‘Home-school charters’ let families use state dollars for Disneyland, horseback riding lessons and more - Los Angeles Times

‘Home-school charters’ let families use state dollars for Disneyland, horseback riding lessons and more - Los Angeles Times

‘Home-school charters’ let families use state dollars for Disneyland, horseback riding lessons and more 

In California, there’s a way parents can use money from the government to buy multi-day Disneyland Park Hopper passes, San Diego Zoo family memberships, tickets to Medieval Times and dolphin encounters at SeaWorld.

There are a handful of charter schools that give students’ families as much as $2,800 to $3,200 — tax dollars sent to the charter schools — every year to spend on anything they want from a list of thousands of home-school vendors approved by the charters, according to the schools’ websites.

Some home-school vendors offer tutoring, curricula, books and other traditional educational services. Other vendors sell tickets to theme parks that are billed as field trips, or extracurricular activities that are billed as P.E., including parkour classes, acting classes, ice skating lessons, horseback riding lessons and more.

It’s such a popular deal that some home-school bloggers have written articles explaining how California parents can take advantage of the schools’ money.

“If you live in California and you’re not taking advantage of this, I don’t know what to say,” said Karen Akpan, a home-school charter parent of four who lives in Beaumont. She wrote a recent blog article describing how she used the educational funds to pay for a family trip to Disneyland, Chicago CityPASSes and Legoland tickets, as well as computer coding kits, educational toys, books and subscription cooking kits for her kids.

The idea behind these charters, which some call “home-school charters,” is that families can customize their children’s education — just like regular home school — but with state education money.

These charters differ from other, more typical independent study schools or hybrid schools or virtual charter schools, which often assign a structured curriculum of courses for students to complete or offer in-person classes at resource centers.

With home-school charters, there doesn’t have to be a set curriculum. Students only have to meet virtually with a teacher once a month and turn in one work sample for each meeting — a sample that the teacher doesn’t grade, according to parents.

It is difficult to know how many charter schools operate this way. The state doesn’t track them. The California School Boards Assn., which has been critical of charter schools, says it has not researched these kinds of charters because relatively few students enroll in them.

These home-school charters are an uncommon marriage between public charter schools and home schooling, which California considers to be private schooling.

They are an extreme but little-known form of school choice that home-school advocates say is unique to California.

“I don’t know of any states where they’re paying for the kinds of things they’re paying for in California,” said Mike Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Assn. a national group that advocates for home-schooling families.

Two of the most popular home-school charters that work this way are Valiant Prep and Inspire Charter School South, both of which were authorized to operate by the CONTINUE READING:  ‘Home-school charters’ let families use state dollars for Disneyland, horseback riding lessons and more - Los Angeles Times

La. Supt. John White Fabricates Three Years Of Teaching Into Five To Garner Questionable Certification | HuffPost

La. Supt. John White Fabricates Three Years Of Teaching Into Five To Garner Questionable Certification | HuffPost

La. Supt. John White Fabricates Three Years Of Teaching Into Five To Garner Questionable Certification

Louisiana has three levels of ed leader certification. Ed Leader 1 requires no teaching experience. Ed Leader 2 requires three years of teaching experience in one’s area of certification.

And Ed Leader 3 requires five years of teaching experience in one’s area of certification.

White does not have five years of teaching experience in his area of certification.

White has three years of teaching experience. White’s application confirms as much.

According to Louisiana law (Bulletin 746), the following criteria must be met in order for a person to be granted ed leader 3 status, certification that allows one to become a Louisiana district superintendent or assistant superintendent:

§ 708. Educational Leader Certificate Level 3 (EDL 3) [Formerly §709]

A. This certificate is required in order to serve as a school system superintendent or assistant superintendent.

Eligibility requirements:

a. valid EDL 2 or one of the Louisiana administrative/supervisory certifications that preceded the educational leadership certification structure;

b. five years of teaching experience in his/her area of certification;

c. five years of successful administrative or management experience in education at the level of assistant principal or above. The assistant principal experience would be limited to a maximum of two years of experience in that position; and

d. passing score on the school superintendent assessment (SSA), in keeping with state requirements.

Note that the five years of teaching experience is just that– teaching experience– and that it is to be in the applicant’s area of certification.

Included with White’s application is the following letter from the Jersey City Public Schools:

December 10, 2015

To Whom It May Concern:

Please be advised that Mr. John White was employed with the Jersey City School District as a certified English Teacher from September 1, 1999 to June 30, 2002. Please feel free to contact me for any further information at (201) 915-6362.

Sincerely,

Tracey A. Stone

Clerk2/Human Resources

To support the idea that White’s three years with Jersey City Schools were in White’s area of certification, his application also includes the following January 26, 2016, email from CONTINUE READING: La. Supt. John White Fabricates Three Years Of Teaching Into Five To Garner Questionable Certification | HuffPost

The MetWest High School Story (Part 5) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The MetWest High School Story (Part 5) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The MetWest High School Story (Part 5)

Internships

Forty percent of the school week is devoted to Learning Through Internships (LTI). Every teacher/advisor meets with their students in and out of school to discuss the work done at the intern site, the on-site mentor, and any issues that have arisen.

As in all Big Picture schools, MetWest has structured the academic year to have students search for and enter into two-day a week unpaid internships during school hours. Called Learning Through Internship (LTI), there is a coordinator that oversees the entire program. A former Advisor/Teacher Michael Cellemme heads this part of MetWest’s program. He is the only staff member who has also worked as a Teacher/Advisor at the first Big Picture school (The Met) in Providence (RI). He is responsible for finding sites for internships, interviewing potential work-site mentors, making matches between individual students and mentors, and monitoring what goes on in the internship.

Local mentors take on the responsibility of helping a student acquire the work and social skills necessary to succeed in a business, government agency, educational and health organization, and similar Oakland groups. Since 2002 when MetWest opened, the school had placed students with more than 400 organizations (2010), including local hospitals, radio stations and restaurants to provide learning opportunities.[i]

Advisor/Teacher Shannon Carey sees how the internship experience has made a huge difference for one of her 20 students, Kris McCoy. McCoy had struggled in school and had been in Oakland’s juvenile hall for being involved in an armed robbery while in the eighth grade. When he arrived at MetWest, he got into several fights in the ninth grade.

Carey said that “he came with an ankle bracelet, and with visits from his parole officer.” She continued: “And needing to be the alpha male and needing to show MetWest who he was and that he shouldn’t be messed with. He was way more CONTINUE READING: The MetWest High School Story (Part 5) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

America’s New School Lunch Policy: Punishing Hungry Students for Their Parents’ Poverty | gadflyonthewallblog

America’s New School Lunch Policy: Punishing Hungry Students for Their Parents’ Poverty | gadflyonthewallblog

America’s New School Lunch Policy: Punishing Hungry Students for Their Parents’ Poverty

There are few things as bad as a hungry child.

Hunched over an aching stomach as the school day creeps toward its end, one in six children go hungry in America today.

It’s harder to learn when you’re malnourished and in pain – especially for children.

It should be harder for adults to let them go hungry.

Yet for many policymakers, nothing is as bad as feeding children and letting their parents avoid the bill.

About 75% of US school districts report students who end the year owing large sums for lunches, according to the School Nutrition Association. And of those districts, 40.2% said the number of students without adequate funds increased last school year.

In fact, that has become the central issue – not child hunger but lunch debt.

Policymakers at the federal, state and school district level are finding new ways to force impoverished parents to pay for their children’s meals even if doing so means CONTINUE READING: America’s New School Lunch Policy: Punishing Hungry Students for Their Parents’ Poverty | gadflyonthewallblog

CURMUDGUCATION: CA: Any Warm Body

CURMUDGUCATION: CA: Any Warm Body

CA: Any Warm Body

California is in the midst of a legislative battle over charters, with the charter business suffering the prospect of a crackdown after years of happy life in the Land of Do As You Please.

There are many issues and voices flying about, but the Pasadena Star-News just chose to speak up for one of the odder old arguments of charter fans-- that charter schools shouldn't have to hire qualified teachers.

The public face of this argument is usually something about flexibility to hire teachers with professional expertise, like bringing in an experienced actor to teach drama class. I understand the appeal of the argument, but the fact that someone has professional accomplishments does not mean that person is in any way capable of teaching others.

Well, this looks harder than I thought it would be

The less public face of this argument is that many charter fans want charters to operated like businesses with visionary CEOs who can hire and fire as they see fit, without being forced to abide by any rules. Teachers-who-aren't-actually-teachers are also great about being paid less than real professionals and are seen as less likely to start making noises about unions and having a voice in running the school and other annoying behaviors that cramp management's style.

The PNS manages to be capture all the ways to be wrong on this issue.

One charter-school official noted to the Union-Tribune that former Gov. Jerry Brown would not be allowed to teach government under current credentialing rules. Likewise, an experienced  CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: CA: Any Warm Body

MATT BARNUM : When school turnarounds backfire: North Carolina’s effort offers a cautionary tale

When school turnarounds backfire: North Carolina’s effort offers a cautionary tale

When school turnarounds backfire: North Carolina’s effort offers a cautionary tale

A few years ago, North Carolina school officials looked at a group of its struggling schools and decided: we need to help.

State officials designed a turnaround strategy for those 75 schools, which were largely rural and served mostly low-income students of color. They dispatched education department staffers to analyze what was going wrong and make a plan, and then sent coaches to work with teachers and principals to improve instruction.

It’s an approach that would seem innocuous at worst and genuinely helpful at best.

But the results look quite different. The program actually caused test scores to fall modestly and teacher turnover to rise sharply at those schools, according to new research.

To Gary Henry of Vanderbilt, one of the researchers, it underscores that intervening in schools can backfire, and it’s not always obvious what schools need to improve.

“‘I always thought that it was better to do something than to do nothing,’” Henry said a North Carolina policymaker recently told him. “But it appears from this,” Henry said, “it actually sometimes could be worse to do something.”

The research adds to the current state of confusion about how best to improve struggling schools at a moment where the strategies states are using are in flux. Under the Obama administration’s federal turnaround program, states’ lowest-performing schools were required to fire the principal, and in some cases half the CONTINUE READING: When school turnarounds backfire: North Carolina’s effort offers a cautionary tale

Teacher's union head calls DeVos handling of student loan forgiveness program 'a travesty' | TheHill

Teacher's union head calls DeVos handling of student loan forgiveness program 'a travesty' | TheHill

Teacher's union head calls DeVos handling of student loan forgiveness program 'a travesty'

The head of the teachers union suing the Department of Education is slamming Secretary Betsy DeVos, calling her mismanagement of the public service student loan forgiveness program a “travesty” and a “betrayal” to millions of Americans.

Randi Weingarten, who is president of the American Federation of Teachers, filed a lawsuit earlier this month against DeVos. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and is brought by eight union members along with Weingarten and the union itself.

“What Betsy Devos has done is a travesty and a betrayal,” Weingarten, an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s handing of the program, told Hill.TV on Tuesday.

An Education Department spokesperson declined to comment, but called the lawsuit "nothing more than the typical political grandstanding from the union." 

The federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007.

The program promises to forgive the remaining balance of federal student loan debt for graduates who have made at least 120 payments and work in a qualifying job for the government or a nonprofit. This includes teachers, firefighters and nurses among other public service workers.

Weingarten emphasized that the current program is in such disarray, that it violates both federal law and the Constitution.

“Why are they not actually saying, ‘wait a second’ — you paid for 10 years, we’re going to find every way to get your loan forgiven,'” she said. “Instead it’s obstacle after obstacle after CONTINUE READING: Teacher's union head calls DeVos handling of student loan forgiveness program 'a travesty' | TheHill

Emails Show DeVos Aides Pulled Strings for Failing For-Profit Colleges - The New York Times

Emails Show DeVos Aides Pulled Strings for Failing For-Profit Colleges - The New York Times

Emails Show DeVos Aides Pulled Strings for Failing For-Profit Colleges

WASHINGTON — Dream Center Education Holdings, a subsidiary of a Los Angeles-based megachurch, had no experience in higher education when it petitioned the federal Education Department to let it take over a troubled chain of for-profit trade schools.

But the organization’s chairman, Randall K. Barton, told the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, that the foundation wanted to “help people live better lives.”

The purchase was blessed despite Dream Center’s lack of experience and questionable finances by an administration favorable to for-profit education. But barely a year later, the company tumbled into insolvency, dozens of its colleges closed abruptly and thousands of students were left with no degree after paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.

Making matters worse, the college is accused of enrolling new students and taking their taxpayer-supported financial aid dollars even after some of its campuses had lost their accreditation, which rendered their credits worthless

Company emails, documents and recordings show that part of why Dream Center kept going is that it thought the Education Department, which under Ms. DeVos has rolled back regulations on for-profit education, would try to keep it from failing. Mr. Barton emailed other Dream Center executives that the department’s head of higher education policy — Diane Auer Jones, a former executive and lobbyist for for-profit colleges — had pulled strings to help the company’s schools in their effort to regain a seal of approval from an accreditor, despite their perilous positions.

In another instance, Dream Center’s chief operating officer told faculty at an endangered campus that Ms. Jones was changing departmental regulations to help the schools obtain accreditation retroactively.

Although the Trump administration did eventually cut off federal aid to the chain of colleges and precipitate their collapse, Democrats say the department failed to respond to warning signs.

Representative Robert C. Scott, a Virginia Democrat who is the chairman of the House Education Committee, unveiled a trove of CONTINUE READING: Emails Show DeVos Aides Pulled Strings for Failing For-Profit Colleges - The New York Times

Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies & Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities

Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies & Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities

Today, July 23, the Commission released "Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies & Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities." Join Chair Catherine E. Lhamon & Commissioner Karen K. Narasaki for a conference call on the report at 10:45 am EDT. Dial-in: 800-353-6461, conf. ID 7829324. See just-released report at: https://bit.ly/2xJve5Z #CivilRights #USCCRReports

Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies & Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities

How the 'School Choice' Movement Has its Roots in Racism - Citizen Truth

How the 'School Choice' Movement Has its Roots in Racism - Citizen Truth

How the ‘School Choice’ Movement Has its Roots in Racism

“We have experimented educationally on children who are poor, who are of color, who go to underfunded schools. We come up with ways of teaching them that are experiments and have absolutely no kind of basis in research.”

Charter schools and the “school choice” movement have become a major part of the fabric of the American education system in recent years, but what are the origins of these institutions and this educational ideology?

In America, there are about 3 million students attending more than 7,000 charter schools around the country, and with the current prevailing political and economic tendencies in the United States, it seems highly likely that this number is only going to continue to grow.

Education and the Trump Administration

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised that if elected, he would be the “nation’s biggest cheerleader for school choice,” and has already made many bold moves on this front, including appointing school choice advocate Betsy DeVos as his Secretary of Education. In May 2017, DeVos was quoted as saying that the goal of Trump’s administration is to enact “the most ambitious expansion of education choice in our nation’s history.”

DeVos has been one of the most vocal champions of the “school choice” movement, pushing all sorts of legislation on the topic, including most recently a federal tax credit that would provide 5 billion dollars in federal money to fund private school scholarships. The plan has faced opposition from both conservatives and liberals who see it as a voucher program by a different name and a way to siphon public funds away from struggling public schools.

Growth of Charter Schools

Many cities around the country have begun to favor charter schools over traditional public schools, and most of the cities with high rates of enrollment in charter schools are financially strapped areas that are dealing with economic turmoil and a fractured public education system.

According to the Key Facts About Charter Schools publication, in Flint, 55 percent of students in the district attend charter schools, and in Detroit, 53 percent of students are educated at charter  CONTINUE READING: How the 'School Choice' Movement Has its Roots in Racism - Citizen Truth

John Thompson: Corporate, data-driven education has been an 'Epic' failure

Corporate, data-driven education has been an 'Epic' failure

Corporate, data-driven education has been an ‘Epic’ failure

Growing up in Oklahoma, physical evidence of corruption was always in plain sight. Riding down the highway, my father would tell me how the road’s surface just changed from one type of asphalt to another because that was all the contractor’s bribes paid for.

When I became old enough to work blue collar jobs, I realized how the disregard for safety laws repeatedly put workers like me in life-threatening positions. On my first professional job, my supervisor told me about the time he asked a consultant, “What does two plus two equal?”

The consultant locked the door, pulled down the window shades, and whispered, “What do you want it to equal?”

Today’s scandals aren’t as readily apparent as the crimes of the past. They are hidden in “the cloud,” in complex computer systems. For that reason, the rapidly unfolding Epic Charter School scandal is both a case study in the dangers of today’s data-driven economy and the failure of corporate school reform.

When I became a teacher, corruption seemed nonexistent in public education (and today’s OKCPS clearly respects the law.) Back then, schools didn’t seem to engage in more or less gamesmanship with numbers than similar institutions. In my first teaching jobs, I was warned about the danger of not complying with special education law. In contrast to more typical violations, breaking disability law could cost your teaching license as well as your job.

Twenty-something years later, I sought to return from retirement and was hired at Seeworth Academy, a now-closed charter school that is being investigated for its special education practices. I was frequently warned than any questioning of special education procedures would result in immediate termination.

Education reforms open door for subtle corruption

Even as the public face of overt corruption in the old industrial world receded, the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 spurred new statistical tricks so that two plus two equals “transformative gains.” It had always been clear that attendance and graduation CONTINUE READING: Corporate, data-driven education has been an 'Epic' failure

Raj Chetty Believes His New Harvard Institute Will Re-Energize the American Dream | janresseger

Raj Chetty Believes His New Harvard Institute Will Re-Energize the American Dream | janresseger

Raj Chetty Believes His New Harvard Institute Will Re-Energize the American Dream

Raj Chetty, the superstar, big-data economist, has returned to Harvard from Stanford to establish his own Opportunity Insights research and policy institute, a project seeded with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. Chetty’s research has created an Opportunity Atlas, which maps neighborhoods of opportunity and other neighborhoods where children are unable to move up the economic ladder.

In an objective and suitably skeptical profile for The Atlantic, Gareth Cook explores the goal of Chetty’s project: “Dozens of the nation’s elite colleges have more children of the 1 percent than from families in the bottom 60 percent of family income. A black boy born to a wealthy family is more than twice as likely to end up poor as a white boy from a wealthy family. Chetty has established Big Data as a moral force in the American debate. Now he wants to do more than change our understanding of America—he wants to change America itself. His new Harvard-based institute, called Opportunity Insights, is explicitly aimed at applying his findings in cities around the country and demonstrating that social scientists, despite a discouraging track record, are able to fix the problems they articulate in journals.”

How does Chetty envision his project will work? “The Opportunity Atlas has a fractal quality. Some regions of the United States look better than high-mobility countries such as Denmark, while others look more like a developing country.  The Great Plains unfurl as a sea of blue, and then the eye is caught by an island of red—a mark of the miseries inflicted on the Oglala Lakota by European settlers. The stark differences recapitulate themselves on smaller and smaller scales as you zoom in. It’s common to see opposite extremes of opportunity within easy walking distance of each other, even in two neighborhoods that long-term residents would consider quite similar. To find a cure for what ails America, Chetty will need to CONTINUE READING: Raj Chetty Believes His New Harvard Institute Will Re-Energize the American Dream | janresseger

Jersey Jazzman: Camden, Charter Schools, and a Very Big Lie

Jersey Jazzman: Camden, Charter Schools, and a Very Big Lie

Camden, Charter Schools, and a Very Big Lie

Let's get back to the deeply flawed editorial from this week's Star-Ledger that I wrote about yesterday. In that post, I explained how "creaming" -- the practice of taking only those students who are likely to score high on standardized tests -- is likely a major contributor to the "success" of certain charter schools.

Charter school advocates do not like discussing this issue. The charter brand is based on the notion that certain operators have discovered some special method for getting better educational outcomes from students -- particularly students who are in disadvantaged communities -- than public district schools. But if they are creaming the higher-performing kids, there's probably nothing all that special about charters after all.

It's important to understand this debate about charters and creaming if you want to understand what's happening now in Camden's schools.

Because Camden was going to be the proof point that finally showed the creaming naysayers were wrong with a new hybrid model of schooling: the renaissance school. These schools would be run by the same organizations that managed charter schools in Newark and Philadelphia. The district would turn over dilapidated school properties to charter management organizations (CMOs); they would, in turn, renovate the facilities, using funds the district claimed it didn't have and would never get.

But most importantly: these schools would be required to take all of the children within the CONTINUE READING: Jersey Jazzman: Camden, Charter Schools, and a Very Big Lie

Does high stakes testing lead to drill and kill, aka, poor instructional practices or is testing necessary to provide accountability and assure equity for poor students of color? | Ed In The Apple

Does high stakes testing lead to drill and kill, aka, poor instructional practices or is testing necessary to provide accountability and assure equity for poor students of color? | Ed In The Apple

Does high stakes testing lead to drill and kill, aka, poor instructional practices or is testing necessary to provide accountability and assure equity for poor students of color?

Education in New York State is edging towards a crossroads: will the next commissioner and the Board of Regents begin to challenge high stakes testing, namely federally mandated grades three to eight testing and the regents examinations required for high school graduation, or, will the supporters of equity for poor children of color fight to retain testing for accountability purposes and challenge inequitable funding across the state?

On one side the opt-out supporters: parents and advocates from high wealth predominantly white schools and districts, advocates, and some members of the Board of Regents, on the other Michael Rebell and other advocates urging reform of state funding formula that are among the most inequitable in the nation as well as civil rights organizations arguing that only through testing can schools and school districts be held accountable for disparate outcomes.

Testing has a long, long history; the regents examinations began in the nineteenth century and were effectively the tracking tool for the worlds of college or work. The majority of students did not take regents exams, they took much lower level competence tests and received a local diploma, In my school, generally looked upon as a high achieving school only a quarter of students received a regents diploma. In the early 2000’s I was on a Schools Under Registration Review (SURR) team at Taft High School in the Bronx, an all minority school with 2000 plus students, I asked, “How many students received a regent diploma?” The answer was five. I said “5%?” No, five.

The students earning a regents diploma were overwhelmingly white, the students CONTINUE READING: Does high stakes testing lead to drill and kill, aka, poor instructional practices or is testing necessary to provide accountability and assure equity for poor students of color? | Ed In The Apple