Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Gov. Wolf Tries to Stop Charter Schools Gorging on Public School Funding | gadflyonthewallblog

Gov. Wolf Tries to Stop Charter Schools Gorging on Public School Funding | gadflyonthewallblog

Gov. Wolf Tries to Stop Charter Schools Gorging on Public School Funding
Sooey! Here Pig Pig Pig!
No one minds that healthy call at the hog farm when it’s time to feed the sows.
But taxpayers do take issue with it when it’s the call of the state legislature gathering a different kind of swine around public tax dollars.
Last week, he took executive action to hold these schools accountable and force them to be more transparent – even if the legislature won’t.
Charter schools are publicly financed but privately run. Unlike authentic public schools, charters are often administered by appointed boards. They don’t have to provide the same level of services for children, don’t have to accept all students, can make a profit and don’t even have to be transparent about how they spend their money.
For years fiscal watchdogs have complained that the state’s 22-year-old charter school law needs revising. However, after lining lawmakers pockets with charter school cash, the legislature continually refuses to do anything about it.
A few Democrats have offered plans that would increase accountability, but they’ve gotten no traction. And Republican plans have almost exclusively offered to make CONTINUE READING: Gov. Wolf Tries to Stop Charter Schools Gorging on Public School Funding | gadflyonthewallblog

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La. PAC Used to Funnel $3M in Out-of-State Billionaire Cash into 2015 BESE Election Disbands | deutsch29

La. PAC Used to Funnel $3M in Out-of-State Billionaire Cash into 2015 BESE Election Disbands | deutsch29

La. PAC Used to Funnel $3M in Out-of-State Billionaire Cash into 2015 BESE Election Disbands

In 2015, six out-of-state billionaires from four families contributed a combined $3M to influence the outcome of Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) election.
shocked-dollar
For the October 24, 2019, primary, out-of-state billionaire spending totaling $2.1M was as follows:
  • John and Laura Arnold (Texas): $625K
  • Michael Bloomberg (New York): $800K
  • Eli Broad (California): $250K
  • Alice Walton (Arkansas): $200K
  • Jim Walton (Arkansas): $200K
In all cases, the funnel used to bring this $2.1M into Louisiana’s October 24, 2015, state board of ed election was Louisiana businessman Lane Grigsby’s Empower Louisiana PAC.
For the October 24, 2015, election, Grigsby used the money to purchase ads in support of corporate ed reform candidates James Garvey, Sandy Holloway, Holly Boffy, and Tony Davis and in opposition traditional ed supporters Mike Kreamer and Lottie Beebe.
The October 2015 BESE election resulted in six ed-reform wins and two runoffs, which were decided in a subsequent, November 2015, election.
Regarding those two BESE seat runoffs, yet another $1M came to Louisiana via Grigsby’s PAC:




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New Study Reveals Privately-Run Charter Schools Under-Enroll Students with Disabilities | UTLA

New Study Reveals Privately-Run Charter Schools Under-Enroll Students with Disabilities | UTLA

New Study Reveals Privately-Run Charter Schools Under-Enroll Students with Disabilities

A new first-of-its-kind report released today proves the theory advocates for students with disabilities and public schools have been saying for years:  charter schools are enrolling fewer students with disabilities. Those they do enroll generally have less severe – and therefore less costly – disabilities, and that this is having a disparate fiscal impact on public school districts. The report and brief, LINK à State of Denial: California Charter Schools and Special Education Students, conducted by United Teachers Los Angeles and California Teachers Association researchers, calculated the cost disparity on San Diego Unified School District, Los Angeles Unified School District, and Oakland Unified School District, and found the gross fiscal impact for these three districts to be between $64.52 million and $97.19 million annually.

“For years, we have heard anecdotally from parents, public and charter educators that the charter industry under-enrolls students with disabilities. For the first time, we can now quantify those stories using data from three of the three largest charter authorizers in the state. Beyond the civil rights concerns, there are also stark fiscal impacts on our public schools. This report shows a disturbing a pattern that, if left unchecked, means we are looking down the barrel of a public education system that will become increasingly segregated and destabilized,” said Elaine Grace Regullano, UTLA’s Strategic Research and Analytics Director and co-author of the report.


STATE OF DENIAL

In the 2016 – 2017 academic year, SDUSD, LAUSD, and OUSD charter schools were serving significantly fewer students with disabilities than district schools – 11.01% vs. 14.27%. In Oakland, charter schools enrolled students at roughly half the rate of district-run schools (7.67% vs. 13.58%). Charter schools in SDUSD, LAUSD, and OUSD were serving a statistically smaller share of students with the most severe disabilities, who are also generally the most expensive to serve, including a persistent under-enrollment of students with autism, intellectual disabilities, multiple disabilities, and orthopedic impairment. In CONTINUE READING: New Study Reveals Privately-Run Charter Schools Under-Enroll Students with Disabilities | UTLA

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Texas: The IDEA Charter FlimFlam | Diane Ravitch's blog

Texas: The IDEA Charter FlimFlam | Diane Ravitch's blog

Texas: The IDEA Charter FlimFlam

Betsy DeVos has awarded more than $200 million to the IDEA charter chain to expand in Texas and beyond. IDEA plans to swamp San Antonio, El Paso, and other cities.
IDEA promises that all students will graduate and go to college, but it doesn’t promise that all students will make it to senior year, or that they will make it in college (earlier studies by Ed Fuller, then at the University of Texas, now at Penn State, found that IDEA graduates had high dropout rates from college).
Read this study of IDEA to learn more.
Texas Charter Schools – Perception May Not Be Real
IDEA Public Schools: Remove the “Rose–Colored Glasses” and Many RED FLAGS Appear
By:  William J. Gumbert
IDEA Public Schools (“IDEA”) is the fastest growing privately-operated charter school in Texas and its rapid expansion in local communities is funded and controlledby “special interests” that desire to “privatize” public education.  With promotions of a “100% College Acceptance Rate” and students being “Accepted to the College or University of Their Choice”, a full-time staff is employed to advocate for IDEA in local communities and to aggressively recruit “economically-disadvantaged” parents dreaming of a better life for their children.
Ann Landers said: “Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocals.  Nobody wants to read the small print in dreams”.But with the education of children and millions of taxpayer dollars at stake, the small print is vitally important. Part 4 of this 5–part series removes the “rose-colored glasses” that are inherent in the promotions of IDEA Public Schools to provide parents, taxpayers and communities an opportunity to review the potential RED FLAGS that appear when the light is solely focused on the facts of the rapidly expanding, privately-operated charter school.
Overview, Growth, Taxpayer Funding and Financial Benefits: As a privately-operated charter, IDEA has been approved by the State to separately operate in community-based school districts with taxpayer funding.  Since opening with 150 students in 2000, IDEA has been consistentlyfocused on expanding its footprint. In this regard, IDEAstrategic growth plan states it will serve 100,000 students by 2022 as new campuses are opened CONTINUE READING: Texas: The IDEA Charter FlimFlam | Diane Ravitch's blog

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Women of #RedForEd Closing the Pay Gap - NEA Today

Women of #RedForEd Closing the Pay Gap - NEA Today

Women of #RedForEd Closing the Pay Gap

Image result for Women of #RedForEd
By Cindy Long
Rosa Jimenez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, is a single mom who shares a bed with her daughter in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, but she’s still just scraping by in a city with one of the highest costs of living in the nation. Jimenez is a high school history teacher.
Fellow Angeleno Georgia Flowers Lee is a special education teacher at Saturn Elementary School in the gentrifying mid-city section. She can’t afford to live anywhere near her school, so she commutes about an hour each way from what she calls a “challenging” part of LA. She’s been an educator—her second career—for almost two decades but still struggles to make ends meet.
“You pay the bills, and you look at what’s left and you decide, ‘OK, what do I do without this month?’” Lee says.
Across the country in rural, western Pennsylvania, Missy Brant teaches kindergarten. She says there are teachers right in her backyard who earn just over the minimum wage. The starting teacher salary in Pennsylvania is $18,500 and has been since 1989, when Brant was just 8 years old and thinking of becoming a teacher like her mom. It never occurred to her that educators would be worse off now than they were then.
Jimenez, Flowers Lee, and Brant aren’t alone. Across the nation, teachers—most of them women—are underpaid and struggling. Their growing frustration has fueled a nationwide movement called #RedForEd that demands professional pay for professional work.
Professions dominated by women have lower pay, but even within the profession there is CONTINUE READING: Women of #RedForEd Closing the Pay Gap - NEA Today

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California Schools May Be Banned From Suspending Students For ‘Willful Defiance’ – CBS Sacramento

California Schools May Be Banned From Suspending Students For ‘Willful Defiance’ – CBS Sacramento

California Schools May Be Banned From Suspending Students For ‘Willful Defiance’


SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – Starting next school year principals and administrators may be banned from suspending students for “willful defiance” of teachers, staff, and administrators.
Senate Bill 419 bans schools from suspending students in grades 4-8 for disrupting school activities or willfully defying school authorities, including teachers and staff. The bill would also ban schools from suspending students in grades 9-12 for the same thing until January 1, 2025. The law would apply to both public and charter schools.
The full Assembly voted to pass the bill Monday by a vote of 58-17, with four Assemblymembers not voting. The vote went along party lines.
A similar bill was vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown last legislative session.
Existing law already prohibits schools from suspending children in grades K-3 for disrupting or willful defiance. Existing law also prevents schools from recommending the expulsion of students in all grades for disrupting or willful defiance.
Students could still be suspended or expelled for other acts, including threatening violence, bringing a weapon or drugs to school, or damaging school property. Teachers could also still be allowed to “suspend pupils from class for the day and the following day who disrupt school activities or otherwise willfully defied valid
authority of supervisors, teachers, administrators, school officials, or other school personnel engaged in the performance of their duties.”
As part of the new bill, superintendents or principals would be asked to provide alternatives to suspension or expulsion that are “age-appropriate and designed to address and correct the pupil’s specific misbehavior.”
The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color supports the bill, writing:CONTINUE READING: California Schools May Be Banned From Suspending Students For ‘Willful Defiance’ – CBS Sacramento



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Not Funding Schools or Paying Teachers? That’s a You Problem, Right? | Teacher in a strange land

Not Funding Schools or Paying Teachers? That’s a You Problem, Right? | Teacher in a strange land

Not Funding Schools or Paying Teachers? That’s a You Problem, Right?

In the school district next to mine—and where I live, all the schools are small and rural—there was an unpaid collective lunch debt in June. As a goodwill gesture, a local craft brewery paid off the debt, $2700, so all the students in Suttons Bay will start the year with a clean slate. There are about 525 kids, PK-12, in the district and roughly half of them meet qualifications for free or reduced lunch.
According to Realtor.Com, the median price of homes for sale in Suttons Bay is $454,000.
You can get a pretty nice house for $450K, almost anywhere in the Midwest. So why are there so many kids on free and reduced lunch in the school district? You can get a hint by noting that the young man who suggested The Mitten Brewing Company pay off students’ lunch debt is both bartender at The Mitten and substitute teacher in Suttons Bay.
There’s poverty in paradise, as Bridge Magazine revealed in a startling series of articles. There are people supporting families on three or four patched-together jobs, often in industries serving the older, wealthier residents in those gorgeous lakefront homes. Lots of those hard-working people have college degrees—the thing that was supposed to keep them ahead of the pack—and student loans.

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Here are the average classroom sizes for all 50 states - INSIDER

Here are the average classroom sizes for all 50 states - INSIDER

Here are the average classroom sizes for all 50 states

Class Size Matters | A clearinghouse for information on class size & the proven benefits of smaller classes - https://www.classsizematters.org/
More students are graduating from high school than ever before. Just last year, 84.6% of the US national graduation class walked away from high school with a diploma. Along with these increased graduation rates, schools around the country are also witnessing an increase in general enrollment. And while that's generally a positive development it does have one unintended consequence: overcrowded classrooms.
Overcrowding in schools has become such a concern that some states have taken legislative measures to cap the number of students in a given classroom. In 2002, for example, Florida made an amendment to its state constitution setting a clear limit on students per class: 22 students for elementary schools and 25 for high schools.
INSIDER used data from the National Center for Education Statistics on classroom sizes around the country to see how the states stack up against each other. To put those classrooms in context, INSIDER also looked at data on how much each state spends on child education, their overall student to teacher ratios, and the average high school graduation rates.
Continue scrolling below to find out the average class sizes for elementary schools and high school in all 50 states. All class sizes listed reflect 2012 statistics unless otherwise noted. CONTINUE READING: Here are the average classroom sizes for all 50 states - INSIDER

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Ohio’s New State Budget Is a School Voucher Expansion Bonanza at the Expense of Public Education | janresseger

Ohio’s New State Budget Is a School Voucher Expansion Bonanza at the Expense of Public Education | janresseger

Ohio’s New State Budget Is a School Voucher Expansion Bonanza at the Expense of Public Education
Ohio has five voucher programs.  Two of them are for students with autism and other disabilities, and their enrollment depends on the incidence of these conditions and parents’ awareness of the availability of voucher funds to pay for private programs.  A third voucher program—the Cleveland Scholarship Program—one of the oldest in the country—is for students in Cleveland.
This blog post will focus on the last two—EdChoice and EdChoice Expansion.  They are statewide Ohio school voucher programs designed specifically, according to the Republican lawmakers who have designed and promoted these programs, to enable students to escape so-called “failing” schools.  It is important to remember that those same legislators have failed adequately to fund the public schools in Ohio’s poorest school districts, and those same legislators have looked at state takeover as another “solution” (besides expanding vouchers and charter schools) for the students in those districts.  Ohio education policy for school districts serving very poor children is defined by punishment, not support.
EdChoice and EdChoice Expansion vouchers rob the public schools of essential dollars needed to educate the majority of Ohio’s students who remain in public schools.  And the vouchers are used primarily by students enrolled in religious schools. Through EdChoice and EdChoice Expansion vouchers, the state is sending millions of tax dollars out of the state’s public education budget and out of the coffers of local school districts to fund the religious education of students who would likely never have enrolled in public schools in the first place.
The problem just got worse this summer when the Ohio Legislature passed a two year budget which radically expands both programs.  The Ohio Association of School Business Officials (OASBO) recently published an update on its website to inform school treasurers about what CONTINUIE READING: Ohio’s New State Budget Is a School Voucher Expansion Bonanza at the Expense of Public Education | janresseger

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NewBlackMan (in Exile) MARK ANTHONY NEAL

NewBlackMan (in Exile)

NewBlackMan (in Exile)


Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech’

by Mark Anthony Neal / 14h
'In this video produced for the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Abloh discusses his wide-ranging influences and the creative philosophy that has shaped his career in fashion and beyond.' -- Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
This Is What the Early Days of Digital Were Like

by Mark Anthony Neal / 14h
'Dial-up, floppy disks, Listservs. If you don’t know what any of these terms mean, you weren’t using computers back in the '80s and ’90s. Use this reel to brush up on your early digital era history. You’ll be schooled by programmers who created created ctrl+alt+del and Tetris, an artist who makes drawings with Excel, the voice behind AOL’s iconic “Welcome! You’ve got mail!” message and the last m
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 60

by Mark Anthony Neal / 15h
'The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, founded by the groundbreaking dancer-choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989), is celebrating 60 years as one of the world's preeminent modern dance companies. Rita Braver looks back at the legacy of Ailey, including his school for aspiring dancers, and talks with those who succeeded him as the company's artistic director, Judith Jamison and Robert Battle .'
Algee Smith Talks Toxic Masculinity In "Euphoria" And The World

by Mark Anthony Neal / 15h
' Algee Smith discusses his Euphoria character, McKay, and how his internal frustrations reflect major societal issues.'-- BUILD Series
James Baldwin vs William F Buckley: A Legendary Debate from 1965

by Mark Anthony Neal / 15h
'In 1965 at the University of Cambridge, two of the foremost American intellectuals were challenged with the question: ‘Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?’ From William F Buckley ’s highly stylised posturing and pointing, to James Baldwin ’s melodious rhetorical flourishes and memorable scowls, what’s become known as the ‘Baldwin-Buckley Debate’ now stands
The Sound of NYC’s Underground Vogue Scene

by Mark Anthony Neal / 15h
'Some are familiar with New York’s underground ballroom scene through Madonna ’s Vogue or films like Paris is Burning . This subculture has been recognized for creating the inventive dance style voguing, but they’ve also created a music genre that’s all their own. Nahre and LA traveled to New York to meet MikeQ , the founder of the first ballroom record label: Qween Beat. MikeQ invited us to Hous
Theatre Corner: Interview with Playwright Dr. Lisa B. Thompson

by Mark Anthony Neal / 20h
' Dr. Lisa B. Thompson is a celebrated playwright who is currently teaching at University of Texas at Austin. Her latest production, The Mamalogues , plays at the Vortex Rep beginning August 23, 2019.' -- theatre corner
The Racial Divide of Breastfeeding in the U.S.

by Mark Anthony Neal / 1d
'In 2011, the United States Breastfeeding Committee declared August National Breastfeeding Month , as a way to promote and support breastfeeding. But the decision to breastfeed, and access to resources around it, can vary a lot depending on your race. In the U.S., white, educated women are more likely to breastfeed and for longer periods, and some reasons for that are deeply rooted in our nation’
On 'Pose,' Janet Mock Tells The Stories She Craved As A Young Trans Person

by Mark Anthony Neal / 1d
' Janet Mock remembers when she saw the documentary Paris is Burning for the first time. She was in 10th grade, living in Hawaii, and had already socially transitioned her gender identity. She was about to embark on her medical transition. That same ball culture she saw in Paris is Burning would come up again in her career, decades later. After launching a career in journalism, writing two memoir

AUG 18

'The Black Messiah' And The Legacy Of Cannonball Adderley

by Mark Anthony Neal / 2d
'Cannonball Adderley was a mere 46 when he died, of a brain hemorrhage, in 1975. An alto saxophonist of robust intellect and irrefutable soul, he left a monumental legacy during his two decades in the spotlight — as a member of the Miles Davis Sextet, an exemplar of 1960s soul jazz and the leading avatar of a brand of post-bop modernism with popular appeal. This episode of Jazz Night In America t
Mapping Pop Music’s Falsetto Obsession

by Mark Anthony Neal / 2d
'It’s nearly impossible to turn on the radio and not hear a male artist singing really high. This isn’t a trend — it has been the status quo for decades. Using the data diving know-how of The Pudding, and drawing on the expertise of Anthony Roth Costanzo , a professional opera singer, Vox digs into the world of the high male vocal range by tracking how pervasive it really is across the decades.'
10 Years of MASCHINE: 9th Wonder

by Mark Anthony Neal / 2d
'Step into the studio with 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit), the legendary producer behind Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Erykah Badu, Mary J. Blige, and more. Find out what makes him one of the most energetic, inspiring, and influential producers in the game – and see how he creates his signature soulful sound with MASCHINE.'-- Native Instruments


Electric Miles: Behind The 'Brew'

by Mark Anthony Neal / 3d
'Electric Miles. Few word pairings in the jazz lexicon are apt to inspire so much contention and challenge and ferment. What the phrase refers to, of course, is a period in the career of trumpeter Miles Davis , spanning the last third of his 

NewBlackMan (in Exile)
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