BREAKING NEWS - Trump goes with anti-public education running mate - Wait What?

BREAKING NEWS - Trump goes with anti-public education running mate - Wait What?:
BREAKING NEWS – Trump goes with anti-public education running mate

As expected, the most unqualified candidate to be President of the United States has chosen a running mate who is equally unprepared, ill-equipped and incapable of representing the people of the nation.

Not only is Indiana Governor Mike Pence the most anti-choice governor in the country, he is nothing short of a puppet for the charter school industry and its corporate education reform allies.

As Indiana’s governor, Pence has driven an anti-teacher, anti-public education political and legislative agenda that has included dramatically expanding charter schools and diverting scarce public funds to voucher programs that, in turn, have allowed private individuals to use taxpayer money to send their children to religious schools.

As a gubernatorial candidate Pence has used his anti-public education agenda to raise massive amounts of money from wealthy corporate education reform donors both in and out of his state.  Many of the most prominent anti-public school big donors appear on Pence’s fundraising reports.

As the Indianapolis Star and other Indiana based newspapers and blogs have reported, Pence has been collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from charter school owners and voucher supporters.

Pence’s education donors include;

• Fred Klipsch, founder and chairman of Hoosiers for Quality Education, “a leading pro-voucher organization. Klipsch boasted in 2012 that he had put together the campaign funding to overcome teacher opposition and push through legislative approval of the Mitch Daniels-Tony Bennett education agenda, including vouchers and charter schools.”

• John D. Bryan, founder and director of Challenge Foundation, “which operators several charter schools, including the Indianapolis Academy of Excellence. He has given nearly $600,000 to Republican campaigns in Indiana, including $145,000 to Pence’s campaigns for governor.

• Roger Hertog, of Success Academy infamy.  Hertog, a major right-wing donor has also given pro-charter school governor Andrew Cuomo at least $30,000.

• Robert L. Luddy,  “who runs a group of private schools and who provided much of the campaign financing for school board candidates who overturned a model school desegregation program in Wake County, N.C., schools.

In July 2012, the education blog, In School Matters led with an article entitled, More on the money behind the Indiana school-voucher law.  Pro-public education blogger Steve Hinnefeld wrote;

Hoosiers for Economic Growth chairman Fred Klipsch explained recently 

BREAKING NEWS - Trump goes with anti-public education running mate - Wait What?:

 

Hoosier School Heist TV is Doug Martin's channel featuring videos of his book tour across Indiana speaking on the corporate takeover of public education. Order Hoosier School Heist at http://hoosierschoolheist.com/.

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New Book on Market-Based, Educational Reforms | VAMboozled!

New Book on Market-Based, Educational Reforms | VAMboozled!:

New Book on Market-Based, Educational Reforms

For those of you looking for a good read, you may want to check out this new book: “Learning from the Federal Market‐Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA [the Every Student Succeeds Act]” here.

As Larry Cuban put it, the book’s editors have a “cast of all-star scholars” in this volume, and in Gloria Ladson-Billings words, the editors “assembled some of the nation’s best minds” to examine the evidence on today’s market-based reforms as well as more promising, equitable ones. For full disclosure, I have a chapter in this book about using value-added models (VAMs) to measure and evaluate teacher education programs (see below), although I am not making any royalties from book sales.

If interested, you can purchase the book at a  reduced price of $30 (from $40) per paperback thru 7/31/17, using the following discount code at checkout: LFMBR30350. Here, again, is the link.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Over the past twenty years, educational policy has been characterized by top‐down, market‐focused policies combined with a push toward privatization and school choice. The new Every Student Succeeds Act continues along this path, though with decision‐making authority now shifted toward the states. These market‐based reforms have often been touted as the most promising response to the challenges of poverty and educational disenfranchisement. But has this approach been successful? Has learning improved? Have historically low‐scoring schools “turned around” or have the reforms had little effect? Have these narrow conceptions of schooling harmed the civic and social purposes of education in a democracy?

This book presents the evidence. Drawing on the work of the nation’s most prominent researchers, the book explores the major elements of these reforms, as well as the social, political, and educational contexts in which they take place. It examines the evidence supporting the most common school improvement strategies: school choice; reconstitutions, or massive personnel changes; and school closures. From there, it New Book on Market-Based, Educational Reforms | VAMboozled!:

After Years of Cuts to Playtime, Parents and Educators Are Bringing Recess Back

After Years of Cuts to Playtime, Parents and Educators Are Bringing Recess Back:

After Years of Cuts to Playtime, Parents and Educators Are Bringing Recess Back

Last year in Seattle public schools, low-income kids won an equal right to play, thanks to a fierce coalition of Seattle teachers and parents who set up an unbeatable campaign to bring recess back to the school day.

Similar efforts are taking place across the U.S., as educators and parents take note of how the No Child Left Behind (NCLB)-era of high-stakes, high-stress testing altered their children’s school day, lengthening the hours that students stay in their seats and squeezing the minutes they swing across playgrounds. It’s time, they say, for the school day to return to a healthier state of play.

In recent years, mandatory-recess legislation has been introduced in at least four states, including Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. Meanwhile, one Texas school has jacked up its daily allotment of recess to four times a day. Recess supporters point to the health benefits of exercise and movement, the way that physical activity supports cognitive development, plus the critical social and emotional learning that takes place when children have unstructured, free time to play.

“It’s been alarming to see the way that No Child led to less recess. Recess has cognitive, emotional, social benefits, and lots of research to support it,” says Terri Drain, a nationally board certified physical education teacher in Alameda County, Calif., and a member of the Society of Health and Physical Educators (SHAPE) board of directors. “I would call it a crime, actually, to deny physical activity to kids… We’re just not designed to sit still.”

 in 2014, about two out of 10 U.S. elementary schools had no daily recess, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Generally, middle and high schools have even less.

With the passage of the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and its welcome focus on local- and state-designed standards, “it’s a great time to spark conversations around what a well-rounded child looks like. It’s not one who sits and takes tests all day,” says Collin Brooks, a nationally board certified physical education teacher from Bend, Ore., and the president of Oregon SHAPE. (To find out how you can get involved in those conversations in your community, visit Get ESSA Right.)

At Brooks’ school, the younger kids get three recesses a day, while the older ones get two. But not all kids are so lucky. In Florida this year, parents complained to state legislators that some schools had zero. (Their mandatory recess bill passed almost unanimously in the Florida House, but stalled in the state Senate.) Overall, in 2014, about two out of 10 U.S. elementary schools had no daily recess, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Generally, middle and high schools have even less.

Making matters worse in Seattle, where there was no district policy on recess, After Years of Cuts to Playtime, Parents and Educators Are Bringing Recess Back:

The Cost of Choice – EduShyster

The Cost of Choice – EduShyster:
The Cost of Choice 

A new study finds that charter school expansion in Michigan has meant financial chaos for a growing number of school districts…

EduShyster: Your new study looks at why certain school districts in Michigan have descended into a state of, as I like to describe it, *smoking ruin.* To keep the suspense alive, tell us what you found DID NOT contribute to the severe financial distress of these districts.

David Arsen: The question we looked at was how much of this pattern of increasing financial distress among school districts in Michigan was due to things that local districts have control over as opposed to state-level policies that are out of the local districts’ control: teacher salaries, health benefits, class size, administrative spending. We also looked at an item that the conservative think tanks are big on: contracting out and privatization. We found that, overwhelmingly, the biggest financial impact on school districts was the result of declining enrollment and revenue loss, especially where school choice and charters are most prevalent. We looked at every school district in Michigan with at least 100 students and we followed them for nearly 20 years. The statistics are causal; we’re not just looking at correlation. 

EduShyster: There’s a table in your paper which actually made me gasp aloud—which I’m pretty sure is a first. I’m talking, of course, about the chart where you show what happened to Michigan’s *central cities,* including Detroit, as charter schools really started to expand.

Arsen: We have districts getting into extreme fiscal distress because they’re losing revenue so fast. That table in our paper looked at the central cities statewide and their The Cost of Choice – EduShyster:

Big Education Ape: Michigan's shortchanging its kids. Why? - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2016/07/michigans-shortchanging-its-kids-why.html

Big Education Ape: State of Michigan Failing Charter Schools: One Year Later Nothing Has Changed - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2015/07/state-of-michigan-failing-charter.html

Many ECOT students spend just one hour online for classes each day, state lawyers say | cleveland.com

Many ECOT students spend just one hour online for classes each day, state lawyers say | cleveland.com:
Many ECOT students spend just one hour online for classes each day, state lawyers say

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Many students at the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) online charter school spend just an hour a day online taking their classes, state lawyers said this week, all while the state pays the school as if they were full-time students.

That detail was included in a filing by the state in Franklin County Common Pleas Court Monday as the Ohio Department of Education audits the giant charter school's records. The state wants to see if ECOT's 15,000 students spent enough time on coursework this past school year to merit the $108 million the state paid the school.

Unlike a traditional school, where teachers can take attendance every day, students at online schools like ECOT take classes at home by computer. That makes it hard to measure whether they are actively taking classes, an issue that is becoming increasingly contentious between Ohio's e-schools and the state.

Since charter schools are paid on a per-student basis by the state, there are millions of dollars at stake in determining which kids qualify as attending a school.

An initial review this spring raised red flags that students at ECOT, Ohio's largest online school, may have done far less work than required.

"Based on its review of a sample of the student log-in records, ODE found that most students logged into ECOT's online platform for only about one hour per day," state lawyers told the court Monday.

That's just a fraction of the six to seven hours per school day that students spend at a traditional school.

It's also far less than the five hours per day students should spend, on average, to reach the 920 hours of learning the state requires over a school year, ECOT's own guidelines say.

"Those (ECOT's) records did not substantiate the number of educational hours for which ECOT had billed ODE," the state's lawyers added.

Until this week, the state had only publicly reported ECOT students spending less than that five hours per week benchmark. The filing on Monday was the first indication of how much less.

Note that students can also meet that five-hour daily average with work offline, but the state and ECOT are sparring over whether the school needs to document that offline time.

The school says that it only has to offer 920 hours of "learning opportunities," regardless of whether students take advantage of them. The state says that students must "participate" in classes for those hours.

The Ohio Department of Education was scheduled to look at records in more detail Monday. ECOT filed suit last Friday to block that audit, but Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Stephen McIntosh on Monday denied the school's request for a restraining order.

Department employees then went to the school to resume the audit Monday afternoon, shortly after McIntosh's lunchtime denial.

The department has not offered any estimate on when a report of its findings will be ready, though state law requires it by Sept. 30.

ECOT spokesman Neil Clark did not dispute the one-hour figure claimed by the state, but said the school is meeting state law.

"ECOT students are offered the required number of hours of learning opportunities everyday, just like students at traditional public schools," he told The Plain Dealer. "As a result of the opportunities provided, ECOT graduates more students than any other school in the state. ODE is unfortunately trying to limit the choice of Ohio families who traditional public schools have failed."

Clark also said the school has clean audits from the state auditor, who has recently blasted the Ohio Department of Education for mismanagement.Many ECOT students spend just one hour online for classes each day, state lawyers say | cleveland.com:

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THE DEBATE OVER CHARTER SCHOOLS

• Many ECOT students spend just one hour online for classes each day, state lawyers say
• ECOT online charter school loses bid to block attendance and funding audit
• Poor-performing charter schools aren't finding second chances after Ohio's charter reform
• Academic results of online schools should bring "outrage" and law changes, national charter school group says
• State school board won't rescue OAK Leadership charter school run by former colleague
• Feds gave $30 million in grants to charter schools that have closed or never opened, report says
• Ohio is paying charter schools for kids that aren't in class, Auditor Dave Yost finds
• State Auditor David Yost finds that state charter school sponsor reviews were "noncompliant"
• State considers delaying charter school quality efforts yet again
• Ohio finally has a plan to fix its charter school data-rigging, but there are a few complications

All Stories

Weingarten praises Democrats’ education stances for convention platform | New York Amsterdam News

Weingarten praises Democrats’ education stances for convention platform | New York Amsterdam News: The new Black view:

Weingarten praises Democrats’ education stances for convention platform

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten offered nothing but praise for the Democratic Party after delegates passed amendments that bridged Bernie Sanders’ and Hillary Clinton’s platforms.

“Thanks to collaboration between Clinton and Sanders drafters and platform committee members, the public education plank in the Democratic platform represents a refreshing sea change in its approach to public education, to the students we serve, and to the parents and educators who work so hard to give all our children the opportunity they deserve,” said Weingarten in a statement. “This platform makes it clear that Democrats are committed to ending the failed era of test-and-sanction, and are ready to refocus on strategies that will help each and every child succeed, from early childhood through college and career.”

Some of the amendments to the education platform that Democrats will present at the upcoming convention include charter schools reflecting the neighborhoods they serve and teaching all children regardless of their special needs, their disabilities or their backgrounds.

“This supports the original vision for charter schools: to complement, not to replace or destabilize, traditional public schools,” stated Weingarten.

Another part of the platform, passed via a unity amendment, will include the goal of providing free tuition for middle-class and working families at public colleges and universities and pushing for a debt-free higher education for all Americans. Clinton mentioned this proposal Tuesday after Sanders endorsed her at a rally in New Hampshire. The amendment calls for year-round Pell Grants, additional support for historically Black colleges and universities and an expansion of debt-repayment options.

“Democrats’ higher education plank is the most progressive in American history,” said Weingarten. “It matches Hillary Clinton’s New College Compact, a plan that contains the best ideas from leaders in the field including Sens. [Elizabeth] Warren and Sanders, as well as from the many young people Hillary engaged on the trail.”

The platform also includes increased support for community schools and alternative discipline practices.Weingarten praises Democrats’ education stances for convention platform | New York Amsterdam News: The new Black view:

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Dorn Says He Will File Lawsuit Against Districts

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Dorn Says He Will File Lawsuit Against Districts:

Dorn Says He Will File Lawsuit Against Districts

From the Everett Herald:

Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn knows school districts use local levies to pay teachers and principals because they don’t get enough money from the state to offer competitive salaries.

He is convinced it is illegal for them to do this.

So the outgoing chief of Washington’s public school system said he intends to sue a few districts to find out.

Dorn is preparing to launch legal action as early as Tuesday in King County Superior Court. He wouldn’t say which districts will be named as defendants. 

The Herald thinks one will be Snohomish because they have one of the highest teachers salaries in the state.Seattle Schools Community Forum: Dorn Says He Will File Lawsuit Against Districts:

Seattle Schools Teacher Keeps Job Even Though He Left Students Alone on Field Trip

I had only vaguely heard about this issue but apparently an investigation happened and the results are in. From the My Northwest: A Ballard High School teacher remains on the job, even after an investigation found he “abandoned” high school students on an overnight field trip with no one but one of the student’s 19-year-old boyfriend. Why did he leave them? So he could attend a Seattle teacher’s u

by Melissa Westbrook / 6min 

Dorn Says He Will File Lawsuit Against Districts

From the Everett Herald : Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn knows school districts use local levies to pay teachers and principals because they don’t get enough money from the state to offer competitive salaries. He is convinced it is illegal for them to do this. So the outgoing chief of Washington’s public school system said he intends to sue a few districts to find out. Dorn is pre

by Melissa Westbrook / 22min 

Washington Supreme Court to State on McCleary; We Have Some Questions

The big news is a reply from the Supreme Court to the Legislature on McCleary. The 2017 legislative session presents the last opportunity for complying with the State's paramount duty under article IX, seciton 1, by 2018. What remains to be done to achieve compliance is undeniably huge, but it is not undefinable. Basically the Court is saying to the State: - this has gone on long enough - we don't

by Melissa Westbrook / 28min hide  //  save

Answers Back from District on Garfield Honors for All

But those answers raise more questions. I had written to district communications (and cc'ed the Board) about this issue. Here are my initial questions and what their reply: Does the Superintendent or district have any statement about the issues raised by Principal Howard and the Times' article? As well, does the Superintendent or district have any statement about the news that LA/History at Garfie

by Melissa Westbrook / 2h 

YESTERDAY

Things Heat Up on the Democratic Platform for 2016

Update: this post from retired teacher/blogger Fred Klonsky puts it all in perspective. end of update And I'm talking about public education. There was much discussion about the platform's stand on public ed issues early on. With Hillary Clinton waffling about charter schools (only "high-quality" ones), it was hard to say what would happen. But now wording has been tightened and it look

5 by Melissa Westbrook / 16h 

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Dorn Says He Will File Lawsuit Against Districts:

Group that wants to launch new L.A. schools names its first grant winners - LA Times

Group that wants to launch new L.A. schools names its first grant winners - LA Times:

Group that wants to launch new L.A. schools names its first grant winners

A group that has vowed to start high-quality schools across Los Angeles on Thursday announced its first grant recipients: a charter school that is expanding, an after-school and summer enrichment program for children, and an organization that recruits recent college graduates for two-year teaching stints.

None of the money went to the Los Angeles Unified School District, although it’s likely to benefit from the teacher-recruitment effort. 

The grants are the first concrete indication of the direction of Great Public Schools Now, a recently formed nonprofit with a particular formula for school reform: Take a school that works and make it larger or build a new one just like it.

The work is vital, say organizers, because 160,000 students in low-income neighborhoods attend failing public schools.

The reform effort grew out of a preliminary, confidential proposal, circulated last year among philanthropists, to move half of L.A. Unified’s students into charter schools over eight years. The proposal, which called for building 260 new charter schools, was developed under the auspices of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and provoked widespread controversy when The Times obtained a leaked copy and wrote about it.

The plan, however, evolved over time, the group says, and the current strategy is to support any kind of successful school, including those in L.A. Unified.

“This is a fantastic opportunity for all of Los Angeles,” Executive Director Myrna Castrejón said at a news conference at Heart of Los Angeles, the Westlake enrichment program slated to receive $500,000.

Great Public Schools Now said earlier this week that its grant money would go to creating and expanding effective schools and training teachers and principals. 

Heart of Los Angeles does not fit in those categories, but it does well-regarded work.

A second recipient is Equitas Academy Charter Schools, which serves the low-income Pico-Union area, just west of downtown.  

Equitas already was building its third small campus. The $2-million grant will make the project more affordable by reducing long-term debt, leaving more money for academic programs, said founder and Chief Executive Malka Borrego.

Charters, most of which are non-union, are run independently of L.A. Unified.

The third recipient, Teach For America, also will receive $2 million, which will payGroup that wants to launch new L.A. schools names its first grant winners - LA Times: 

Los Angeles “Reform” Group Makes Grants to Other Reformers | Diane Ravitch's blog - http://wp.me/p2odLa-eM4 via @dianeravitch