CURMUDGUCATION: GOP Election Preview: Our Children Were Robbed

CURMUDGUCATION: GOP Election Preview: Our Children Were Robbed

GOP Election Preview: Our Children Were Robbed

I live in Northwester Pennsylvania, and this is Trump country. We've got a GOP controlled legislature and a Democratic governor, and a great deal of contentiousness stemming from that situation. And in the recent primary election, voters passed a constitutional amendment that de-powered the governor in the case of, say, a massive pandemic and gave emergency powers to the legislature instead.

Though we don't have many votes to offer up here, we make a good place for conservative candidates for state office to try out their road show, because lots of folks are gunning for the governor's seat.

As with most states, there are peculiarities that apply only to this state (e.g. the ongoing feud between Philadelphia and the entire rest of the state). But it's still a good place to spot some of the upcoming arguments that the GOP will use in their next election bid. 

Lou Barletta just announced his run and swung through my neighborhood. Barletta was mayor of Hazleton, PA, where, teamed up with the infamous Kris Kobach, he spearheaded anti-immigrant rules that were declared unconstitutional. He then was a Us Representative for almost a decade, before having his ass handed to him by Bob Casey, Jr., in 2018. He went into private consulting, including helping boost Brexit, and he has maintained his Trumpist credentials--he was one of the "electors" who met up in 2020 to vote for Trump, just to, you know, keep options open.

Barletta stopped just up the road from me this week, and the local paper covered the visit (paywall--sorry). Some of his talking CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: GOP Election Preview: Our Children Were Robbed

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: One District (Mostly) For Sale

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: One District (Mostly) For Sale

PA: One District (Mostly) For Sale

Chester Upland is a district that has struggled with issues and money and racism for decades; they are the history of every problem facing public education in the last century, right up to and including the gutting of a public education system by privatizing charter operators. Poorer and Blacker than all surrounding districts, they have suffered through one damn thing after another.

Chester Upland School District has been under the state's thumb via a declaration of financial collapse for about a decade. The court has been in charge of the district, and has okayed the idea of letting the charters that have drained the districts of resources go ahead and buy up the last of the bits.

It's hard to track everything that has happened because so little of it has happened in public view, but three charter organizations have now submitted plans for partial charter takeover of the district's schools.

The three proposals were pitched at a meeting that was presented in person and on line, and critics of the plan were not impressed. 

Harris indicated Thursday’s presentation was designed to communicate Friendship’s philosophy CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: PA: One District (Mostly) For Sale

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: The Special Ed Funding Triple Whammy

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: The Special Ed Funding Triple Whammy

PA: The Special Ed Funding Triple Whammy

Are you ready for the best explainer yet for the screwed-up state of Pennsylvania's charter funding when it comes to special ed students?  

Here at the Institute, we're fans of the work of Research for Action. The Philly based research group is meticulously independent and well-conceived and executed. We're previously looked at their work on test-based (poverty-punishing) assessment, the failure of cyber-charters, and the astonishing PA gap between students and teachers of color.

Now they've produced a video outlining the troubles with Pennsylvania's formula for funding special ed in charter schools. 

This matters because right now Governor Tom Wolf is trying to fix this, and charter school advocates are screaming that the governor is trying to cut their funding. That's technically a true, but in spirit, it's a lie. PA's charter schools continue to CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: PA: The Special Ed Funding Triple Whammy

PA Gov. Wolf Fires Charter School Appeals Board. Every. Single. Member. | gadflyonthewallblog

PA Gov. Wolf Fires Charter School Appeals Board. Every. Single. Member. | gadflyonthewallblog

PA Gov. Wolf Fires Charter School Appeals Board. Every. Single. Member.

Being Governor of Pennsylvania must be one of the most thankless but important jobs ever.

With a hopelessly gerrymandered legislature, a majority of Republican lawmakers representing a minority of voters stops nearly anything from getting done for the rest of us.

If it weren’t for a Democratic Governor to act as a check and balance on this lunatic fringe, the state would devolve into chaos.

Case in point: the Charter School Appeals Board (CAB).

It took Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, seven years to fire his predecessor’s appointments and nominate replacements to the CAB.

Yet the GOP legislature is crying crocodile tears that he’s exceeding his authority by doing so.

The board is supposed to be a place where charter schools can challenge decisions CONTINUE READING: PA Gov. Wolf Fires Charter School Appeals Board. Every. Single. Member. | gadflyonthewallblog

How to Vote on Ballot Measures in Pennsylvania’s 2021 Primary Election | gadflyonthewallblog

How to Vote on Ballot Measures in Pennsylvania’s 2021 Primary Election | gadflyonthewallblog

How to Vote on Ballot Measures in Pennsylvania’s 2021 Primary Election

Can you feel it?

The primary election is just a few weeks away.

Voters will decide all kinds of things like who will represent their respective parties for school board, judges, magistrates, county council, etc.

However, that’s not all.

There also will be four statewide ballot initiatives. All Allegheny County residents will get a fifth. And Pittsburgh residents will get a sixth.

If you’re like me, you don’t want these questions to come as a surprise on May 18 or before (if you’re casting a mail in ballot).

These queries can change the state for better or worse in dramatic ways, yet for some reason, they don’t write these things in the way everyday people talk.

This is lawyer speak. You have to wear a long black robe and put on a white haired wig (called a peruke) just to understand these things.

But don’t get your gavel in a tizzy.

As a public service, I’m going to translate each question and make a suggestion on how you should vote.

QUESTION 1: CONTINUE READING: How to Vote on Ballot Measures in Pennsylvania’s 2021 Primary Election | gadflyonthewallblog

Do you live in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania? I’m running for County Council in District 9

 

 

More on the campaign: https://stevenforcouncil.com/

 

https://www.facebook.com/Steve4County

 

Donate: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/stevensinger

A New Children’s Fund – Reducing Student Inequality Through Allegheny County Council | gadflyonthewallblog

A New Children’s Fund – Reducing Student Inequality Through Allegheny County Council | gadflyonthewallblog

A New Children’s Fund – Reducing Student Inequality Through Allegheny County Council

Public schools are not funded fairly.

Every child does not receive equitable resources or even close to what they need.

The state and federal government provide some funding, but they leave it up to each neighborhood to take the brunt of the burden.

So the majority of funding comes from local tax revenues – rich communities give their kids more than enough and poor ones struggle to give them enough to even get by.

This means things like class size, access to tutoring and remediation, extracurricular activities, advanced placement courses, field trips, counseling, even access to a school nurse often depends on how rich of a community kids live in.

It’s a backward and barbaric way of supporting children – a kind of economic Darwinism that gives the richest kids the most advantages from the very start while holding back everyone else.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but don’t look to the state or federal government to fix it.

No matter who has been in power in the Oval Office or held majorities in Congress, national lawmakers don’t seem to care much about public schools unless it has to do CONTINUE READING: A New Children’s Fund – Reducing Student Inequality Through Allegheny County Council | gadflyonthewallblog

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Charters Argue To Keep Money They're Not Owed

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Charters Argue To Keep Money They're Not Owed

PA: Charters Argue To Keep Money They're Not Owed

Governor Tom Wolf is once again trying to address Pennsylvania's lousy charter funding rules, but right-sizing charter funding would cut into charter profiteering, and so, the pushback is under way. 

A full package of the current talking points turned up in The Daily Signal, a right-wing website. This piece of commentary comes from Amber Northern, a senior vp for research at the reformy Fordham Institute and Lenny McCallister, who, after a career as a media commentary guy, now holds down dual jobs as CEO of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools and as a senior fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation, a free market thinky tank with ties to ALEC. 

The big hook they want to hang their argument on is a recent piece of research conducted for Fordham by Mark "Jersey Jazzman" Weber. For whatever reason, they choose not to link to that research, but you can find it here. Read that, and then read further insights about the research itself here, from Weber himself. The key finding that they would like you to notice is that when students leave a public school for charters, the per-pupil spending in the public school mostly goes up. This, they note, is "contrary to charter critics' preferred narrative" (thereby suggesting that this is a concern that charter critics made up, rather than a sincere concern). 

However, what this charter critic has always said is that you can't run multiple school districts for the money that was CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Charters Argue To Keep Money They're Not Owed

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: A Reminder That Charter Schools Are Businesses

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: A Reminder That Charter Schools Are Businesses

PA: A Reminder That Charter Schools Are Businesses

Who do you suppose might have said the following:

During the last few years, we’ve created a complete business ecosystem at The Waterfront. This strategic purchase was the natural next step as we continue to expand our operations.

A: A classroom teacher

B: A building principal

C: A corporate VP in charge of mergers and acquisitions

D: The CEO of a cyber charter school

The answer is D, and the speaker is Thomas Longenecker. Longenecker is the CEO (former COO) and president of Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA); he's also an adjunct professor of school finance and school law at Wilkes University, a PA university that specializes in online degrees. Before all that, he was business chief at two different school districts. His LinkedIn profile has a 13-year gap between his college graduation with a BA in business and his first school district job. 

CCA was launched in 2003 and has become the biggest cyber charter in PA. Their website leans heavily on the "It's free!" angle. They used to be called Commonwealth Connections Academy until 2016, and the website under that name is still live. Because--the name change coincided with the dropping of Connections Academy LLC as their education  program provider, but Connections Academy remains one of the Pearson cyber school brands still busily working the ed biz. Commonwealth Connections, owned by Pearson, at one point employed a guy named Mickey Revenaugh as a lobbyist; Revenaugh was also the corporate chair of the ALEC education task force. It gets confusing--CCA's 2017 990  shows them contracting with Pearson for $24 million worth of learning management platforms; that's less than half of the $54 million they spent in 2016, but it's not like they completely cut the cord. And previous year's costs for Commonwealth Connections to run CCA were in the $21 million range. 

Tracking personnel is tricky-- Longenecker's LinkedIn profile has him becoming CEO in 2019, but the previous CEO (Maurice Flurie) didn't leave the post till July of 2020. Flurie previously turned up CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: PA: A Reminder That Charter Schools Are Businesses

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Budget Kicks Off Another Round Of Charter Battles

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Budget Kicks Off Another Round Of Charter Battles

PA: Budget Kicks Off Another Round Of Charter Battles

Governor Tom Wolf has released his budget proposal, and charter supporters are not happy.

This is not the first time Wolf has made the charter school industry sad. Back in the summer of 2019 he fired some shots across their bows with an aggressive agenda for fixing Pennsylvania's messed up charter funding system. In return, they've launched a variety of PR pushes; indications are they have something a little more potent in mind this time.

In his 2020 budget speech, tried to soothe the industry and thread the needle, saying that Pennsylvania students should get a great education "whether in a traditional public school or a charter school" an noting that "Pennsylvania has a history of school choice, which I support." But he also said that some charter schools are “little more than fronts for private management companies, and the only innovations they’re coming up with involve finding new ways to take money out of the pockets of property taxpayers.”

The 2021 budget has several features to tighten up Pennsylvania's exceptionally loose charter industry. 

Pennsylvania's 14 cyber charters will be audited. "Wait," you say. "the cyber charters aren't audited?" The answer is "barely;" six of the charters have never been audited at all, and the largest cyber CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Budget Kicks Off Another Round Of Charter Battles

On This Holiday Honoring Dr. King, Consider the Plight of Children Today in Pennsylvania’s Chester Upland School District | janresseger

On This Holiday Honoring Dr. King, Consider the Plight of Children Today in Pennsylvania’s Chester Upland School District | janresseger

On This Holiday Honoring Dr. King, Consider the Plight of Children Today in Pennsylvania’s Chester Upland School District

Posted on January 18, 2021 by janresseger

Today is the holiday set aside for reflection on the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.  Peter Greene’s new history of the ruination of Pennsylvania’s Chester Upland Public Schools, published last week in Forbes, ought to be required reading on this holiday to remind us how badly our society has stumbled along the journey for justice for America’s poorest African American children.

On Wednesday, Joseph R. Biden will be inaugurated as U.S. President.  Look for a new post on Friday, January 22.

Greene explains: “As the new year begins, one Pennsylvania public school district faces the prospect of being completely dismantled and handed over to charter operators. Chester Upland School District is poised to become an example of what can happen to a public school district that needs assistance, and gets nothing but trouble instead.  CUSD has weathered every sort of challenge a district can face, but may now be on its last legs, about to make history as the first Pennsylvania district to be completely privatized.”

I have known about the tragedy in Chester Upland since the mid-1990s, but Greene explains how its segregated history goes back to the years before Brown, when the district educated Black and white children separately as a matter of policy. Greene reports that only after 1964 was Chester Upland ordered to desegregate, but middle class white flight followed, and “the 1960s saw an exodus of major employers like Ford Motor and Baldwin Locomotive. People CONTINUE READING: On This Holiday Honoring Dr. King, Consider the Plight of Children Today in Pennsylvania’s Chester Upland School District | janresseger

CURMUDGUCATION: Pennsylvania's Teacher Problem

CURMUDGUCATION: Pennsylvania's Teacher Problem

Pennsylvania's Teacher Problem

We already know that the teaching profession is primarily composed of white women (average age 43). But sometimes, when you break data down in particular ways, it becomes even more striking.

Research for Action is a Philly-based group that has done some great work over the years, and they've done some research about the TOC/SOC balance in PA that are featured both in this article from Sojourner Ahebee and a "supplemental" Twitter thread (and you can read the research here).

Some of the PA data is just striking. First, PA is an outlier when it comes to the gap between students and teachers of color. Nationally, the share of SOC is 2.5 times the share of TOC, but in PA the SOC share is 6 times greater (only NE, NH and Indiana have a bigger gap). I'm not totally shocked and surprised by that; PA suffers from a fairly severe urban vs. rural divide, and the rural parts of the state are pretty white. 

But when RFA starts breaking down by districts, it gets even starker. There are 500 school districts in PA (which is its own problem) and 184 of those districts employ zero teachers of color. Only about twenty-five districts in the entire state have staffs that are more than 5% TOC. Here's a map from Research for Action, breaking it down district by district: CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Pennsylvania's Teacher Problem

Will PA Schools Ask Parents to Oversee CDT Testing at Home? | gadflyonthewallblog

Will PA Schools Ask Parents to Oversee CDT Testing at Home? | gadflyonthewallblog

Will PA Schools Ask Parents to Oversee CDT Testing at Home?

Should parents be asked to administer on-line tests to their own children at home?

Back in May someone at Data Recognition Corporation (DRC) had an idea.

Since a global pandemic had shuttered classrooms, no children were being forced to take the multi-billion dollar testing company’s products.

Federally mandated assessments like the Pennsylvania System of School Assessments (PSSA) and Keystone Exams – which are made by DRC – were cancelled.

And local districts weren’t even making students take assessments like the Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDT) – an optional test to determine if kids were ready to take the mandatory tests.

If someone at DRC didn’t act quickly, the Commonwealth might ask for a refund on the $1.3 billion it spent on standardized testing in the last eight years.

 The Minnesota-based DRC, a division of CTB McGraw-Hill, wasn’t about CONTINUE READING: Will PA Schools Ask Parents to Oversee CDT Testing at Home? | gadflyonthewallblog

Now is Not the Time to Reopen Steel Valley Schools | gadflyonthewallblog

Now is Not the Time to Reopen Steel Valley Schools | gadflyonthewallblog

Now is Not the Time to Reopen Steel Valley Schools

On Friday, Johns Hopkins University reported the highest number of cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began.

That’s 83,757 new cases and 943 new deaths.

Now is not the time to reopen schools.

This comes after 77,000 cases were reported the day before – which, itself, had been the record.

At this rate, the US will have 100,000 new cases and 1,000 new deaths a day very soon.

Now is not the time to reopen schools.

Allegheny County has 14,818 cases and 421 deaths.

Cases have increased by 8% this week.

Now is not the time to CONTINUE READING: Now is Not the Time to Reopen Steel Valley Schools | gadflyonthewallblog

Why Is McKeesport Area School District Still Open After COVID-19 Outbreak? | gadflyonthewallblog

Why Is McKeesport Area School District Still Open After COVID-19 Outbreak? | gadflyonthewallblog

Why Is McKeesport Area School District Still Open After COVID-19 Outbreak?

At least six staff members and students at McKeesport Area School District (MASD) tested positive for COVID-19 in the last week alone.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) Website, two or more cases in a school building within a 14-day period call for some sort of closure to ensure the safety of students and staff.

So why are none of the district buildings closed?

The western Pennsylvania district located southeast of Pittsburgh reopened on a hybrid schedule on Sept. 2 with about a third of parents opting to keep their children out of the buildings and in the district-run cyber program.

Since then, finding concrete information about Coronavirus infections at our public schools – MASD or others – has not been an easy task.

Local newspapers only occasionally report on them and rarely put single incidents in context. Nor is there any government or other comprehensive database that collects CONTINUE READING: Why Is McKeesport Area School District Still Open After COVID-19 Outbreak? | gadflyonthewallblog

CURMUDGUCATION: Today in Teacher Depreciation

CURMUDGUCATION: Today in Teacher Depreciation

Today in Teacher Depreciation

When you're in the work, the general noise from the chorus of teacher devaluators can become a faint background buzz. And then something happens, and you're reminded suddenly, "Oh, yeah. That's a thing." 

Happened twice to me on Twitter in the past 24 hours. First, there was the noise surrounding the Trump thing on the teevee last night, including this little punch from Mercedes Schlapp, a senior advisor for the Trump/Pence campaign

This is obviously supposed to be an insult, but I live in western Pennsylvania, right up the road from Pittsburgh, where the international airport includes a whole display/play area devoted to one of Pittsburgh's most beloved sons, Fred Rogers (she spelled his name wrong). Mr. Rogers is a national treasure and one of the few icons who hasn't been outed as some sort of secretly terrible monster. 

Why would anybody treat him as an insult punchline? Because they respect strength and cruelty and in Mr. Rogers, they see the twin "weaknesses" of being kind and gentle and of communicating with CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Today in Teacher Depreciation