Why the gov't let many trade schools become diploma mills - Yahoo Finance

Why the gov't let many trade schools become diploma mills - Yahoo Finance:

Why the gov't let many trade schools become diploma mills

WASHINGTON (AP) — How did trade schools go from being mom-and-pop shops that trained mechanics and hair stylists to making billions on Wall Street? And if the industry is as predatory as the Education Department and many lawmakers suggest, why didn't they stop it?

In 1990, there wasn't a single publicly traded college. Now, there are more than a dozen with most of them being investigated by state and federal regulators for fraud or deceptive business practices. Among the allegations is that many of these schools enrolled unqualified students, taught bogus coursework, and encouraged prospective students to lie on financial aid forms so they could access federal dollars.

Several consumer advocates interviewed by The Associated Press point to 2002 as the beginning of a dangerous rise of for-profit colleges. That's when an Education Department memo written under President George W. Bush suggested colleges wouldn't be severely penalized if they compensated college recruiters for getting students in the door. The memo became a tacit endorsement for the kinds of high-pressured sales tactics that emerged.

The next big change, they say, came in 2006, when Congress passed legislation backed by the Bush administration that erased a requirement that colleges deliver at least half their courses on a campus.

The top regulator on higher education at the Education Department during this time was Sally Stroup, now general counsel for the for-profit's chief lobbying arm, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities.

"That's when these guys took off," said Tom Harkin, a former Democratic senator from Iowa who led a 2012 investigation into the for-profit industry. He said moving everything online made it easier for private investors to snap up failing schools and hide from regulators. Meanwhile, the schools invested heavily in lobbyists and making political connections that guaranteed access to federal Why the gov't let many trade schools become diploma mills - Yahoo Finance:

Ohio’s effort to reform its ridiculed charter schools is a big fail - The Washington Post

Ohio’s effort to reform its ridiculed charter schools is a big fail - The Washington Post:

Ohio’s effort to reform its ridiculed charter schools is a big fail

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is expected to officially announce this month that he is running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Don’t expect to hear him tout his state’s charter schools.

Ohio lawmakers looked like they were actually going to do something about the state’s ridiculed $1 billion charter school system, the No. 1 sector in Ohio for misspending tax dollars. A two-year effort to write legislation that would strengthen oversight of these schools passed in the state Senate in June, and was believed to have majority support in the state House. But, alas, the bill never made it to a final vote.

What happened? The bill — which, again, had the votes to pass — was tabled because, apparently, some lawmakers still want to make changes. The bill is supposed to come up again in September, but who really knows, given tepid efforts in the past to improve schools. Even if a bill passes later, implementation will be significantly delayed.

You’d think that the lousy state of Ohio’s charter system would have set a fire under everyone with even half a fingerprint on it. How bad is it? A June story in the Akron Beacon Journal started this way:

No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.

The newspaper had reviewed 4,263 audits released last year by the state and concluded that charter schools in the state appear to have misspent public money “nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.” It says that “since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.”

[Troubled Ohio charter schools have become a joke]

To understand why there is skepticism about Ohio’s effort to provide better oversight to charters, one only has to look at what it has already been trying to do. Kasich and lawmakers came up with a plan a few years ago to pressure the organizations that grant permission for groups  to open charters to do a better oversight job. Those groups, called “agencies” in Ohio, include schools Ohio’s effort to reform its ridiculed charter schools is a big fail - The Washington Post:

Parents Fight Conservative Zealots and Charter School Advocates For Control of Their Kids' Education | Alternet

Parents Fight Conservative Zealots and Charter School Advocates For Control of Their Kids' Education | Alternet:

Parents Fight Conservative Zealots and Charter School Advocates For Control of Their Kids' Education

In Jefferson County, Colorado an acrimonious debate is taking place over the future of public school.

It's Tuesday evening, and people have come to church — but not for religion.

What's bringing people to Green Mountain United Methodist Church in the heart of Lakewood, Colorado, is a meeting modestly titled "Church and society: Stand up for students."

In a cramped, wood-paneled room on the second floor, two dozen attendees rise, one after another, to introduce themselves and say why they are here. "I'm concerned," say a few. "Scary," "outrageous," say others.

A neatly dressed elderly man speaks up: "When you've been given a lot for the education of your own children, it's important that the children after yours get that same level of education, or better. I don't believe we're doing that."

"I have two children in school," a younger woman says. "I hear things that are troubling. So I'm here to learn more."

The last woman to introduce herself, wearing a T-shirt declaring she is a "Jeffco Rebel," starts a stack of handouts circulating around the room. That's when a woman seated at the head of the room says, "We're here to arm you with information."

This is Jefferson County, Colorado.

Sprawling westward from the Denver skyline, where the front range of the Rockies sharpens its ascension to the peaks, Jeffco, as the locals call it, is experiencing an acrimonious debate about its public schools.

At scores of house parties like this one, parents and public school activists circulate flyers and repeat a well-rehearsed message of dissent. They complain of a new school board majority that is secretive, disrespectful to parents and teachers and irresponsible with tax dollars. They warn of the influence of right-wing groups, some with connections to evangelical Christianity. They complain of a powerful charter school industry, different from the "organic charters" Jeffco parents already send their kids to.

Behind every grassroots issue they identify lies a much "bigger thing," as more than one parent will tell you.

It's a complicated narrative that defies stereotypes and neat polarities. Although the fight is political, Republicans and Democrats are distributed on both sides of the debate. The argument is about education, but it's not an argument over pro-charter school versus anti-charter. Jeffco has had charters for years, many of which are highly popular with parents. Neither is this a narrative about choice versus anti-choice. Jeffco already allows parents toenroll their children in any school in the district (although there are cases of selective enrollment), and many families do opt for a school other than their neighborhood one.

Jeffco is a mostly white, middle-class and suburban school district that hardly resembles the "failing" school systems you're used to hearing about. According to the district's website, Jeffco students "outperform the state in all grade levels and content areas" on state mandated achievement tests. Six of the district's high schools rank in the top 40 of the 2014 Best High Schools in America according to U.S. News & World Report, and 11 elementary schools were listed as 5280 Magazine's top public elementary schools.

And Jeffco is not a community where teachers' unions are defending their turf from disgruntled parents. Parents, not union operatives, lead the numerous and frequent house parties like the one at Green Mountain Church.

What is also true about Jeffco is that the story unfolding here is one that isrecurring across the country, as community after community becomes mired in debates about who gets to call the shots in education systems strained by unending financial austerity and an unremitting "reform" agenda whose intent is unclear to the people in its way.

A Conflict About Curriculum

Jefferson County was first thrust into the media spotlight in 1999, when two armed students committed horrific killings at Columbine High School. More recently, this district of over 85,000 students, the second largest in the state, made headlines again when mass student walkouts occurred in high schools across the district to voice concerns over a proposed review of an AP U.S. history course.

As the Associated Press reported at the time, students were alarmed that the stated purpose of the review was "to make sure materials 'promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights' and don't 'encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.'"

The students took to the streets multiple days in a row to voice their right to learn about the history of protest and civil disobedience that helped create the country they live in today. Some teachers got involved as well, staging a "mass sick-out" in support of the students.

When MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry interviewed two student leaders of the protest, Ashlyn Maher and Kyle Ferris, Ferris explained, "We wanted to get the school board's attention. They're not really listening to the concerns of the Parents Fight Conservative Zealots and Charter School Advocates For Control of Their Kids' Education | Alternet:

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson Fights Email Release Amid Allegations Of Nepotism Benefiting His Wife

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson Fights Email Release Amid Allegations Of Nepotism Benefiting His Wife:

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson Fights Email Release Amid Allegations Of Nepotism Benefiting His Wife

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson doesn’t want the public to see private emails he sent to an attorney while he was involved with a national group of black city leaders. That’s according to local news outlets that requested the emails amid allegations that Johnson used his position as president of the National Conference of Black Mayors to promote a business run by his wife.

A California judge is expected to decide Thursday whether Sacramento can release the emails sent between Johnson and a black mayors' conference attorney. Johnson, who played professional basketball for 13 years before becoming the first African-American elected mayor of California’s capital, has sued the weekly city newspaper, the Sacramento News & Review, to stop certain emails from becoming public, according to a USA Today report.

Johnson’s personal attorney, Peter Haviland, said the lawsuit that his client filed in Sacramento Superior Court Wednesday is meant to prevent a violation of attorney-client privilege. "No responsible journalist nor attorney disputes that the attorney-client privilege is a bedrock of America's civil society,” Haviland said in an email to KXTV-TV.

“Public records requests are not intended to violate that privilege, and the law does not allow disclosure of attorney-client privileged materials pursuant to public records requests," the email continued.

Johnson, 49, was elected president of the National Conference of Black Mayors in 2012, one year after he married Michelle Rhee, a former chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools. Members of the mayors’ conference had challenged whether Johnson's election as their leader was valid as well as claims that he used the position to promote his wife’s education reform nonprofit, StudentsFirst.

Through the California Public Records Act, news outlets have asked for emails Johnson sent to the black mayors conference’s bankruptcy attorney. The emails were sent by Johnson from an unofficial email account. Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson Fights Email Release Amid Allegations Of Nepotism Benefiting His Wife:

It’s Official: The Feds Will Collect Psycho-Social Data On Your Child - California Political Review

It’s Official: The Feds Will Collect Psycho-Social Data On Your Child - California Political Review:

It’s Official: The Feds Will Collect Psycho-Social Data On Your Child

The Feds are mandating a “test” starting in 2017 for your kids. No it is not what they know about history, science or math. It is private, personal information taken from the kids for a national database—without telling us how it will be used. As we know the data collected by the Fed is totally secure—except for the NSA, the 32 million people that work or worked for the Feds—including the CIA.

“Almost any parent would read this and wonder why his child’s mindsets and personal goals are any of the government’s business. Indeed, there is serious doubt whether NAEP even has the statutory authority to delve into such matters. The federal statute authorizing NAEP requires that the assessment “objectively measure academic achievement, knowledge, and skills” and that the tests “do not evaluate or assess personal or family beliefs and attitudes . . . .” The statute further requires that NAEP “only collect information that is directly related to the appraisal of academic achievement . . . .”

This is the role of government. I urge parents to tell their children to refuse to answer any such questions. I urge the public to demand their school board not allow this invasion of privacy. When will we revolt against a totalitarian government controlling us by forcing our kids to give them information?

It’s Official: The Feds Will Collect Psycho-Social Data On Your Child

Government of the people and by the people should not plumb and manipulate the people’s psyches and emotions, especially when so many kids can still hardly read and cipher.

By Jane Robbins, The Federalist, 6/29/15

Every year, hundreds of thousands of U.S. students take the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP), the federally authorized test known as the “nation’s report card.” Education Week reportedrecently that, beginning in 2017, NAEP will ask “background questions” designed to gauge each student’s level of “motivation, mindset, and grit.” It’s not enough for the federal government to keep tabs on whether your child knows the material he’s been taught. Instead, it wants to peer inside his mind and critique his personality to see if he has the “noncognitive skills” government thinks he should.

As described by the Educational Testing Service at a conference of the Association for Psychological Science, two of the categories on the NAEP background survey will be labeled “grit” and “desire for learning.” Questions in these categories will be presented to all test-takers. Specific subject areas may include additional questions about other “noncognitive factors” such as “self-efficacy” and “personal achievement goals.”

Almost any parent would read this and wonder why his child’s mindsets and personal goals are any of the government’s business. Indeed, there is serious doubt whether NAEP even has the statutory authority to delve into such matters. The federal statute authorizing NAEP requires that the assessment “objectively measure academic achievement, knowledge, and skills” and that the tests “do not evaluate or assess personal or family beliefs and attitudes . . . .” The statute further requires that NAEP “only collect information that is directly related to the appraisal of academic achievement . . . .”

Presumably NAEP bureaucrats would argue that the background questions aren’t part of the assessment itself, so don’t violate the prohibition against assessing attitudes. Even so, is the non-cognitive information these questions collect “directly related to the appraisal of academic achievement”? Only in the sense that every aspect of one’s personality might theoretically affect one’s academic performance. If we take that broad a view, there is no limit to what NAEP can ask about.

Do you find yourself getting frustrated when you study? Does poor academic performance make your parents angry with you? Do you have problems at home that might affect your schoolwork? We’re here to help.

Now Schools Are Responsible for Kids’ Feelings

In any event, it’s no surprise that a federal education program is moving beyond assessing academic knowledge and into the realm of attitudes, mindsets, and dispositions. For years now, the federal government has openly advocated teaching and measuring the “appropriate” (that is, government-approved) mindsets for students. The concept is known as “social/emotional learning,” or SEL.

Do we really want the government determining what types of attitudes and mindsets are necessary to be a It’s Official: The Feds Will Collect Psycho-Social Data On Your Child - California Political Review:

Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson seeks to block e-mails

Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson seeks to block e-mails:

Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson seeks to block release of e-mails

K.J. sues SN&R over controversial emails http://bit.ly/1JxLt4B

Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson has filed a legal challenge against a local newspaper in an effort to block the release of e-mail records sought under California’s open records law.

In a petition filed in Sacramento Superior Court on Wednesday, private attorneys hired by Johnson are seeking to block the release of e-mails from one of Johnson’s personal accounts on the basis of attorney-client privilege.

The e-mails in question are at the center of a public records request filed by the Sacramento News & Review in which the newspaper reported the mayor and other city officials had been using private Google Mail accounts to conduct official city business.

Under the California Public Records Act, government officials at the state and local level are required to hand over records related to government matters, including correspondents sent from and received to official government e-mail accounts. However, certain records may be withheld under the CPRA, including documents that relate to attorney-client privilege.

The newspaper reported in March that Johnson and other city officials had been discussing and conducting official city business using third-party e-mail service providers instead of their government accounts. The paper identified Johnson’s Chief of Staff Daniel Conway and press spokesperson Ben Sosenko as using Google mail accounts; the paper said Johnson himself uses an account under the address kevinjohnson.com, which is paid for through a commercial service, according to records reviewed by The Desk.

Johnson has already handed over some of his e-mails to Michael Benner, the deputy city attorney for Sacramento, according to the News & Review. Benner said the e-mails were public records because they contained messages between Johnson and a private firm hired to handle an ongoing legal matter involving the mayor. Since the e-mails did not contain communications between Johnson and a city attorney, the e-mails were determined to be public records, Benner told the paper.

But sources close to the mayor told The Desk on Wednesday that an audit performed by the city attorney’s office turned up some e-mail records that “probably fit under the attorney-client privilege” exemption of the CPRA.

“Upon its review, it’s been discovered that approximately 100 emails contained in the responsive documents were communizations between the law firm…and the mayor and his staff,” the city attorney wrote in an email message sent to city officials. “It was deemed likely that these e-mails would be considered attorney-client privilege, but the city has no basis to claim this privilege between a third-party law firm involving non-city manners. The third-party law firm would have to assert the privilege through a court order.”

The e-mail written by the city attorney was provided verbally to The Desk by a source familiar with the ongoing dispute involving the records request. The Desk could not independently verify the authenticity of the e-mail message.

The e-mail would appear to contradict a claim reported by the News & Review in which the paper said Benner found the records from Johnson’s personal account were not exempt from disclosure under attorney-client privilege.

“As far as I’m concerned, these are public records,” Benner told the paper.

But Ballard Spahr, the private law firm hired by Johnson for the matter, disagrees.

“Public records requests are not intended to violate that privilege and the law does not allow disclosure of attorney-client privileged materials pursuant to public records requests,” Peter Haviland, an attorney for the firm, told The Desk by e-mail.

The petition filed in court on Wednesday notes that another newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, filed a Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson seeks to block e-mails:

The Michigan Family Buying Indiana Education | Hoosier School Heist Blog

The Michigan Family Buying Indiana Education | Hoosier School Heist Blog:

THE MICHIGAN FAMILY BUYING INDIANA EDUCATION

Art by Clyde Gaw

By Doug Martin,  the author of Hoosier School Heist (find iton Facebook)

(cross-posted at Schools Matter)

If you haven’t read my book Hoosier School Heist, chances are you don’t know Betsy DeVos.  Without a doubt, Betsy DeVos and her family members are some of the biggest players behind school privatization in Indiana (and several other states).

Betsy DeVos is the wife of Richard (Dick) DeVos, Jr., the Christian Right leader of Amway and Right-to-Work  supporter who ran for governor of Michigan in 2006 and almost won.   As I explain in my book, Richard, in a video a few years back, detailed the family plan for Indiana public education and school privatization across the country.

Betsy DeVos’ brother Erik Prince founded the Christian military force Blackwater, known for its massacre, threats to a U.S. investigator, and big government payouts in the War on Terror.

Along with Walmart’s Walton family, Betsy DeVos heads the American Federation for Children, a front-group which funneled money into the Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC which in turn handed tons of campaign donations to Indiana Republicans (and lawmakers in several other states) to pass anti-public education bills to benefit for-profit charter operators and rightwing free-market-promoting Christian schools.

Besides giving Tony Bennet $10,000 directly, the DeVos family has handed $940,000 to the American Federation for Children.

Mike Pence has received just $20,000 in campaign donations The Michigan Family Buying Indiana Education | Hoosier School Heist Blog:

K.J. sues SN&R over controversial emails - Page Burner - July 1, 2015 - Blogs - Sacramento News & Review

K.J. sues SN&R over controversial emails - Page Burner - July 1, 2015 - Blogs - Sacramento News & Review:

K.J. sues SN&R over controversial emails

by Cosmo Garvin

Kevin Johnson is suing SN&R and the city of Sacramento to block the release of emails between his office and lawyers involved in Johnson’s legal troubles with the National Conference of Black Mayors.

The litigation is meant to force SN&R to agree that the city should not disclose certain emails even though the city attorney has determined them to be public records. Failing that, Johnson’s attorney wants a Sacramento Superior Court judge to prohibit the city from releasing emails, which he believes are protected by attorney-client privilege.

Johnson’s attorney, David Pittinsky, with the Philadelphia-based law firm Ballard Spahr, threatened the legal action last week.

“We’re not suing you as a bad person,” he said during a phone call. “But we need to protect ourselves.”

Let’s back up. Regular readers may remember that SN&R filed a public-records request in March in order to better understand how and why the mayor’s staff uses a network of private Gmail accounts to do city business (read the story, “Special Delivery,” printed on April 23: http://tinyurl.com/KJsecretemail.)

You may also recall that Johnson has used city staff for many of his non-city projects. One of those was a takeover of the leadership of the National Conference of Black Mayors, which was described in a PowerPoint presentation to city staff as a “coup” (read my recent column, from June 11, titled “KJ Inc. strikes again”: http://tinyurl.com/KJincStrikesAgain.)

The NCBM takeover resulted in a nasty legal fight involving Johnson and aggrieved NCBM officials. Each of these separate threads—the parallel email accounts for the mayor’s staff, and the NCBM coup—show the remarkable extent to which Johnson uses city resources for non-city business. 

In the course of reviewing documents for SN&R’s records request, deputy city attorney Michael Benner identified several emails between the mayor’s staff and Ballard Spahr—that’s the firm representing the mayor and the K.J. sues SN&R over controversial emails - Page Burner - July 1, 2015 - Blogs - Sacramento News & Review:

An amusing Common Core irony - The Washington Post

An amusing Common Core irony - The Washington Post:

An amusing Common Core irony

Diane Ravitch, the education historian, former assistant secretary of education, and titular leader of the movement against corporate school reform, edited a book decades ago titled “The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation.” It is an anthology of speeches, letters, poems, songs, documents and essays by people who have “inspired, delighted, enraged, and roused America.”

Ravitch is also a fierce critic of the Common Core State Standards (as she wrote here). It turns out — as Ravitch wrote on her blog — that the book is listed in Appendix B of the Common Core State Standards as a “text exemplar” in the category of Informational Texts: History/Social Studies — but she is not mentioned as the editor. Three spots above “The American Reader” on the exemplar list is “An American Primer,” whose editor, Daniel J. Boorstin, is mentioned.

(From Appendix B of the Common Core English Language Arts Standards)

[Everything you need to know about Common Core — Ravitch]

In fact, if you look at the complete list of text exemplars, there are plenty of anthologies with the editors’ names listed. For example:

(From Appendix B of Common Core ELA Standards)

(From Appendix B of Common Core ELA Standards)

An amusing Common Core irony - The Washington Post:

Russ on Reading: State Teacher Equity Plans: Following Data Down the Rabbit Hole

Russ on Reading: State Teacher Equity Plans: Following Data Down the Rabbit Hole:

State Teacher Equity Plans: Following Data Down the Rabbit Hole

You may remember that last fall with great fanfare, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in another of a long line of misguided educational decrees, announced that they were requiring states to develop new plans to ensure equity in the distribution of quality teachers (I wrote about this decree here). Well, now those plans are in and available for public inspection here.

Education week has looked at twelve of those state reports and provides a good summary of what they found here. Basically, some of these reports offered a few new ideas, but others recycled ideas from the last equity plan from 2006 or reported on the progress they had made with certain programs.

Reading these lengthy, dense reports could be a really good cure for insomnia, so I only looked at two of the reports, one from the state where I live, Pennsylvania (80 pages)and the one from the state where I work, New Jersey (40 pages).

Here is my summary of the two plans:

The Pennsylvania report said blah, blah, blah, professional development; blah, blah, blah teacher preparation; blah, blah, blah new Russ on Reading: State Teacher Equity Plans: Following Data Down the Rabbit Hole:

About those Ed Regs for Improving Teacher Equity: A preview of new (old) findings | School Finance 101

About those Ed Regs for Improving Teacher Equity: A preview of new (old) findings | School Finance 101:

About those Ed Regs for Improving Teacher Equity: A preview of new (old) findings 

Doc student Mark Weber and I have been blogging a bit less lately and digging in on a number of interesting academic papers ranging from analyses of charter school expenditures to inter and intra-district resource inequality.  Among these papers is an analysis of data provided by ED for states to run preliminary analyses of measures of teacher equity across schools.

As states roll out their plans, this topic is again getting some ed media attention, most of which (if not all) misses entirely the point that regulatory pressure passed by states along to local public districts will achieve little or nothing in equalizing the distribution of teacher/teaching/instructional resources across schools and children statewide. That is, without any attention to inter-district disparities in school funding, whichas I have noted, have only continued to get worse. Bottom line, you can’t fix cross-school, statewide disparities in resources without fixing between district disparities in funding. Here are a portion of the intro and conclusions of our current draft:

Intro:

New federal regulations (State Plans to Ensure Equitable Access to Excellent Educators)[1] place increased pressure on states and local public school districts to improve their measurement and reporting of gaps in teacher attributes across schools and the children they serve, and ultimately to mitigate revealed disparities. But, these regulations largely sidestep the extent to which availability of financial resources might influence the distribution of teachers, pointing a finger instead at “root causes” such as lack of effective leadership, lack of comprehensive human capital strategies and otherwise ineffective and inefficient personnel policies.[2] Failure to emphasize the potential role of broader financial disparities as a root cause of inequitable access to excellent educators, and thus failure to mitigate those disparities, may undermine the administration’s goals.

Despite a lack of explicit attention to inter-district fiscal disparities as possible root causes of inequitable access to excellent educators, the administration provides guidance on measuring teacher equity using existing data sources and measures which either directly or indirectly involve financial resources. While broadly referencing “inexperienced, unqualified, or “out-of-field teachers” as a concern,[3] the administration’s guidance also cites measures of teacher salaries and cumulative school site spending on teacher compensation (as reported in the recent CRDC collection).[4]

Coinciding with these new federal regulations are a series of legal challenges in states including California and New York which claim that state statutes providing due process protections and defining tenure status for teachers are a primary cause of deficiencies in teacher qualifications, specifically in districts and schools within districts serving disadvantaged minority populations (Black, 2016). Implicit in these legal challenges is an assumption that if statutorily defined tenure status and due process requirements pertaining to teacher dismissal did not exist, statewide disparities in teacher qualities between higher and lower poverty schools (under the statutes in question) would be substantially mitigated. Like the federal regulations, this approach fails entirely to consider that disparities in district financial resources may be substantial determinants of statewide variations in teacher attributes.

As a basis by which inequality should be determined, the administration places 

About those Ed Regs for Improving Teacher Equity: A preview of new (old) findings | School Finance 101:

FUSD board divided on need for outside investigation of bidding processes | Fresno Bee Fresno Bee

FUSD board divided on need for outside investigation of bidding processes | Fresno Bee Fresno Bee:

FUSD board divided on need for outside investigation of bidding processes

 The Fresno Unified School District Board of Trustees remains divided in the wake of acontroversial construction deal that was recently deemed illegal by the 5th District Court of Appeal.

Board members disagree about whether an independent investigation should be conducted to answer questions about how and why the district went outside the scope of typical bidding processes when it signed a near-$40 million contract with Harris Construction to build Rutherford B. Gaston Middle School.

While the board has not taken up the matter in a public meeting, with board leadershipshutting down requests to get it on the agenda, trustees have taken their arguments public anyway, signing off on two conflicting letters to the editor in The Bee in the past week.

In a letter to the editor in Tuesday’s paper, trustees Janet Ryan and Christopher De La Cerda say fellow trustees’ call for an outside investigation is unnecessary, and defend lease-leaseback deals — the process used in the Harris Construction case. Lease-leaseback deals were designed for cash-strapped districts that want to build schools. The method allows school districts to handpick developers who will pay the upfront building costs, then the district pays to lease the school until it’s paid off.

The appellate court found the Gaston Middle deal was not a true lease-leaseback deal because Fresno Unified had the money to pay it off immediately, and the decision has left critics alleging district officials broke the rules in order to favor Harris Construction.

I WOULD SUGGEST THAT THE ON-GOING CRITICISM HAS BEEN WORTH IT.

Fresno Unified Trustee Christopher De La Cerda, citing construction of Gaston Middle School as a positive development being overshadowed by the debate of how it was paid for

“As a current board member and former educator, I continue to remind myself what is at the center of this issue. The district finally built a state-of-the-art middle school for a part of our community that lacked one for more than 30 years. The positive impact that it has had on the children, their families and the community is just beginning to be realized,” De La Cerda said Tuesday in an email. “For that, I would suggest that the on-going criticism has been worth it.”

De La Cerda and Ryan point to other cases where other school districts in California have gone to court and won regarding the lease-leaseback method, and say any investigation would be “unwise” while the case is still pending a final court decision. The board voted to appeal the most recent court decision, asking that the case move to the California Supreme Court. The district has already spent $117,000 litigating the case, according to a district official.

The case was not addressed at a Fresno Unified Audit Committee Meeting on Tuesday, but it could be in the future, according to Ryan.

The committee — made up of some trustees, district staff and community members — meets quarterly with an external auditor, required to oversee districts by state law, and an additional internal auditor that Fresno Unified employs voluntarily to keep an eye on finances and business practices.

Ryan said that while she doesn’t think an investigation is needed, she would support a move to have the firm already employed by the district — Price, Paige & Company — to conduct an audit of the bidding process in question.

“I’m a part of this committee and I trust these guys and think they do a good job,” Ryan said Tuesday. “In September, if we want to put that on the agenda, that’s something I would support.” The Audit Committee voted Tuesday to renew its contract with Price, Paige & Company, extending its seven-year business relationship.

But three of the seven Fresno Unified trustees want new eyes on the case and are asking that the board consider hiring an outside firm that has no prior ties to the district to look into the Harris Construction contract.

THE PUBLIC SHOULD BE OUTRAGED.

Fresno Unified Trustee Brooke Ashjian, lamenting what he says is a lack of open discussion about how bond dollars are being spent

Trustee Brooke Ashjian said the board’s current focus on the purpose of lease-leaseback deals is a red herring, and that the concern is more about the deals that happened between Fresno Unified and Harris Construction prior to the company’s selection for the project. Harris Construction agreed to do consulting for free in exchange for winning the project’s contract — and without the full board’s approval.FUSD board divided on need for outside investigation of bidding processes | Fresno Bee Fresno Bee:

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/education/article25922365.html#storylink=cpy