California: Unbridled Charter Expansion Threatens Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

California: Unbridled Charter Expansion Threatens Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog:

California: Unbridled Charter Expansion Threatens Public Schools

Thomas Ultican, teacher of physics and mathematics in San Diego, California, writes about the disastrous impact of charter schools on public schools. According to a study commissioned by the United Teachers of Los Angeles, the district loses $500 million annually to charters.

The charter lobby in the state–led by the California Charter School Association– is wealthy and politically powerful.

Ultican points to Prop 39, passed into law in 2000, as the mechanism that allows privately managed, lightly regulated charters to expand into public space and gobble up resources and the students they want.

“The MGT study illustrates how charter school law in California is fashioned to favor privately operated charter schools over public schools. If a local community passed a bond measure in the 1980’s to build a new public school, it is the law in California that the members of that local community – who still might be paying for that public school – will have no choice but to allow a private operator move into the facility. In addition, the charter school law requires the local school district to incur many direct and indirect costs to support charter schools.

“In California, since its statehood, a super-majority (67%) was required to pass a school bond measure. In 2000, after losing an effort that March to mitigate the super-majority rules and the infamous proposition 13 limitations, supporters brought forward proposition 39 that would reduce school-bond super-majorities to 55% and did not seriously threaten proposition 13 protections enacted in 1978. It passed 53% to 47% in November.

“In the official ballot summary for proposition 39 in the November 7, 2000 election the support message was signed by Lavonne Mcbroom, President California State PTA; Jacqueline N. Antee, AARP State President; and Allan Zaremerg, President California Chamber of Commerce. The statement against the proposition was signed by Jon Coupal, Chairman Save Our Homes Committee, Vote No on Proposition 39, a Project of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association; Dean Andal, Chairman Board of Equalization, State of California; and Felicia Elkinson, Past President Council of Sacramento Senior Organizations.

“This proposition was a battle royal with every media source and elected official bloviating endlessly about the righteousness of their side. However, like in the official ballot measure statements, there was no California: Unbridled Charter Expansion Threatens Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog:

 

Jersey Jazzman: Charter Schools and the De-Professionalization of Teaching

Jersey Jazzman: Charter Schools and the De-Professionalization of Teaching:

Charter Schools and the De-Professionalization of Teaching



Hey, New Jersey -- and especially all of you "conservatives": Did you know Chris Christie is using your tax dollars to make what essentially are commercials for charter schools that are linked to a Turkish, Muslim cleric? 

Bergen Arts & Science Charter School and Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter School, lauded by Christie in this taxpayer-financed video, have both been linked by the Gulen Charter Schools website to the Gulenist movement.

No, this isn't a conspiracy theory: the Gulenist charter school phenomenon has been reported by CBS News, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall St. Journal. These schools, all linked to Fethullah Gulen, have been popping up all over the country and are the subject of concerns expressed by the federal State Department due to their use of H1B visas to admit Turkish nationals into the US.

You'd think that someone in the NJ press would find it notable that Chris Christie, now Donald Trump's transition chair, was using taxpayer funds to promote charter schools tied to a Muslim cleric. But no, that's not news for them -- and neither, apparently, is what I'm going to document below:

Last week, I told the story of Thomas Edison EnergySmart, a school that enrolls far fewer special education and economically disadvantaged students than Franklin Township, its host public school district. Christie sings the charter's praises, even as it drains funds from Franklin's public schools, which educate the kids the Gulen-linked charter does not take in.

Let me quickly show that Bergen A&S is following the same playbook before I get to the heart of the matter. This charter gets most of its students from Garfield, but Hackensack and Lodi are also sending districts. How do these districts compare to the charters in - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/05/charter-schools-and-de.html#sthash.9M7ypClU.dpuf

New Education Law: Bipartisan No More | US News

New Education Law: Bipartisan No More | US News:

New Education Law: Bipartisan No More
Republicans are fuming over what they perceive as complete disregard for the intent of the reform law.

Republicans on Capitol Hill and conservative education policymakers are accusing the Obama administration of breaking its promises on education reform, saying recently released federal guidelines for how states and school districts should implement the bipartisan law are overreaching and encroach on local authority.

“The administration has decided that rather than try to find a middle ground or to work in a spirit of cooperation that they are going to push their own policy preferences to the max,” says Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “Many administrations have done the same, but to do this on the heels of a bipartisan compromise, it’s left a bitter taste in a lot of people’s mouths.”

The White House was quick to push back on that assessment.

[READ:  Battle Raging Over Implementation of Every Student Succeeds Act]

“This bill is a result of consensus that this law needed to be reformed and refined,” said Cecilia Munoz, assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council, to a group of reporters Thursday. “We needed to get away from the one-size-fits-all approach, and I’m quite confident that that coalition is not going to break up.”

She continued: “The details matter a lot, but the consensus around what we needed to accomplish, what we in fact accomplished by passing the law and what we believe we are accomplishing with these regulations is quite strong.”

The Education Department released on Thursday a series of proposed regulations to the new education law aimed at providing more specificity for how states and school districts should design their accountability systems. The proposals were met with criticism from GOP lawmakers, who were quick to warn that they were not in line with the foundation of the law – namely to provide more flexibility to states and school districts.

“I am disappointed that the draft regulation seems to include provisions that the Congress considered – and expressly rejected,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a key architect of the law. “If the final regulation does not implement the law the way Congress wrote it, I will introduce a resolution under the Congressional Review Act to overturn it.”

While Alexander’s staff is still going through the 192-page package of regulations, one of the major proposals conservative policymakers have complained about is a tightening of the indicators states and districts are allowed to use – in addition to test scores – to show student success and school quality.New Education Law: Bipartisan No More | US News:

Success Academy Charter Schools Plans to Share Curriculum Online - WSJ

Success Academy Charter Schools Plans to Share Curriculum Online - WSJ:
Success Academy Charter Schools Plans to Share Curriculum Online
Push to present the charter school network as a national model comes after months of increased scrutiny

 Success Academy Charter Schools intends to start posting its lesson plans online this summer, going so far as to specify what type of snail is the best for kindergartners’ science experiments.

Eva Moskowitz, founder of the growing charter network, said she hopes sharing her curriculum and teacher training resources at no charge will help shift the focus of debates on education from politics to the nitty-gritty of what children need to know, how they learn best and how to pace instruction.

“These are all really important questions if America is going to find its way out of the educational quagmire it’s in,” she said in an interview. “It’s not only our disadvantaged students who are suffering terribly. Even our affluent students are not doing so well internationally.”

This push to present Success Academy as a national model comes after months of increased scrutiny of the network, which consistently racks up high scores on state exams, far outpacing city and state averages. Most of its students are poor children of color.

Critics say the organization systemically nudges out the hardest-to-serve students, an accusation Ms. Moskowitz denies. It was sued this year by several families who said their struggling children were harassed into leaving through harsh discipline, excessive suspensions and other means. The network’s oversight body at the State University of New York is also investigating the allegations.

Amid the criticism, the network has garnered support as well, including a $25 million grant in April from the Robertson Foundation to expand its influence. Success Academy was named one of three finalists for the Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, a national award for charter-management organizations.

Ms. Moskowitz said she has long planned an online trove of literacy lessons, science experiments and math problems that her staff has developed.

Educators around the U.S. often ask for Success Academy’s materials and workshops for teachers and principals, she said. “It made sense, given the volume of requests, to just share it all as soon as we can.”

With 34 schools in New York City, Success Academy aims to have 50 sites in two years and 100 in a decade in the city. Charters are publicly funded and independently operated, and usually aren’t unionized. Opponents say they drain precious money and space from traditional public schools.

Other networks have also sought to fulfill one of the original missions of charters, to innovate and share what works. Uncommon Schools, for example, has released eight books on its methods. The national nonprofit has held free training sessions with host districts, and sells videos and workshops as well.

A frequent critic of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city’s teachers union, Ms. Moskowitz often presents her network as a refuge for students escaping low-performing public schools and their bureaucracy. The mayor campaigned promising to curb charter schools’ growth and has clashed with Ms. Moskowitz over the city’s obligation toSuccess Academy Charter Schools Plans to Share Curriculum Online - WSJ:

ESSA Regulations: Disappointment or Denial? Guest post by Peggy Robertson | BustED Pencils

ESSA Regulations: Disappointment or Denial? Guest post by Peggy Robertson | BustED Pencils:

ESSA Regulations: Disappointment or Denial? Guest post by Peggy Robertson

 Back in Denver after 29 days MIA and finally back in the saddle. So it appears during my hiatus they finally released the 192 pages of ESSA regulations.

Damn that ESSA opportunity that just keeps on giving. And the same old players are quoted saying the same old crap while ESSA takes the lead in privatizing public schools and destroying our profession.

Randi Weingarten is supposedly concerned about the proposed regulations. And Fairtest continues to be the “go to” for commentary regarding ESSA. What we need to understand is that the unfortunate result will be the maintaining of the status quo.  They want the public to continue to think something is happening that favors the public—the common good. There ain’t nothing happening!

I was on the War Report radio show during my hiatus in MO and more or less unleashed my wrath on this BS about the opt out glory days, ESSA, and the unions. Hey, I was cooped up in MO for 29 days so it’s probably a good thing I had a minute to explode versus implode. But this is the deal. Opt Out is child’s play – pure child’s play compared to what ESSA has unleashed – not sure you can remember what child’s play looks like these days, but I can assure you it was much easier and carefree compared to where we are headed with the wrath of ESSA .

Now all of a sudden everybody and their mother loves opt out. They f$%&ing love it— for good reason—because they know that opt out alone will be the perfect ploy to distract everyone from the venom ESSA is just dying to spew very very soon. If you put your cards in opt out alone expect to lose and lose fast – ESSA has the royal flush.

So once again, when someone says ESSA is an  “opportunity” know that this person is brainwashed or somehow benefiting from ESSA. Also, when someone is quoted in an article about ESSA and they spew a lot of words that say absolutely nothing. You can come to the same conclusion.

There’s money to be made off of commiserating around ESSA while pretending to support it, not support it, understand it, reason with it, while spitting weak words that pretend to have some sort of fake influence in shaping it to meet the needs of children and our society—there’s a helluva lot of status, money, and ego stroking to be made off of parading those ESSA Regulations: Disappointment or Denial? Guest post by Peggy Robertson | BustED Pencils:

Feminism-in-Schools Featured at First International Girls’ Studies Association Conference « Feminist Teacher

Feminism-in-Schools Featured at First International Girls’ Studies Association Conference « Feminist Teacher:

Feminism-in-Schools Featured at First International Girls’ Studies Association Conference

Feminism-in-schools movement leaders, Ileana Jiménez, Hanna Retallack, Marnina Gonick, and Jessica Ringrose, at the first International Girls’ Studies Association Conference, UK (photo courtesy, Ileana Jiménez)

Leaders in the feminism-in-schools movement recently made history at the inauguralInternational Girls’ Studies Association (IGSA) conference when we were featured in the event’s opening plenary at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK from April 7-9. It was the first time that a global girls’ studies conference featured teachers and researchers sharing our work together on #HSfeminism, a hashtag I created in the last few years to bring visibility to our movement.

As we each presented our papers individually followed by a panel discussion, ProfessorMarnina Gonick of Mount Saint Vincent University in Canada; Professor Jessica Ringroseand doctoral researcher, Hanna Retallack, both of the Institute of Education, University College, London; and I made a bold statement that our intersectional feminist pedagogies and practices are transforming the landscape of classroom curricula, student activism, and professional development for educators.

We were particularly honored that our plenary took place at the same time as the Black Girl Movement Conference, where activists and scholars gathered at Columbia University for three days in New York City to focus on Black girls, cisgender, queer, and trans girls, in the United States. We feel strongly that as girls’, women’s, and gender studies scholars, we must all work together collectively to support girls of color in our activism and teaching.

Now that we are post-conference and closing out our school year, I brought together my colleagues via email to reflect on what the IGSA plenary meant for us.

Ileana Jiménez: I remain ecstatic that my #HSfeminism talk on “Black Girls Blog #BlackLivesMatter” received such a wonderful response at the conference; I was thrilled that delegates from such a wide range of regions around the world, from Australia to South Africa, responded so powerfully, especially to the video that I shared about my student Jessica, and the blog post she wrote about how #BlackGirlsMatter, in which she links the ways in which both the erasure and visibility of Black girls in our culture leads to violence against women and girls of color in the media, at school, and at the hands of police brutality.

As an educator of color, it was especially important to me to share Jessica’s work while the Black Girl Movement Conference in New York and our IGSA conference in Norwich was happening. The Girls’ Studies community was literally convening simultaneously in Feminism-in-Schools Featured at First International Girls’ Studies Association Conference « Feminist Teacher:

CURMUDGUCATION: TheThird Way (To Make a Bundle in Education)

CURMUDGUCATION: TheThird Way (To Make a Bundle in Education):

TheThird Way (To Make a Bundle in Education)



What is the Third Way? Well, whatever it is, it launches tomorrow (May 31) in Boston with featured guest appearances by Secretary of Education John King and Massachusetts Secretary of EducationJames Peyser (formerly honcho of New Schools Venture Fund). So maybe we'd better dig a little and see if we can figure out exactly what we're talking about.

The event is touted as The Emerging Third Way: Blazing an Optimistic Path Ahead in K-12 Education, and the blurb on the registration site starts with this little history lesson:

Since 1635, Massachusetts has been known for its district public schools- the “first way”. Since 1993, Massachusetts’ charter schools have led the nation in pioneering a “second way”. It is time to recognize a Third Way – an emerging set of strategies that combine school-level autonomies and energetic innovation with a commitment to universal service and local voice. The Third Way does not obviate the need and demand for either of the other ways but it does hold out a promising path for cooperative change that could raise student success, especially among disadvantaged students, on a large scale.

I'm just going to skip over the first part of the history lesson because arguing about whether or not Massachusett's charter schools have been nation-leading pioneers since 1993 is like getting in argument about whether or not a trio of alopeciac yeti infiltrated the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes during the eighties. It makes a damn good story, but not a very good evidence-based paper. So there goes our Common Core based writing score.

But can we close read a path to understanding the Third Way? Well, "emerging set of strategies" means roughly "we're still working on punching up the rough draft." Next, "autonomies and energetic innovation" are supposed to be the virtues of charter schools, while "universal service and local voice" are concerns of the public ed CURMUDGUCATION: TheThird Way (To Make a Bundle in Education):



Big Education Ape: CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Goodbye, May! - http://go.shr.lc/1sZ0UzZ

 

The Washington Teacher: DC Teacher Contract 4% Percent Offer Revealed- WTU Prez Davis Finally Comes Clean!

The Washington Teacher: DC Teacher Contract 4% Percent Offer Revealed- WTU Prez Davis Finally Comes Clean!:

DC Teacher Contract 4% Percent Offer Revealed- WTU Prez Davis Finally Comes Clean!

WTU Prez Liz Davis reveals 4% Teacher contract offer

This article recounts information shared by Cardozo Education Campus teachers with Malcolm Lewis Barnes, independent journalist shortly after attending a recent meeting with WTU President Liz Davis. Disclaimer: Mr. Barnes is also the campaign manager for the Candi Peterson WTU slate 2016.

By Malcolm Lewis Barnes

According to several confirmed sources who attended a May 25th school wide meeting at Cardozo Education Campus, when pressed for answers WashingtonTeachers' Union President Liz Davis admitted that she turned down a 4 percent (4%) offer that was on the table during last year's teacher contract negotiations.

An impatient group of over 40 Cardozo teachers were present last Wednesday who had just attended an afternoon monthly faculty meeting and were later joined by WTU President Davis. Davis declared during the meeting that the 1% raise that Chancellor Kaya Henderson offered was ‘unacceptable.’ Davis revealed at the meeting that late in 2013, there was a four percent offer on the table that she turned down because the chancellor was just beginning to press her initiative on the extended school year.

“Four percent is better than no percent,” said Grace Cooke-Thomas, a special education teacher at Cardozo Education Campus as she expressed her exasperation about the fact that the Chancellor was able to push through the extended school year with nearly a dozen schools, mainly east of the river in wards 7 and 8.

Davis indicated that she didn’t bring the four percent offer to anyone’s attention because she didn’t think it was worth discussing because the WTU  didn’t accept it in light of the extended school year issues being discussed across the board rather than at selected low performing schools.

During the meeting, Cardozo teachers demanded to know, “Where was the transparency? Why were only certain schools being targeted for rallies to bring attention to the 1% offer? And most important, why wasn’t Davis playing a more effective role as a union leader instead of expecting teachers to take to the streets in support of her failed effort to get a contract?’

The Cardozo teachers’ group just got tired of President Davis beating around the bush about contract negotiations and they asked her directly to disclose what’s actually in the contract that she claims she is negotiating.

“I’m a bit frustrated and I’ve seen teachers lose their jobs. I hear a lot of talk but nothing is being done. Teachers don’t want to march and hold rallies because they are being bullied by principals and are afraid of reprisal”, said Ms. Cooke-Thomas.

When Davis suggested that a survey be conducted, the Cardozo staff lost their patience and the group asked to The Washington Teacher: DC Teacher Contract 4% Percent Offer Revealed- WTU Prez Davis Finally Comes Clean!:

La. Superintendent John White Sues Citizens Who Made Public Records Requests | deutsch29

La. Superintendent John White Sues Citizens Who Made Public Records Requests | deutsch29:

La. Superintendent John White Sues Citizens Who Made Public Records Requests

James Finney, a Louisiana citizen, has filed numerous unanswered public records requests for information related to school enrollments and statistical calculations.

On March 12, 2016, Finney appealed to BESE regarding difficulties in having his public records requests filled by John White and alerted the board that he had decided to sue.

In response, Louisiana State Superintendent John White chose to sue Finney.

The following discourse represents the full contents of an email dated May 31, 2016, from Finney to all Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) members and copied to White:

Greetings once again to members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education:

As you may recall, I sent you an email March 12 (attached below) describing the status of several pending record requests that I had placed with John White and the Department of Education.  I also mentioned the existence of a lawsuit (Finney vs White, 6395333, attached).  That lawsuit, which was filed May 22, 2015, was set for trial in late April.

However, on April 11, Mr. White’s attorney requested and was granted a continuance, presumably to become better prepared for trial and to resolve a scheduling conflict with the Department’s sole witness.  Rather than prepare for trial, however, it seems that Mr. White instead instructed his attorney to file two lawsuits against me which appear to be groundless, unnecessary, and against the public interest. Meanwhile, Mr. White and his staff have made no effort to address the 35 pending requests which are subject of my lawsuit.

The first new lawsuit (White vs Finney, 647827, attached) addresses five requests I made in fall 2015, five that I made in February of this year, and one that I made in March. In the lawsuit, Mr. White apparently is asking the judge 

La. Superintendent John White Sues Citizens Who Made Public Records Requests | deutsch29:

NEWS FLASH - Common Core PARCC tests gets an “F” for Failure - Wait What?

NEWS FLASH - Common Core PARCC tests gets an “F” for Failure - Wait What?:

NEWS FLASH – Common Core PARCC tests gets an “F” for Failure

Despite the rhetoric, promises and hundreds of millions of dollars in scarce public funds, a stunning assessment of the data reveals that the Common Core PARCC test DOES NOT successful predict college success.

The utter failure of the PARCC test reiterates that the same may be true for those states that have adopted the Common Coe SBAC testing scheme.

Here is the news;

The Common Core PARCC tests gets an “F” for Failure (By Wendy Lecker and Jonathan Pelto)

The entire premise behind the Common Core and the related Common Core PARCC and SBAC testing programs was that it would provide a clear cut assessment of whether children were “college and career ready.”

In the most significant academic study to date, the answer appears to be that the PARCC version the massive and expensive test is that it is an utter failure.

William Mathis, Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center and member of the Vermont State Board of Education, has just published an astonishing piece in the Washington Post. (Alice in PARCCland: Does ‘validity study’ really prove the Common Core test is valid? In it, Mathis demonstrates that the PARCC test, one of two national common core tests (the other being the SBAC), cannot predict college readiness; and that a study commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Education demonstrated the PARCC’s lack of validity.

This revelation is huge and needs to be repeated. PARCC, the common core standardized test sold as predicting college-readiness, cannot predict college readiness. The foundation upon which the Common Core and its standardized tests were imposed on this nation has just been revealed to be an artifice.

As Mathis wrote, the Massachusetts study found the following: the correlations between PARCC ELA tests and freshman GPA ranges from 0.13-0.26, and for PARCC Math tests, the range is between 0.37 and 0.40. Mathis explains that the correlation coefficients “run from zero (no relationship) to 1.0 (perfect relationship). How much one measure predicts another is the square of the correlation coefficient. For instance, taking the highest coefficient (0.40), and squaring it gives us .16. “

This means the variance in PARCC test scores, at their best, predicts only 16% of the NEWS FLASH - Common Core PARCC tests gets an “F” for Failure - Wait What?:

Robots in the Classroom: Can/Will They Replace Teachers? They’re HEEEERE. – Missouri Education Watchdog

Robots in the Classroom: Can/Will They Replace Teachers? They’re HEEEERE. – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Robots in the Classroom: Can/Will They Replace Teachers? They’re HEEEERE.

From “SoftBank Plans To Open A Store Staffed (Almost) Entirely By Pepper, Its Humanoid RobotPepper”. SoftBank  acquired Paris-based Aldebaran Robotics (the creator of Pepper) in 2012.

Industries employing workers making minimum wage are discovering robots can replace human beings to perform duties, saving the company money.  From Building robot McDonald’s staff ‘cheaper’ than hiring workers on minimum wage in The Mirror:

A former McDonald’s CEO warned that robots will take over staff jobs at the fast food empire – because it’s cheaper than employing humans.

Ed Rensi has said that buying highly skilled robotics is a cheaper alternative than employing people on minimum wage to work in the company’s worldwide restaurants.

He warned that huge job losses are imminent, and commented that it would be ‘common sense’ to replace humans in the workplace.

This comes as a study into the future of human employment has predicted a surge in machine-led work such as robotic counsellors, body part makers and virtual lawyers.

Watch the accompanying video showing how efficient robots are in their duties.  A new Industrial Revolution is outsourcing humans in the job market and that includes teachers.

Robots are already teaching and data mining in some classrooms and are touted as being excellent resources for special need students.  Fromhttps://asknao.aldebaran.com/:

The youtube video can be found here:

 Robots in the Classroom: Can/Will They Replace Teachers? They’re HEEEERE. – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Use of substitute teachers on the rise | The Columbus Dispatch

Use of substitute teachers on the rise | The Columbus Dispatch:

Use of substitute teachers on the rise

After 13 years in public schools, Kyrah Mattson has come to know that having a substitute teacher means an “easy” day.

There may be a worksheet or a movie, but “never anything serious,” the 18-year-old said while enjoying her last weeks of high school.

“Sometimes I like it, but being a senior — I want to get out of here and graduate so I need my actual teacher so he can tell me what I need to do in class,” Mattson said.

If the time Mattson has spent with substitute teachers is anything like the average experience for public school students across the United States, the resident of Rockford, Illinois, will have spent almost the equivalent of a full academic year with substitute teachers during the course of her K-12 education.

A GateHouse Media examination found that absenteeism could be having a big impact on students like Mattson:

• Nationally, teachers average 11 days absent each year, according to a 2014 study by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. During the course of a 13-year education — kindergarten through 12th grade — that amounts to 143 days, or 6 percent of all the time a student spent in a classroom. It's roughly a month shy of a full 180-day school year.

• Having a sub, according to several academic and thinktank studies and affirmed by a data analysis by GateHouse Media, is widely associated with lower student achievement.

• The situation also may be getting worse: According to the research conducted in May by Gatehouse Media, the average number of days that some school districts had subs in the classroom last year was 14.5 — or 188.5 days over the course of 13 years. The data analysis also showed higher use of substitute teachers in some lower-income schools. The cost of substitute teaching is on the rise, as well. School districts spent nearly $335 million on substitute teachers during the 2012-2013 school year, with 115 districts reporting. In 2014-2015, with 118 districts reporting, they spent almost $356 million, a 6 percent increase in three years.

“Research has shown a significant negative impact on student achievement in classrooms where the teacher is absent for 10 days,” the National Council on Teacher Quality reports in its 2014 study. “ Yet in the average classroom in this study, teachers exceeded this level of absence, often for perfectly legitimate reasons and even in pursuit of becoming a more effective instructor.

“Given the time and attention spent on school programs, new curriculum and strategies to strengthen teacher quality, we may be overlooking one of the most basic, solvable and cost-effective reasons why schools may fail to make educational progress,” the council concluded.

“Every day is so precious," said Sandi Jacobs, the council's senior vice president for state and district policy. "The idea that a substitute just needs to sort of hold down the fort for the day, and it doesn’t really matter if any real learning goes on — that’s harder and harder for districts to accept. At the same time, finding people who could step into a class seamlessly and accomplish what the teacher would have accomplished had she been there is a very tall order.”

<< Interactive graphic: Missed Days >>

More subs, lower performance

Districts spend $4 billion on substitute teachers each year, according to a 2012 study by Raegen T. Miller, a researcher at the left-leaning American Progress think tank in Washington.

Miller also co-authored a teacher absence study in 2007 for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Both studies — along with another 2007 examination of the issue co-authored by Duke University economist Charles Clotfelter — come to the same common-sense conclusion: Students’ academic achievement suffers when teachers aren’t in the classroom.

Among their findings:

• On average, 36 percent of teachers nationally were absent more than 10 days during the 2009-2010 school year based on the 56,837 Use of substitute teachers on the rise | The Columbus Dispatch:

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan's plan: Fix education for all kids

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan's plan: Fix education for all kids:

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan's plan: Fix education for all kids

The fate of a proposed commission that would oversee Detroit schools may hinge on Mayor Mike Duggan's ability to win over charter operators in the city.

The issue is expected to come to a head today. Duggan has asked charter operators who support the plan to show up for a morning news conference to provide a counterpoint to what he says is increasingly "nasty and vicious" rhetoric from charter advocacy groups that have fiercely lobbied against the commission.

The proposed Detroit Education Commission is part of a $715-million legislative fix for the collapsing Detroit Public Schools. Opponents of the DEC and several key charter advocacy groups say the DEC would favor DPS over charters and take choice away from parents in the city.

Follow Duggan's news conference

Can't see the tweets? Follow this link: http://scrbliv.me/2102370

But Duggan said the commission is crucial to improving education in Detroit, which now has a very fragmented education system.  About 46,000 children attend DPS schools, 34,000 attend charter schools in the city and 27,000 attend charters and traditional public schools outside the city. An additional 6,000 are enrolled in the Education Achievement Authority, a state reform district.

Test scores in the city are among the worst in the state and the nation.

"This is a failure all the way around," Duggan said of the state of education in the city during a Friday meeting at the Free Press.  "We don't need to be blaming anybody. We've got to change the way we're educating these children."

Renee Burgess, whose management company runs three charter schools in the city, said Friday that she plans to back Duggan at today's news conference.

DETROIT FREE PRESS

Revenue shortfall complicating budget negotiations

"Our organization is 100% behind it," Burgess said. "The city desperately needs a coordinated, centralized system. Right now it's too fragmented and uncoordinated."

The commission would help establish an accountability system for schools in the city that would assign letter grades to schools based on academic achievement, improvement in academic achievement and other factors. The commission also would have authority over the openings of schools in the city. The only exception would be charter and traditional public schools that receive an A or B grade under the accountability system; they would be able to open new schools without the commission's approval.

"What the DEC would do is set a single standard that would be based primarily on growth," Duggan said. "If you take over a school where 2% of the kids are reading at Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan's plan: Fix education for all kids: