CURMUDGUCATION: A Voucher By Any Other Name

CURMUDGUCATION: A Voucher By Any Other Name:

A Voucher By Any Other Name

The New York legislature is getting ready to look at Education Tax Credits again. I know this because advocates are busy pushing it on twitter, including and most especially the Catholic Schools of New York. "We need your help to pass the education tax credit," they declare.

How does a education tax credit work? (These things have been around forever.) Simple, actually-- say we're giving a tax credit of $500 and you owe $2,000 in taxes this year. You send your child to an approved private school. Voila-- you owe $1,500. The government is going to give you $500 to help pay for your child's private schooling.

If you're thinking, "Well, that sounds pretty much like a voucher," you are correct. It is pretty much like a voucher. Here's Andy LeFevre, director of ALEC's education task force back in 2008.

"Tax credits have become popular in many states and are looked at in a little more favorable light in states than vouchers," said LeFevre. "And it's something that unions have a much harder time fighting against than a voucher program. I think they realize that the end goal is the same as a voucher; it's just a different way to come about it."

Catholic Schools of New York concur. They like how things worked out with a similar program in Florida, where the program now generates half a billion dollars in revenue for Catholic and private schools--er, I mean, a half a billion in scholarships for the students.

New York's initiative is so exciting it has its very own website at investined.org. (No doubt they meant to get "investinpubliced.org" but it just wasn't what they had in mind). The site declares boldly that "every child deserves a quality education" because that's a pretty controversial position to take. There's a nice Cuomo-centric video reminding us that ETC provides scholarships for "low and middle-income students." So many glowing happy pictures that you would think thousands and CURMUDGUCATION: A Voucher By Any Other Name:

Alliance schools paying alumni to promote anti-UTLA message - LA School Report

Alliance schools paying alumni to promote anti-UTLA message - LA School Report:

Alliance schools paying alumni to promote anti-UTLA message

*UPDATED

A bitter war of words between the management of  Alliance College-Ready Public Schools and UTLA, the union trying to organize its teachers, got nastier today.

UTLA accused Alliance management and the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) of “anti-teacher activity” by paying alumni to call parents of students to sway their opinion against union efforts to draw the Alliance teachers into UTLA.

The CCSA confirmed that it is paying alumni to make calls, but claimed to be doing nothing wrong.

UTLA released what it said were “leaked” emails from a CCSA employee, Annie Lee, that included the script the alumni were to follow when they called the parents.

“This is sowing the seeds of distrust among parents and students,” Michael Letton, an Alliance teacher, said in a statement issued by UTLA. “This is an unethical practice. Paying alumni to read a script designed to get parents to sign a petition against their own students’ teachers infuriates me.”

Elana Goldbaum, a teacher at Alliance’s Gertz-Ressler Richard Merkin 6-12 Complex who has been active in the union drive, said, “I don’t want parents to get misinformation. This is 100 percent a campaign to create fear among parents. It’s inappropriate.”

Alliance College-Ready Pubic School operates 26 charter within LA Unified, many of them high performing, and its teachers currently work independently without union representation. A group of teachers at Alliance has been working recently to organize Alliance’s 600-plus teachers to join UTLA.

In a statement, CCSA confirmed it had hired “less than 10″ alumni over the age of 18 to “share information with the Alliance community about UTLA’s well documented opposition to charter public schools.” CCSA also said it had nothing to hide and Alliance schools paying alumni to promote anti-UTLA message - LA School Report:

A call to curb expansion of charter schools in Black communities | New Pittsburgh Courier

A call to curb expansion of charter schools in Black communities | New Pittsburgh Courier:

A call to curb expansion of charter schools in Black communities

The SEED Public Charter School of Washington, a public boarding school for poor and academically at-risk students is shown, Friday, April 24, 2015, in southeast Washington. The idea is for public boarding schools to put round-the-clock attention on students away from such daunting problems as poverty, troubled homes and truancy. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) 

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Parents, students and advocates for strong neighborhood schools continue to pressure civic leaders to end the expansion of charter and contract schools in Black and Latino communities across the nation.

Jitu Brown, the national director of Journey for Justice Alliance, a coalition of community, youth and parent-led grassroots organizations in 21 cities, said that the fight for public education – which suffers with the expansion of charter and contract schools –is a human and a civil rights issue.

As voices from the community were increasingly drowned out by philanthropic groups seeking wholesale educational reform, the state takeover of schools, corporate charters and appointed school boards have become the status quo, Brown said.

According to Education Week, a magazine published by Editorial Projects in Education, a nonprofit that produces K-12 educational content in print and online, more than 60 percent of philanthropic donations funneled into education of young people in the United States went to charter and contract schools in 2010. Less than 25 percent of funding went to those programs about 15 years ago.

“What would actually be revolutionary, brand new, and fresh is if community wisdom was listened to and [corporations] worked with the people who are directly impacted by the institutions that they have to live with everyday,” said Brown.

Brown described two separate and unequal sets of expectations, one for White and middle class children and another, lower set of expectations for Black and Latino children that often influence education policy. Those disparities will continue until society finds the courage to confront them.

“We want what our friends in other communities have, said Brown. “They don’t have contract schools, they don’t have charter schools in middle class White communities they have world-class neighborhood schools.”

Daniel del Pielago of Empower DC agreed.

As the education organizer for Empower DC, a grassroots group that supports low- and moderate-income District residents living in the nation’s capital, said that when communities work together, and when they’re given the chance to put together solutions that work, they find success that doesn’t require corporate intervention.

That success is embodied by the community school model championed by groups such as the Alliance.

According to the Coalition for Community Schools, a network of educational groups that provide support for youth development family and health services, community schools feature an “integrated focus on academics, health and social services, youth and community development and community engagement” that promotes “student learning, stronger families and healthier communities.”

Helen Moore, the co-chairperson of the Keep the Vote/No Takeover Coalition in Detroit, Mich., said that the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently working its way through a Republican-led Congress still at odds with President Barack Obama, should give communities the power to control the destinies of their children.

Moore said that neither “No Child Left Behind” Act, George W. Bush’s education initiative, nor President Obama’s “Race to Top” fulfilled what was supposed to really happen: giving Black and Brown school systems the power and resources they needed to implement high-quality educational programs for their children.

“What’s lost in the minutiae of school closures is the dismantling of good neighborhood schools,” said Brown. “There were actually solid well-performing schools in our community that were receiving schools for students that lost their schools due to closures.”

Two years later, Brown said, those schools often saw their test scores plummet, creating a cascading effect. Overcrowded classrooms make it harder for teachers to do their jobs lowering morale and have a negative impact on an already stressful learning environment.

“One of the casualties of corporate education interventions is the removal of Black teachers a significant part of the Black middle class. And who are they replaced by? They are replaced by newer, younger, Whiter and more transient teachers,” said Brown. “We are all for teaching diversity, but we also know that that is a civil rights issue. Children have the right to look at their teachers and dream that they can be that they should be able to see themselves.”

Earlier this month, the Alliance hosted a conference in Newark, N.J. in an effort to strengthen national networks and equip activists, parents and other community stakeholders with the tools to organize and combat myriad inequities that exist in public school systems nationwide.

The group also advocates for more penalties for schools that lean too heavily on zero tolerance policies that disproportionately suspend and expel students of color for minor infractions. It favors more federal A call to curb expansion of charter schools in Black communities | New Pittsburgh Courier:

The Charter School Miracle that Isn’t—Special Education in NOLA:

The Charter School Miracle that Isn’t—Special Education in NOLA

MAY 27, 2015 BY NANCY BAILEY LEAVE A COMMENT

It’s segregating kids with disabilities, and letting the charter schools off the hook.
—Parent advocate Karran Harper Royal

The changes happening to schools in New Orleans—the conversion from public to private—has sadly become a prototype for schools across the country. All parents, teachers and taxpayers should be concerned. While charter advocates see charters as miracles, in special education we know they’re not, and New Orleans demonstrates this well.

Here, I am referring to the article by Danielle Dreilinger from The Times-Picayune (where I also got the quote above) describing the special education charter school changes in NOLA since the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) recent settlement. It demonstrates well the hypocrisy of charter schools for students with special needs.

These students are the square pegs (I say that admiringly) that can’t fit into the one round hole, and it is why many school reforms don’t work—Common Core, charter schools, and cheap teacher training are examples.

Charter schools promised to do for students, especially poor students, what they claimed public schools failed to do. But what we have seen repeatedly is the selectivity of students in charter schools who are able to march in a straight line—I mean that literally. Real public schools never had any problems working with these students!

While traditional public schools were de-funded and credentialed teachers demoralized, charter schools, with young, fast-tracked teacher temps, many from Teach The Charter School Miracle that Isn’t—Special Education in NOLA:

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Sacramento High Council approves budget with 5 additional employees for Mayor Kevin Johnson | The Sacramento Bee

Sacramento City Council approves budget with 5 additional employees for Mayor Kevin Johnson | The Sacramento Bee:

Sacramento High Council approves budget with 5 additional employees for Mayor Kevin Johnson 

The Sacramento City Council gave initial approval Tuesday to a budget that costs nearly $7 million more than the spending plan proposed by the city manager and includes five additional employees for Mayor Kevin Johnson.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article22462737.html#storylink=cpy

The late-night additions to City Manager John Shirey’s proposed budget of $940 million totaled about $6.9 million. The extra spending includes full-time employees whose costs are projected to increase annually by about 4 percent, according to Leyne Milstein, Sacramento’s finance director.

The council members who opposed the additional costs were Larry Carr, Steve Hansen and Jeff Harris.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article22462737.html#storylink=cpy

 Shirey began the budget portion of Tuesday night’s council meeting by saying he continued to support the passage of the budget as written – without any significant additions or reductions.That included five mayoral positions that would bolster the mayor’s staff and increase his spending by 70 percent. The positions, three of which were listed in the city manager’s line item rather than in the mayor’s budget request, drew skepticism and critique from some council members who believed the mayor had not fully justified the jump in staff and and spending.

Hansen, who has been a vocal critic of the mayor’s moves to fortify his office, made a late play to propose an alternate solution: reallocate those five full-time jobs to the Department of Parks and Recreation. That proposal failed by a 3-6 vote.


Read the rest: Sacramento City Council approves budget with 5 additional employees for Mayor Kevin Johnson | The Sacramento Bee:

Educating. All Our Children:

Educating. All Our Children

Bringing together research, analysis, advocacy and community on behalf of the public's schools

Welcome to Educating. All Our Children., dedicated to building an informed community of advocacy on behalf of our children and their education. The public’s schools, so vital to democracy and to children’s wellbeing, are under siege.  Testing systems that once seemed to be an expensive bureaucratic nuisance that “one day too would pass” are now widely understood to be the Trojan horse of statistical tricks to triage students, discredit teachers, and cast suspicion on the very legitimacy of public education.  The urgency of this assault on the public’s schools calls for timely, informed, collective response:  a paradox of both immediacy and thoughtful deliberation. 

The “All Our Children” in our name means just that – every child must grow and learn and thrive under our care.  The “Educating” extends to us, the parents, teachers, scholars, activists, policy shapers – the grown-ups who must get smarter about what is going on before we can fully educate the children. 

Educating. All Our Children.  will keep the focus on the children as we share timely information, important research studies, voices from the classroom, and in doing so, work to recast – and reclaim --the debates about what our schools would be like if we were committed to a powerful, equitable, and democratic education for all our children.

To begin, a piece I wrote as an introduction to a special issue on Education and Democracy for the American Educational Research Journal – in 2002! Our struggle isn’t new, but energies must be:

“There has perhaps been no time in our history when the links between a public education and democracy have been as tenuous as they are right now, at the beginning of this new century.  From Jefferson to Dewey, from the common schools to the freedom schools, educational practices and policies in the United States have invoked the values of democracy for their legitimacy. Even when the reality has fallen far short of the ideal, the articulated premise surrounding public support for the education of children has been democracy’s need for an educated citizenry.  That an educated citizenry could prevent, discern, and even throw off tyranny underlay the presumption that the education of children was a shared and common good, an insurance, if you will, against tyrants and oppression, against those who would co-opt or silence the voices of the many. The denial of literacy to slaves spoke perversely of the power that Whites believed an educated mind to possess – a power multiplied when held not just by one slave, but by slaves in common. 

Our press and government chambers are filled with stories about education, advocacy for education, plans for education “reform.” Education would seem to be a vaunted priority, a collective good. Yet when closely exampled, many of the policies and practices being promoted as reforms are attempts to restructure even publicly funded education into forms of private goods.  Such efforts include privatization and standardization.

Privatization, particularly in the form of vouchers, removes public education dollars from public governance, transferring public funds into private entities that may or may not have any responsibility to serve a public purpose. . . a fairly transparent threat to a tradition of schooling that presumes both a democratic purpose and a democratic governance of schools. 

The symbolic language of education for democracy has dominated the history of education in the US, even when many of our schools were highly inequitable in the populations they served and extremely hierarchical in their bureaucratic structures.  That symbolic language. . . nevertheless provided a common ground where, from time to critical time, citizens could revisit not only their goals for schooling, but their ideals for their children and for their country."

Our hope in launching this blog – a decade after those concerns were raised -- is to create a space for reclaiming, re-asserting the many ways we need to be talking about children and the public’s schools – morally, developmentally, democratically, creatively, truly educationally.  Educating. All Our Children. aspires to be that common ground.Educating. All Our Children:

*An excerpt from “Private Asset or Public Good: Education and Democracy at the Crossroads,” the Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue on Education and Democracy, American Educational Research Journal (summer 2000, vol 30,2; pp 243-238.)Educating. All Our Children:

ABOUT ME

Linda McSpadden McNeil

Dr. Linda McSpadden McNeil is Professor of Education and the Director of the Center for Education at Rice University. She is the author of Contradictions of School Reform: The Educational Costs of Standardization, an early study of the harmful effects of standardized testing, and Contradictions of Control: School Structure and School Knowledge. Her research focuses on educational equity, democratic schooling, and the importance of the public’s schools. She is currently analyzing curricular losses under standardized schooling and the ways globalization and privatization threaten to increase the inequities in students’ access to substantive knowledge in schools.

View my complete profileEducating. All Our Children:

Act by Friday: Will your voice be heard on Leadership Policy? | Cloaking Inequity

Act by Friday: Will your voice be heard on Leadership Policy? | Cloaking Inequity:

Act by Friday: Will your voice be heard on Leadership Policy?

Will the Council of Chief State School Officers ignore educational equity, inequality, race, class, gender, ability, language, special status, marginalization, and social justice? I recently received several letters from leaders in the field that are suggesting that this may be the case.

The following letter came via email from Professor John Roberts at Penn State:

Dear Colleagues and Fellow Educational, Parent, and Community Leaders:

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is in the final stages of updating the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) standards, and the public comment period closes on the 29th of May. These highly influential policy standards shape the practice, professional development, and evaluation of school leaders across the country.

We want you to know that in the current draft, none of the seven core standards themselves make explicit reference to educational equity, inequality, race, class, gender, ability, language, special status, marginalization, or social justice. You may access the seven draft standards in a press release by the CCSSO here.

This omission is dismaying since a previous draft of these standards included specific language around educational equity and racial inequities. The findings of research and the voices of practitioners are very important for influencing the development of the language in the standards. We believe it is critical that the educational research community, school leaders, and local communities speak again on this issue.

At this time, we are inviting you to support an open letter addressed to the CCSSO, which is available at the following link:

Your signature in support of the letter will include your institution or organization name, which is for identification purposes only and is not intended to imply an endorsement or support from your institution. Your name, should you choose to sign in support, will appear in an attachment to the letter that we will present to the CCSSO Trustees and leadership team.  If you do not wish to sign in support of the letter, please forward this email to your colleagues and contact the CCSSO directly if you share the perspective that equity and equitable schools are a critical part of developing standards for future school leaders.

Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely,

Ann M. Ishimaru, Assistant Professor, University of Washington

John E. Roberts, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University

Bradley W. Davis, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Arlington

Mollie K. Galloway, Chair, Department of Educational Leadership, Lewis & Clark

Mark A. Gooden, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Michael E. Dantley, Dean, College of Education, Health and Society, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

Bradley Davis, faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington also relayed the following,

In September of 2014, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released a draft revision of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) standards. Last updated in 2008, these highly-influential policy standards shape the practice, professional development, and evaluation of school leaders in 45 states and in our nation’s capital. The most apparent change in the September 2014 draft was an expansion in the total number of standards from six to eleven. Chief amongst these additions was standard 10, which dealt with equity and cultural responsiveness, imploring school leaders to ensure “the development of an 

Act by Friday: Will your voice be heard on Leadership Policy? | Cloaking Inequity:

The Ongoing Struggle of Teacher Retention - The Atlantic

The Ongoing Struggle of Teacher Retention - The Atlantic:

The Ongoing Struggle of Teacher Retention

Getting experienced educators to work in the highest-need schools requires more than bonus pay.

Standing in front of my eighth-grade class, my heart palpitated to near-panic-attack speed as I watched second hand of the clock. Please bell—ring early, I prayed. It was my second day of teaching, and some of my middle-school male students were putting me to the test.

In a span of three minutes, the group in room 204 had morphed from contained to out of control. Two boys were shooting dice in the back of the room, and as I instructed them to put their crumpled dollar bills away, several others took off their shoes and began tossing them around like footballs. Before I could react, one boy broke into my supply closet. He snatched handfuls of No. 2 pencils and highlighters and sprinted out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

This was 2004. I was 22 years old and had been placed as a beginning teacher in one of Kentucky’s most troubled, underperforming, and dysfunctional middle schools. I had no prior teaching experience, nor had I studied education as an undergraduate. I’d only begun my alternative certification work at the University of Louisville a few months prior, having been recruited by Teach Kentucky. I’d enter the classroom only having completed two graduate courses—I was expected to learn on the fly. I wasn’t ready for the stress, the culture shock, or the pressure to increase student reading scores.

It takes many educators a decade or even longer to become truly effective in their craft.

I resigned from the position before Christmas. I hadn’t even gotten my certification.

The district in which that middle school is located, Louisville’s Jefferson County Public Schools, is one of the nation’s largest, serving over 100,000 students in roughly 150 schools. Eighteen of them are labeled “priority schools,” meaning they demonstrate exceptionally low student achievement. Unsurprisingly, most of these campuses serve student populations with at least three-fourths of kids on free or reduced-priced meal plans, an indicator of poverty.

For example, Knight Middle School has one of the lowest performance rankings in the district and the highest percentage of teachers with four years of experience or fewer: 80 percent and 84 percent, respectively. Knight ranks in the fifth percentile, according to state metrics. Similar statistics exist at Doss High School, where over 84 percent of students are on free or reduced-price lunch and 71 percent of the teachers have four years of experience or fewer.

The combination of poor performance and limited teacher experience makes it especially difficult for Knight and Doss, and similar schools across the country, to fulfill strict guidelines under the federal No Child Left Behind law. If Knight and Doss fail to improve reading and math proficiency, among other academic indicators, they are subject to various sanctions. Those include removing the principal, which is what the Kentucky Department of Education recommendedfor Doss earlier this month. Replacing teachers is also an option.

Although some educators hit their stride early on in their careers, experience matters in the classroom for both students and teachers. Recent studies suggest that it takes many educators a decade or even longer to become truly effective in their craft—to efficiently deal with distractions and disruptions, create and The Ongoing Struggle of Teacher Retention - The Atlantic:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Feds turn over another rock and the plot thickens

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Feds turn over another rock and the plot thickens:

Feds turn over another rock and the plot thickens

 

Today's Sun-Times story by Lauren Fitzpatrick takes us even deeper into the seamy underbelly of Chicago's pay-for-play contracting process under the current system of mayor control of public education.



The most interesting part of the story for me was the way CPS practically stuffed it's $20.5 million, no-bid contract into Synesi/SUPES founder Gary Soloman's pocket. This after the State Board had ruled found the group(s) unqualified to help the city's schools improve.

Though CPS touted Synesi’s past work in other urban districts, the Illinois State Board of Education found that Synesi failed at a fundamental level to show how it would actually help the schools improve if they were awarded the money, according to records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

“No indication of a daily work experience that garnered results,” is how another state scorer summed up a segment of the review, awarding just 362 points out of a possible 580. In another graded section of its application, Synesi got just 5 points out of a possible 40, the records show.

 In April 2013, grant applications were submitted for Carver Military Academy, Corliss, Farragut and what then was called Marine Math 

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Feds turn over another rock and the plot thickens: