Charter school board may get rare perk – pay | The Sacramento Bee

Charter school board may get rare perk – pay | The Sacramento Bee:

Charter school board may get rare perk – pay

Charter schools, unlike big school districts, don’t usually pay their board members. But trustees of a single charter school in Del Paso Heights will start receiving $600 a month if a proposal to amend the school’s bylaws gets final approval.

Highlands Community Charter School, approved last year by Twin Rivers Unified, offers students older than 22 an opportunity to earn high school diplomas, learn vocations and improve English skills. The publicly funded school serves 350 students, including many ex-offenders.

Galt Joint Union school district, by comparison, educates about 3,800 K-8 students. Its trustees are paid $180 a month. Twin Rivers Unified trustees are paid $750 a month to serve their 28,000 students. Both districts offer health benefits to board members.

The California Education Code allows school districts to pay their trustees monthly stipends based on enrollment. School boards can elect to take less, or add up to 5 percent to the base amount. These payments often come with medical and dental benefits.

Charter schools are governed by state nonprofit rules and their own bylaws, which offer more latitude.

“I’m not aware of other charter schools that pay stipends,” said Emily Bertelli, spokeswoman for the California Charter School Association. The charter advocacy organization doesn’t recommend stipends, she said.

Leaders of Highlands Community Charter School say the payments are justified because the board members work eight to 16 hours each week. “It (the board) is really active and really runs this place,” said Murdock Smith, who recently stepped down from the school board to become the school’s part-time chief financial officer.

Holding a seat on the charter’s board is demanding because the school has grown rapidly, recently adding four off-site classrooms, said Ward Allen, president of the nonprofit corporation that runs the charter school. The passage of Proposition 47, which reduced penalties for some crimes, has meant more people are being released from prison and are calling the school searching for job training.

“We’re on the verge of being discovered,” Allen said. “We are basically seeing the flood start, and I don’t know how quickly it is going to abate. I think it will be busy, busy year.”

Locally, neither Fortune Charter Schools, California Montessori Project nor Aspire Public Schools – three of the region’s largest charter school systems – pay stipends to their board members.

“Board stipends are pretty unusual for charters, but they are not unheard of,” said Karl Yoder, chief financial officer for Delta Managed Solutions. His company offers human resources and other support services to 35 California charter schools, including Highlands Community Charter.

Yoder said only three to four of the charter schools he works for offer stipends to trustees. “What we recommend is a stipend that covers the incidental costs of being a board member,” he said.

The proposed Highlands Community Charter School bylaw amendment also would allow for paying the person acting as the Twin Rivers Unified board liaison – currently Linda Fowler – $600 a week for lobbying efforts.

The Highlands board has been weighing the bylaw revision for more than a month. It tentatively voted to adopt the revised bylaws on June 27, pending review from the school’s attorney. The item has been put on the agenda twice since then, but no action was taken at either meeting. The matter continues to be under legal review, said Highlands attorney Thomas Cregger.

The move to pay stipends to the charter board and to pay the Twin Rivers liaison is among the controversial decisions recently made by officials at Highlands Community.

Last month, the FPPC announced it will investigate whether Fowler, who also serves as president of the Twin Rivers Unified school board, violated conflict-of-interest rules by accepting thousands of dollars in consulting fees from Highlands Community Charter, which she helped establish. Fowler is retired from the state Department of Justice, where she was an investigative auditor.

Highlands paid Fowler’s consulting firm $13,000 in October to pursue a federal startup grant before canceling the contract when the school’s principal questioned its propriety.

Every five years, the Twin Rivers Unified school board has the power to decide whether to renew the charter of Highlands Community Charter.

Diana Lambert: 916-321-1090, @dianalambert

BOARD STIPENDS

State law sets the base amount a school board member can be paid monthly on district enrollment. School boards can elect to take less, or add up to 5 percent to the base amount. Charter schools are governed by state nonprofit laws and their own bylaws.

Enrollment / Base pay

60,000+ / $1,500

25,000-60,000 / $750

10,000-25,000 / $400

1,000-10,000 / $240

150-1,000 / $120

150 or less / $60

Charter school board may get rare perk – pay | The Sacramento Bee:

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article30511734.html#storylink=cpy

CPS's Opinion of Parents and Teachers: Idiots Windy City Teachers

Windy City Teachers: Tales of Urban Reform: CPS's Opinion of Parents and Teachers: Idiots:

CPS's Opinion of Parents and Teachers: Idiots Windy City Teachers

CPS teachers and staff recently received the following email:

"Dear Colleagues,

The first day of school for students is Tuesday, September 8 and we need your help to get the word out.

There are several ways to participate in our Back-to-School campaign, including the annual Bud Billiken Day Parade on Saturday August 8. We want CPS to have a major presence at this event, so please consider volunteering your time for a portion of the day.  Visit cps.edu/b2svolunteering to see your options and to register.

You can also support our Back-to-School efforts by phone banking (i.e. calling CPS families to make sure they know when school begins). If you are interested in this option, please email face@cps.edu.

Finally, you can support our students by helping them start the school year with the classroom supplies they need.  Many children will arrive at school on September 8 without adequate supplies. To purchase school supply kits for these students, or to find out how you can donate supplies to our schools, visit cps.edu/supplythefuture."

CPS teachers and staff also received the following flyer reminding us of free meals provided by CPS:

"LunchStop serves free, healthy meals at 40 outdoor CPS locations!  Any child 1-18 years can receive a free meal every Monday through Friday from June 28th to August 28th (children do not have to be CPS students)."

Although Rahm has claimed that "CPS continues to set new standards of excellence," we disagree.

According to the city, CPS parents are unable to:

Windy City Teachers: Tales of Urban Reform: CPS's Opinion of Parents and Teachers: Idiots:

Wendy Lecker: Want to know how a student is doing? Ask a teacher - StamfordAdvocate

Wendy Lecker: Want to know how a student is doing? Ask a teacher - StamfordAdvocate:

Wendy Lecker: Want to know how a student is doing? Ask a teacher

A friend of mine had a priceless reaction to the specious claim by education reformers that our children need standardized tests so parents can know how they are doing in school. He laughed and said that in 20 years of parent conferences no teacher ever felt the need to pull out his children’s standardized tests to provide an accurate picture of how well they were learning.

Parents have relied on teachers’ assessments to gauge their children’s progress and most have pretty much ignored their children’s standardized test scores. For decades, this approach has served parents and students well. Recent research shows that non-standardized, human assessments of student learning are superior to standardized tests of all kinds.

I have written about the voluminous evidence showing that a high school GPA is the best predictor of college success, and that the SAT and ACT, by contrast, are poor predictors. (http://bit.ly/1K7CNzG)

Even standardized college placement tests, tests ostensibly designed to measure “college readiness,” fail miserably at that task — with real and damaging consequences for students.

College remediation is often used as a weapon by education reformers. Overstating college remediation rates was one of the tactics used by Arne Duncan to foment hysteria about the supposedly sorry state of America’s public schools and justify imposing the Common Core and its accompanying tests nationwide. As retired award-winning New York principal Carol Burris has written, while Duncan and his allies claimed that the college remediation rate is 40 percent, data from the National Center on Education Statistics show that the actual percentage is 20 percent.

Exaggeration is not the only problem with college remediation. Many of the students placed in remedial classes in college do not even belong there.

Judith Scott-Clayton of Columbia’s Teachers’ College and her colleagues examined tens of thousands of college entrants and found that one-quarter to one-third of those placed in remedial courses based on standardized placement tests were mis-assigned. These students wrongly placed in remedial classes could have passed a college- level course with a B or better. Moreover, when students are mis-assigned to remedial courses, the likelihood of them Wendy Lecker: Want to know how a student is doing? Ask a teacher - StamfordAdvocate:

NPR Is Gaga about PARCC and Its State-comparison Potential | deutsch29

NPR Is Gaga about PARCC and Its State-comparison Potential | deutsch29:

NPR Is Gaga about PARCC and Its State-comparison Potential

On August 07, 2015, NPR released this piece concerning setting the cut scores for the PARCC tests that students took in the spring.

NPR makes this statement:

…Until last year, it was all but impossible to compare students across state lines. Not anymore.

This is not true. States have been required to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).

What is interesting is that the Fordham Institute’s grading of state standards (and finding in favor of Common Core even though it did not give Common Core a higher rating than all state standards) demonstrates no connection between their ratings of state standards and NAEP scores.

So now, we have PARCC, and according to NPR, we have a number of individuals meeting to “nail down cut scores for those 5 million tests.”

If anyone tells you that PARCC or any other standardized test is by definition “objective,” don’t buy it.

Instead, believe what Center for Public Education director Patte Barth says in that NPR piece:

“Establishing cut scores is part science. It’s part art. But it’s also part political.”

I wonder which part dominates.

Tough call, eh?

So, it seems, this group in Denver is going to make sure that states cannot produce an “illusion of improvement.” What is missing, however, is any established connection between PARCC, it’s Denver-ballroom-basement-meeting-set cut scores, and previous tests used by the states.

My teaching colleague, Herb Bassett, observed as much in a FB posting of the NPR link:

Explains how a committee is in process of determining which students passed 

NPR Is Gaga about PARCC and Its State-comparison Potential | deutsch29:

solidaridad: Join Voices Against Privatizing Public Education's efforts to repeal the California charter school law

solidaridad: Join Voices Against Privatizing Public Education's efforts to repeal the California charter school law:

Join Voices Against Privatizing Public Education's efforts to repeal the California charter school law

There is a small grass-roots group that has been working diligently to create a ballot proposition to repeal the charter school laws. While a seemingly daunting task, there might not ever be another chance to do this before the privatizers eliminate public schools altogether (Eli Broad just announced his plans to cut LAUSD's public schools in in half). The group has an online petition that now has over 600 signatures. They also have a facebook group. Both of which are linked here:

Ballot Initiative to REPEAL the CA Charter School Act of 1992

Voices Against Privatizing Public Education

Most importantly, they have picked up a handfull of key labor leaders and organizations:

• AFT Local 6161 (Palomar Faculty Federation)
• North County Labor Alliance
• Escondido Public School Advocates
• Bill Freeman- NEA Board member for California
• Alita Blanc- United Educators of San Francisco

The coalition is working hard to get several more organizations on board, including local Democratic party clubs in several large cities. Please consider getting involved, and perhaps even endorsing theefforts of the group.

Professor Wayne Au: The Opt Out Movement

Antioch University Friends of Education Speaker Series - Wayne Au will talk about various issues with high-stakes testing and organizing against the tests. Au is an Associate Professor in the Education Program at the University of Washington, Bothell, and he is an editor for the social justice magazine, Rethinking Schools. Most recently, he co-authored the article, "Rethinking schools: Enacting a vision for social justice within US education" for Critical Studies in Education and co-edited Pencils Down: Rethinking High-Stakes Testing and Accountability in Public Schools.

Professor Wayne Au: The Opt Out Movement

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The fall of Chancellor Wise

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The fall of Chancellor Wise:

The fall of Chancellor Wise

 Asked if she was taking the fall for the Board of Trustees, Wise said, “no,” she was sharing the responsibility. -- Illinois Public Media, September 04, 2014

Phyllis Wise has been forced to resign from her $549,069/yr. job as University of Illinois Chancellor. I say, good riddance to you Chancellor Wise and may the rest of the Board of Trustees go with you. You have helped disgrace the name of a once-great state university system and made me ashamed to call it my alma mater. I received both my masters and Ph.D. from UIC.



Wise takes the fall but it was the Board of Trustees that violated the basic principles of academic freedom and the First Amendment when they rescinded their job offer to professor Steven Salaita over his controversial posts (critical of Israel's attack on Gaza) on Twitter. Rather than stick up for principle, the cowardly chancellor and trustees caved under pressure from a handful of wealthy and powerful donors who threatened to withhold their contributions if Salaita was hired.



This of course, is not the first time the U of I trustees have violated the rights of faculty members and the principles of academic freedom. I'm thinking back to 2010 when my friend and UIC colleague Bill Ayers was denied emeritus status by Board Chairman Christopher Kennedy who was bitter about an obscure Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The fall of Chancellor Wise:

White House was ‘grateful’ to Jeb Bush for helping with Common Core, says former Obama aide - The Washington Post

White House was ‘grateful’ to Jeb Bush for helping with Common Core, says former Obama aide - The Washington Post:

White House was ‘grateful’ to Jeb Bush for helping with Common Core, says former Obama aide

This can’t be a tweet that Jeb Bush is going to like.

Daniel Pfeiffer, a former senior advisor to President Obama for strategy and communications, expressed the White House’s gratitude to the former two-term Florida governor on Thursday, the day of the GOP presidential contender debates were held in Cleveland. For what? For supporting the Common Core State Standards and even helping them to persuade states to adopt them.

Here’s the tweet:

Bush has been on the defensive for some time over his long-time support for the Common Core, a set of math and English Language Arts standards that most states adopted several years ago. When he became the governor of Florida in 1999, he became a pioneer in the corporate education reform movement that used student standardized test scores to hold schools “accountable,” promoted vouchers and charter schools, and pushed to change the way teachers were credentialed. When he left office in 2007, he became a reform evangelist around the country, promoting his “Florida Formula” while advising states on how to adopt the same reforms.

[Here’s what Jeb Bush really did as governor to public education in Florida]

He was an early and consistent Core supporter, even as other Republicans began to turn against the initiative, which had the support of the Obama administration. (While the administration did not write the standards, it did make adopting common standards a requirement of states wanting to win federal Race to the Top money and/or a waiver from the most onerous aspects of No Child Left Behind. The administration also provided some $360 million in federal funds to two multi-state consortia to develop new Common Core standards tests.)

A few years ago Bush had no problem speaking harshly about Common Core critics. For example, in October 2013, he told an audience at his Foundation for Excellence in Education’s annual conference:

“What I want to hear from them is more than just opposition. I want to hear their solutions for the hodgepodge of dumbed-down state standards that have created group mediocrity in our schools…. Criticisms and conspiracy theories are easy attention grabbers. Solutions are hard work.”

After he became a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, he began to offer far more nuanced support for the Core and was much kinder to its critics. In May 2015, he told Fox News host Megyn Kelly:

Common Core means a lot of things to different people, so they could be right based on what’s in front of them. I respect people 

White House was ‘grateful’ to Jeb Bush for helping with Common Core, says former Obama aide - The Washington Post:

SKrashen: CAN ACCESS BALANCE THE EFFECT OF POVERTY?

SKrashen: August 2015:

Webinar Presentation 4

CAN ACCESS BALANCE THE EFFECT OF POVERTY?

Predictors of NAEP grade 4, 2007, 51 states

predictors	beta	t	P
Poverty	-0.72	7.42	0
Access	0.53	1.62	0.055

r2 = .63

Access = bks/student in school libraries, circulation in public libraries

Predictors of PIRLS:

Predictors of the reading test: PIRLS 2006

predictor		P
poverty	-0.41	0.005
independent reading in school	0.16	0.14
library: 500 books	0.35	0.005
Instruction	-0.19	0.085

r2 = .63 

Krashen, S., Lee, S.Y. and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is the library important? Multivariate studies at the national and international level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 8(1): 26-36.

Replication:  PIRLS 2011

Predictor	beta	p
SES	0.52	0.01
library: 5000 bks	0.20	0.08
class libr	0.08	0.28
parent read	0.065	0.31
early lit	-0.26	0.04
Instruction	-0.016	0.5

r2 = .62

Note: Parental reading and classroom library correlated with PIRLS reading scores, but the effect disappeared in the multiple regression.

Note: Poverty and access are the main predictors of reading achievement in all studies.

 SKrashen: August 2015:

Public Schools to Teachers: Run Your Class on Fear or Get Fired - The Daily Beast

Public Schools to Teachers: Run Your Class on Fear or Get Fired - The Daily Beast:

Public Schools to Teachers: Run Your Class on Fear or Get Fired

As part of a burgeoning new public school program called “No Nonsense Nurturing” teachers are required to wear earpieces. They’re reminded to be less enthusiastic and “expect 100 percent compliance.” And in at least one high profile case, the teachers who objected were let go.

To her face we called her Mrs. Thompson, but behind her back it was “Sarge.”

Sarge was our 8th grade Language Arts teacher. Rumor was that she’d been in the military, maybe an officer in the Women’s Air Corps, maybe part of the Normandy invasion, charging the beach with a knife in her teeth. Her necklace of Nazi ears was stored away in her top desk drawer.

No one knew the full truth. The legend grew with each successive school year.

Sarge was squat with a short, salt and pepper bristly haircut, and an authoritative, gravelly voice. Think R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.

Oh, and the stare. Try to pass a note to a friend, she would see you and give you the stare, and then you would shred the paper yourself, rather than waiting for Sarge to come and do it for you.

On the other hand, Mrs. Thompson was also deeply kind and enthusiastic and loving, and one of the most important teachers in my life. I am more than 30 years removed from her classroom and I can conjure her like it was yesterday.

When I first heard of a system called “No Nonsense Nurturing,” via a middle-school teacher Amy Berard’s first-hand account (first published at the EduShyster blog), I thought of Mrs. Thompson, whose entire being seemed to be anti-nonsense.

Berard recounts her experience working with the Center for Transformative Teacher Training, which uses the No Nonsense Nurturing system to “train” teachers in their particular method of “classroom management.”

Somewhere along the line, the school reform movement decided that fear would be their governing value.

During the “real time teacher coaching,” the instructor wears an earpiece and is coached in the NNN method by observers in the back of the classroom. As educator Peter Greene argues, No Nonsense Nurturing is the latest iteration of “scripted” lessons which aim to “human-proof” the classroom. The NNN instructor is told to use short phrases focused on the immediate task at hand, including narration of what the instructor observes each student doing.

As Berard says:

As my students entered the room, I was supposed to say: “In seats, zero talking, page 6 questions, 1-4.” I don’t even talk to my dog like that. Constant narration of what the students are doing is also key to the NNN teaching style. “Noel is finishing question 3. Marjorie is sitting silently. Alfredo is on page 6.”

But Berard’s application of the method displeased her observers. She expressed Public Schools to Teachers: Run Your Class on Fear or Get Fired - The Daily Beast:

Teachers pose some pointed questions for next GOP debate - The Washington Post

Teachers pose some pointed questions for next GOP debate - The Washington Post:

Teachers pose some pointed questions for next GOP debate

Republican presidential candidates from left, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Scott Walker, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and John Kasich take the stage for the first Republican presidential debate at the Quicken Loans Arena Thursday, Aug. 6, 2015, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

(Update: another debate scheduled)

Teachers around the country were watching the Aug. 6 debate in Cleveland in which 10 candidates for the Republican presidential nomination sparred and posed questions on Twitter that they would like to see them answer. There will be an education debate among the candidates on Aug. 19 in New Hampshire, which you can read about here, and a  debate scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 16, at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. Here are some of the questions that teachers tweeted to the hashtag #BATSask, a reference to the BATS, the Badass Teachers Association, a group founded in 2013 by educators sick and tired of being blamed for whatever woes exist in the public education system.

Here are some of the tweets. If you have questions to add the list, put them in the comments and I’ll do an update before the next debate.

Teachers pose some pointed questions for next GOP debate - The Washington Post:

Badass Teacher (BAT) Association

WELCOME TO THE BAT CAVE

Badass Teacher Association Web Site

Major charter school expansion in the works for L.A. Unified students - LA Times

Major charter school expansion in the works for L.A. Unified students - LA Times:

Major charter school expansion in the works for L.A. Unified students

A Prominent local education foundation is discussing a major expansion of charter schools in Los Angeles aimed at boosting academic achievement for students at the lowest performing campuses.

Details of the project are not yet fully clear. But charter school leaders said they have met with officials from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in recent months about the effort. The Keck Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and other organizations that support the independently run, publicly financed charters also are involved, according to people who attended the meetings. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

The Broad Foundation said the charter plan is in an early, exploratory phase, but declined to provide specific information.

"People have been demanding better public schools forever and not getting them," said Swati Pandey, a spokeswoman for the foundation. "We hope this will be a bigger, better and more ambitious effort to make that happen."

The people who attended the meetings said organizers displayed maps showing Los Angeles neighborhoods where they said thousands of students are going to under-performing public schools.

An ambitious expansion of charter schools would be costly and would likely face a political fight. And it's not known what kind of funding commitments the organizers have locked down.

One person who attended a meeting said the goal was to enroll in charter schools half of all Los Angeles students over the next eight years. Another said there was discussion of an option that involved enrolling 50% of students currently at schools with low test scores. A source said the cost was estimated to be $450 million; another said hundreds of millions of dollars are needed.

Officials from Keck and Walton could not be reached for comment.

Currently, more than 100,000 L.A. students attend charters, about 16% of district enrollment, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District. L.A. Unified has more charters, 207, and more charter students than any other school district in the country.

"The conversation I had focused on decreasing the number of students attending failing public schools," said Parker Hudnut, chief executive officer of ICEF Public Schools, a charter group that enrolls 3,900 students in 10 South Los Angeles schools.

"We looked at maps of L.A. and how many students are attending these schools and talked about what can we do about it," he said. "They tried to identify areas of L.A. where tens of thousands of students are going to schools that they deemed unsatisfactory."

"It's exciting," said Cristina de Jesus, president and chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools California, which operates 20 charters in the L.A. area. "It's re-energizing the conversation around education and education choices in Los Angeles."

Charters are exempt from many rules that govern traditional schools; most are non-union.

United Teachers Los Angeles has long been at odds with Eli Broad. Union President Alex Caputo-Pearl accused the philanthropist of repeatedly trying to weaken the "input of teachers over how education is run in their schools."

"We're concerned about anything Eli Broad is involved with," he said.

School board President Steve Zimmer said that while some charters serve students well, a rapid expansion could undermine the district's own school improvement efforts. L.A. Unified enrolls students who are more difficult and expensive to educate than those at charters, he said. Those students would be left with fewer resources if there were an exodus to charters, Zimmer said.

"The most critical concern would be the collateral damage to the children left behind," he said.

Funding for the proposed effort could go toward obtaining classroom space and for covering the early administrative costs of new charters. It also could be used for training teachers and administrators. Discussions are underway with Teach for America to provide instructors, according to those familiar with the planning.

TFA recruits recent college graduates for two-year stints, frequently in charter schools.

Charters became a central issue in this year's school board elections; supporters, through a political action Major charter school expansion in the works for L.A. Unified students - LA Times: