Boston: Falling Enrollment Forces Charter Chain to Retrench | Diane Ravitch's blog

Boston: Falling Enrollment Forces Charter Chain to Retrench | Diane Ravitch's blog

Boston: Falling Enrollment Forces Charter Chain to Retrench

The celebrated Boston charter City on a Hill is closing one of its schools and imposing budget cuts at another due to falling enrollments.

Once a shining star in the Boston charter school world, City on a Hill Charter School is facing a massive financial crisis, prompting trustees on Monday to enact a series of dramatic budget cuts: It will lay off 23 teachers, administrators, and other staffers at its Roxbury and New Bedford campuses and will close the New Bedford campus in June.

“This is a really difficult decision and we don’t take it lightly,” said Cara Stillings-Candal, chair of the trustees in an interview following their Monday morning board meeting. “We wouldn’t have made these decisions if it wasn’t in the best interest of families and students.”

The sweeping budget cuts represent the latest turbulent turn for the nearly 25-year-old charter school, which has been struggling with high leadership turnover, lackluster academic performance, and financial woes. Earlier this year, state officials placed the New Bedford campus on probation, and a year earlier teachers at all three sites unionized, a rarity for independent charter schools, which place a premium on operational autonomy.

The severity of this fall’s financial crisis emerged after CONTINUE READING: Boston: Falling Enrollment Forces Charter Chain to Retrench | Diane Ravitch's blog

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Voucher Bill Still A Threat

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Voucher Bill Still A Threat

PA: Voucher Bill Still A Threat

Pennsylvania House Speaker and Betsy DeVos fanboy Mike Turzai has suffered a momentary setback in his drive to use Harrisburg schools as a launching pad for a PA voucher program, but he reportedly has not given up.

HB 1800 targets the ailing school district at a point where it has only recently been placed in financial receivership under the control of a state-appointed overseer. One might think that the legislature might take a minute or two to see if their Plan A is going to work, but Turzai smells an opportunity, and he's willing to be the guy who runs into the operating room five minutes after the start of a critical operation and hollers, "She's gonna die anyway-- let me have some of those organs."

The PA Auditor General has weighed in, pointing out that the bill would "bleed out" the district. This is particularly true because the bill would actually award vouchers to students who live in the Harrisburg district, but have never actually attended public school. For those families, the vouchers would be a tasty little windfall. For the district, the vouchers would mean that the district would lose a mountain of money before their enrollment dropped by a single student.

The bill has plenty of other lousy features. It CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Voucher Bill Still A Threat

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Thanks and Best Wishes

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Thanks and Best Wishes

Thanks and Best Wishes

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

T.S. Eliot

“Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.” 

Gandhi

"Thank you for listening. Thank you for abiding me. And now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, I bid you goodbye and take my leave."

Frank Deford

Seattle Schools Community Forum: People To Thank - https://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2019/12/people-to-thank.html

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Last Resources - https://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2019/12/last-resources.html

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Thanks and Best Wishes

Dividing Fractions Directly and Other Things We Can't Unknow | The Jose Vilson

Dividing Fractions Directly and Other Things We Can't Unknow | The Jose Vilson

DIVIDING FRACTIONS DIRECTLY AND OTHER THINGS WE CAN’T UNKNOW

“Last year, we learned to keep-flip-change …”

She sees my face wince, but proceeds anyways.

“The way that goes is you keep the original fraction, change the division to multiplication, and then flip the second fraction.”

“OK, but why does it work?”

Shrug.

“Who else learned it this way?”

About three-fourths of the room raises their hand. (The other fourth still seemed to struggle with dividing fractions. More later.)

“OK, out of those of you who learned it this way, why does this work?”

I get a few “because the teacher said so”‘s, “because it just works,” “because I did well on the test” and just kept shaking my head gently while listening. Sure, the easy thing to do at that moment would have been to punch down (metaphorically, people) and tell them that their last teacher was wrong for unveiling a trick without giving them the magic behind it. The harder conversation was sitting right CONTINUE READING: Dividing Fractions Directly and Other Things We Can't Unknow | The Jose Vilson

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION + ICYMI: Deer Season Edition (12/1)

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Deer Season Edition (12/1)

ICYMI: Deer Season Edition (12/1)

Yes, it may be Thanksgiving weekend where you are, but in my neck of the woods, schools are closed tomorrow for the first day of deer season. Don't knock it if you haven't eaten some excellent deer baloney. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week

School District's Computer Servers Hacked

Sign of the times. This one was in New Jersey. One more reminder of the vulnerability of school data systems.

Betsy DeVos Gives Defrauded Students The Back of Her Hand    

Over at The Hill they've noticed that DeVos is not exactly racing to help students drowning in debt incurred at frauduversities. Fun detail I hadn't previously seen in coverage of this-- when DeVos signed off on claims already approved, she added "with extreme displeasure" below her signature. What a sweetheart.

Teachers Effects On Student Achievement and Height  

This is just awesome. Researchers took a look to see what happened if you used VAM to check on which teachers had the best effect on student height. Turns out VAM is just as valid for that purpose as it is for measuring teacher effect on test scores. A great addition to everyone's VAM is a sham file.

Research Center's Leadership Professional Development Program Had No Impact. Why?

In a shocking development, yet another set of PD stuff turns out to be largely useless (I know-- I'm shocked, to). Peter DeWitt at EdWeek asks what the problem might be.

Vouchers Explode In Ohio

Stephen Dyer at 10th Period takes a look at how Ohio charter vampires are upping their blood intake to even more dangerous levels.

i-Ready Sells 50-Year-Old Education Failure  

Thomas Ultican has a thoroughly researched look at all the reasons i-Ready is a snare and a delusion. A great read (and not just because he included me).

Kindergarten Teachers Speak Ot For Children's Happiness

Peter Gray at Psychology Today reminding us, again, that pushing academics on the littles is not doing anybody any good.

Ed Tech Agitprop  

Audrey Watters is freakin' awesome. Here's the text of a recent speech she delivered about the stories that ed tech pushers use to sell their junk. A must read.

When the Teachers Are Avatars and the Students Are Data  

Wrench in the Gears traveled to Seattle to speak about some of the threats hiding behind the tech revolution in education.

Trust Issues for Billionaires

David Dawkins at Forbes identifies one of the many longterm problems that come with the rise of our philanthropist kings.

Murmuration: Emma Bloomberg's Obscure Nonprofit    

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has been digging again, and she's found another project messing with education being funded by Michael Bloomberg's daughter.

CURMUDGUCATION: ICYMI: Deer Season Edition (12/1)

CATCH UP WITH CURMUDGUCATION

AND DON'T FORGET PETER GREENE ON FORBES CLICK HERE 

TX: Bigotry In The Classroom

by Peter Greene / 54min

This is a troubling story, for several reasons. Georgia Clark was an English teacher in the Fort Worth Independent School District, a district with over 80% Hispanic student population. Clark sent a message to Donald Trump, asking him to do something about all the illegal [sic] immigrant students. Her request included charming lines like "anything you can do to remove the illegals from Fort Worth

YESTERDAY

Ed Tech Giant Powerschool Keeps Eating the World

200+by Peter Greene / 23h

If you want to be a tech giant, you can try to grow organically within your company, or you can just look for companies that are already doing what you want to do, and buy them. Some are better than the strategy than others-- Facebook absorbed Instagram well enough, but Google seems to kill everything it touches . Back in the day, PowerSchool was a simple little program for taking care of classroo

NOV 29

CO: READ Didn't Work. Quick, Call A Consultant!

100+by Peter Greene / 1d

In 2012, Colorado joined the list of states whose legislators don't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Colorado passed the READ Act , "born out of convincing research by a variety of sources...that shows students who cannot read by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school." That's an interesting, possibly valuable correlation. But to ar

NOV 28

Be Grateful

100+by Peter Greene / 2d

It's ironic, with a very American sort of irony, that we have a national holiday about thankfulness and gratitude, because we are kind of lousy at that whole thankfulness and gratitude thing. We're more attracted to the self-made story, the I-pulled-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps story, the story that in this country, anyone can get ahead with grit, virtue and hard work (and if you haven't gotten

NOV 27

AI: Bad Data, Bad Results

57by Peter Greene / 3d

Once upon a time, when you took computer programming courses, you had two things drilled into you: 1) Computers are dumb. Fast and indefatigable, but dumb. 2) Garbage in, garbage out. The rise of artificial intelligence is supposed to make us forget both of those things. It shouldn't. It especially shouldn't in fields like education which are packed with cyber-non-experts and far too many people w

Finn And Hess Accidentally Argue For Teacher Tenure

69by Peter Greene / 4d

Chester Finn (honcho emeritus, Fordham Institute) and Rick Hess (AEI education guy) are concerned about the threat of rampant wokeness , particularly in the reformster universe. And they are not afraid to exercise some strenuous prose in service of the point: School reformers have long seen themselves as plucky champions of change. Today, however, as funders and advocacy groups chant from a common

NOV 26

TN: Doubling Down On Bad Reading Policy

80by Peter Greene / 5d

Among the worst policy ideas of the past decades, we have to count third grade reading retention laws. These laws can sometimes give schools a brief bump in test scores, but the consequences for actual human students are not good . And some folks in Tennessee have decided that more of a bad idea would be super. Why tell a eight or nine year old child that they failed third grade, even though they

NOV 24

ICYMI: Good Lord Is Thanksgiving Really Next Week Edition (11/24)

by Peter Greene / 7d

I find that in retirement holidays sort of sneak up on me. I suppose it's because I'm not exposed to the daily reminders from students and the school calendar. Mostly I like it, but sometimes I'm surprised. In the meantime, here are some 

CURMUDGUCATION - http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/

Learning From The Historic Gains We Won In The Chicago Teachers Strike | PopularResistance.Org

Learning From The Historic Gains We Won In The Chicago Teachers Strike | PopularResistance.Org

LEARNING FROM THE HISTORIC GAINS WE WON IN THE CHICAGO TEACHERS STRIKE

As a Chicago Public Schools (CPS) student from first grade through high school, and in my 17 years of teaching in the system, none of my schools ever had a full-time social worker or nurse every day of the week.

In the first contract the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) secured in the era of legalized public sector bargaining, in 1967, the language states: “a plan shall be devised to make available to teacher nurses a list of vacancies to which they may indicate their desire to transfer.” That language, providing no firm guarantee of staffing ratios, remained virtually unchanged for half a century. All subsequent contracts until 2019 include no references to bilingual education, dedicated staff and resources for our homeless students, case manager positions for our diverse learner population, sanctuary language to protect undocumented students from ICE, living wages for our lowest-paid paraprofessional members, or a dedicated article on early childhood education. Now, that’s all changed.

After 52 years of struggle, and an 11-day citywide strike, we were finally able to secure these critical demands—and more. We won 180 case-manager positions, 20 English language program teachers, full-time staff for homeless students, up to $35 million to lower excessive class size and even nap time for our little ones. This dedicated effort to win seminal staffing supports and educational justice for CPS students did not happen overnight—it’s been a long and protracted fight for the schools they deserve.

During the lead up to the 2019 strike, the editorial pages of the two major CONTINUE READING: Learning From The Historic Gains We Won In The Chicago Teachers Strike | PopularResistance.Org