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Thursday, September 6, 2018

Teacher Kim Cook on Andrew Gillum & saving Florida public education | The Edvocate Blog

Teacher Kim Cook on Andrew Gillum & saving Florida public education | The Edvocate Blog

Teacher Kim Cook on Andrew Gillum & saving Florida public education


Florida has been under single party rule for more than 20 years. This complete lack of checks and balances has normalized an unrelenting assault on our most precious asset: public education. With each year, the destructive political intent behind the “school reform” agenda has grown bolder and more extreme. We are at a place where politicians make little attempt to hide their contempt for teachers, students, parents and districts
Alachua teacher, Kim Cook shares her views on just how important the current governors’ race and upcoming 2018 election is to Florida public education
I’ve seen some educators saying on social media that they won’t vote for Andrew Gillum. Here is my response.
For those of you who are saying you won’t vote for Gillum, please consider the following (from a teacher):
The Florida legislature and governor’s office has been Republican for 20+ years. In that 20 years, we have seen nothing but bill after bill with the sole intent of destroying public education. The vast majority of those bills have been signed into law by the governor. Here is a review of the legislation (please add anything I forget):
  1. The Republican legislature and Jeb Bush introduced the FCAT in order to track student “progress” ignoring the fact teachers are entirely capable of assessing their own students.
  2. The Republican legislature and Jeb Bush then started using FCAT results to grade schools, falsely equating low socioeconomic schools with “bad teaching.”
  3. The Republican legislature and Jeb Bush linked passing the third grade FCAT with retention and the 10th grade FCAT with high school graduation–despite research that clearly demonstrated this would be detrimental to students and communities.
  4. The Republican legislature and Jeb Bush linked school grades to money–awarding “A” schools with Continue Reading: Teacher Kim Cook on Andrew Gillum & saving Florida public education | The Edvocate Blog



The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high: Trends in the teacher wage and compensation gaps through 2017 | Economic Policy Institute

The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high: Trends in the teacher wage and compensation gaps through 2017 | Economic Policy Institute

The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high

Trends in the teacher wage and compensation gaps through 2017

Image result for The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high

Summary and key findings

Teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Colorado have raised the profile of deteriorating teacher pay as a critical public policy issue. Teachers and parents are protesting cutbacks in education spending and a squeeze on teacher pay that persist well into the economic recovery from the Great Recession. These spending cuts are not the result of weak state economies. Rather, state legislatures have enacted them to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. This paper underscores the crisis in teacher pay by updating our data series on the teacher pay penalty—the percent by which public school teachers are paid less than comparable workers.
This report was produced in collaboration with Center on Wage and Employment Dynamicsat the University of California, Berkeley.
Providing teachers with a decent middle-class living commensurate with other professionals with similar education is not simply a matter of fairness. Effective teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student educational performance.1 To ensure a high-quality teaching workforce, schools must retain experienced teachers and recruit high-quality students into the profession. Pay is an important component of retention and recruitment.
As noted in an earlier paper (Allegretto and Mishel 2016), retention and recruitment is a challenge as states struggle to return to pre-recession teacher levels. Every state headed into the 2017–2018 school year with teacher shortages (Strauss 2017) and new EPI research indicates the teacher shortages persist (Garcia forthcoming).
In their study of the teacher shortage in California, Darling-Hammond et al. point to a number of factors limiting the supply of teachers, from layoffs that “left a mark on the public psyche” to frozen salaries, declining working conditions, and increased class sizes. “One sign of the impact is that only 5 percent of the students in a recent survey of college-bound students were interested in pursuing a career in education, a decrease of 16 percent between 2010 and 2014,” the authors noted (Darling-Hammond et al. 2016, iii).
To address teacher shortages, it is necessary to focus on both recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers. Many policies are needed to accomplish this goal, and providing appropriate compensation is a necessary, major tool in addressing shortages:
Even if teachers may be more motivated by altruism than some other workers, teaching must compete with other occupations for talented college and university graduates.… Teachers are more likely to quit when they work in districts with lower wages and when their salaries are low relative to alternative wage opportunities, especially in high-demand fields like math and science. (Darling-Hammond et al. 2016, 18)
As we have shown in our more than a decade and a half of work on the topic, relativeteacher pay—teacher pay compared with the pay of other career opportunities for potential and current teachers—has been eroding for over a half a century. In How Does Teacher Pay Compare (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2004), we studied the long-term trends in teacher pay. We followed this up with The Teaching Penalty, published in 2008, and updated our findings in other papers (Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel 2011; Allegretto and Tojerow 2014; and Allegretto and Mishel 2016). As noted, this body of work has documented the relative erosion of teacher pay. For instance, female teachers enjoyed a wage premium in 1960, meaning they were paid more than comparably educated and experienced workers. By the early 1980s, the wage premium for female teachers became a penalty. The total compensation penalty (how much less teachers make in wages and benefits relative to comparable workers) has also increased.
Here we extend our analysis through 2017. Our examination of the teacher wage gap begins in 1979.2 Our examination of the teacher compensation penalty (combining wage and benefit data) begins in 1994, the earliest year for which teacher benefit data are available. With this update, we continue to sound the alarm regarding the long-run growth in the pay penalty. We also provide estimates of teacher wage penalties by state. Following are key highlights of the report:
The mid-1990s marks the start of a period of sharply eroding teacher pay and an escalating teacher pay penalty
  • Average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted for inflation) decreased $27 from 1996 to 2017, from $1,164 to $1,137 (in 2017 dollars). In contrast, weekly wages of other college graduates rose from $1,339 to $1,476 over this period.
  • For all public-sector teachers, the relative wage gap (regression-adjusted for education, experience, and other factors known to affect earnings) has grown substantially since the mid-1990s. The teacher wage penalty was 1.8 percent in 1994, grew to 4.3 percent in 1996, and reached a record 18.7 percent in 2017.
Wage penalties have grown significantly for both male and female teachers
  • The wage premium that female teachers had in the 1960s and 1970s has long been erased, replaced by a growing wage penalty. Our previous research found that female teachers earned 14.7 percent more in weekly wages than comparable female workers in 1960. This report finds that the teacher weekly wage premiumfor female teachers had fallen to 4.2 percent in 1979. And the wage premium for female teachers largely disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s, replaced by a large and growing wage penalty in the 2000s and 2010s. In 2017, female public school teachers were making 15.6 percent less in wages than comparable female workers.
  • The wage penalty for male teachers is much larger. The weekly wage penalty for male teachers was 22.1 percent in 1979 and improved to 15.1 percent in 1994, but worsened in the late 1990s into the early 2000s. In 2017, male public school teachers were making 26.8 percent less in wages than comparable male workers.
Improvements in benefits relative to professionals have not been enough to offset the growing teacher wage penalty






'I can't believe it's not a crime': Brnovich says lawmakers must pass charter school reforms - AZPM

Arizona AG: Lawmakers Must Pass Charter School Reforms - AZPM

'I can't believe it's not a crime': Brnovich says lawmakers must pass charter school reforms


PHOENIX — Arizona's attorney general is calling for legislation to lend more oversight to the state's charter schools in response to a recent investigation by The Arizona Republic into financial dealings at a major online school.

Mark Brnovich's remarks came after the Republic previously reported that Primavera online charter school, which has a dropout rate 10 times higher than the state average, paid Chief Executive Damian Creamer an $8.8 million shareholder distribution, The Arizona Republic reported.

The investigation also found Primavera accumulated a $36 million investment portfolio from its share of state education funds instead of using that money to pay teachers and reduce class sizes.
Brnovich, a Republican running for re-election in November, said he wants candidates for the Arizona Legislature to join him in pursuing charter school reform.
Ashley Berg, the Charter Board's executive director, called the board an "objective enforcement body" that operates "to implement the law as it exists and to ensure that all charter schools and charter operators follow those laws."
Despite numerous requests for Primavera online charter school to respond to questions, school officials provided no comment on The Republic's reporting before publication.
Primavera spokesman Jason Rose said last week that the $8.8 million distribution given to Creamer was used to pay current and projected state and federal income taxes associated with the company's profits.
Rose declined to disclose the profits that were used to calculate Creamer's tax liability, nor would he say if Creamer was using the distribution to pay taxes on income earned outside of Primavera.
Rose added that Primavera will use the state money it invested in recent years to start new charter schools in Arizona.
Current state law impedes Brnovich's office from fully investigating charter schools, said Brnovich, who has two daughters in charter schools. That's because the Legislature has exempted charter schools from procurement and conflict-of-interest laws that traditional district schools are subject to.
Brnovich said lawmakers should pass legislation that allows the state auditor general to investigate the finances of charter schools. Currently, the auditor general can investigate only traditional public schools. Charter schools receive up to $2,000 more in per-pupil state funding than district schools.
Brnovich also wants legislation that requires charter schools to segregate public funds from private funds in businesses related or tied to the charter school. Arizona permits for-profit businesses to own charter schools.
Arizona AG: Lawmakers Must Pass Charter School Reforms - AZPM




Leaked DeVos rules could trigger drastic changes in Columbia’s sexual assault policies - Columbia Daily Spectator

Leaked DeVos rules could trigger drastic changes in Columbia’s sexual assault policies - Columbia Daily Spectator

Leaked DeVos rules could trigger drastic changes in Columbia’s sexual assault policies



Updated September 6, 2018 at 10:34 a.m.
Newly proposed federal Title IX regulations could spark broad changes to Columbia policies governing sexual misconduct, bolstering the rights of the accused and making it difficult to bring a legal complaint against Columbia for its handling of investigations, according to legal experts.
If implemented, the policies could reduce victims’ legal ground for filing a complaint against Columbia, which currently faces the second highest number of Title IX investigations in the Ivy League. Consequently, anti-sexual assault activists worry that the new rules will make it more difficult to hold the University accountable through litigation.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ proposed policies, obtained and released in a New York Times report, delineate a higher threshold for what constitutes sexual harassment. They also hold schools accountable for formal complaints only if they are made to officials directly responsible for enforcing rules—meaning most advisers and student life employees, like residential advisers, would not be legally mandated reporters.
While the regulations do not mandate that universities change their policies, schools that do not will face more legal pushback from anyone accused of harassment, creating a deterrent for universities that don’t comply, according to Title IX expert Saundra Schuster.
In a statement to Spectator, Executive Vice President for University Life Suzanne Goldberg said that Columbia will review the proposed rules carefully when they are formally released, but encouraged all students to learn more about Columbia’s gender-based misconduct policy.
Columbia’s current sexual misconduct policies were first established during the Obama era, marking an effort to make Title IX resources more accessible. They use the “preponderance of the evidence” as a standard to find Continue reading: Leaked DeVos rules could trigger drastic changes in Columbia’s sexual assault policies - Columbia Daily Spectator