New Book Defines Neoliberalism, Challenges Elite Charade of Changing the World | janresseger

New Book Defines Neoliberalism, Challenges Elite Charade of Changing the World | janresseger

New Book Defines Neoliberalism, Challenges Elite Charade of Changing the World

Betsy DeVos, our current U.S. Secretary of Education, is easy to peg.  She’s an education libertarian who has been known to declare, “Government really sucks.” She believes in the glory of private markets and has an added commitment to religious education and using government money to help parents pay for it.

But how do we accurately name and fully explain to ourselves the thinking of people like Arne Duncan and Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the people who call themselves Democrats for Education Reform? These Democrats want to divert public tax dollars away from the traditional public schools—which continue to serve over 50 million American children—to unregulated private contractors called charter schools. How did school privatization become bipartisan, with conservative Republicans like DeVos favoring vouchers and Democrats enthusiastically supporting charters? Turning so-called “failing” public schools over to Charter Management Organizations, if you will remember, was one of the “remedies” of the bipartisan, Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, and of Race to the Top, the project of Obama-era Democrats.

In his new book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas helps us out here.  While much of the book focuses on current trends in the philanthropic sector, Giridharadas also defines the values that have become a new kind of conventional wisdom about public policy in our now alarmingly unequal society.  Giridharadas provides the data depicting the incomes of the rest of us next to those in the top One Percent and the top .001 Percent.  He describes the kind of inequality that separates the rich and the poor but leaves the rich with all the power when it comes to framing solutions to unequal healthcare, for example, or a public education system that has, following residential trends, become increasingly segregated by economics as well as race—schools with radically unequal funding that provide radically disparate access to opportunity.  Giridharadas does not explore these social and economic challenges in themselves, nor does he suggest solutions. Instead he chooses to delineate all the ways powerful elites have assigned themselves responsibility for solving the problems—and to describe the injustice that follows when the Continue reading: New Book Defines Neoliberalism, Challenges Elite Charade of Changing the World | janresseger

Teacher Kim Cook on Andrew Gillum & saving Florida public education | The Edvocate Blog

Teacher Kim Cook on Andrew Gillum & saving Florida public education | The Edvocate Blog

Teacher Kim Cook on Andrew Gillum & saving Florida public education

Florida has been under single party rule for more than 20 years. This complete lack of checks and balances has normalized an unrelenting assault on our most precious asset: public education. With each year, the destructive political intent behind the “school reform” agenda has grown bolder and more extreme. We are at a place where politicians make little attempt to hide their contempt for teachers, students, parents and districts

Alachua teacher, Kim Cook shares her views on just how important the current governors’ race and upcoming 2018 election is to Florida public education

“I’ve seen some educators saying on social media that they won’t vote for Andrew Gillum. Here is my response.

For those of you who are saying you won’t vote for Gillum, please consider the following (from a teacher):

The Florida legislature and governor’s office has been Republican for 20+ years. In that 20 years, we have seen nothing but bill after bill with the sole intent of destroying public education. The vast majority of those bills have been signed into law by the governor. Here is a review of the legislation (please add anything I forget):

1. The Republican legislature and Jeb Bush introduced the FCAT in order to track student “progress” ignoring the fact teachers are entirely capable of assessing their own students.
2. The Republican legislature and Jeb Bush then started using FCAT results to grade schools, falsely equating low socioeconomic schools with “bad teaching.”
3. The Republican legislature and Jeb Bush linked passing the third grade FCAT with retention and the 10th grade FCAT with high school graduation–despite research that clearly demonstrated this would be detrimental to students and communities.
4. The Republican legislature and Jeb Bush linked school grades to money–awarding “A” schools with Continue Reading: Teacher Kim Cook on Andrew Gillum & saving Florida public education | The Edvocate Blog

The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high: Trends in the teacher wage and compensation gaps through 2017 | Economic Policy Institute

The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high: Trends in the teacher wage and compensation gaps through 2017 | Economic Policy Institute

The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high

Trends in the teacher wage and compensation gaps through 2017

Download PDF Press release

Summary and key findings

Teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Colorado have raised the profile of deteriorating teacher pay as a critical public policy issue. Teachers and parents are protesting cutbacks in education spending and a squeeze on teacher pay that persist well into the economic recovery from the Great Recession. These spending cuts are not the result of weak state economies. Rather, state legislatures have enacted them to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. This paper underscores the crisis in teacher pay by updating our data series on the teacher pay penalty—the percent by which public school teachers are paid less than comparable workers.

This report was produced in collaboration with Center on Wage and Employment Dynamicsat the University of California, Berkeley.

Providing teachers with a decent middle-class living commensurate with other professionals with similar education is not simply a matter of fairness. Effective teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student educational performance.1 To ensure a high-quality teaching workforce, schools must retain experienced teachers and recruit high-quality students into the profession. Pay is an important component of retention and recruitment.

As noted in an earlier paper (Allegretto and Mishel 2016), retention and recruitment is a challenge as states struggle to return to pre-recession teacher levels. Every state headed into the 2017–2018 school year with teacher shortages (Strauss 2017) and new EPI research indicates the teacher shortages persist (Garcia forthcoming).

In their study of the teacher shortage in California, Darling-Hammond et al. point to a number of factors limiting the supply of teachers, from layoffs that “left a mark on the public psyche” to frozen salaries, declining working conditions, and increased class sizes. “One sign of the impact is that only 5 percent of the students in a recent survey of college-bound students were interested in pursuing a career in education, a decrease of 16 percent between 2010 and 2014,” the authors noted (Darling-Hammond et al. 2016, iii).

To address teacher shortages, it is necessary to focus on both recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers. Many policies are needed to accomplish this goal, and providing appropriate compensation is a necessary, major tool in addressing shortages:

Even if teachers may be more motivated by altruism than some other workers, teaching must compete with other occupations for talented college and university graduates.… Teachers are more likely to quit when they work in districts with lower wages and when their salaries are low relative to alternative wage opportunities, especially in high-demand fields like math and science. (Darling-Hammond et al. 2016, 18)

As we have shown in our more than a decade and a half of work on the topic, relativeteacher pay—teacher pay compared with the pay of other career opportunities for potential and current teachers—has been eroding for over a half a century. In How Does Teacher Pay Compare (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2004), we studied the long-term trends in teacher pay. We followed this up with The Teaching Penalty, published in 2008, and updated our findings in other papers (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2011; Allegretto and Tojerow 2014; and Allegretto and Mishel 2016). As noted, this body of work has documented the relative erosion of teacher pay. For instance, female teachers enjoyed a wage premium in 1960, meaning they were paid more than comparably educated and experienced workers. By the early 1980s, the wage premium for female teachers became a penalty. The total compensation penalty (how much less teachers make in wages and benefits relative to comparable workers) has also increased.

Here we extend our analysis through 2017. Our examination of the teacher wage gap begins in 1979.2 Our examination of the teacher compensation penalty (combining wage and benefit data) begins in 1994, the earliest year for which teacher benefit data are available. With this update, we continue to sound the alarm regarding the long-run growth in the pay penalty. We also provide estimates of teacher wage penalties by state. Following are key highlights of the report:

The mid-1990s marks the start of a period of sharply eroding teacher pay and an escalating teacher pay penalty

• Average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted for inflation) decreased $27 from 1996 to 2017, from $1,164 to $1,137 (in 2017 dollars). In contrast, weekly wages of other college graduates rose from $1,339 to $1,476 over this period.
• For all public-sector teachers, the relative wage gap (regression-adjusted for education, experience, and other factors known to affect earnings) has grown substantially since the mid-1990s. The teacher wage penalty was 1.8 percent in 1994, grew to 4.3 percent in 1996, and reached a record 18.7 percent in 2017.

Wage penalties have grown significantly for both male and female teachers

• The wage premium that female teachers had in the 1960s and 1970s has long been erased, replaced by a growing wage penalty. Our previous research found that female teachers earned 14.7 percent more in weekly wages than comparable female workers in 1960. This report finds that the teacher weekly wage premiumfor female teachers had fallen to 4.2 percent in 1979. And the wage premium for female teachers largely disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s, replaced by a large and growing wage penalty in the 2000s and 2010s. In 2017, female public school teachers were making 15.6 percent less in wages than comparable female workers.
• The wage penalty for male teachers is much larger. The weekly wage penalty for male teachers was 22.1 percent in 1979 and improved to 15.1 percent in 1994, but worsened in the late 1990s into the early 2000s. In 2017, male public school teachers were making 26.8 percent less in wages than comparable male workers.

Improvements in benefits relative to professionals have not been enough to offset the growing teacher wage penalty

• While relative teacher wage gaps have widened, some of the difference may be attributed to a tradeoff between pay and benefits. In other words, school districts may not be giving teachers raises but are instead offering stable or slightly better Continue reading: The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high: Trends in the teacher wage and compensation gaps through 2017 | Economic Policy Institute

'I can't believe it's not a crime': Brnovich says lawmakers must pass charter school reforms - AZPM

Arizona AG: Lawmakers Must Pass Charter School Reforms - AZPM

'I can't believe it's not a crime': Brnovich says lawmakers must pass charter school reforms

PHOENIX — Arizona's attorney general is calling for legislation to lend more oversight to the state's charter schools in response to a recent investigation by The Arizona Republic into financial dealings at a major online school.

Mark Brnovich's remarks came after the Republic previously reported that Primavera online charter school, which has a dropout rate 10 times higher than the state average, paid Chief Executive Damian Creamer an $8.8 million shareholder distribution, The Arizona Republic reported.

The investigation also found Primavera accumulated a $36 million investment portfolio from its share of state education funds instead of using that money to pay teachers and reduce class sizes.

Brnovich, a Republican running for re-election in November, said he wants candidates for the Arizona Legislature to join him in pursuing charter school reform.

Ashley Berg, the Charter Board's executive director, called the board an "objective enforcement body" that operates "to implement the law as it exists and to ensure that all charter schools and charter operators follow those laws."

Despite numerous requests for Primavera online charter school to respond to questions, school officials provided no comment on The Republic's reporting before publication.

Primavera spokesman Jason Rose said last week that the $8.8 million distribution given to Creamer was used to pay current and projected state and federal income taxes associated with the company's profits.

Rose declined to disclose the profits that were used to calculate Creamer's tax liability, nor would he say if Creamer was using the distribution to pay taxes on income earned outside of Primavera.

Rose added that Primavera will use the state money it invested in recent years to start new charter schools in Arizona.

Current state law impedes Brnovich's office from fully investigating charter schools, said Brnovich, who has two daughters in charter schools. That's because the Legislature has exempted charter schools from procurement and conflict-of-interest laws that traditional district schools are subject to.

Brnovich said lawmakers should pass legislation that allows the state auditor general to investigate the finances of charter schools. Currently, the auditor general can investigate only traditional public schools. Charter schools receive up to $2,000 more in per-pupil state funding than district schools.

Brnovich also wants legislation that requires charter schools to segregate public funds from private funds in businesses related or tied to the charter school. Arizona permits for-profit businesses to own charter schools.

Arizona AG: Lawmakers Must Pass Charter School Reforms - AZPM

 Download the full report [PDF]    Download 4-page Executive Summary [PDF]

Leaked DeVos rules could trigger drastic changes in Columbia’s sexual assault policies - Columbia Daily Spectator

Leaked DeVos rules could trigger drastic changes in Columbia’s sexual assault policies - Columbia Daily Spectator

Leaked DeVos rules could trigger drastic changes in Columbia’s sexual assault policies

BY KHADIJA HUSSAIN AND KAREN XIA | SEPTEMBER 6, 2018, 10:35 AM

Updated September 6, 2018 at 10:34 a.m.

Newly proposed federal Title IX regulations could spark broad changes to Columbia policies governing sexual misconduct, bolstering the rights of the accused and making it difficult to bring a legal complaint against Columbia for its handling of investigations, according to legal experts.

If implemented, the policies could reduce victims’ legal ground for filing a complaint against Columbia, which currently faces the second highest number of Title IX investigations in the Ivy League. Consequently, anti-sexual assault activists worry that the new rules will make it more difficult to hold the University accountable through litigation.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ proposed policies, obtained and released in a New York Times report, delineate a higher threshold for what constitutes sexual harassment. They also hold schools accountable for formal complaints only if they are made to officials directly responsible for enforcing rules—meaning most advisers and student life employees, like residential advisers, would not be legally mandated reporters.

While the regulations do not mandate that universities change their policies, schools that do not will face more legal pushback from anyone accused of harassment, creating a deterrent for universities that don’t comply, according to Title IX expert Saundra Schuster.

In a statement to Spectator, Executive Vice President for University Life Suzanne Goldberg said that Columbia will review the proposed rules carefully when they are formally released, but encouraged all students to learn more about Columbia’s gender-based misconduct policy.

Columbia’s current sexual misconduct policies were first established during the Obama era, marking an effort to make Title IX resources more accessible. They use the “preponderance of the evidence” as a standard to find Continue reading: Leaked DeVos rules could trigger drastic changes in Columbia’s sexual assault policies - Columbia Daily Spectator

Save Public Education By Raising Teacher Salaries To $60k Federal Minimum

Save Public Education By Raising Teacher Salaries To $60k Federal Minimum

Save Public Education By Raising Teacher Salaries To $60k Federal Minimum

Demonstrators hold a sign reading "Our Students Deserve Better" during a rally inside the Oklahoma State Capitol building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S., on Tuesday, April 3, 2018. Photographer: Scott Heins/Bloomberg

Betsy DeVos and her for-profit “education reformer” friends would like to slash public school teacher salaries, increase class sizes, and sell more standardized testing programs to schools. They operate with the belief that teachers are the problem and that technology should replace living, breathing, loving humans in our public schools.

This approach is reckless because teachers have, by far, the single greatest measured impact on student success of any school factor. Sadly, despite this, 40 U.S. states and the District of Columbia are experiencing severe teacher shortages.

This is not a fluke. Since the No Child Left Behind era began almost 20 years ago, teacher pay has dropped an average of $30 per week when adjusted for inflation. In that period of time, pay for other college graduates has risen by $124 per week as the cost of living in the American middle class has risen by 30%. To make matters worse standardized testing, teacher evaluations, and scripted curriculum have decimated teacher creativity and autonomy. Needless to say, teacher satisfaction has plummeted and professional teachers have had to take night and summer jobs just to survive.

American public school teachers make a median annual salary of just over $55,000. Meanwhile, doctors make a median salary of just under $200,000. What a demotivating embarrassment for master’s level professionals who work long hours day-in and day-out to level the very unlevel playing field here in America.

I have heard educational and political leaders argue that there is no panacea for the poor international outcomes and chronic inequity rampant in America’s public school system. As a master’s educated professional who made just over $38,000 in my first year as a classroom teacher, I couldn’t disagree more. If we want to attract and retain top talent in the teaching profession so that we can build a world-class K12 public education system, we have no choice but to Continue reading: Save Public Education By Raising Teacher Salaries To $60k Federal Minimum

WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY LEARN FROM NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE STORM? – School Finance 101

WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY LEARN FROM NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE STORM? – School Finance 101
WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY LEARN FROM NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE STORM?

Full Review: https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/BBaker.NPE_.NOLA_.pdf

SUMMARY

In July of 2018, the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans released a comprehensive, summative longitudinal report on the effects on student outcomes of the package of reforms implemented in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005. The following policy brief reviews the findings of this recent report by Douglas Harris and Matthew Larsen, offers critique of their methods and interpretation of findings and attempts to provide broader policy context for those findings.

In summary, Harris and Larsen find significant positive effects of Post-Katrina New Orleans school reforms on short-term student achievement measures, and longer term college attendance, persistence and completion. They attribute these results to the “market-based” reforms adopted following Katrina, and go to great lengths to dismiss or downplay threats to the validity of this conclusion. But for many reasons, that attribution may be misguided.

1. First, the authors downplay the potential influence of significant changes in the concentration of poverty across neighborhoods and schools—specifically the reductions in extreme poverty which may contribute significantly to the improved student outcomes in the years following Katrina;
2. Second, the authors understate the importance of the substantial increases to funding which occurred concurrently with organizational and governance changes in the district, specifically disclaiming the importance of increased funding by suggesting that the funding increases would not have existed but for the reforms;
3. Third, the authors argue, without evidence, that similar funding increases provided to the old, New Orleans school system would not likely have had similar impact, claiming they would have been inefficient or wasteful. At the same time the authors sidestep the fact that much of the funding increase in the new system was allocated toward increased and duplicative overhead expenses, as well as increased transportation costs resulting from citywide choice;
4. Fourth, the authors define the treatment as the package of market-based reforms, which are largely changes to the governance and organization of New Orleans schools, rather than focusing on the types of schools, programs and services, and qualifications of incoming staff who entered this

Adopting similar governance and organizational changes, and citywide choice in other contexts may lead to very different results. It remains unclear whether population change and redistribution, coupled with the infusion of resources could have resulted in similar effects, even without structural reforms.

WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY LEARN FROM NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE STORM? – School Finance 101

Duncan and DeVos Are Both Wrong, We Need Old-School Reform Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog
Duncan and DeVos Are Both Wrong, We Need Old-School Reform

Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spent the last few months trying to rehabilitate his work and distinguish it from DeVos. This spring he implored us to ignore current claims that education reforms of the past have failed.  On his book tour, he has been arguing that “education lies” often drive education policy. Yet, Duncan was an extremely disappointing Secretary Education who too often fell victim to the education lies himself: money does not matter, ineffective teachers are ruining public schools, charter schools will outperform public schools, and federal leadership on rigorous standards will save us all.

To his credit, Duncan believes in public education and gets a lot right in his current critiques.  He is a strong advocate of prekindergarten education and poignantly says that presidential elections show that Americans love their guns more than the love children.  Yet, Duncan refuses to be candid about his own mistakes. So he feeds the idea that the current problem in education, like every other public policy problem, is the Trump Administration. Our education reform problems, unfortunately, are more endemic than the current administration.  They need better solutions than rose-colored glasses.

The “education reforms” that Duncan says worked—desegregation and more equalized school funding—preceded his tenure as Secretary.  He did nothing to further those reforms.  Instead, he routinely pushed through reforms that didn’t work.  An honest appraisal of the past decade reveals that Duncan caused more harm than good. 

Secretary Duncan created the Race to the Top grant program and offered states money in exchange for major policy changes. In the aftermath of the recession, he could demand almost anything he wanted. He got states to do three things: adopt new teacher evaluation systems that they could use to hire, fire, and promote teachers largely based on statistics; expand charter schools; and adopt college and career ready standard, aka Common Core. Two Continue reading: Education Law Prof Blog

The real story of New Orleans and its charter schools - The Washington Post

The real story of New Orleans and its charter schools - The Washington Post

The real story of New Orleans and its charter schools

School choice proponents love to talk about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005 and the public school system was decimated. A collection of charter schools opened to replace the troubled traditional school district that had previously existed, and since then the city is often pointed to as a success for school choice and state takeovers of local schools.

Why is this effort called a success?

Standardized test scores are up from before the hurricane. But is the increase really impressive? The 2018 results for the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program exams found that only 26 percent in the Orleans Parish-Recovery School District had achieved “mastery” or above, less than the 34 percent state average.

(It is worth nothing that I don't think test scores should be viewed as significant measures of accomplishment, but school choice proponents do, so that is why they are being cited.)

So what is really going on in the schools of New Orleans? Are whatever improvements are being made happening for the reasons that charter school supporters say? Is it the “charterness” of the schools themselves or other factors that speak to traditional public schools as well?

That's what is discussed in this post by Carol Burris, a former New York high school principal who is executive director of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Burris was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the National Association of Secondary School Principals named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Burris has been chronicling problems with modern school reform and school choice for years on this blog. She has previously written about problems with charter schools in California and a number of other states.

[What and who are fueling the movement to privatize public education — and why you should care]

By Carol Burris

New Orleans, post-Katrina, is undoubtedly the most cited example of the success of state takeovers, charters and choice.

Former education secretary Arne Duncan once said that Hurricane Katrina was the “best thing” that ever happened to education in the city (though he later apologized). The New York Times’s opinion columnist David Leonhardt recently praised the city in his series on New Orleans school reform. And the City Fund, led by Neerav Kingsland, the former chief executive of New Schools for New Orleans, uses New Orleans as a tool to pry open the coffers of philanthropy for its portfolio approach of school governance — one that would Continue reading: The real story of New Orleans and its charter schools - The Washington Post

LOIS WEINER: A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor

A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor

A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor
This Labor Day, with public opinion firmly in favor of unions and teachers racking up victories across the country, the news for the labor movement is actually hopeful.

A Chicago teacher takes a break from picketing during the union's 2012 strike. yooperann / Flickr

Despite many setbacks, this Labor Day, the news for the labor movement is hopeful. Public support for unions has been increasing with the realization that they improve working and living conditions for both unionized and non-union workers.

Sustaining this reversal requires that we fight for good unions — democratic unions that make demands for the whole working class central to their agenda, integrate struggles against social oppression, and are willing to take direct action like strikes.

This is what the past year’s #RedforEd teacher walkouts has taught labor. It’s also why we should, yet again, thank a teacher this Labor Day.

Workers are suffering from capital’s successful attacks on the political and economic gains that labor and its allies have won in a century of struggle and sacrifice. Labor is still reeling from its diminished influence in politics, and young workers especially are suffering from capitalism’s offensive. As the New York Times “workologist” advised readers, employees who are dissatisfied with their working conditions have almost no legal protections.

They may think suing an employer will bring relief, but the only legal protections workers have are in cases of discrimination. The exception, ignored by the “workologist,” is if you have a union contract and are willing to enforce it.

Labor desperately needs vision and courage. And this is the context in which teachers have demonstrated a new grammar for unions to build political support as well as win economic gains.

The state-wide walkouts in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona and a one-day protest in North Carolina occurred because working teachers dared to challenge conditions their unions had accepted as inevitable. While some teacher activists were officers of their local unions in state affiliates of the National Education Association (NEA) or the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), neither union represented more than a handful of school employees.

The vast majority of teachers who walked out were “ordinary” teachers and school workers. They weren’t union members. Moreover, this was a movement started and sustained by workers, independent of and often in defiance of the union apparatus.

The “red state” walkouts follow in the steps of teacher activists in US cities who have been transforming their unions through reform caucuses, inspired by the bold strike of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in 2012. #RedforEd and the burgeoning movement of reform caucuses in both NEA and AFT show how we might create workers’ organizations that are democratic, defend labor’s political purposes, and build collective action at the workplace.

Unions can’t bring democracy to the workplace if they are autocratic and hierarchical, or if they continue to cast the union as a business that provides services to members, who in turn, pay dues and do little more. The term “free riders,” workers who are represented by a union but don’t join and pay dues, which the Right intends the new Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME to produce, in droves, is symptomatic of this destructive mindset. It casts workers’ alienation from their unions as an individual moral failing, as occurs when dining out with friends but then refusing to pick up your share of the bill.

Organized labor has not yet figured out how to mount a counter-offensive against what was identified forty years ago as a one-sided class war against us. Yes, we need laws that defend workplace rights. How will we win this legislation when we can’t even win the right to strike and don’t demand it from Continue reading: A Lesson Plan for Organized Labor