Governor Orders Study on Charter School Impacts – California Educator

Governor Orders Study on Charter School Impacts – California Educator

Governor Orders Study on Charter School Impacts
Newsom working with legislators to improve charter accountability, transparency

In response to growing concerns about unregulated charter schools siphoning public funds away from neighborhood public schools, Gov. Gavin Newsom called for a study on the impacts of charter school growth on local school districts statewide, and announced he is working with the Legislature to improve charter school transparency and accountability.

Newsom asked Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond to convene experts to closely examine how charter schools impact school district budgets and to provide recommendations by July 1. The governor is also working with state legislators to mandate transparency for charter schools to ensure tax dollars spent on education only support schools that are accountable to the public.

“We commend Governor Newsom on asking for this study. It is an important and long overdue step toward holding charter schools accountable,” says CTA President Eric Heins. “California leaders must have an accurate picture of the impact that charter expansion has had on many traditional neighborhood public schools.”

Newsom’s plan to shine a light on unregulated charter schools comes on the heels of the historic United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) strike, which led to the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education’s call last week for a state study of charter impacts and a moratorium on new charter approvals until the study is complete.

The NAACP has also been active in seeking more accountability and transparency for charter schools, adopting a resolution in 2016 calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion until these issues are resolved. The NAACP created a task force to investigate charter schools nationwide, eventually issuing a report that found a “wide range of problems” with charter schools. NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson says many charter schools’ practices are troubling.

“For the NAACP, we have been far more aggressive toward bad public schools then we’ve ever been against charter schools,” Johnson says. “We aren’t going to change our approach because there is a market-driven concept to education. We believe the same for public schools should apply to charter schools.”

For more information about the impact of charter schools on community public schools, visit Kids Not Profits.

Governor Orders Study on Charter School Impacts – California Educator

The Kind Of Policy We Must Never Make Again | Current Affairs

The Kind Of Policy We Must Never Make Again | Current Affairs

THE KIND OF POLICY WE MUST NEVER MAKE AGAIN
“Race To The Top” education funding showed every bad tendency of contemporary liberalism…

Detroit’s public schools suffer from widespread maintenance issues. Facilities need half a billion dollars worth of repairs, which officials admit are simply not going to happen in the short run. Here’s a 2016 description of “appalling” conditions at a local elementary school:

The gym is closed because half of the floor is buckled and the other half suffered so much rainwater damage from the dripping ceiling that it became covered with toxic black mold. Instead of professionally addressing the problem, a black tarp simply was placed over the entire area like a Band-Aid. That area of the school has been condemned. The once beautiful pool sits empty because no one has come to fix it. The playground is off-limits because a geyser of searing hot steam explodes out of the ground. What do our kids do for exercise with no gym, playground or pool? They walk or run in the halls.

It’s with these steam geysers and moldy gyms in mind that we should evaluate the “Race to the Top” (RTT), the Obama administration’s signature education policy initiative. RTT gave $4.3 billion in funding to U.S. schools through a novel mechanism: Instead of giving out the aid based on how much a state’s schools needed it, the Department of Education awarded it through a competition. Applications “were graded on a 500-point scale according to the rigor of the reforms proposed and their compatibility with four administration priorities: developing common standards and assessments; improving teacher training, evaluation, and retention policies; creating better data systems; and adopting preferred school-turnaround strategies.”

Note what the disproportionate focus is here: quantitative measurement and assessment procedures. Race To The Top emphasized teacher evaluations, the introduction of new technology, the collection and sharing of data, and other “innovations” thought to more efficiently produce student achievement. When the administration promoted RTT, assessment and data collection were spoken of first, along with “revising evaluation and compensation policies to encourage effectiveness.” The Obama administration also wanted states to adopt policies favorable to charter schools—Education secretary Arne Duncan said explicitly that “States that do not have public charter laws or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools will jeopardize their applications under the Race to the Top Fund.”

The Race to the Top was an overwhelming success, if success is defined as getting states to adopt the policies the Obama administration wanted. The majority of U.S. states instituted at least some of the reforms RTT rewarded. Ordinarily, it is very CONTINUE READING: The Kind Of Policy We Must Never Make Again | Current Affairs

The LAUSD Superintendent’s Web of Deceit

The LAUSD Superintendent’s Web of Deceit

The LAUSD Superintendent’s Web of Deceit

Test Two may be more daunting — namely, explaining why [Austin Beutner] put a scandal-plagued and #MeToo-accused former State Assemblymember on the district payroll as a lobbyist.

-Bill Raden, Capital & Main

Instead of meeting with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) in the days leading up to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) strike, Superintendent Austin Beutner and Board President Monica Garcia were in Sacramento in an effort to “drum up lawmaker opposition to the teachers strike.” They were accompanied on this trip by Sebastian Ridley-Thomas (SRT), the son of “powerful L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas (MRT)”. While not publicly disclosed at the time, SRT was there as a paid lobbyist for the District.

As if a District pleading poverty while paying a lobbyist during labor negotiations was not bad enough, the choice of SRT is particularly bewildering. It appears that, under Government Code §87406, the former Assemblyman was legally prohibited from lobbying his former colleagues “for one year after the end of the term to which” he was elected, a waiting period that he had not met. The younger Ridley-Thomas resigned from his elected office on December 27, 2017, citing “health reasons.” He “was the subject of two sexual harassment complaints at the time he stepped down”.

SRT was then hired as a professor of social work and public policy by USC despite his not having a graduate degree. Shortly afterward, MRT “made a $100,000 donation from his campaign coffers to the social CONTINUE READING: The LAUSD Superintendent’s Web of Deceit

Policy Makers Need a New Path to Education Reform - The Atlantic

Policy Makers Need a New Path to Education Reform - The Atlantic

I Used to Preach the Gospel of Education Reform. Then I Became the Mayor.
Policy makers need to question their assumptions about what makes a good school.

During my first campaign to be Chicago’s mayor in 2011, I promised to put education reform at the forefront of my agenda. Having participated in Washington policy debates for the better part of two decades, I felt confident I knew what to do. Then, as now, education reformers preached a certain gospel: Hold teachers solely accountable for educational gains. Expand charter schools. Focus relentlessly on high-school graduation rates. This was the recipe for success.

Three years before that, when President-elect Obama tapped me to be his White House chief of staff, I argued that leaders should never let a good crisis go to waste. I was now determined to take my own advice. At the moment of my inauguration, Chicago’s schools were unquestionably in crisis. Our students had the shortest school day in America. Nearly half of Chicago’s kids were not being offered full-day kindergarten, let alone pre-k. Teacher evaluations had not been updated in nearly four decades. During my first months in office, I hit the ground running, determined to change all that. Then, much to my surprise, roughly a year into my reform crusade, circumstance prompted me to begin questioning the wisdom of the gospel itself.

My initial doubts emerged four days into what turned out to be the first Chicago teachers strike in three decades. After a series of arduous negotiations with Karen Lewis, the union president, we’d arrived at the basic contours of an agreement. In return for higher salaries, Lewis accepted my demands to extend the school day by an hour and 15 minutes, tack two extra weeks onto the school year, establish universal full-day kindergarten, and rewrite the outdated evaluations used to keep the city’s educators accountable.

One key issue remained: the autonomy of principals. The question was whether individual principals would have the ability to hire faculty of their own choosing, or whether, as Lewis preferred, principals would have to select from a limited pool maintained downtown with the union’s strong input. Honestly, since I’d gotten everything I really wanted, I was tempted to fold. The reform gospel doesn’t pay much mind to principals. Moreover, the new accountability standards promised to rid the schools of bad teachers.

But while I was preparing to brief reporters assembled at Tarkington Elementary on Chicago’s South Side, Mahalia Ann Hines, a former school principal (who happens to be the artist Common’s mother) pulled me aside. Hines, who holds a doctorate from the University of Illinois, had spent 15 years as a principal, at grade levels from elementary through high school. If we were CONTINUE READING: Policy Makers Need a New Path to Education Reform - The Atlantic

Charter Schools Didn’t Change the World—Now Let’s Move Beyond That Tired Debate

Charter Schools Didn’t Change the World—Now Let’s Move Beyond That Tired Debate

Charter Schools Didn’t Change the World—Now Let’s Move Beyond That Tired Debate
A quarter century later, the verdict is in: Charter schools aren’t the panacea their proponents hoped. Now let’s lay down our arms and help the kids.

The recent LA teachers strike, and the school board’s vote to recommend a moratorium on new charter schools, reignited the a long-standing debate on charter schools—one that seems so dated.

The strike brought back memories of my first experiences with education policy as President of SEIU, America’s largest non-teaching union. It was around 2005. I replaced Sandy Feldman, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, as a judge for the LA-based Broad Foundation prize for urban schools (later I became a board member). Unions promoted education reform—but different kinds. The AFT’s iconic president, Al Shanker, backed “the greatest possible choice among public schools,” while the competitor union, the National Education Association, promoted charter schools’ role in “incubating innovation within the existing public education system.”

A man named Mike Garcia was then the president of the SEIU’s janitors union in Los Angeles. Though he headed a militant immigrants’ union, he became committed to a role for charter schools after learning that his members’ highest priority—after wage increases—was for the union to assist in the educational success of their children.  Janitors’ kids lacked the opportunities of the city’s wealthier parents to move to better-funded or higher-performing school systems, manipulate the public system, or enroll in a private school. Mike went on to serve on the board of union charter operator Green Dot Public Schools. And as a board member, I became familiar with many dedicated charter school missionaries pushing against the status quo to advance their vision of educational excellence and equity.

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  Betsy DeVos’ Charter Schools Sucked Public Schools Dry

  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  Elisha Brown

  
  

  
  
  
  

  

  
  

But now, 25 years since Minnesota passed the country’s first charter school law, I think it is time for a candid evaluation, from both reformers and opponents, of charters’ role in the future of education and 21st century innovation more broadly.

THE MATH IS CLEAR—CHARTERS ARE NOT THE FUTURE

Despite two decades of world-class effort, startup capital for facilities, and massive philanthropic support for curriculum, college prep, leadership development, and technology, along with the support of high-quality talent organizations—Teach for America, The Broad Center, and TNTP, formerly known as the New Teacher Project—today’s charter school report card is the following:

1) The total number of public charter schools is approximately 7,000 out of nearly 100,000 schools. CONTINUE READING: Charter Schools Didn’t Change the World—Now Let’s Move Beyond That Tired Debate

Charter Schools: The Issue is Not Student Scores on High-Stakes Standardized Tests Produced by Big Business | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools: The Issue is Not Student Scores on High-Stakes Standardized Tests Produced by Big Business | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools: The Issue is Not Student Scores on High-Stakes Standardized Tests Produced by Big Business

Charter school supporters and promoters have long been severely obsessed with comparing charter school and public school students’ scores on expensive curriculum-narrowing high-stakes standardized tests produced by big corporations. They fetishize test scores and believe such scores are useful and meaningful in some way, despite what extensive evidence has shown for decades.

One reason charter school supporters and promoters dogmatically fixate on pedagogically meaningless test scores is because they do not want to draw anyattention to the real underlying problem with charter schools, which is that they are privatized, marketized, corporatized, deregulated, deunionized, non-transparent, pro-competition, political-economic arrangements that siphon billions of public dollars from public schools every year and make rich people even richer while drowning in fraud, corruption, waste, arrests, scandal, and racketeering.

Nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are contract schools that operate outside the public sphere and benefit mainly major owners of capital, even though they are portrayed as a way to “empower parents.” Test scores do not change this. Whether students’ scores on unsound tests produced by for-profit companies are high or low, it does not make the looting of billions of dollars in public funds by charter schools from public schools acceptable. Test scores cannot cover up this large-scale theft and destruction. Scores on tests not produced by educators and lacking a human-centered perspective necessarily serve retrogression.

Even if every student in every charter school in the country scored well on tests produced by big business, there is still no justification for the existence, let alone expansion, of charter schools and the massive looting by the rich of public funds and facilities from the public.

Charter schools have no right to public funds because they are not public schools; they are privatized deregulated arrangements based on the outmoded ideologies of competition, individualism, and consumerism. This is why CONTINUE READING: Charter Schools: The Issue is Not Student Scores on High-Stakes Standardized Tests Produced by Big Business | Dissident Voice

Dress code discrimination: When OK attire depends on your skin color

Dress code discrimination: When OK attire depends on your skin color

When acceptable attire depends on the color of your skin
Parental dress codes are a thing in some educational institutions

Every day educators teach students the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Many are familiar with the biblical verse, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed that one day we’d live in a nation where children (and their parents) “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” All of these sayings are saying the same thing — yet what does it say about us when we judge someone by the most superficial cover of them all: their wardrobe?

While wearing a respectable suit and tie, Donald Trump announced a policy that separated children from their parents coming across the border; he looked businesslike as he referred to Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as “shithole” countries; he was dressed formally as he signed the largest corporate tax cut in U.S. history into law; and he looked like an upstanding citizen when he likened torch-toting neo-Nazis and Confederate sympathizers to antiracist activists in the aftermath of the Charlottesville riots. Trump may have been appropriately dressed on all those occasions, but his actions betrayed the dignity of the White House.

Still, he wasn’t wearing his pajamas, or exposing his body parts, like some parents do when they take their kids to school, and that’s the important thing, you know.

“A principal I talked to told me a lady came into the office with her sleepwear on with some of her body parts hanging out. You got children coming down the hall in a line and they can possibly see this,” Tennessee State Rep. Antonio Parkinson said on the NBC show TODAY in January.

Related: Schools should not be battlegrounds for Trump’s fake war

Parkinson is making waves, writing dress code policy for public school parents who he’s told are “wearing next to nothing,” and while walking their children to school no less. These loutish parents, CONTINUE READING: Dress code discrimination: When OK attire depends on your skin color

Sacramento school district threatens bankruptcy to extort concessions from teachers - World Socialist Web Site

Sacramento school district threatens bankruptcy to extort concessions from teachers - World Socialist Web Site

Sacramento school district threatens bankruptcy to extort concessions from teachers

As school districts in Oakland and Los Angeles, California prepare for new spending cuts in the face of widespread teacher and working class opposition, the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in the state’s capital is also preparing draconian cuts.

SCUSD officials recently announced they have until November to find $16 million in cuts to avoid a state takeover. An additional $16 million in cuts, they said, must be found in advance of the following school year.

The Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA), has been in contract negotiations with the district for over a year. Negotiations are currently stalled and although the SCTA is threatening to call a strike by the more than 2,800 Sacramento teachers is has not set a timeline or even called a strike authorization vote. In 2017, a strike was averted after the union reached an agreement providing a paltry 2.5 percent salary increase for teachers each year for three years. The last time teachers struck in Sacramento was in 1989.

To push through the cuts, the district is relying upon the collaboration of the five district unions covering school employees: the SCTA, United Professional Educators (UPE) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021. “It’s going to be very difficult for us to achieve the cost savings we need if not all bargaining partners are at the table,” said office of education spokesman Alex Barrios.

The SCTA has countered the district’s financial assessments with claims that revenues actually increased by more than $120 million between the 2013-2014 and 2017-2018 school years. In spite of this, the SCTA has already accepted the district’s austerity demands in practice.

In an agreement reached between the SCTA and the district in December 2017, cuts to teacher health benefits were to be utilized to decrease class size and hire new nurses. According to The Sacramento Bee, the SCTA’s own proposals estimate the district can save $12 million each year by redirecting lifetime health benefits for teachers. The union also claims the district’s financial woes can be lessened by curbing excessive administrator salaries, pushing for the district to cut principal and school administrator positions from 267 to 190. While this demand is aimed at appeasing angry teachers, the reduction of administrators is often the prelude to further privatization measures.

Meanwhile, the Oakland Education Association (OEA) has accepted as a matter of course the closure of more than 24 public schools or one third of the district’s schools. Most if not all would be converted to private charter schools. Oakland already has the second highest number of charters in the country in CONTINUE READING: Sacramento school district threatens bankruptcy to extort concessions from teachers - World Socialist Web Site

Long-Time School Privatizer, Cory Booker Enters 2020 Race as Democratic Presidential Contender | janresseger

Long-Time School Privatizer, Cory Booker Enters 2020 Race as Democratic Presidential Contender | janresseger

Long-Time School Privatizer, Cory Booker Enters 2020 Race as Democratic Presidential Contender

Public education policy is not usually something on which Presidential candidates have a solid record. They make their cases on foreign, economic, and environmental policy. The future of public schools makes it into the Party platforms but rarely becomes a candidate’s make-or-break issue.

However, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who, last Friday, declared himself a Democratic candidate for President in 2020, has a long record of projects that threaten public education.  Cory Booker has been a leader in the effort to privatize public education for nearly two decades.

Most recently as mayor of Newark, New Jersey from 2006-2013, he collaborated with New Jersey’s Republican Governor, Chris Christie on an idea for a charter school transformation for the city’s schools. In her 2015 book, The Prize, Dale Russakoff summarizes the Booker-Christie scheme: “One of the goals was to ‘make Newark the charter school capital of the nation.’ The plan called for an ‘infusion of philanthropic support’ to recruit teachers and principals through national school-reform organizations, build sophisticated data and accountability systems, and weaken tenure and seniority protections. Philanthropy, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending.” (The Prize, pp. 20-21) Booker was the salesman who enticed Mark Zuckerberg to pay for it all.  The plan was launched in celebrity fashion when Zuckerberg presented a check for $100 million to Christie and Booker on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Even as Russakoff traces the eventual four-year failure of their scheme, her book’s topic is less about school reform than about the hubris of Cory Booker and the cruel arrogance of Chris Christie. She concludes: “For four years, the reformers never really tried to have a conversation with the people of Newark. Their target audience was always somewhere else, beyond the people whose children and grandchildren desperately needed to learn and compete for a future. Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg set out to create a national ‘proof point’ CONTINUE READING: Long-Time School Privatizer, Cory Booker Enters 2020 Race as Democratic Presidential Contender | janresseger

It’s ‘Black Lives Matter at School Week': Why that matters, and how classrooms are taking part - The Washington Post

It’s ‘Black Lives Matter at School Week': Why that matters, and how classrooms are taking part - The Washington Post

It’s ‘Black Lives Matter at School Week': Why that matters, and how classrooms are taking part

It speaks to our times that this year’s Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action starts when the Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, is under intense pressure to resign. The calls have followed revelations that his 1984 medical school yearbook page included a racist photo and that he had applied shoe polish to his face to imitate Michael Jackson in a 1984 dance contest.

[‘That medical school yearbook page is vintage Americana’: A black professor on education and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam]

Black Lives Matter at School Week was started by teachers, parents and administrators who organize for racial justice in education and sponsor an annual week of action during the first week of February. It is connected to but not directly linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, and it has been supported by school boards, unions and other organizations along with public officials.

The goal of the week is to teach young people through lessons, discussions, art and social action about structural racism, black identity and history, and restorative justice and related issues. The organizers say thousands of people throughout the country took part last year and they expect a similar level of participation this year.

Israel Presley, a Seattle student activist, recalled last year’s Black Lives Matter at School Week in a video promoting the occasion. “I learned so much, so much, that really empowered me as a black male,” he said. “This was probably the first time I was really excited about school.”

The week-long event is taking place in an era when President Trump is seen as normalizing racism by disparaging people of color and refusing to condemn white supremacists. In many places throughout the country, incidents of racial bullying are rising on K-12 campuses. Just a few months ago, the Utah chapter of the NAACP called for schools to address a growing number of incidents in which white students were hurling racial slurs at black students. CONTINUE READING: It’s ‘Black Lives Matter at School Week': Why that matters, and how classrooms are taking part - The Washington Post

Pittsburgh Christian Academy Tries to Become a Charter School to Cash in on Taxpayer Funding | gadflyonthewallblog

Pittsburgh Christian Academy Tries to Become a Charter School to Cash in on Taxpayer Funding | gadflyonthewallblog

Pittsburgh Christian Academy Tries to Become a Charter School to Cash in on Taxpayer Funding

The line between public and private school is getting awfully thin in Pittsburgh.

City public school directors received a request from Imani Christian Academy, a religious school in the East Hills, to be allowed to transform into Imani Academy Charter School for the Fall term of 2019.

Though parochial schools have metamorphosed into charter schools in Florida, Tennessee and Washington, D.C., this would be the first such transformation in Pennsylvania, according to Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools.

The change would require Imani to give up its religious curriculum in exchange for being fully funded by taxpayer dollars.

However, there are numerous red flags in the school’s application that make one wonder if operators are being entirely honest about giving up a faith-based curriculum.

First, there is the proposal by the school, itself.

The application does not specify that religious values will be taught in the classroom. However, its personnel budget lists a comparative religion teacher on staff. The list CONTINUE READING: Pittsburgh Christian Academy Tries to Become a Charter School to Cash in on Taxpayer Funding | gadflyonthewallblog