Following the money on the Walton-Hutchinson takeover of Little Rock schools | Arkansas Blog

Following the money on the Walton-Hutchinson takeover of Little Rock schools | Arkansas Blog | Arkansas news, politics, opinion, restaurants, music, movies and art:

Following the money on the Walton-Hutchinson takeover of Little Rock schools

Posted By Max Brantley on Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 9:19 AM

click to enlarge

It's not yet clear when the final House Education Committeebattle will be fought on HB 1733 to allow the state to privatize any or all of a public school district judged to be in academic distress.

It's monumental legislation that would make all school teachers and administrators fire-at-will employees without due process rights.  It would destroy one of the two last remaining teacher union contracts in Arkansas. It allows for the permanent end of democratic control of a school district or those portions of it privatized. It would capture property tax millage voted by taxpayers for specific purposes, including buildings, and give them to private operators. It would allow seizure of buildings for private operators at no cost. CORRECTION:  I'd originally written that Little Rock was the last collective bargaining district in the star. Fort Smith classroom teachers still negotiate with the Fort Smith School District. An anti-union organization the Waltons fund, the Arkansas State Teachers Association, has spent a great deal of money trying to solicit members in Fort Smith, a teacher there reports.

This bill is the work of the Walton Family Foundation. People the Walton money supports — lobbyistsGary Newton of Arkansas Learns, Scott Smith of the Arkansas Public School Research Foundation, Kathy Smith of the Walton Family Foundation and Laurie Lee of Arkansas Parents for School Choice — are the leading lobbyists. Smith has been quoted by others as saying he's the primary author (his organization gets $3 million a year from the Waltons), but it follows similar legislation introduced in other states, with poor to disastrous results (New Orleans).

(Concurrently and coincidentally, the Walton Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation are sponsoring a school study in Little Rock by the Boston Consulting Group, an outfit that has studied and recommended mass privatization in other cities.)

The goal is to make the Little Rock School District a laboratory for the pet education aims of the Waltons, who own the University of Arkansas, particularly the department ginning out propaganda in behalf of this bill. Gov. Asa Hutchinson is fully on board. He's been resisting a solid plan to put competent people in charge in Little Rock and moving on fixing the six schools on which the entire district of 48 schools was placed in academic distress. His plan is to pass a law to overcome Johnny Key's lack of a teacher certificate, master's degree and 10 years education experience and become state Education Commissioner. Key would then find a Walton-favored outfit to run the six schools at issue and be poised to take over as many others as the Waltons deem necessary.

It's been a long battle, but money does tend to win out. The last firewall is the Democratic Party's capture of half the seats on the House Education Committee. Can the 10 Democratic members be held firm against the Walton millions? Is there a possibility that the intervention of school superintendents against the bill (because it puts every single district in similar peril of loss of local control) could peel off a vital Republican vote or two? It will be high drama when the day comes.

Meanwhile, here are some Republican votes to watch. I'd predict they wouldn't stray from the pro-Walton voting column.

Reps. Bruce Cozart, Bill Gossage and Charlotte Douglas and Sens. Jane English and Bart Hester.Cozart is chair of House Education. English is chair of Senate Education.  Douglas and Gossage also serve on House Education.  Hester? Wherever an ignoble cause can be found, you can usually find Bart Hester.

Last August, according to lobbyist expense filings, they all got expenses-paid trips to an "education reform" meeting in Washington courtesy of Laurie Lee's School Choice client. The amount reported for each legislator's plane ticket and Capitol Hilton stay was $1,982.60.

(Yes, I checked to see if all the legislators had reported their free trips. When legislators appear in official capacities and get more than $150 worth of expenses, they are supposed to report it.  All but Douglas' Following the money on the Walton-Hutchinson takeover of Little Rock schools | Arkansas Blog | Arkansas news, politics, opinion, restaurants, music, movies and art:

My Son Takes the Year Off from Math, and His Teacher is OK - Living in Dialogue

My Son Takes the Year Off from Math, and His Teacher is OK - Living in Dialogue:



My Son Takes the Year Off from Math, and His Teacher is OK 

 By Sarah Lahm.

I need to thank my son’s teacher for loving him, even when it seems like an impossible task.

She called me the other day, to say he had disappeared for about thirty minutes during school. She hadn’t been able to find him, and then, when she did, she told him he couldn’t come to the YMCA with the rest of the class, as planned, to go swimming.

After I swallowed hard, feeling shame and dread creep up my throat (there have been quite a few phone calls home this year), I thanked her for not letting him go swimming with the class. He has to learn, we both agreed, that he can’t run off like that.

As I suspected, he had run out of class to avoid the day’s math lesson. Trying to teach my boy math, we’ve learned, turns him into a sad, frustrated, angry kid who feels cornered and defeated.

He has math anxiety. I think he developed it last year, when his regular teacher was gone on a leave of absence, and the substitute teacher–who meant well, I am sure–brought a different kind of pressure to bear on the kids than his regular teacher did. The substitute kept the kids in from recess because “they had so much (math) work to catch up on,” and pushed the kids to plow through a bunch of work in order to be on schedule with the Minneapolis Public Schools’ “Focused Instruction” approach, which revolves around frequent benchmark testing.

I cannot say for sure this is what caused my son’s anxiety around math to develop, but it has gotten worse this year.

Thankfully, he has a teacher who knows him very well, or at least tries to. He is an expert button-pusher, and can be tough, stubborn, and disruptive, yet also sweet, kind, and funny. He can read and spell very well, and My Son Takes the Year Off from Math, and His Teacher is OK - Living in Dialogue:

NYC Public School Parents: City Hall rally: Our Schools, our Voice and the Governor's Missed Opportunity Agenda

NYC Public School Parents: City Hall rally: Our Schools, our Voice and the Governor's Missed Opportunity Agenda:

City Hall rally: Our Schools, our Voice and the Governor's Missed Opportunity Agenda

On Sunday at City Hall Park a rally was held hosted by Public Advocate Letitia James about the need to fight for fair funding for our schools and against the Governor's damaging education proposals. Tish was terrific as usual about the need to support and protect our schools and listen to parents and teachers but that instead, the Governor has put forward a "Missed Opportunity Agenda." .  

Other electeds and advocates who spoke eloquently included AM David Weprin and Joanne Simon, former Councilmember and lead plaintiff  in the CFE education funding lawsuit Robert Jackson, and Zakiyah Ansari of AQE.  Here is a news story; below is my speech: 

On Thursday there were a beautiful series of rallies at more than 100 schools throughout NYC in all the five boroughs.  Parents, students, and teachers held hands and surrounded their schools, in a peaceful, and even joyful symbolic action to protect their schools.  They were out there to show they are united in spirit and determined to defend against the Governor’s destructive proposals to defund, disrupt, dismantle and privatize our public school system.  Parents do love their public schools; they just want them properly supported and funded, with smaller classes and a well-rounded education, full of arts, music and science and all the things that children need to flourish.

And what was the Governor’s response?  According to his spokesperson, he called our peaceful protests “a tantrum of special interests”.  Then he said, “Frankly, the louder special interests scream — and today they were screaming at the top of their lungs — the more we know we’re right.”

Well, Governor, parents are NOT a special interest – at least in the way you meant it.  Parents have one special interest – their children, and you need to recognize that parents in NYC are fed up with the agenda of test prep, budget cuts, and punitive sanctions on our schools and teachers that we had for 12 years under Michael Bloomberg – and that failed utterly to improve our schools.  Instead we demand that you give us the support that they need – and that the state’s highest courts said was your constitutional obligation. 

I also want to warn you, the last time a state leader called parents a special interest was John King – and he was run out of the state on a rail for his arrogance and refusal to listen to our concerns.

Now the Governor has put forward many outrageous proposals as part of his budget but I want to focus on just one - his proposal to raise the charter cap– which could send 250 more charters to NYC.  This could truly be disastrous for our schools and drain even more resources and space from our already underfunded and overcrowded public schools.

Why?  Because last year in the budget, he included a clause in the law that obligates the city to provide space to new charters within our already overcrowded school buildings going forward – or pay for NYC Public School Parents: City Hall rally: Our Schools, our Voice and the Governor's Missed Opportunity Agenda:

California Department of Education Monitoring Social Media During STAR Testing

Monitoring Social Media During STAR Testing - Year 2013 (CA Dept of Education):

California Department of Education Monitors Social Media During STAR Tests

SACRAMENTO—Heightened monitoring and reporting of California's Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) assessments this year identified 242 schools where social media postings occurred during administration of the tests, only 16 of which included postings of test questions or answers.

None of the postings affected school test results. As in 2012, when similar numbers of social media postings occurred, the majority involved students posing with the covers of test booklets or with materials that were not legible. The California Department of Education (CDE) placed a cautionary flag on the publicly posted test results for all schools where a posting occurred. (A list of the flagged schools is attached.)

"We take the validity and reliability of our assessments very seriously, and our schools do too, which is why we redoubled our efforts to monitor these postings and alerted school districts when they occurred," said Deputy Superintendent Deb Sigman, who oversees assessments and accountability issues for CDE. "These postings look to be attempts by students to gain attention among their friends, not an effort to gain an advantage on a test."

The 242 schools identified this year compares with 216 schools in 2012. That year, 12 schools had postings that included legible test questions or answers.

In addition to the more rigorous monitoring, CDE also conducted random security audits, instructed examiners and STAR coordinators as to the proper protocol, and reinforced the responsibilities of local officials to maintain security of all test material.

Though the implications for accountability have not yet been determined, in general, if a security breach affects less than 5 percent of the number of students tested, the school is ineligible for academic awards. If the breach affects more than 5 percent of the number of students tested, the school's API—the state's measure of accountability—could be invalidated.

Final decisions regarding accountability reports for affected schools will be made within the next few weeks, when CDE releases its statewide accountability reports.

Attachment

2013 Schools with Social Media Postings of Legible Test ItemsMonitoring Social Media During STAR Testing - Year 2013 (CA Dept of Education):

Big Education Ape: P is for PARCC, Pearson and Pushback (and Peeps) | EduShyster http://bit.ly/1BMT6C3

Big Education Ape: To Catch a Cheat: More on the Pearson Problem as Our Problem | the becoming radical http://bit.ly/1BMWi0w

Big Education Ape: High Stakes Testing Makes Surveillance Necessary - Living in Dialogue http://bit.ly/1NXWpeI

Big Education Ape: Talking to Bob Braun about Pearson spying on children. 03/15 by Busted Pencils | Education Podcasts http://bit.ly/1BMWCfz

Big Education Ape: Pearson Caught Spying On Students. Big Brother Is Here http://bit.ly/1BMWIE5

Big Education Ape: Big Pearson and New Jersey's State Department of Education are Cooperating in new Spy Gate http://bit.ly/1xnP4Lc

Ethnic Studies Now (SCUSD) - Ethnic Studies Now

Ethnic Studies Now Petition (SCUSD) - Ethnic Studies Now:

ETHNIC STUDIES NOW PETITION (SCUSD)

 Why Ethnic Studies?

We, the undersigned, support the effort to construct and implement an ethnic studies class as a high school graduation requirement in the Sacramento City Unified School District.

Sacramento, CA is the 2^nd most ethnically diverse city in the United States (US Census Bureau, 2015). Our school district is a beautiful mirror of our population; our students are 37% Hispanic or Latino, 17.4% Asian, 18% African American, 19% white, and 5.3% of students are two or more ethnicities. In our district, residents speak over 44 languages and 38% do not speak English at home (SCUSD, 2015).

We need a high school curriculum that reflects the diversity of all students.  Despite our numbers, only 1 out of 13 high schools within our district offers ethnic studies.  Because over 80% of our school district populations are students of color, we need to offer a course that includes and investigates these rich histories and lived experiences.

By having an ethnic studies course, our hope is that all students will learn to respect, accept, and love themselves.  We want all students to think critically about the importance of their race, ethnicity, location, and identity as it exists in history and in the present.  We believe that ethnic studies courses can offer important narratives that are missing from the euro-centric lens that history is often shown through.  We want to empower our students to learn more about themselves and their communities, build empathy and unity with other ethnic groups, and push for social justice.

Who's signing Ethnic Studies Now Petition (SCUSD) - Ethnic Studies Now:

Comparable but Unequal | Center for American Progress

Comparable but Unequal | Center for American Progress:



Comparable but Unequal 

• Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF and Scribd versions.
• Download the report: 
  PDF
• Read it in your browser: 
  Scribd

For appendix tables, see the PDF or Scribd versions of this issue brief.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear with its Brown v. Board of Education decision that education “must be made available to all on equal terms.” Sixty years later, that promise remains unfulfilled. Millions of students—largely low-income students and students of color—continue to attend segregated and economically isolated schools. State and district school finance systems perpetuate and compound these inequities by providing less money to students with the greatest need.

Federal law—through Title I, Part A, of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA—attempts to ameliorate these disparities. It requires school districts to provide “comparable” educational services in high-poverty and low-poverty, or non-Title I, schools as a condition of receiving Title I dollars.

But the devil, as always, is in the details. Under current law, districts can compute comparability using average teacher salaries or teacher-to-student ratios instead of actual expenditures on teacher salaries. And because teacher salaries constitute the largest proportion of school budgets and teachers with greater experience earn higher salaries and tend to teach in lower-poverty schools, this compliance method renders it impossible to accurately compare school budgets.

This problem is not an oversight. Federal law explicitly prohibits districts from calculating comparability using actual expenditures. Instead, it chooses to treat teachers as interchangeable widgets. For example, if School A has 10 teachers and School B has 10 teachers, they must be providing a comparable education. It is this loophole in federal law—the “comparability loophole”—that is at the heart of school funding inequities.

But research over the past decade has conclusively shown that all teachers are not equal. Some have a vastly greater impact on student achievement than others. In fact, a recent RAND Corporation report stated, “among school-related factors, teachers matter most.” And while experience is not a perfect proxy for effectiveness, research consistently shows that teachers undergo a steep learning curve during the first three years on the job and then gradually reach a peak in their fifth year. Consequently, it is particularly problematic that schools disproportionately serving low-income students also have more than their fair share of new teachers. Additionally, though individual teacher effectiveness varies, schools with more new teachers are, on average, not comparable to schools with more experienced teachers.

Ensuring that Title I funds provide additional funds for disadvantaged students is not a small issue. Indeed, it goes to the heart of the American promise of equal opportunity: No matter your background or family circumstance, you have a shot at a middle-class life if you work hard and get a good education. While money is not the only driver of a high-quality education, research shows that money really matters for disadvantaged students.

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study found that:

For poor children, a twenty percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public school is associated with nearly a full additional year of completed education, 25 percent higher earnings, and a 20 percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of poverty in adulthood. … The results … highlight how improved access to school resources can profoundly shape the life outcomes of economically disadvantaged children, and thereby significantly reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

The comparability requirement in ESEA is the mechanism through which the federal government can ensure that the public education offered to poor students is at least as well resourced as that offered to their more affluent peers. By allowing districts to use measures of educators instead of expenditures to demonstrate that they are providing comparable educational services, federal law ceases to have teeth. This is commonly referred to as the comparability loophole.

Effects of the comparability loophole

To determine the scope and depth of the funding inequity between higher- and lower-income students, we analyzed the most recent available data from the U.S. Department of Education, or DOE, on how much districts spend on each of their schools. The DOE collected this information on more than 95,000 public schools through its Civil Rights Data Collection during the 2011-12 school year. We compared how districts fund schools that are eligible to receive federal Title I dollars with other schools in their grade span—elementary, middle, or high school grades—and found vast disparities throughout the country in how districts spend state and local dollars on Title I schools. Whenever possible, we compared Title I schools with non-Title I schools in each grade span. In other cases, we compared higher-poverty Title I schools with other Title I schools. We adjusted school spending for differences in cost of living across districts.

Nationally, we found that:

• Due to the loophole in federal law, more than 4.5 million low-income students attend inequitably funded Title I schools. In most states, there are tens of thousands of students from low-income households who attend Title I schools that are not funded equitably relative to other schools in their district. See the appendix for state-by-state results.
• These inequitably funded schools receive around $1,200 less per student than comparison schools in their districts. Overall,these schools receive around $668,900 less per year than comparison schools. In Fort Worth, Texas, for example, inequitably funded Title I schools receive around $2,600 less per student.In some districts, the disparities are even wider. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, inequitably funded Title I schools receive around $4,900 less than other schools. These disparities can add up to millions of dollars at the state level. If these gaps were closed, inequitably funded schools in Texas would receive another $1.6 billion annually, and in New Mexico, they would have an additional $65 million. See the appendix for state-by-state results.
• If the federal loophole were closed, high-poverty schools would receive around $8.5 billion in new funds each year. This estimate is similar to findings reported in a previous study that used 2008-09 school finance data, also based on information collected by DOE. This amount is equivalent to around 1.5 percent of total state and local revenues, which were more than $500 billion in the 2011-12 school year. For inequitably funded Title I schools, these dollars could add real value. See appendix for state-by-state results.

As Congress works to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, improving school funding has been a key focus. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Rep. John Kline (R-MN), chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, both proposed changing the distribution of Title I funds. This would allow states the option of distributing funds solely on the basis of the number of low-income students, rather than continuing to use the four formulas that target the funds to concentrations of poor students. Moreover, both of their proposals fail to address the comparability loophole and would continue to allow districts to demonstrate comparability in ways that mask real inequities in school resources. Members of the House Education and the Workforce Committee recently approved Rep. Kline’s proposal.

What could $668,900 buy?

Comparability is about a broad range of resources. Title I schools should at least have the same amount of resources—to invest as school leaders see fit—as other schools. They may choose to hire more experienced, and thus more costly, teachers, or they may choose to invest in technology, a new curriculum, an after-school program, or teaching supplies. If shortchanged schools received an additional $668,000, they could do one of the following:

• Purchase new MacBook Pro computers for more than 550 students
• Construct six new libraries
• Implement a new music education program that serves more than 3,500 students
• Institute a new arts program covering more than 190 classrooms
• Hire 12 new guidance counselors with an average salary of nearly $54,000
• Give a $10,000 bonus to more than 60 teachers

This paper is not the first to point out this issue of comparability. The fiscal inequities perpetuated by the comparability loophole are well documented. In a DOE national study of school finance during the 2008-09 school year, the department looked at differences in spending between schools in the same districts and found that about 40 percent of Title I schools were underfunded relative to non-Title I schools. In 2012, the Center for American Progress issued its “Unequal Education” report, which analyzed the first wave of DOE per-school expenditure data that included actual teacher salaries. It found that children of color are routinely being shortchanged. CAP has long argued that the loophole is one of the most significant barriers to educational equity. Other groups such as The Education Trust and the New America Foundation have also analyzed the impact of the loophole and found that districts claiming comparability significantly underfund higher-poverty schools.

It is important to note that districts reported their own financial information for the Civil Rights Data Collection, or CRDC. Districts might have chosen somewhat different approaches to completing the financial survey. The CRDC focuses on expenditures from state and local funds. School-level financial data is already scarce, but this focus on state and local resources makes it difficult to cross-validate these school-level findings even with available state-level school finance results.

Although legally comparable, schools can still have large funding inequities

The following is an example of how the comparability loophole permits school funding inequities to persist. The schools are hypothetical, reproduced from a Center for American Progress video released in 2011.

In this scenario, each school serves the same number of students with the same number of teachers. Each teacher is paid according to a district-wide salary schedule. In West Dillon, the average teacher has 20 years of experience, while teachers in East Dillon are much less experienced. According to the law, these schools are comparable. But in actuality, the Title I school receives $400,000 less overall in state and local funds or $2,000 less per pupil.

Recommendations

To ensure that low-income schools are funded at equal levels with their more affluent counterparts, Congress should update the law and close the comparability loophole in the following three ways:

1. The comparability calculation must be based on actual expenditures, including actual teacher salaries.
2. Districts should be required to achieve comparability between Title I and non-Title I schools only by demonstrating that Title I schools receive state and local funding that is at least equal to the average of the district’s non-Title I schools.
3. Districts that serve only Title I schools must show that higher-poverty schools receive no less than the average total of state and local funds for lower-poverty schools.

Under current guidance from the U.S. Department of Education, districts can demonstrate comparability at the 90 percent level. In other words, districts can claim that they spend comparable amounts at Title I schools as long as those schools provide at least 90 percent of services offered in other schools. Districts can interpret that percentage as a ceiling not a floor. The department’s guidance should not allow for this amount of leeway.

Some have argued that the only way for districts to close the comparability gap is to force experienced teachers to transfer to high-poverty schools, which typically employ teachers with fewer years of experience and lower salaries. In fact, states and districts could provide a host of additional resources to the high-poverty schools and leave the staffing distribution as is. By purchasing the kind of enrichment activities listed in the “What could $668,900 buy?” text box above, districts would comply with the requirement.

In addition, districts could change their compensation systems to reward effectiveness instead of seniority or educational degree attainment. In this way, districts can pay highly effective teachers more, particularly those working in schools serving high concentrations of low-income students. With more highly effective teachers clustered in high-poverty schools, these districts could close the comparability gap through supporting highly effective teachers in these schools rather than forcing teachers to move to high-poverty schools.

At the same time, actually achieving comparability given that schools have been inequitably funded throughout history will not be easy. That is why Congress should require meaningful compliance with the comparability provision to be phased in gradually. Priority would first be given to the schools that have been most egregiously shortchanged. Full compliance would be required within five years. The following timetable would serve that end:

• Year one: All districts must publicly report all expenditures by school level. These facts must be made available in an easy-to-read format that is available to the public. The report must also include the percentage of students eligible to receive free and reduced-price lunches. In each subsequent year, the district continues to report this data.
• Year two: States and districts begin to fill in funding gaps. States would rank their Title I schools by per-pupil expenditures and ensure that the lowest-spending 25 percent of schools are funded to at least 100 percent of the average level of their districts’ comparison schools. These gaps could be closed through state or local actions or a combination of both.
• Year three: States ensure that the lowest-spending 50 percent of Title I schools are funded to at least 100 percent of the average level of their districts’ comparison schools.
• Year four: States ensure that the lowest-spending 75 percent of Title I schools are funded to at least 100 percent of the average level of their districts’ comparison schools.
• Year five: States ensure that all Title I schools are funded at least to the level of the average of their districts’ comparison schools.

Under current law, districts already risk losing their Title I dollars if they fail to comply with comparability requirements. Congress should expand this provision to hold states accountable for the gaps outlined above as well. Here, the guiding principle is that states hold the ultimate responsibility for operating inequitable funding systems. Specifically, states should risk losing their full allocation of Title I dollars each year that they fail to keep on track with the above timeline. This arrangement would be a strong deterrent to states and districts that wish to continue their current approaches to funding their most disadvantaged schools. Nationally, this amounts to a reasonable trade-off. For example, we found that in the second year—the first year of narrowing comparability gaps—states and districts would be responsible for closing gaps by around $2.3 billion in exchange for receiving more than $14.6 billion in federal Title I funds.

Conclusion

Students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds deserve the same opportunities at their peers from higher-income families. Notwithstanding the fact that comparability is the law of the land, the way districts comply with the provision undermines its true intent. Under the current fiscal policy, districts can spend less of their own state and local dollars on the schools with the highest needs, and most do spend millions of dollars less in these schools. Therefore, Congress should close the comparability loophole by requiring that districts fund their Title I schools at the same level as or higher than—based on actual spending—their other schools.

To truly address the problem of fiscal inequity, Congress must seize this opportunity to close the comparability loophole. An improved comparability provision could go a long way toward ensuring that all low-income students get their fair share of state and local funding.

Robert Hanna is a Senior Policy Analyst, Max Marchitello is a Policy Analyst, and Catherine Brown is Vice President of Education Policy at the Center for American Progress.

Comparable but Unequal | Center for American Progress:

Soon-to-open Flex Academy, with ties to for-profit K12, excites some, raises eyebrows in others | MinnPost

Soon-to-open Flex Academy, with ties to for-profit K12, excites some, raises eyebrows in others | MinnPost:



Soon-to-open Flex Academy, with ties to for-profit K12, excites some, raises eyebrows in others

 Have you seen the billboards that have sprung up alongside the highways that transect Minneapolis, Richfield and Bloomington promoting Flex Academy, a new school slated to open next fall?

Depending on whom you ask, the signs signal the imminent privatization of public education, an unfair marketing advantage or an innovation that could catapult schools into the new millennium.

When fully enrolled, Flex Academy will be a public charter serving 525 students in grades 6-12 in a “blended learning” environment. Students will show up to school in Richfield where they will work online at their own pace. Many of the school’s features — from the digital curriculum to the template for its website — are provided by a publicly traded corporation, K12 Inc.

Excitement — and raised eyebrows

The concept is one that excites most proponents of innovation in education: Combining technology that allows lessons to be personalized for each student with a 19-to-one student-teacher ratio that allows plenty of supportive face-time. The local names associated with the school are well-respected educators and scholars.

But the other novelty has eyebrows raised. Some of the tax dollars that will follow Twin Cities students to the school will go to pay for billboards, recruiters and marketers. Some will find their way into the pockets of corporate stockholders.

Like other Minnesota charters, Flex Academy is a nonprofit governed by an independent school board. Board members may choose to augment K12’s offerings or not use them at all. But that doesn’t seem likely: The proposal to create the school was made by a K12 vice president who founded the first two Flex academies, both located in California’s Bay Area.

The model — local teachers, aides and administrators working closely with a company that provides “turnkey” management and academic services — is on the rise in other parts of the country. But it’s new to the Twin Cities, where most charter proponents have eschewed bringing profit into the picture.

Indeed, with a few exceptions Minnesota has not even seen the arrival of the nonprofit charter management organizations many states court because their economies of scale allow them to hit the ground running and to use network resources for recruitment, teacher professional development and other things that bedevil cash-strapped stand-alone start-ups.

The school’s charter authorizer, Innovative Quality Schools (IQS), is not troubled by Flex’s contract with K12. The group authorizes the very successful Duluth Edison Charter Schools, an 18-year-old program that contracts with the privately held for-profit Edison Learning.

“We sometimes think our current schools are not for-profit,” observes Bob Wedl, a former state education commissioner, a partner at the think tank Education Evolving and IQS’ liaison to Flex. “Houghton-Mifflin, IBM — lots of places sell stuff to schools.”

'Hybrid disruption'

IQS is more interested in what’s been termed “hybrid disruption.”

“There are any number of things we were really interested in with this model,” Wedl explains. “The curriculum is online. That enables students to move at their own pace. Teachers can then guide students who need more support.”

Veteran Minneapolis teacher and principal Greg Gentle will lead the new program. He was in the process of exploring opening a blended learning school in 2012, the year San Francisco Flex Academy posted the largest gains in its district. When he learned the organization was trying to open a school here, he went to visit the California one.

“I was definitely skeptical,” he says. “I was a teacher in Minneapolis Public Schools when Edison came and went and I understand people’s concerns about public dollars and for-profit entities in public education. But don’t forget that Edison now has a very successful school in Duluth. It can work.”

And it’s easier than going it alone, Gentle says. “I worked with new charter schools in the past that really struggled because they didn’t have the kind of financial support they needed,” he says. “We have great support including strong curriculum and in the area of operations. Operations is hard for start-ups. We are much better positioned for a strong foundation to launch Flex Academy because of relationship with K12.”

LRN on NYSE and NASDAQ

K12 enrolls more pupils — 137,000, including some in schools that buy only its curriculum — than any other education management organization (EMO) in the country. Its stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ as LRN.

Soon-to-open Flex Academy, with ties to for-profit K12, excites some, raises eyebrows in others | MinnPost:MinnPost's education reporting is made possible by a grant from the Bush Foundation.

A Warning from Chicago for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats | Observer #‎Chuy2015‬ ‪#‎imwithchuy‬

A Warning from Chicago for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats | Observer:

A Warning from Chicago for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats

By Lincoln Mitchell | 03/16/15 7:29am

COMMENT 

Jesus “Chuy” Garcia forced Rahm Emanuel into a runoff. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The runoff election for mayor of Chicago between incumbent Rahm Emanuel and challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia is a reminder of why it is so important for Hillary Clinton to have no serious opponent in the Democratic Primary for President. Ms. Clinton and Mr. Emanuel are not exactly similar candidates, and they are running in different kinds of races. Mr. Emanuel is a divisive incumbent who has had a very controversial first term, while Ms. Clinton currently holds no elective office and was generally seen, particularly within the Democratic Party, as very successful in the last job she held.

There are, however, some interesting similarities too. Both are party insiders, deeply aligned with the establishment wing of their party. Mr. Emanuel is one of the few Democratic politicians who has spent close to as much time as Ms. Clinton strolling the corridors of Democratic power. Before getting elected Mayor of Chicago in 2011, he worked in the first Clinton campaign for President, held a series of high level jobs in Bill Clinton’s administration, and served as Chief of Staff to President Obama for several years. He also found time to make a small fortune working as an investment banker between his time in the Clinton White House and Congress. Mr. Emanuel and Ms. Clinton are both extremely prolific fundraisers.

But Mr. Emanuel’s resume, political connections, money and even campaign events with President Obama could not get him to 50% of the vote, the figure needed to avoid a runoff, in the first round of Chicago’s nonpartisan electoral system last month. There are many possible explanations: Mr. Emanuel’s combative personal and political style, racial politics in Chicago, or his decisions to, among other things, close 50 schools that had heavily African American and Latino student bodies. However, a more accurate explanation for Mr. Emanuel’s failure to win in the first round is that he was too conservative for a left of center urban electorate like the one in Chicago. This dynamic cannot be too unfamiliar for anybody that can remember the collapse of Christine Quinn’s campaign to become New York City’s mayor, in the face of a challenge from the left, in 2013. Although, Andrew Cuomo withstood a spirited primary challenge last fall from lefty Zephyr Teachout, he is a similar kind of candidate.

It would be wrong to read Ms. Quinn’s defeat, Mr. Emanuel’s inability to avoid a runoff and Mr. Cuomo’s failure to drub an obscure candidate with no money as part of a political pattern that threatens Ms. Clinton, but it would also be wrong to ignore these events altogether when thinking about her campaign. All three of these politicians, like Ms. Clinton, are centrist establishment Democrats who have been political, and party, insiders for at least a quarter of a century.

Over the last several decades, the Democratic Party may have moved towards the left as conservative southern factions, represented most notably by Bill Clinton in the 1990s, have receded, but Ms. Clinton has also moved rightward, particularly on foreign policy. Fortunately for Ms. Clinton there is no apparent equivalent of Jesus Garcia. For Ms. Clinton, the lesson from Chicago is the same one she learned in 2008, if a dynamic progressive candidate can put a campaign together, superior fundraising and connections cannot make up for being out of synch with the base

Read more at http://observer.com/2015/03/a-message-from-chicago-for-hillary-clinton-and-the-democrats/#ixzz3UZZUtK9H 
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