los Angeles branch (ROSLA), has established a Solidarity Fund. If the teachers do strike tomorrow, you can make a donation here. Funds will be used by ROSLA to raise public awareness and support the strike. The Network for Public Education welcomes four outstanding leaders to our NPE Board - Network For Public Education
