The LAUSD Tried to Secure a Source of Funding and All It Got Was a Bill for $12.5 Million

The LAUSD Tried to Secure a Source of Funding and All It Got Was a Bill for $12.5 Million

The LAUSD Tried to Secure a Source of Funding and All It Got Was a Bill for $12.5 Million

Proper planning for ballot initiatives like this takes months and years, not weeks…Nor has the district done at this time the preparation necessary to run a successful campaign so the taxpayers would support it…I believe a better option is to properly plan to do this by 2020 when we can be successful.”
– Austin Beutner, July 10, 2018

Last July, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board Members Scott Schmerlson and George McKenna proposed adding a parcel tax to the November 2018 ballot. After initially indicating that he would support the measure, LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner came out against the parcel tax at the July 10, 2018, board meeting. Beutner admitted that the tax was needed, but said that the timeline of four and a half months was too short in order to get the measure passed by the voters. He also pointed out that the $5 million price tag for holding the election would put a strain on the budget. His suggestion for the district to wait until the 2020 election cycle was backed by the votes of Board Members Monica Garica, Nick Melvoin and Ref Rodriguez, sending the proposal to its defeat. The parcel tax was dead.

Or so we thought.

Suddenly, last February the parcel tax returned. With just a couple of days notice it returned to the board’s agenda as a proposal for the CONTINUE READING: The LAUSD Tried to Secure a Source of Funding and All It Got Was a Bill for $12.5 Million

Where Is Elizabeth Warren's Plan For K-12 Public Education?

Where Is Elizabeth Warren's Plan For K-12 Public Education?

Where Is Elizabeth Warren's Plan For K-12 Public Education?

Elizabeth Warren has plans.   

You can buy a t-shirt that says so. The New York Times says that her plans have helped her “gain ground,” which is another way of  saying that the press is finally giving her the kind of coverage she deserves and not relegating her to back bench status while they get all excited about Mayor Pete (that’s the back bench where much of the press also place Harris and Gilliland—can you guess what those candidates have in common).  

Go to her website and you can find plan after plan listed. Plans for new tax structure. Plans for ending voter suppression. Plans for fixing foreign policy. Even plans for more affordable college.  

But no plans for K-12 public education.  

Bernie Sanders has a plan. Joe Biden has sort of a plan. Kamala Harris has a proposal.  

But so far, Warren’s direct address of K-12 education consists of a promise to appoint a secretary of education who has been a teacher in a public school. She has also called Betsy DeVos the worst secretary of education ever. Beyond that, we don’t know what her plans for K-12 education might be.  

Democrats who are heavily invested in that particular issue are CONTINUE READING: Where Is Elizabeth Warren's Plan For K-12 Public Education?

Rebecca Solnit: How Internet Insinuation Becomes Campaign Fact | Literary Hub

Rebecca Solnit: How Internet Insinuation Becomes Campaign Fact | Literary Hub

Rebecca Solnit: How Internet Insinuation Becomes Campaign Fact
On the Curious Case of Elizabeth Warren and the "Charter School Lobbyist" Who Wasn't

The Internet is a costume party in which everyone comes dressed in an opinion, or rather dozens of them or an endless array, one right after another. An opinion is, traditionally or at least ideally, a conclusion reached after weighing the evidence, but that takes time and so people are dashing about in sloppy, ill-formed opinions or rather snap judgments which are to well-formed opinions what trash bags are to evening gowns. If opinions were like clothes, this would just be awkward, but opinions are also like votes. They shape the discourse and eventually the reality of the world we live in. Journalists used to say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts, but opinions are supposed to be based on facts and when the facts are wrong or distorted or weaponized, trouble sets in.

Big Education Ape: Charter School Lobbyist Introduces Elizabeth Warren at Rally | gadflyonthewallblog - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/06/charter-school-lobbyist-introduces.html

There was actually a nice victory over distortion and insinuation a couple of weeks ago. The Washington Post put out a story on May 23 that was titled “While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour.” (If you look it up now, the title has been changed to not shout about the money any more.) It was kind of a nonstory: one of the nation’s leading bankruptcy lawyers, while teaching at one of the nation’s most distinguished law schools, did some work on the side, as law professors apparently often do.

If you didn’t know anything about legal experts’ compensation rates, $675 an hour might seem high, and the whole thing seemed to be trying to suggest that there was something shady about the whole thing. Perhaps women are not supposed to earn a lot of money, though we knew from the sideswipes about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s waitress work that we are not supposed to work in low wage jobs either. Perhaps women are always either too much or not enough. For the record, I am wildly enthused about Warren as a presidential candidate, but I was enthused about accuracy a long time before she came along, and this is a story mostly about accuracy and its opposites. The stories I’m relating could be told about any number of other candidates who’ve been misrepresented in ways that have stuck as smears.

One of the two journalists, Annie Linskey, had penned an earlier Post story whose headline suggested a desperate reaching for controversy: “Elizabeth Warren reshaped our view of the middle class. But some see an angle.” The story declared there had been, “a bitter dispute over the CONTINUE READING: Rebecca Solnit: How Internet Insinuation Becomes Campaign Fact | Literary Hub

CREDO Says Pennsylvania Charter Schools Are Weak and Unimpressive | Dissident Voice

CREDO Says Pennsylvania Charter Schools Are Weak and Unimpressive | Dissident Voice

CREDO Says Pennsylvania Charter Schools Are Weak and Unimpressive

In another recent study on charter schools, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, “finds little to no progress in charter school impact in Pennsylvania.”¹

A June 4, 2019 press release from CREDO states that: “Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found over four years of study that the typical charter school student in Pennsylvania makes similar progress in reading and weaker growth in math compared to their traditional public school peer (TPS).”

The press release does not mention what sort of selective enrollment practices are practiced in Pennsylvania’s charter schools, but it is well-known that charter schools across the nation regularly cherry-pick their students. It is also worth noting that, “Of the state’s 15 cyber charters, 10 are operating with expired charters.”²

The CREDO Pennsylvania finding is extra significant given that it comes from an organization that is unrelentingly pro-charter school and funded heavily by billionaires who have been working for years to impose privately-operated charter schools on the entire country (e.g., Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation).

Nearly 30 years after they appeared on the American education landscape, charter schools, which barely make up seven percent of all schools in the country, have demonstrated weak results on a broad and consistent basis. These privately-operated segregated schools that often over-suspend students CONTINUE READING: CREDO Says Pennsylvania Charter Schools Are Weak and Unimpressive | Dissident Voice

NYC Educator: Why Are We Raising a Generation of Non-readers?

NYC Educator: Why Are We Raising a Generation of Non-readers?

Why Are We Raising a Generation of Non-readers?

I had a lot of time on Monday. I proctored for one hour and 15 minutes, and then I was pretty much free. Also, we were free the next day. It felt like a Friday, and I just want to thank all my Muslim brothers and sisters for giving us that Tuesday off.

No one was in trouble on Monday This was good for me, and my members, but I hadn't brought a book or anything. So I sat down and read the new social studies Regents exam. I haven't studied history in, oh, decades, and I'd have aced this test. I had almost no prior knowledge whatsoever. There were only two questions that confused me, and both were in the short answers.

I don't remember exactly what the first one was, but I do remember that I looked at it very carefully, reconsidered, and decided it was a different answer. I was absolutely sure I was correct. The hardest question on the test for me was one about revolutions. Was it the Iranian Revolution, the French Revolution, or one of two other revolutions?

I had no idea. Then I looked at the source names, and waddya know, one of them was in French. It was the French Revolution. There was some essay question about the rich oppressing the poor, or the capitalists exploiting countries, and they asked me to choose three out of five given non-fiction pieces to cite and prove my point. I chose the last three, which were on target. I was very confused by a tea advertisement, though it may have just been evidence the English were using Indian tea. It didn't matter. The last three all fit.

What I noticed about this exam is that it was a reading test. If you could read, you could pass. You needed no specific prior knowledge. Odd, then, that you'd have to spend a year sitting in a social studies class all so it could culminate in a test that you needed no particular information to pass. I'd think that would be more appropriate for an English test, but the English Regents exam does absolutely nothing of the sort.

So we have a social studies exam that tests reading, and an English exam that tests nothing. And a lot of students, unless the geniuses in Albany set the past score low enough so as to render the exam utterly meaningless, are going to tank on this test. This is because they are not readers, and we are no longer developing readers. We are developing a generation who knows how to look at line 24 and decide whether it means A, B, C or D. We minimize the importance of reading fiction and push tedious crap, and it has precisely opposite the intended effect.

I am a reader. When I was very young my mother sat with me until I cracked the code, and from that point I was liberated. I was fascinated with comic books and read them CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Why Are We Raising a Generation of Non-readers?

Steve Lopez: Why Measure EE Lost and What It Means for the City’s Future—And America’s Future | Diane Ravitch's blog

Steve Lopez: Why Measure EE Lost and What It Means for the City’s Future—And America’s Future | Diane Ravitch's blog

Steve Lopez: Why Measure EE Lost and What It Means for the City’s Future—And America’s Future

Steve Lopez, a columnist for the L.A. Times, is outraged by the low and negative vote on Measure EE. He wrote that city gave a collective shrug.

On this, the last week of school before summer break in the Los Angeles Unified School District, voters have sent a loud and clear message to roughly 600,000 students:

Your schools may be crumbling, your libraries may be closed, your class sizes may be unmanageably large, about 90% of you live in poverty and thousands of you are homeless, but who cares?

The Measure EE parcel tax on Tuesday’s ballot needed two-thirds approval and didn’t even get 50%. It would have cost the average homeowner about 75 cents a day. As supporters pointed out, California is in the bottom tier of funding per pupil nationally, and New York City schools spend about $8,000 more per student than L.A. Unified spends.

The response from Los Angeles was a shrug…

As hopes for EE’s passage faded Tuesday night, an East L.A. grandmother told me she had voted yes, partly because she wants a nurse at her granddaughter’s school more than just once a week.

“This is a crisis,” said Maria Leon.

The principal of Telfair Elementary School in Pacoima,where nearly a quarter of the students were recently classified as homeless, told me he tried his best to counter social media attacks on Measure EE.

“Do I want to see my taxes go up? No,” said Jose Razo. “But I want to invest in the future of our kids, and $220 for me is a small price to pay to make class sizes smaller and bring back the things we so desperately need. I get it. It’s supposed to be the state that takes care of us. But until they get their act together, we have to do what we can for our kids.”

Glenn Sacks, a social studies teacher at James Monroe High School in North Hills, expressed his frustrated CONTINUE READING: Steve Lopez: Why Measure EE Lost and What It Means for the City’s Future—And America’s Future | Diane Ravitch's blog

CURMUDGUCATION: A Spectacular Charter Scam

CURMUDGUCATION: A Spectacular Charter Scam

A Spectacular Charter Scam

You may skimmed past reports of the San Diego indictment of charter scam artists thinking, "Ah, just another charter fraud story." But this $50 million scam is worth a closer look because it highlights several of the problems with modern charters.

The scammers were led by Sean McManu and Jason Schrock. McManus is Australian, but as various other operators have shown (particularly the infamous Gulen chain), there's no real barrier to non-Americans getting into the business of owning and operating US schools. The indictment of eleven defendants runs to 235 pages, and is the result of a year's worth of investigation.

The San Diego Union Tribune has been digging through the indictment, and though the business has been widely covered, their reporters, Morgan Cook and Kristen Taketa, have done an exceptional job of picking apart the details. Most of the following details are taken from their account.

McManus was already in the charter biz when he teamed up with Schrock in 2016 to kick the scam off with a perfectly legal maneuver-- buying a couple of cyber charter schools. This is one of those features of charters that distinguishes them from public schools-- they can completely change owners and operators. In fact, in 2017, McManus sold off another cyber charter operation, which was soon in the process of tying to take over yet an other school.

McManus and Schrock took the two schools and changed the names-- several times, in fact. It's a CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: A Spectacular Charter Scam

The Birthday Bike Ride Challenge | The Merrow Report

The Birthday Bike Ride Challenge | The Merrow Report

The Birthday Bike Ride Challenge

What follows is a diversion from the political madness and (perhaps) an opportunity for you to donate to a favorite cause.   In just a few days I will turn 78, and on or around my birthday I will once again attempt to bike my age.  This will be my 9th consecutive attempt, and, while I was successful the first eight times, as a stock prospectus is required to state, “Past performance is not indicative of future results.”

The ride doesn’t get any easier for two obvious reasons:  Every year the distance increases, and every year I am a year older.  An athletic nephew has suggested that it might be time to consider switching to kilometers; to be honest, there are mornings when yards would be a challenge!

However, last year I managed 83 miles, which I guess means I have 6 miles in the bank, plus 2 miles stored up from the year I was supposed to bike 73 and went 75.

Last year I challenged readers to donate $77 to their preferred cause if I made it, and many of you accepted the challenge.  You reported donating $90,000, an astounding sum!  However, my friend and noted author Jim Loewen (“Lies My Teacher Taught Me,” “Sundown Towns”) generously earmarked $77,000 of his annual donation to Tougaloo College, the HBCU in Mississippi, in my name and said I could count it toward the total, which I did.

Still, $13,000 is a pretty cool number.

Last year I suggested Planned Parenthood as a recipient, and that’s an even better idea this time around.

The Network for Public Education does important work on behalf of teachers and strong public schools (and also for “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party”).

I’m impressed by the fledgling Coalition of Independent Public Charter Schools, a group that is trying to get charter schools to behave honorably (which, unfortunately, many do not do.)

As a former education reporter, I’d be happy if you chose to donate to the Education Writers Association,  The Hechinger Report, or Chalkbeat, three organizations that improve the quality of education reporting and contribute mightily to the public’s understanding of the enterprise.

Finally, if you want to give me a birthday present, please send a copy of my book, “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education,” to friends of yours who still believe in the faux ‘Education Reforms’ of George W. Bush (“No Child Left Behind”) and Barack Obama (“Race to the Top”).   While it is obvious that the Trump Administration is hostile to public education, his predecessors did incalculable damage with their embrace of ‘test and punish’ accountability and largely unaccountable charter schools.  As I argue in the book, schools have to stop asking, “How Smart Is This Child?” and ask instead, “How Is This Child Smart?”

If you think you might want to ride with me (and one of my daughters, bless her), send me an email at john.merrow@gmail.org.

I will let you know the outcome, one way or another.  If you will tell me about your donation(s), I will keep a running tab….

And thanks for reading this far. Now I have to go stuff myself with pasta!!

The Birthday Bike Ride Challenge | The Merrow Report

Children are more than test scores: Facebook Community Standards and the 2019 True Teacher Education Activist

Children are more than test scores: Facebook Community Standards and the 2019 True Teacher Education Activist

Facebook Community Standards and the 2019 True Teacher Education Activist

I decided, to write a Facebook post about the June 10, 2019 the New Haven Public School Advocates call for people to come attend the Board of Education Meeting to speak up against cutting more teachers. Once again, Facebook has decided a Education Activist Literacy Professor is too much to handle. Perhaps, telling parents and teachers to stand up and fight back against these school budget cuts is just too radical for Facebook.
Maybe using the words fight back, is too much for Facebook. Or maybe I tagged the wrong people. Or maybe a Literacy Professor who not only defends his students and teachers in the school house, but outside is too much for Facebook to handle. Either way this True Teacher can't be silence!
I let my reader decide

So connecticut, it is that time of year again, when public schools in Black, Brown, and Poor Communities when cities announced layoffs, school closings, and cut librarians, special education and reading teachers, social workers, and after school programs. Maybe cut a few more art and CONTINUE READING: Children are more than test scores: Facebook Community Standards and the 2019 True Teacher Education Activist

Where the 2020 Hopefuls Stand on Public Education - Progressive.org

Where the 2020 Hopefuls Stand on Public Education - Progressive.org

Where the 2020 Hopefuls Stand on Public Education
Broad support for the wave teacher strikes has candidates jostling each other step up on public education.

In May, Bernie Sanders unveiled his Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education, a bold plan that called for a dramatic increase in federal support for public education. Within a week, Joe Biden announced his own plan that, in part, was similar to the Sanders’s plan.

Both called for a tripling of federal aid for impoverished children, known as Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; both called for a dramatic increase in federal aid to pay for disabilities; and both plans supported big pay hikes for teachers. 

The days when Democratic candidates called for school sanctions, tougher tests, and the evaluation of teachers by test scores appear to be gone, thank goodness. Candidates with neoliberal, pro-reform histories like Cory Booker and Michael Bennett are going nowhere in the polls and are regularly panned on Twitter and Facebook by advocates of public schools. 

Meanwhile, the teacher strikes of the past year have received popular sympathy and support. That support has been noticed by the candidates, who now jostle each other to prove that they are teachers’ true best friend. Support for universal preschool, significant subsidy of public college tuition, and calls for higher teacher pay are positions nearly universally adopted by the candidates.

Teacher strikes and the #RedForEd movement have protested both low salaries as well as insufficient supports of students. Striking teachers in Los Angeles made it clear that the expansion of charter schools has impacted the district’s finances, thus hurting the district’s ability to fund essential services for kids. The teachers’ #RedForEd movement joined the parent-led Arizona Save Our Schools organization to halt the expansion of vouchers in that state. 

This year’s teacher walkout in West Virginia protested the legislature’s plan to establish charter schools and vouchers—a struggle that continues. In addition, Education Secretary Betsy De Vos’s and Donald Trump’s full embrace of the CONTINUE READING: Where the 2020 Hopefuls Stand on Public Education - Progressive.org

Teachers’ pay: Salaries often can’t cover rent, cost of living

Teachers’ pay: Salaries often can’t cover rent, cost of living

'Can't pay their bills with love': For many teaching jobs, teachers' pay can't cover rent
New teachers can't afford median rent almost anywhere. Our city-by-city analysis validates a theme in teacher strikes. But that's not the full story

In sunny Miami, bilingual elementary teacher Mari Corugedo has 26 years of experience, a master's degree and a passion for helping Spanish-speaking students quickly learn English.

Her annual compensation for those skills: $64,000, plus benefits. That doesn't go far in this popular coastal city, where median rent has shot up to almost $2,000 per month, and the median mortgage is almost $1,300 per month before taxes or insurance, according to the real estate site Zillow. 

"We spend a good 30% to 40% of our income on our mortgage," said Corugedo, 52. "I would have moved out of Miami by now if not for my husband's additional income."

Beginner teachers have an even tougher time affording Miami. Skyrocketing housing prices combined with relatively low educator salaries have made the area one of the nation's priciest cities for starting teachers.

In the first analysis of its kind, USA TODAY examined salaries and housing costs for teachers all over the country. 

New teachers can't afford the median rent almost anywhere in the U.S, the analysis shows — a point often made during recent teacher strikes across the country.

But that's not the full story.

It's not just pay: No matter where they work or what they earn, teachers feel disrespect

Despite widespread demand for higher salaries, teachers in some regions are actually making ends meet, especially as they approach the middle of their careers. 

In other areas, mid-career teachers are right to say they can't afford to live on their salaries without picking up side hustles or commuting long distances. Some of those places are only affordable for the very highest-paid teachers.

And then there are places that no teacher can afford, no matter how much they earn. Like CONTINUE READING: Teachers’ pay: Salaries often can’t cover rent, cost of living

Hooked on Phonics Redux | radical eyes for equity

Hooked on Phonics Redux | radical eyes for equity

Hooked on Phonics Redux

The commercial reading program Hooked on Phonics, with iconic over-the-top commercials for those of us of a certain generation, had to abandon those ads in 1994:

Under an agreement disclosed this week between the makers of the reading program Hooked on Phonics and the Federal Trade Commission, the manufacturer must abandon its advertising campaign or conduct far more research into the program’s effectiveness–and disclose any evidence of failure.

Anyone paying even slight attention to current media fascination with the “science of reading” and dyslexia may benefit from revisiting the problem with Hooked on Phonics and their outlandish claims:

Orange County-based Gateway Educational Products, maker of Hooked on Phonics, agreed to a settlement that bars the parent company from making unsubstantiated claims about the program’s ability to teach people to read. The settlement, which was signed Aug. 29, was made public Wednesday by the commission.

The FTC had charged that Gateway was making sweeping, unproven promises that the program could teach anyone to read, regardless of their limitations. Gateway admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement, and will pay no penalty, said Christian S. White, acting director of the commission’s bureau of consumer protection.

“They offered a one-size-fits-all solution–you have reading problems, this is the product,” White said. “Gateway’s evidence just doesn’t back up these broad, sweeping claims.”

The claims, according to the commission, included statements that Hooked CONTINUE READING: Hooked on Phonics Redux | radical eyes for equity

Proposed misassignment systems needs teeth :: K-12 Daily

Proposed misassignment systems needs teeth :: K-12 Daily :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet

Proposed misassignment systems needs teeth

(Calif.) A coalition of advocates for low-income families has warned lawmakers that plans working through Sacramento to reduce the number of teachers improperly assigned classroom duties may actually have the opposite effect.

Both the Newsom administration and Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles, have introduced legislation that would fully utilize a new data collection system so that schools statewide—including charters—are monitored annually for teacher misassignments.

The letter points out that neither proposal includes language that would formally require schools to correct any assignment problems found by the new review process.

The coalition–which includes Public Advocates, a San Francisco-based non-profit law firm, the American Civil Liberties Union of California and Californians Together—sent a letter raising the issue Monday to the chairs of the Legislative Conference Committee.

“Current law states that county superintendents of schools shall notify school administrators of assignments with “no legal authorization” and “advise him or her to correct the assignment within 30 days,’” the coalition said. “The current proposal, however, reduces the county superintendent role to data verification and presents the LEA and the school administrator with no obligation to act, even to review potential misassignments—let alone correct them.”

Ensuring that all students have a properly credentialed instructor was one key settlement agreement made in the landmark Williams lawsuit from 2006. Making sure that local educational agencies comply with the mandate, however, has proved problematic—especially during the teacher shortage that districts have faced in recent years.

Under the Williams settlement, only those schools ranked at the bottom on statewide testing are monitored for teacher assignments every year. Otherwise, schools are looked at on a rotation of every four years.

The governor’s plan, as well as AB 1219, would both require annual evaluation of misassignments, CONTINUE READING: Proposed misassignment systems needs teeth :: K-12 Daily :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet