Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Has Obama Finally Rejected Austerity - and Will California Reject It Too? | California Progress Report

Has Obama Finally Rejected Austerity - and Will California Reject It Too?

Posted on 14 June 2010

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By Robert Cruickshank

It has become the most important political story of the year - the battle between the New Hoovers who demand austerity, and the rest of the world that understands we need prosperity instead of prolonged recession. So far the Obama Administration has been hard to pin down on this. They pushed hard to get the $787 billion stimulus done in early 2009, but made the stimulus too small to pull the nation out of recession for fear of asking for too much.

Since then, calls for austerity have grown louder. Some of this comes from wealthy folks like Pete Peterson spending a ton of money to push this messaging out to the public. Some comes from Austerity Democrats who do not understand how economies actually work. And some comes from the teabaggers, who as I explained are afraid deficit spending will undermine their privileges by being spent on nonwhite and poor people.

California has been suffering from the flaws of austerity since the summer of 2007. Budget cuts have merely worsened the recession and worsened the budget crisis, not solved it. Yet it would have been worse had the White House not won the stimulus

Has Obama Finally Rejected Austerity - and Will California Reject It Too? *By Robert Cruickshank* It has become the most important political story of the year - the battle between the New Hoovers who demand austerity, and the rest of the world that understands we need prosperity instead of prolonged recession. So far the ...

What Really Happened In 2004? *By Sam Gold* *National Organization of Injured Workers* First of all let's get something straight; there was no reform of Workers' Compensation, period! Call it whatever you want, but don't you dare call it a reform! The word "reform" is defined in ...

Electing Equality: Voters Chose LGBT and Pro-LGBT Candidates at the Polls *By Chris Moore* Equality California Last night's elections were invigorating! The outcomes are generally very favorable for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Californians and could prove to be history making. There are, however, some dangerous

Virtual Cream Skimming � The Quick and the Ed

Virtual Cream Skimming

by Rob Manwaring

After reading Bill Tucker’s proposal on virtual school funding, it made me think of my own experience in the pre-virtual world, and testing out of a subject. When I was in high school, and was given the option to test out of senior government, I jumped at the chance. I bought a two-sided cheat sheet at the junior college with the basics of civics and government, and spent one weekend of prep. I passed the test, fulfilled my government requirement, and freed up some space in my senior year schedule. This was great for me, but I wonder if it would have been a good investment of tax dollars if someone had received funding for the educational services that were provided to me (i.e. none).
Bill proposes to fund virtual schools on a performance basis instead of an attendance basis. Basically if a student passes a test at the end of the virtual term (however long that may be), then the school gets paid. So, under Bill’s virtual school funding proposal, virtual schools – public and private – would get paid for a similar type of service provision that I received in testing out of senior government.
Assume that the state was paying public and private companies based on student outcomes. Both entities would target their marketing at students like me that could pass the test with almost no effort on their part. In my

This Week In Education: Thompson: The Growing Culture Of Dishonesty

Crunchtime: What Schools Are REALLY Doing To Save Money

by Alexander Russo

Despite what you may have heard, there are lots of other things that schools can (and are) doing to save money besides laying teachers off:

Four day weeks are

Thompson: The Growing Culture Of Dishonesty

by john thompson

A-Russ, "a hard man to please," wasn't satisfied with the six investigations listed by the New York Times of the pattern of cheating that always grows during test-driven accountability regimes. Valerie Strauss cites a seventh, where an assistant principal who was hired at the turned around Central Falls High School, misstated test growth at his old school in his resume. Rather than use the word "cheating," I would

Quote: "It's The Teachers' Turn"

by Alexander Russo

"You could argue that it’s the teachers’ turn to absorb some of the pain that they have been spared to date." -- Charles Lane, Washington Post

Pictures: Talk To The Hand (In Chicago)

by Alexander Russo

Meet Karen Lewis, the feisty science teacher who just won the race to head the Chicago Teachers Union.

Beyond Bubble Tests and Bake Sales: Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks at the 114th Annual National PTA Convention | U.S. Department of Education

Beyond Bubble Tests and Bake Sales: Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks at the 114th Annual National PTA Convention

JUNE 11, 2010

Thank you. It's an honor to speak to the nation's oldest and largest volunteer child advocacy organization.

Ever since Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst founded what would become the PTA in 1897, the PTA has led the fight to improve the education and health of our nation's children. We take many of the PTA's successful campaigns for granted today, from installing sprinklers and fire alarms in schools, to mandatory immunization of children, to the creation of kindergarten classes and hot lunch programs.

Yet it is easy to forget how hard-fought many of those struggles were—and just how profoundly parental involvement has altered the landscape of public schools over the last century. When Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Heart first formed the National Congress of Mothers, they did so at a time when women could not vote and were not supposed to speak out about education. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the merger of the National PTA and the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers—a pointed reminder of the decades-long shame of segregated schools that echoes to this day in Memphis and elsewhere.

I want to suggest to you today that it is time for the PTA to take the lead again in preparing students to compete in the 21st century. President Obama has set an ambitious goal for the nation. He wants America to again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. That goal is the North Star for all of our education efforts. To reach it, the college degree attainment rate must rise from 40 percent to 60 percent. President Obama and I are convinced we have to educate our way to a better economy.

We will not attain the 2020 goal by doing what we are doing now--only just a little bit better. Our educational system needs transformational change. To achieve that transformational change, parents and educators need to start thinking beyond the limited vision of student achievement and family engagement that have often defined education reform in the past.

It is time to think beyond assessing students with narrowly-focused bubble tests. It is time to think beyond the bake sale- barometer in promoting parental involvement. And it is time to think beyond the focus on math and English alone, and give every child a well-rounded education. We must stop narrowing the curriculum. Our children need—and deserve—so much more.

My hope is that PTAs around the nation can be leaders in pressing for higher standards, better assessments, for a richer vision of parental involvement, and for a well-rounded curriculum.

Will the Department of Education Crack Down on For-Profit Colleges? | Center for Media and Democracy

Will the Department of Education Crack Down on For-Profit Colleges?

Submitted by Ross Wolfarth on June 14, 2010 - 11:39am.

On every TV channel, commercials for schools like DeVry and the University of Phoenix blare promises of better-paying jobs. Every year over a million Americans respond to these sales pitches. All too often these students receive tens of thousands of dollars in debt and very little else. TheDepartment of Education was expected last week to release new “gainful employment” regulations that would limit the ability of such for-profit colleges to charge exorbitant prices for illusory job gains. Now it seems that the Obama administration is wavering in the face of aggressive industry lobbying. For-profit education is big business in America, and big business means political clout.

How For-Profit Colleges Work (Or Don't Work)

As the resources of public four-year and community colleges have been pushed to their limits by state budget cuts and rising demand, for-profit career colleges have taken up much of the slack. Yet the performance of some of these institutions is shady given their high costs. According to the College Entrance Examination Board, graduates of for-profit colleges leave school with an average of $29,500 in debt, almost three times as much as graduates of four-year public colleges. According to a recent New York Times article, for-profit college graduates account for 44% of student loan defaults, despite constituting only seven percent of the overall student population.

For-profit colleges earn money not on tuition paid directly by students, but through federal grants and federal student loan programs. Last year 86% of the revenue of the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, came from federal sources. In February of this year, the Department of Education proposed surprisingly stringent regulations cracking down on schools that leave students with a lot of debt and only a little employability. Under the “gainful employment” regulations, colleges would be ineligible for federal student aid if the debt load of graduates could not be repaid with eight percent

Turning the Page for Change celebration! Notes from the news, June 15 | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Notes from the news, June 15 | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Notes from the news, June 15

by Erika Owens

Please join us at our 7th annual Turning the Page for Change celebration!

Microsoft's Philly high school traveled rocky road AP via The Inquirer
School of the Future graduates its first class this year, which has inspired a look back and the challenges and opportunities at the tech-centric, project-based school.

See also: School of Future: High on tech, low on basics? Daily News

Social justice slate sweeps to victory in the Chicago Teachers Union The Notebook blog
In a move that should inspire and challenge social justice teacher activists, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators won leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union.

Philadelphia's young lag in military readiness, study finds The Inquirer
How to address this lag? Retired servicepeople urge increases in education funding, with a focus on early chilldhood education.

For students in foster care, a hard-won graduation WHYY
Arise Academy, a charter school for foster kids, graduated its first class this year.

Olney High Program Gives Students 'Healthy' Perspective KYW
St. Christopher Children's Hospital runs a program that exposes Olney High students to health careers.

Lenfest Foundation, Peco give to Philadelphia Education Fund Philadelphia Business Journal

PhillyInc: Study: More jobs will require higher education The Inquirer

Please email us if we missed anything today or if you have any suggestions of publications, email lists, or other places for us to check for news.

Click here to get Notes from the news in your inbox every day.

Notes from the news

Should it be illegal to skip parent-teacher conferences? Proposal draws mixed reaction | MLive.com

Should it be illegal to skip parent-teacher conferences? Proposal draws mixed reaction

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy believes parents need to be involved in the education process, and she thinks they should be punished if they aren't.

Worthy, pointing to a relationship between truancy and parental involvement, wants to make it illegalfor parents in Wayne County to miss scheduled parent-teacher conferences.

In a statement released yesterday, she clarified that under the ordinance she is developing parents would only be punished if they failed to attend at least one conference:

June 14, MyFoxDetroit: At this time we are in the exploratory phase of a creating a countywide ordinance that would make it a violation for any parent or guardian who fails to go to at least one parent-teacher conference during the school year. Some parents or guardians never set foot in a school. I would like to look at this as an incentive to encourage those responsible to take and active interest in their children's education. The thrust of my proposal is not to lock parents or guardian up; that would be done only as a last resort.

I have seen that younger and younger children are committing more violent acts and we need to look at different approaches. I know we need to try something different. We should not have to legislate this, but what we have been doing is not working.

While Worthy's idea hinges on coercion, she's not the first to propose incentives to boost parental involvement or student achievement in local schools.

The Detroit Public Schools announced last week it will give away a total of $25,000 in Target gift cards to parents who provide up-to-date contact information for future communications. And State Sen. Hansen Clarke (D-Detroit) recently re-introduced legislation that would encourage struggling schools to offer privately-funded cash incentives to students who improve their grades.

Worthy has acknowledged her plan will be controversial, and early reaction has confirmed that expectation:

Rick Naughton, superintendent of Huron Schools, told Michigan Radio that legal action is not the way to get parents involved. "I think there's probably more creative things we can do as a school district than going to that level. I just don't want to get into an adversarial relationship

The Education Report Portraits of inspiration at MLK Elementary

The Education Report

Portraits of inspiration at MLK Elementary

By Katy Murphy
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 6:30 am in buildings, elementary schools
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new mural at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. Courtesy photo

Local artist Jamie Morgan worked with fourth- and fifth-grade students at West Oakland’s Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School to create a new mural around the entrance. It’s titled ”We Have a Dream,” a tribute to the school’s namesake and

A student’s MTA protest yields to broader education critique | GothamSchools

A student’s MTA protest yields to broader education critique

by Elizabeth Green

Jaritza Geigel, a student organizer with Make the Road New York and the Urban Youth Collaborative, led a walkout to protest cuts to student subway access.

As part of a blog post about the walkout for EdVox, Jaritza also added this overall sense of the state of education in the city:

We are done having Mayor Bloomberg close down schools, which only increase over-crowding; we are done having funds removed overnight from our schools; we are done seeing valuable teachers

Sacramento Press / Sacramento: Child removal capital of California

Sacramento: Child removal capital of California

by Richard Wexler

Sacramento is now California’s capital in more ways than one.Data released today by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform show that Sacramento County is the child removal capital of California.
Among the state’s larger counties, Sacramento County takes away proportionately more children than any other, when the number of children taken away is compared to the number of impoverished children in each county. Sacramento takes children at a rate nearly double the average for these counties.
NCCPR released its latest California Rate of Removal Index Monday. It’s available on our website here.
The Index shows that in recent years, much of California has made remarkable progress in reducing the trauma of needless foster care and making children safer. But that hasn’t happened in Sacramento. And while progress is threatened everywhere by budget cuts, in Sacramento County, progress also is threatened by the take-the-child-and-run mentality that makes all children less safe.
(NCCPR’s ranking of counties factors in child poverty because we believe it is the fairest way to compare county performance. But when entries are compared to total child population, Sacramento County still performs atrociously, with the second worst rate of removal, only slightly better than Imperial County).

Improvements, Challenges in Chicago's Teacher Evaluation System - Teacher Beat - Education Week

Improvements, Challenges in Chicago's Teacher Evaluation System

by Stephen Sawchuk

Results from year one of a pilot teacher-evaluation system in Chicago show a much broader range of ratings under the new system than under the district's existing one, with at least 8 percent of pre-tenured teachers receiving at least one "unsatisfactory" rating, according to a new paper out from the Consortium on Chicago School Research. (The Web link isn't up yet. I will post it as soon as it is available.)
Although Chicago is not the only district putting a new teacher-evaluation system in place, it is certainly one of the few that's paying a lot of attention to implementation, studying it, and documenting the results. The system, based on Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, was rolled out in 44 schools in 2008-09 and expanded to 100 in 2009-10. The data here is from the first year of implementation and used "matched" observations to determine whether an administrator and external observer gave the same rating.
According to the data, over a third of teachers received all "proficient" or "distinguished" scores from their principals on the various strands of the observation framework, and about a third received a mix of "basic" and "proficient" scores.
Consistency among the parties performing the teacher observations was high in the aggregate, but less so on individual strands of the evaluations and in terms of outliers. For instance, at the high end of the ratings scale, principals were more likely than observers to give the highest rating of "distinguished" versus a rating of

This Week In Education: AM News: Budget Cuts, Lackluster Performance

AM News: Budget Cuts, Lackluster Performance

by Alexander Russo

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Schools Hit by Deep Budget Cuts Face a Tough New Math Wall Street Journal: As the school year winds down, educators are grasping for new ways to do more with less, and to remedy an embarrassing reality: Despite spending more per student than the average developed country, U.S. schools perform below average in core subjects such as math and reading... Duncan Courts State Lawmakers on Reform Agenda EdWeek: "Performance pay for teachers didn't fly at all with this group," said Ms. King, who is a member of the National Conference of State Legislatures. "But it's good the department met with us.".. DPS chief donates bonuses, raise Ed News Colorado: Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg has donated his raise and bonuses – worth $47,707 – to the DPS foundation to launch an employee-giving campaign... Race to Top Buy-In Level Examined EdWeek: States increased the amount of support from local teachers' unions in their applications for the second round of stimulus grants, but made far less progress in enlisting districts or expanding the number of students affected by the education reform plans... Papers Hint at High Court Nominee's Policy Thinking EdWeek: As one of President Clinton's domestic policy advisers, Elena Kagan sometimes weighed in on education issues.

Quote: "It's The Teachers' Turn" * [image: Quotes2] "You could argue that it’s the teachers’ turn to absorb some of the pain that they have been spared to date."* -- Charles Lane, Washington Post

Pictures: Talk To The Hand (In Chicago) Meet Karen Lewis, the feisty science teacher who just won the race to head the Chicago Teachers Union. Lewis defeated Marilyn Stewart, who ran the union during most of the Duncan era and infamously (to many of her members) allowed the Board to ...

Schools Hit by Deep Budget Cuts Face a Tough New Math - WSJ.com

Schools Face Test on Budget Math

By MARK WHITEHOUSE And AMY MERRICK

DOWNE TOWNSHIP, N.J.—For seventh-grader Kyle Scarpa, budget strains affecting schools across the country are hitting where it hurts.

A Race to the Top?

View Slideshow

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Jason Andrew for the Wall Street Journal

Kyle Scarpa in his bedroom in Newport, NJ.

In the wake of the worst recession in more than half a century, many communities find themselves with no choice but to cut funding for education. In Downe Township, N.J., the cuts are hitting where it hurts.

In addition to freezing wages and jettisoning its librarian, the school he attends here in southern New Jersey will cancel his after-school remedial math and literacy classes. His teacher believes the tutoring helped him build confidence and get his average grade up to a C from a D.

"He could fall through the cracks," says teacher Rose Garrison, noting that Kyle is among four kids in her class having trouble keeping up. "When you're teaching exponents and you have kids who don't know the multiplication tables, how are you going to teach them?"

The struggles at Downe Township School illustrate the challenges public schools face across America as a convergence of factors—ravaged state and local finances, tapped-out taxpayers and a reform push by the Obama administration—force wrenching change. As the school year winds down, educators are grasping for new ways to do more with less, and to

Tuesday, June 15, 2010