An Enrollment Crisis Is Coming for School Districts - Voice of San Diego

An Enrollment Crisis Is Coming for School Districts - Voice of San Diego

An Enrollment Crisis Is Coming for School Districts
If even a small number parents choose not to send their kids back to traditional schools in the fall, it could trigger a massive funding crisis and sever the longtime link between neighborhoods and schools.

Deep down in their May 18 letter to lawmakers warning that they could not “in good conscience” return students to the classroom if the state follows through on proposed budget cuts, superintendents of the six largest school districts in the state also requested a change.

They asked lawmakers to “authorize school districts to earn average daily attendance using a three-year rolling average of ADA.”

Right now, schools are mostly funded using average daily attendance calculations. Each student carries with them a number. If they go to school, that school and school district gets their funding. Districts care deeply about getting kids into classes not only because of their commitment to learning, and their mission, but because funding doesn’t come if they don’t. If students go to charter schools, they take that funding with them and some of those charter schools aren’t part of the districts. Last year, we helped uncover one of the biggest fraudulent manipulations of this average daily attendance system in the state’s history.

So, in that letter, the districts were asking that the state protect them from what could happen to their funding not from the budget cuts but from the loss of students they may experience. It was a subtle acknowledgement of a real nightmare in the works for them.

An enrollment crisis is coming.

If even 5 percent or 10 percent of parents don’t send their kids to traditional schools this year, it would deliver a massive funding crisis for schools that have already been grappling with enrollment declines. The deadline to lay off teachers has already passed. It is difficult to imagine how they can rearrange and cut costs swiftly enough to absorb the change. Especially with increased costs to deal with the health crisis on the horizon.

But the enrollment crisis is coming.

The San Diego County Office of Education is advising districts to prepare for parents who are CONTINUE READING: An Enrollment Crisis Is Coming for School Districts - Voice of San Diego

Why California Kids Should Go on Strike - LA Progressive

Why California Kids Should Go on Strike - LA Progressive

Why California Kids Should Go on Strike

As COVID Collapses Budgets, It’s Up to Children to Save Their Schools

Dear California Kids,

Don’t let us adults destroy your futures! This time of “distance learning” and COVID-19 chaos is the opportunity of a generation—maybe a century—to fix what’s so very wrong with how California treats you. And right now, you have unprecedented power. I am begging you to use it.

Before COVID-19, California wasn’t doing well by its 9.1 million residents under age 18. Now in crisis, the state’s adults are conspiring without your input to make things even worse for you. By June’s end, your governor and legislature will likely pass a budget that cuts a record $15.1 billion from your schools, further hurts the economy, and guts other programs essential to your growth.

You may think that you can do nothing to stop this—after all, you are being ignored as politicians and powerful adult interests make decisions about your future. Even at your own schools, few of you are being asked for your suggestions about how to improve distance learning or how to make your own classrooms safe and productive for your return.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Right now, with schools closed because of the pandemic, California’s children and teens have more leverage than ever before.

This leverage comes from the fact that education can’t restart in California without your consent. If you kids act together, you have the power to keep the schools shut down. This applies to distance learning, which can’t work if you refuse to sign on to the internet, as well as to physical school reopenings, which won’t happen until you agree to walk back onto those campuses.

Your advantage is not just practical. It’s moral. School districts—having thrown you into hastily CONTINUE READING: Why California Kids Should Go on Strike - LA Progressive

Community Care: Grief Circle – Parenting for Liberation

Community Care: Grief Circle – Parenting for Liberation

Community Care: Grief Circle

Parenting for Liberation is honored to co-host a Grief Circle with Spiritual Alchemy.

“As Black parents in the Americas, we are no stranger to harm to our communities and the killing of our children at the hands of law enforcement or vigilantes. However, what has sustained us is our ability to gather in community to tell stories, share a meal and lean on one another spiritually, physically and emotionally during times of profound loss, grief, and mourning and for many there is a palpable absence of this during this time of COVID-19. 

As such, spaces like Wailing Circle are not only necessary, but critical for providing a place that is safe for community to gather. A space where our souls have permission to grieve in whatever form and manner that feels right. We need spaces for our deafening wail as we call the names of those who are sick, those who have died and those who have been killed. Space and time to grieve what has been lost. Space to lament dreams and expectations we have nurtured and to which we have given our life blood that we must now surrender. Our souls need. spaces where folks commit to lean in and not look away but allow for us to show up as our whole selves and our collective humanity, which allows for our pain to break them open in a new way. We need spaces to remind us of our collective humanity and the abundant possibility of what can be called forth in time like these.”

ML Daniel, Spiritual Alchemy

RSVP here.

Community Care: Grief Circle – Parenting for Liberation

All White People Must Confront How the System Only Works in Total Whiteness – radical eyes for equity

All White People Must Confront How the System Only Works in Total Whiteness – radical eyes for equity

All White People Must Confront How the System Only Works in Total Whiteness

I was born in 1961, after Brown v. Board but before the Civil Rights Act.

My childhood in the upstate of South Carolina included the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy as well as vivid memories of my mother’s family living through the racial unrest in nearby Asheville, North Carolina and my uncle being shipped off to the Vietnam War.

My parents had been raised in the 1940s and 1950s throughout North and South Carolina; they were among the white Americans who disapproved of King, and I recall vividly my parents’ animosity for Muhammad Ali that sat next to their anger at the mainstream media for bringing down Richard Nixon.

I was born in 1961, but I was baptized and washed daily in whiteness.

I believed in whiteness even as I was conditioned never to see it because my accusatory gaze was trained on blackness, and any racial identity not white.

These were the lessons of my home, my community, my school, and nearly every moment of the media I was consuming through news or entertainment.

My history books, TV shows, movies, novels, and comic books were filled with white saviors—and all that was wrong with the world shaded in darkness, blackness.

By the time I entered college during the fall of Jimmy Carter and the rise of CONTINUE READING: All White People Must Confront How the System Only Works in Total Whiteness – radical eyes for equity

Most California districts would get more in federal aid than they’d lose in budget cuts | EdSource

Most California districts would get more in federal aid than they’d lose in budget cuts | EdSource

Most California districts would get more in federal aid than they’d lose in budget cuts
Districts argue they still need more money — distributed differently.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and coalitions of labor and school district groups are asserting that California schools won’t be able to open safely if Congress doesn’t provide more aid to cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

Yet by one measure, school districts collectively would get nearly as much in already promised federal aid as their proposed state funding would be cut in 2020-21. And many districts may get more than they’ll lose in state aid.

Through the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act that Congress passed in March, California’s K-12 schools would receive enough to cover more than 90% of the $6.4 billion that Newsom is proposing to cut from school districts’ and charter schools’ funding in the next state budget to make up for a massive projected decline in tax revenue.

Newsom is proposing a cut of approximately 8% of districts’ general fund, known as the Local Control Funding Formula. It provides a base amount and additional funding for “high-needs” students: English learners, and low-income, homeless and foster students in every district.

An EdSource analysis projects that of the 897 districts that receive their funding through the funding formula, 546 school districts and county offices of education — 60.4% of the total — would get more CARES Act funding than they’d lose in cuts to the funding formula. These numbers don’t include the 100-plus mostly wealthy “basic aid” districts excluded from the Local Control Funding Formula because their property tax revenues exceed what they would get through the formula.

The main factor for the wide differences in districts’ CARES Act funding is the allocation formula that Newsom has chosen to address students’ loss of learning as a result of pandemic-related school closures. He would direct $2.9 billion — about half of the CARES Act money going to K-12 — only to districts categorized as “concentration” districts under the funding formula. These are districts where at least 55% of students enrolled are high-needs.

All districts, however, would still be entitled to the rest of the CARES Act money: an CONTINUE READING: Most California districts would get more in federal aid than they’d lose in budget cuts | EdSource

Katy Grimes: Sacramento City School District Email Claims 'Racism is Prevalent Throughout This Country, Including in Sacramento' - California Globe

Sacramento City School District Email Claims 'Racism is Prevalent Throughout This Country, Including in Sacramento' - California Globe

Sacramento City School District Email Claims ‘Racism is Prevalent Throughout This Country, Including in Sacramento’
This is exactly what they think of you

In an email sent out June 1st by officials in the Sacramento City Unified School District, the subject – “Advisory of Citywide Curfew” – deviated from the purpose of the message about the curfew straight into offensive shaming and pandering.

Dear Sac City Unified Community:

We acknowledge the pain associated with the death of George Floyd and the racism that is prevalent throughout this country, including in Sacramento. We value protest. However, we learned that due to instances of violence and looting, the City of Sacramento is imposing a curfew beginning tonight at 7:00 pm with an increased police presence.

We are asking parents/guardians to partner with our district, the City of Sacramento and the Black Child Legacy Campaign to account for your student in compliance with the curfew mandate.

Thank you for your contribution to the safety of our youth and community.

Copyright © 2020 Sacramento City Unified School District, All rights reserved.

The email message went to all SCUSD employees, parents of SCUSD students, and community members.

A teacher friend was livid, and responded saying the statement about this city, its residents, and the country, is vile.

This is the same school district which killed a wildly successful Competitive Academic Program because Sacramento school district officials deemed it “too white.” Parents reported white and Asian kids were purposely removed from program lottery.

California Globe reported recently when Sacramento City School District Superintendent Jorge Aguilar took a significant pay increase, while schools are closed, and after stating last year that he would not accept a salary increase while the CONTINUE READING: Sacramento City School District Email Claims 'Racism is Prevalent Throughout This Country, Including in Sacramento' - California Globe

Hundreds of Sacramento Kids Stopped Schooling Due To COVID-19 - capradio.org

Hundreds of Sacramento Kids Stopped Schooling Due To COVID-19 - capradio.org

Hundreds of Sacramento Kids Stopped Schooling Due To COVID-19

More than 500 Sacramento kids have lost touch with the Sacramento City Unified School District since schools closed their doors in mid-March to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The number of kids who hadn’t started the distance-learning process was initially higher — 1,636 students — but school district employees have whittled the number of kids down by calling, texting and emailing families over the past few weeks. 

Now, school officials are trying to reconnect with the kids who are hardest to reach, by visiting children’s homes one-by-one. 

"We’re getting down to our truly, truly, unreachable, no-contact students," said Jennifer Kretschman with the Sacramento City Unified School District, who is heading up efforts to find the kids and help them log into their online classrooms. 

Kretschman says initially, the district may have lost touch with students because they had outdated contact information for families. Some kids didn’t start distance-learning right away because they didn’t have a laptop, or had trouble logging into classes. But other families are lost in the shuffle because of tough life changes.

"A lot of families were displaced and had to move or go stay with relatives just because of job loss and all the other things that were happening," Kretschman said. 

Last Wednesday, Kretschman and Ethel Baker elementary school Principal Nate McGill CONTINUE READING: Hundreds of Sacramento Kids Stopped Schooling Due To COVID-19 - capradio.org

A Significant Error in Policy Thinking | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

A Significant Error in Policy Thinking | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

A Significant Error in Policy Thinking

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic and the imminent re-opening of schools in the next few months, I re-visit a post I published nearly a decade ago about a significant error that policymakers have committed repeatedly in actions taken about teachers, teaching, students, and learning. The current crisis offers officials and practitioners an opportunity to reconsider past thinking about schooling. 

As a result of inhabiting a different world than teachers, policymakers make a consequential error. They and a cadre of influentials confuse teacher quality with teaching quality, that is, the personal traits of teachers—dedicated, caring, gregarious, intellectually curious—produce student learning rather than the classroom and school settings.

Both are important, of course, but policymakers and their influential camp followers have accentuated personal traits far more than the organizational and social context in which teachers teach daily. So if students score low on tests, then who the teachers are, their personal traits, credentials, and attitudes come under close scrutiny, rather than the age-graded school, the regularities in daily practices that accompany this organization, neighborhood demography, workplace conditions, and resources that support teaching. The person overshadows the place.[i]

In attributing far more weight to individual teacher traits rather than seriously considering the situation in which teachers teach, policymakers (I include civic and business leaders) end up having a cramped view of teaching quality. Quality teaching is complex because an essential distinction is masked: the difference between “good” teaching and “successful” teaching. Both “good” and ” CONTINUE READING: A Significant Error in Policy Thinking | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Russ on Reading: Instruction for the Vulnerable Reader: Spelling

Russ on Reading: Instruction for the Vulnerable Reader: Spelling

Instruction for the Vulnerable Reader: Spelling

Today I continue with my series on the vulnerable reader gathering posts from the past to look at instruction for our neediest readers. My previous post looked at one aspect of word work: decoding. In this post, I look at most frustrating of topics: spelling.

Many vulnerable readers have difficulty with accurate spelling. For some children the difficulty is inability to hear sounds in words in the order they occur. For other children, it may be a lack of visual memory for words. After all, 50% of words are not regularly spelled, so we need to develop visual images of words such as "know" to know how to spell them. Still other children may not develop good spelling because they do not read or write enough or because they have not developed a "spelling conscience", a desire to spell correctly.

Most poor readers are also poor spellers, but not all good readers are good spellers. Many factors go into the equation. The good news is that spelling is not connected to intelligence, and with tools like spell check available, there is no reason for poor spelling to be debilitating to young learners, unless outside forces make it that way.

Invented spelling is a tool for young learners to learn how words work. For CONTINUE READING: Russ on Reading: Instruction for the Vulnerable Reader: Spelling

Mail Order Schools: the Past and Present of Distance Learning – Have You Heard

Mail Order Schools: the Past and Present of Distance Learning – Have You Heard

Mail Order Schools: the Past and Present of Distance Learning

Students flailing without real teachers. Sky-high dropout rates. Aggressive sales pitches. Sound familiar? Have You Heard revisits America’s first great love affair with distance learning, the learn-by-mail craze that swept the nation 100+ years ago. The case for distance learning made by the original (for profit) edu-preneurs was virtually identical to what we’re hearing today. But while they sold the promise of “personalized learning” free from the distraction of classmates, distance learning 1.0 suffered from the same problem that plagues its 21st century counterpart: learning alone has never worked for the vast majority of students. Special guests: education historian Bob Hampel and “Young Jack,” a student at an early 20th century correspondence school. Complete transcript available here.

The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Have You Heard · #90 Mail Order Schools: the Past and Present of Distance Learning

Mail Order Schools: the Past and Present of Distance Learning – Have You Heard

Louisiana Superintendent Cade Brumley Confirmed; Jessica Baghian Submits Resignation | deutsch29

Louisiana Superintendent Cade Brumley Confirmed; Jessica Baghian Submits Resignation | deutsch29

Louisiana Superintendent Cade Brumley Confirmed; Jessica Baghian Submits Resignation

On June 01, 2020, the Louisiana Senate confirmed Louisiana’s new state superintendent, Cade Brumley:

BESE@BESE_LA

The Louisiana Senate has confirmed BESE's appointment of Cade Brumley as State Superintendent of Education: https://bit.ly/2XOW1KF  #laed #lalege

51

2:51 PM - Jun 1, 2020

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Cade Brumley@cadebrumley

I’m honored, humbled, & downright excited to become Louisiana’s State Superintendent of Education. I appreciate @BESE_LA’s appointment & LA Senate’s unanimous confirmation. I look forward to serving Louisiana’s students, educators, families & communities. #laed #lalege #lagov

569

2:48 PM - Jun 1, 2020

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112 people are talking about this

Brumley’s first day as state superintendent is June 08, 2020.

Many individuals congratulated Brumley in the comments section of his Twitter announcement.

I noticed assistant superintendent, Jessica Baghian, did not.

Jessica Baghian

On June 03, 2020, Advocate journalist Will Sentell tweeted that Baghian has submitted her resignation effective June 12, 2020:

Will Sentell

✔@WillSentell

Assistant State Superintendent of Education Jessica Baghian submits resignation effective June 12. Narrowly lost bid to become state superintendent of education two weeks ago.#laed

13

9:16 AM - Jun 3, 2020

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See Will Sentell's other Tweets

Baghian’s exit represents an end to the narrative-muddying, John White era in Louisiana education.

I expect that other John White hires will be leaving , as well.

We have turned a corner in Louisiana education.

Goodbye, Jessica Baghian.

Welcome, Cade Brumley.

Cade Brumley

___________________________________________________________________

My latest book, A Practical Guide to Digital Research: Getting the Facts and Rejecting the Lies, is now available for purchase on Amazon and via Garn Press!

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Louisiana Superintendent Cade Brumley Confirmed; Jessica Baghian Submits Resignation | deutsch29