Breaking: Senate Education Leaders Close In On Bipartisan ESEA Rewrite - Politics K-12

Senate Education Leaders Close In On Bipartisan ESEA Rewrite - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

Senate Education Leaders Close In On Bipartisan ESEA Rewrite

After nearly two months of negotiating behind closed doors, Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., the chairman and ranking member of the education committee, appear to be nearing consensus on major pieces of a bipartisan draft to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, according to sources.

In what seems to be a departure from Alexander's original draft legislation, unveiled in January, the version being negotiated likely wouldn't allow Title I dollars for low-income students to follow them to the school of their choice, sources said.

The elimination of that language would be a big win for Murray, and especially for the Obama administration, which has all but said it would veto any bill that included the provision, known as "Title I portability." In their view, that would funnel resources out of poor communities and into wealthier ones.

Still, Title I portability is a big priority for Republicans in a rewrite of the ESEA, the current version of which is the No Child Left Behind Act. Some, including Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., would like to see such a provision pushed even farther to allow Title I dollars to also be used at private schools.

In addition, the version being discussed in negotiations that are slated to continue throughout the weekend would maintain the annual federal testing schedule, sources said. Currently, states are required to test students every year in math and English/language arts in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and also in science once in grades 3 through 5, once in grades 6 through 8, and once in high school.

Alexander's original draft included two testing options: stick with the annual testing regimen, or give states lots of leeway in how they assess students. The latter option would have allowed states to essentially go their own way on testing, whether that meant testing only in certain grade spans, using portfolios, combining the results of different formative assessments, or trying out competency-based tests, to name a few things.

Still, sources said, the compromise that's under discussion would provide some additional flexibility on testing through a limited pilot program that would allow states and school districts to develop innovative assessments.

The other half of the testing debate has to do with accountability. And at first blush, it seems as though Murray would come up somewhat short on her wish for a more-robust accountability system than what Alexander had included in his original draft.

Under the evolving draft, sources said, states would still need to disaggregate student data to help compare subgroups of students, including minorities, low-income students, English-learners, and those with disabilities. And they would still need to report graduation rates. But, as under Alexander's original draft, states would be able to create their own accountability systems, without the education secretary's hands-on involvement.

Murray has been firm in saying that states need to be held accountable for the billions of taxpayer dollars that they're sent each year, something that Alexander's previous draft, she has said, doesn't do.

However, it sounds like Murray would eke out something of a win on her demand that early-childhood education be included in the NCLB rewrite, according to sources. The version being negotiated doesn't appear to include anything as significant as an entirely new title authorized for billions of dollars, but it would list early-childhood education as an allowable use of funding for a broad swath of programs in the ESEA. That wouldn't be a major departure from current law, but it would provide more specificity.

And the evolving discussions could also produce a competitive grant program that would allow states to better coordinate their early-childhood education programs in order to increase quality and access. Of course, as with any authorization, there's no guarantee Congress would actually provide the funding for that program.

Murray, a former preschool teacher, and the administration have pushed hard to merge early education into the federal K-12 law. In fact, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said just last week that it was the administration's No. 1 priority for a rewrite of the law.

In a speech on March 24, Alexander was adamant that he'd prefer to reorganize the $22 billionthat already goes to federal early-education programs rather than adding new language to law.

The negotiations are still a work in progress, and the details are likely to continue to evolve before the education committee marks up a bill the week of April 13. Among the other apparent areas of agreement, sources said, are provisions that would:

• Maintain the education secretary's waiver authority from provisions of the law, but place limits on tying conditions to waivers.
• Require states to have challenging academic standards, but those standards wouldn't need to be reviewed by the education department.
• Tweak the definition of "supplement not supplant."
• Not close the so-called "Title I comparability loophole."
• Keep in place maintenance of effort, which requires states to keep up their own funding at a particular level in order to tap federal Title I funds, while providing some flexibility for districts.
• Continue to require that schools have at least 40 percent of students in poverty in order to use Title I dollars for programs that benefit the entire school. The Alexander draft—and a bill to rewrite the NCLB law that was debated in the House—would scrap this requirement, allowing any school that gets Title I money to use the funds with all of its students.

It's important to remember that an Alexander/Murray draft would be just the first step in a lengthy Senate legislative process. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle would have the opportunity to try to add language to or eliminate language from a bill during the markup process.

Assuming Alexander's committee clears a bill, and assuming it's still bipartisan at that point (and that's a big assumption since Republicans will have the majority numbers to add and eliminate Senate Education Leaders Close In On Bipartisan ESEA Rewrite - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

RAHM Why are you pushing the Corporate Agenda in Chicago #DumpRahm #‎Chuy2015

RAHM Why are you pushing the 

Corporate Agenda  in Chicago?

Big Education Ape: The Case Against Rahm | Profit and Laws ‪#‎Chuy2015‬ ‪#‎imwithchuy‬ http://bit.ly/1IbiYLM

Big Education Ape: Rahm's Accomplishments REALLY!!! Does Rahm deserve another four years? #‎Chuy2015‬ ‪#‎imwithchuy‬ http://bit.ly/1FqWjHD

Big Education Ape: #HedgePapers No.7: Rahm Emanuel and his Hedge Fund Flash Boys — Hedge Clippers http://bit.ly/1IItGa6

Big Education Ape: Schooling in the Ownership Society: Revolving door from Rahm's City Hall to hedge-funder's offic... http://bit.ly/1FqWMcU

The Case Against Rahm | Profit and Laws ‪#‎Chuy2015‬ ‪#‎imwithchuy‬

The Case Against Rahm | Profit and Laws:

The Case Against Rahm

I wish I could be with Rahm and feel Chicago is in the hands of a tough, capable leader. But I’ve come to understand that our great city is about to re-elect a guy just as bad or worse than Rod Blagojevich. I wish I were exaggerating.

If this mayor isn’t corrupt, he does nearly everything possible to look like it. And, where isn’t corrupt, he’s just incompetent.

Like you, I had heard buzz words that went in and out of my head – red light cameras; Magic Johnson; Janitors; Bond downgrade. Election day is Tuesday, and I needed to figure out who to vote for. So, I started reading. And, I’m horrified by what I’ve learned. When you lay it all out, it’s a stunning portrait of a skilled crook, who is either going to bankrupt our city while he blusters and bullshits or he’s going to tempt the doors of prison.

Rahm is Corrupt

Can we start with a basic rule? People who make decisions on how to spend government dollars shouldn’t be a recipient of any of those dollars. That’s a conflict of interest, and it’s illegal. So, here’s the problem: some of Rahm’s decision-makers are recipients of the public cash they are spending for the city. Not pennies – millions of dollars of government money are funneled by Rahm or his soldiers into the pockets of Rahm and his soldiers. It’s just that simple. No one is hiding it. They are stealing my tax dollars and yours in broad daylight. But, look, I don’t want to write a 30 page opus any more than you want to read it.  So, let me tell you a few short stories, ripped from the headlines.

Magic Johnson and the School Janitors

In 2013, The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) hired Magic Johnson’s company, SodexoMAGIC, to clean 33 schools; they also hired Aramark, a huge company, to clean the rest of the schools. The price: $80 million to Magic Johnson, $260 million to Aramark.

In September, not long after Magic and Aramark took over cleaning the schools, principals and teachers started complaining that the schools were filthy, infested with vermin and covered in grime or worse. Rahm promised to fix the problem. Five months later, the schools remained filthy – Magic Johnson did three things:

1. He announced he would give back $10 million to a Chicago summer jobs program.
2. He gave $100,000 to Rahm’s campaign funds.
3. One month later, he gave another $150,000 to Rahm’s campaign funds.

When a reporter asked Rahm if taking campaign contributions from a city vendor was unethical, the Mayor said, “The good news is he’s given $10 million to our children and provided 5,000 of our kids an after-school program.”

So Magic Johnson got an $80 million paycheck from our city, donated $250,000 to the boss and did a shoddy job for our school children. Ironically, he did manage to launder the exchange with a $10 million donation to the city that can probably be used to reduce taxes on the $80 million of income from the city.

Money From Pension Managers

Of course, the city pays millions of dollars every year to a variety of professional investment firms to invest city pensions – that’s okay. The problem is that many of those firms are run by people who have donated more than $600,000 to Rahm’s campaign accounts.

For example:

• Managers at Madison Dearborn have given more than $500,000 to Rahm’s campaign funds. Madison Dearborn is concealed as a city vendor. You have to peel back the layers on the funds it manages, and when you do, it turns out that nine Madison Dearborn funds hold a substantial chunk of one $5.3 billion pension.
• Another investment firm, John Buck Co., manages roughly $54 million in Chicago pension funds and earns hundreds of thousands in fees every year. Managers at John Buck Co. have given $57,500 to Rahm’s campaign funds.

These donations could violate at least two laws:

• SEC rules against managers of municipal pension funds bribing government officials.
• Rahm’s own adopted rules against city officials taking campaign contributions from city contractors.

Look, there is a reality to politics – you have to raise money. But, Rahm raised more than $30 million. If he didn’t want to be or look corrupt, he should have followed his own rule and not taken money from people who have benefited financially from his ability to control the city. He should have had more respect for the voters and the city to avoid both the suspicion and the drama of parsing out which funky payments were the product of graft and which were the product of friendship. But, all the money doesn’t just flow into Rahm’s campaign funds – some goes to his friends.

$20 Million Mentors for School Principals

Here’s a doozy. CPS is $1.1 billion in the hole for next year, and measures are being put in place to enable CPS to file for bankruptcy. But, CPS just hired a company to coach school principals – for $20 million. The company is Supes Academy. Before Rahm named her to be the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Barbara Byrd-Bennett worked for Supes Academy. No one else – for-profit, not-for-profit or academic – was asked to bid on this contract. If Supes was an outstanding, obvious choice, fine, but Supes has a relatively weak track record and no relevant differentiators that make them qualified for a no-bid contract.

School Board Member’s Companies Triple Business with CPS

Deborah Quazzo is a venture capitalist who invests in for-profit education companies. Rahm appointed her to the Chicago School Board in June, 2013. And, man, oh man, is she mad. The Sun Times figured out that companies she partly owns have tripled their business with CPS since Quazzo joined the board. She is outraged that someone would dare to besmirch her reputation, since she’s done everything to the letter. Okay. Let’s put aside some key omissions from her disclosure report (like a couple of companies). Let’s put aside the fact that, after she joined the board, one of Quazzo’s companies started discounting bills to just below $25,000 (sparing required CPS approval for bills over $25,000.) Let’s just look at the coincidental facts:

	Before She Joined the School Board	After She Joined the School Board
Amounts paid to Quazzo’s companies…	$930,000	$2,900,000

She has recused herself from voting; she has promised to donate profits made form contracts. But, she still owns them, she still maintains a powerful presence on the board. And those companies that provide for-profit services to our nearly insolvent not-for-profit schools have exploded under her watch.

The Red Light Cameras and Rahm’s Number One Aide

For years, lobbyist John Borovicka was one of Rahm’s top aids. In 2013, the city needed to hire a new red light camera provider. The city awarded the $44 million city contract to Xerox State & Local Solutions, Inc., just 18 days after it hired John Borovicka to lobby the mayor’s office. (Truthfully, I’m the only one I know who likes the red camera program. But, in reality they don’t work very well. They ticket people running through yellow lights or a few miles over the speed limit, and there is no proof that they improve safety.)

So those are the 4 stories I promised you. There are more, but after awhile it just gets repetitive. If Rahm is not corrupt, he’s got a funny way of showing it. If he’s not corrupt, he would hold himself, his decision-makers, as well as his donor-vendors accountable. But, that’s not always the case.

Remember, CPS outsourced its janitorial services to Magic Johnson’s company and Aramark. From the beginning, school workers complained about filthy buildings. On September 17, 2014, Rahm was The Case Against Rahm | Profit and Laws:

Toward Fiscal Sustainability: A New Approach in Prudent Fiscal Management of Chicago

Click here to go to Jesus "Chuy" Garcia for Mayor of Chicago Website

‪#‎Chuy2015‬ ‪#‎imwithchuy‬

The Lost Children of Katrina — The Atlantic

The Lost Children of Katrina — The Atlantic:

The Lost Children of Katrina

A decade after the hurricane, New Orleans' community grapples with the effects of missed schooling and mass displacement.

Ten years ago, the Lee family evacuated from New Orleans to a Houston neighborhood so rife with hostility for evacuees that the ice-cream truck refused to stop for them. At the corner store, the clerk threw their money back rather than serve them. Peers called them "refugees," as if they weren’t from this country, and suggested they "swim home" to New Orleans rather than burden Houston, said Devante Lee, who was 11 when Hurricane Katrina hit.

At the new school that Devante’s 14-year-old sister, Cessileh, attended, young New Orleanians regularly fought Houston students. So their mother kept her sons home rather than expose them to harm.

They ended up missing school for an entire year.

"It hurt my mom, us not being in school. At that time, she felt like she’d let us down," said Devine Lee, who was 13. "But she was terrified. They were shooting us out there." Her fears were confirmed when a teen they knew casually from New Orleans was killed in Houston, he said.

Devine, who is outgoing by nature, would spend hours on a nearby basketball court, nurturing dreams of playing professionally. Devante, who is quieter, remembers mostly staying at home, trying to hold onto his New Orleans accent and identity.

An untold number of kids—probably numbering in the tens of thousands—missed weeks, months, even years of school after Katrina. Only now, a decade later, are advocates and researchers beginning to grasp the lasting effects of this post-storm duress. Increasingly, they believe the same lower-income teens who waded through the city’s floodwaters and spent several rootless years afterward may now be helping drive a surging need for GED programs and entry-level job-training programs in the city. It’s no coincidence, they say, that Louisiana has the nation’s highest rate of young adults not in school or working.

Many of the Americans who today lack both jobs and diplomas may have been Katrina-era adolescents, who often suffered such high levels of trauma and instability that learning became nearly impossible. It was "like throwing seeds at cement," said Lisa Celeste Green-Derry, a New Orleans-based education researcher.

A decade ago, the Lees’ mother hadn’t anticipated that her sons would lose an entire school year. The circumstances seemed temporary, just a stopover until New Orleans cleaned and re-opened housing and schools. Then, three months after Katrina, the state of Louisiana announced a complete reconfiguration of New Orleans’ notorious public schools in what then-Governor Kathleen Blancocalled "the opportunity of a lifetime."

In justifying the state takeover of the schools, which would later be handed over to charter-school operators, Blanco assumed that most evacuee children had transferred to  superior schools outside of New Orleans. "Parents have new expectations for what schools should be and what they should provide," she said at a presentation announcing the legislation, just a few months after Katrina. "These families will only return home when we can meet these new, and higher, expectations."

Few imagined that the education of so many evacuee children would be disrupted for so long.

About half of Katrina evacuees were said to have hailed from badly devastated New Orleans, many from flood-prone, high-poverty neighborhoods. Most children had attended the city’s public schools, notorious for dilapidated buildings and classes from which fewer than half the students graduated. While some displaced children thrived in better schooling elsewhere, countless others didn’t have an opportunity to settle down: Many low-income New Orleans evacuees spent several years after the storm in nomadic exile, moving among family members’ residences or in search of jobs or housing.

Early on, children’s advocates noted that serial moves and school absences were prevalent. A 2006 study by the Children’s Health Fund and the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, part of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, warned that 20 percent of displaced children were either not enrolled in school or not attending regularly, missing an average of 10 days a month. The families interviewed for the Mailman study had moved an average of 3.5 times by six months after the storm, with some moving as many as nine times. Not surprisingly, evacuee children couldn’t keep up with their studies. Four and a half years later, Mailman researchers found that more than one-third of Katrina’s displaced children were at least one year behind in school for their age.

 While disasters are sometimes portrayed as events affecting everyone equally, children from more fragile families are more likely to be traumatized and to recover more slowly, said Lori Peek, a sociologist who co-directs the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University. After observing 650 displaced New Orleans-area children, Peek and her collaborator Alice Fothergillfound that poorer children were more likely to be exposed to Katrina’s floodwaters, resulting in "challenges concentrating in schools, higher anxiety levels, and more behavioral problems."

Similarly, Mailman’s researchers found that evacuee children were more than four times more likely than the average child to show symptoms of serious emotional disturbance, which can stunt kids' ability to advance socially, emotionally, and academically.

Lower-income children were also more likely to be displaced far from their homes, to move often, and to encounter bullying and discrimination, Peek and Fothergill found. "The children whose lives were most disrupted and whose social support systems and family networks were shattered were left with few tools or resources to pick up the pieces," they concluded. Those who conducted Katrina research in the early years wonder what happened to the displaced children they met. Thousands didn’t return, and the population of children in New Orleans dropped by 43 percent between 2000 and 2010.  

When the Lee family returned to New Orleans about a year after the storm, several schools had reopened, but much of the system remained in chaos. Devante, who came back first with an aunt, enrolled in a school where classes were held in temporary trailers run by high proportions of interim teachers. He said his campus sometimes shut down for the day without notice.

For thousands of New Orleans schoolchildren, these experiences were the rule, not the exception. "I think 90-percent-plus of my students didn’t learn for a year after Katrina," said Matthew Feigenbaum, a former dean at Renew Accelerated High School, which works with over-age students who have fallen behind.

Despite the missed class time, when they returned to New Orleans the two Lee brothers were placed into the "right" grade for their ages. But Devine said he was unable to focus in an environment where few teachers seemed like they had control of their classrooms. "They were getting run over," he said. Even worse, after missing "a substantial amount of work," Devine was lagging academically. During his junior year in high school, he made a deal with his mom that he’d drop out and work toward his GED.

Researchers and others are trying to understand the impact that the displacement had on kids’ education, a task complicated by evacuee return rates, which are as low as 50 percent in some analyses. This summer, the New Orleans-based Education Research Alliance is slated to release an analysis of how the disruption affected test scores for New Orleans students. But the study The Lost Children of Katrina — The Atlantic:

These Corporations That Raise Money For Schools Keep 48 Percent For Themselves | ThinkProgress

These Corporations That Raise Money For Schools Keep 48 Percent For Themselves | ThinkProgress:

These Corporations That Raise Money For Schools Keep 48 Percent For Themselves

 Elementary school students are in their school gymnasium for a pep rally. An extremely enthusiastic young host shows them a video based on the year’s theme: a community spirit called “Rock’n Town Live.” He leads the students in loud cheers of “go Tigers,” “can’t believe it,” and “thirty to thirty-five laps.” And in addition to whipping the kids into a frenzy, he and the school’s principal take turns asking the kids to go home and get two adults to pledge a contribution. Roughly half of that money will go to benefit the school. Roughly half of it will go to Booster Enterprises Inc., a Georgia-based for-profit company putting on the event.

This is the scene in a video was shot at a Memphis Lutheran parochial school, but the same story plays out in hundreds of public and private schools across the country.

Booster Enterprises, which says it currently hosts Boosterthon events in schools in about 35 states, is one of several firms offering to outsource fundraisers known as “fun runs.” In 16 states, kids are participating in a similar program hosted by an Arizona-based company called Apex Fun Run. And still other schools use a comparable fun run fundraiser company called FundRunners. The general structure for all three appears to be pretty similar: the companies send a team to each school to promote “character education,” fitness, and pledges. They host pep rallies, spend several days getting the kids excited for the fundraiser, and then cheer on the students as they run laps around a track to earn sponsor contributions. And they take a large percentage of the haul.

Some parents and administrators rave about fun run fundraising events as the best and easiest fundraising they’ve ever found. Others have strongly objected to the the use of school-day time for the efforts, and the 48-percent cut often pocketed by these companies. Charity watchdog groups advise that no more than 25 percent of proceeds from a fundraiser should go to outside fundraising firms.

And some experts say these programs are emblematic of a national move toward more corporate involvement in public education. At the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Education Policy Center, experts have extensively studied commercialism in America’s schools. They have noted that in times of educational funding challenges, “beleaguered educators are ever more open to offers of corporate ‘partnerships’ that might bring in additional money for their schools. Unfortunately, many school-business partnerships are little more than marketing arrangements that have few benefits for schools while carrying with them the potential to harm children” psychologically, educationally, and health-wise.

The price of outsourced fundraising

Since the 1980s, the Key School in Annapolis, Maryland, has raised a good chunk of funds through its annual 5K, 10K, and Family Fun Run event. Trish Gallant, the parent programs and special events director for the private school, said the school organizes the entire thing in-house each year and gets many of the necessary overhead costs donated by parents. “They are kind enough to sponsor it, they carry the expenses,” she told ThinkProgress, and with over 200 runners participating from inside the school and the running community, “it’s a good moneymaker for us.”

But not every PTA, PTO, and school has the resources to put together a fundraising event by themselves. Chris Farri, the development director at Grace Christian Academy of Maryland in Waldorf, Maryland, told ThinkProgress that with the decline of volunteerism that has coincided with the growth of two-income families, her school does not have “the army of volunteers you need to put on something like this.” Recognizing the “you have to spend money to make money,” the small Christian school turned to Boosterthon four years ago. The company sends a team to the school, it does just about all the work, and the school gets just about half of the proceeds. And, according to Farri, it has been “very much a success,” and has helped bring in the funds needed to purchase smart boards and smart desks for the classrooms.

Boosterthon markets itself as a “hassle-free event that rallies families to get involved and provides the resources to fund their budget.” Apex says that “‘hassle-free’ is not just a bullet point on our marketing materials – it’s a promise from our team to yours.” And FundRunners says its program is “designed to keep the hassles off the schools and parent organizations. But in return for the enthusiastic team of young facilitators, the recipients pay a price.

A Boosterthon spokesman told ThinkProgress that in the past, the company simply charged a $2,000 fee and took a flat 48 percent of all contributions. But since, it has created a sliding scale option based on how much the event These Corporations That Raise Money For Schools Keep 48 Percent For Themselves | ThinkProgress:

From “Bad” Teachers to Teachers as Cheaters: The Burden of the Impossible | the becoming radical

From “Bad” Teachers to Teachers as Cheaters: The Burden of the Impossible | the becoming radical:

FROM “BAD” TEACHERS TO TEACHERS AS CHEATERS: THE BURDEN OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

 The guilty verdict in the Atlanta cheating scandal seems to be a logical conclusion to the “bad” teacher mythconfronted nearly five years ago by Adam Bessie.

As a 30-plus-years educator, I have daily witnessed a not-so-subtle disdain for teachers, directly as people and broadly as a profession.

One situation that captures that, I think, is the many times among my cycling group years ago when people would discover I was then an English teacher. Each time, the person would say, “I better watch what I say then”—not so jokingly.

The stereotype of the authoritarian and humorless English teacher—gray hair in a bun, red pen at the ready—is likely the image many people conjure when they think about teachers.

Not all, but many.

School for too many children is something to endure, a place that seems impossible to navigate without getting into trouble, and especially for children of color, the first confrontation with discipline and punishment that are inequitable and inevitable.

So I regret to admit that a significant reason the “bad” teacher myth works politically and there seems a great deal of glee about teachers/educators being busted for cheating is our fault—our fault each time we have created or perpetuated authoritarian schooling.

That said, I must then stress here it isn’t that simple.

I have, then, a few questions.

The first, Why are 11 educators being convicted in Atlanta, but Michelle Rhee continues to skip along scot-free?

Another, Why did professional educators commit these crimes?

And finally, What does the popular glee over these convictions reveal about justice in the U.S. as well as lingering racism and sexism?

I have some ideas about how all of these are connected.

Let me start with Rachel Aviv’s headline about the Atlanta scandal, by focusing on the subhead: Wrong Answer: In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school made a shocking choice.

My first idea is that there is nothing “shocking” about the cheating scandal, but that it is entirely predictable, if not reasonable.

I recommend Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale which dramatizes the consequences of “reduced circumstances.”

Adults, children, and animals backed into a corner will behave in ways that are unlike their normal behavior.

Offred/June fantasizes about murder with a knitting needle; she had been a “normal” wife and mother before the From “Bad” Teachers to Teachers as Cheaters: The Burden of the Impossible | the becoming radical: