Adult education programs were hard-hit by changes in spending rules for school districts struggling to keep basic operations going during California's budget crisis, according to a new study released Thursday.
The spending mandates for formerly required programs, such as adult education, ended when the state slashed targeted funding for them by 20% in 2009, while also approving steep cuts to basic education dollars.
Local school officials took advantage of new-found flexibility by reducing spending on suddenly optional offerings by well more than 20%.
Eight of the 10 school districts in the study “reduced adult education programs, often sharply,” wrote the researchers.
“Spending on core instructional materials, including textbooks, was also reduced in the majority of districts," the report stated. "Special instructional activities for gifted and talented students were
The 2001 signing of the PATRIOT Act marked the beginning of a “temporary” and unofficial state of emergency for the American people. During this state of emergency our liberties, privacy, and due process would all be sacrificed in order for us to wage war on terrorism at home and abroad.
Now Congress is poised to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, and a handful of senators concerned about the government’s ongoing overreach are attempting to at the very least slow the process down and make the law more transparent.
Rand Paul (R-KY) has been one of the fiercest critics of the Act in the senate, and yet it appears that Senate
#privatemonepublicschools Here's a handy-dandy little crib sheet for the Gates Foundation's $78 million one-year advocacy spend, based on Sam Dillon's NYT article and the accompanying documents, ranked from
Forty Senate Republicans have now joined their colleagues in the House to support Paul Ryan’s plan that would turn Medicare into vouchers that funnel money to private health insurers. They thumbed their nose at the special election in upstate New York earlier this week that delivered a victory to Democrat Kathy Hochul, who made the plan the focus of her upset victory.
So now it’s official. The 2012 campaign will be about the future of Medicare. (Yes, it will also be about jobs, but the Republicans haven’t come up with any credible ideas on that front, and the Democrats seem incapable of doing what needs to be done.)
This spells trouble for the GOP. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans — even a majority of Republican voters — want to preserve Medicare. They don’t want to turn it over to private insurers.
It would be one thing if Republicans had consistency on their side. At least then they could take the high road
The Big Picture: Privatizing Education (Part One of Three)
By Kristin
The “education reform” sweeping the nation right now isn’t reform at all. It’s privatization and deregulation. This three-part article explains what privatization is and who benefits from it. The forthcoming Part Two will explain the strategy being used, and Part Three will show how the different aspects of “education reform” work together as a process — and how it can be stopped!
Part One: An Introduction to Privatization
Since the 1800s, public education has been free and available to everyone. It held the promise that allowed people to strive for equal education and equal opportunity for everyone. But there is now a strong push to privatize every element of our public education system, including our schools, teachers, and curriculum. By the time my children graduate high school, will it still be universally available? Will it even be called “public education” any more?
The parents, teachers, and students who support public education can fight privatization through widespread, coordinated, and sustained opposition.
But there’s one big obstacle standing in the way of this opposition: the process is big, complicated, and sneaky.
A few days ago, I posted my concerns regarding the contorted logic of the Brookings report on evaluating teacher evaluation systems. More recently, NEPC posted a slightly revised version of that blog post here:http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Passing%20muster%20fails%20muster.pdf
Below is an addition to the NEPC version which was not in my original post, but rather, a comment I had made in response to a comment in my post.
The awkward issue here is that this brief and calculator are prepared by a truly exceptional group of scholars, and not just reform-minded pundits. It strikes me that we technocrats have started to fall for our own contorted logic – that the available metric is the true measure – and the quality of all else can only be evaluated against that measure. We’ve become myopic in our analysis, and we’ve forgotten all of the technical caveats of our own work, simply assuming the
technical caveats of any/all alternatives to be far greater.Beyond all of that, I fear that technicians working within the political arena are deferring judgment
Dear Diane,
"They never had a formal education, and they don't understand the value of education," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently said of the poor. "The old Norman Rockwell family is gone."
Bloomberg got properly chastised for these words, but they get at the heart of the matter. We have a heritage of disrespect for the poor. Either they don't know what they're doing or they deserve what they get. (While we insist on bragging about our rags-to-riches family histories to prove the latter.)
Meanwhile, over the past 100 years we have raised the bar from a few years of schooling to a high school degree and now a bachelor's degree. If you can't do it, well, you had your chance. Its value? It's measurable to dollars and cents in your pocket. Yes, Siena College always knew better, Diane.
At the same time, the gap between the poor and rich has grown exponentially, and the amount that's inheritable has grown apace. And, the odds of running into each other in the grocery store, the post office, or at a local meeting—ala Rockwell—has grown ever more remote.
Jerome Torres is the former senior policy analyst for the San Diego Unified school board. He is a consultant for San Diegans 4 Great Schools, which is campaigning for a makeover in how the school board is chosen. Torres is the first in a series of guest bloggers I'm hosting at Schooledthis week to talk about the achievement gap for Latino students in San Diego; check back tomorrow and later this week for more perspectives. These are his views, not mine or those of voiceofsandiego.org. Comments? Questions? You can contact Jerome at jotorres22@msn.com or just post a comment on the blog.
The continuing failure of San Diego Unified School District to address the needs of its largest and growing population is growing into a crisis.
Today, Latino students comprise 46 percent of the total student population — 61,000 strong. Addressing the prevailing academic achievement gap between Latino students and their white counterparts has evolved from a moral imperative to an economic one. We are literally risking the future viability of the greater San Diego region if we don't
From her “Sacrificed for Charters” (March 31, 2010), did you know: “Special Education students are falling victim to the fierce battle to find space for charter schools inside city school buildings. . . . At eight of the 15 buildings making room next year (2011), at least a quarter of the students are special education or seriously disabled. . . . For these vulnerable kids, the space crunch may mean less one-on-one instruction, therapy sessions in the back of the classroom, and cramped
Any discussion of education philanthropy is incomplete without mention of the “New Big
by Frederick M. Hess • May 26, 2011 at 9:40 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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I was disappointed by the page one New York Times story on the Gates Foundation that my friend, NYTreporter Sam Dillon, penned last Sunday. The much-discussed, rather critical account on the Gates Foundation's role in K-12 schooling, is something I would've expected to like, but I found the treatment of my own contribution to reflect a broader problem with the storyline.
I went back and forth on whether to address it. But given that the article, by zooming in on Gates, masked larger questions about the dynamics of edu-philanthropy, I figured it might be worth clarifying the larger point. After hearing from a number of individuals who clearly thought I meant something other than what I said, I decided, "What the heck."
A crucial point in the NYT story was the contention that the Gates Foundation is (cue Dr. Evil finger-to-lip gesture) scheming to influence education policy, and that they're alternately buying up or intimidating
Is it possible that the US has been heading in the wrong direction for most of the 30 years it has been focused on school reform? That’s the conclusion a reader of “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” would be hard pressed not to draw. The paper, written largely by Marc Tucker of the National Center for Education and the Economy, contrasts the approaches taken by five high performing (but quite different) entities — Toronto, Japan, Norway, Shanghai and Singapore — with what we have been doing here.
You can read the paper here.
The essential message: those places aren’t doing any of the stuff we have focused on — charter schools, alternate certification, small classes and pay for performance, to name a few of our ‘magic bullets.’ Instead, they have developed comprehensive systems: their teachers are drawn from the top of the class, are trained carefully and, if hired, are paid like other professionals. They spend more on the children who are the toughest to educate, they diagnose and intervene at the first sign of trouble, they expect their best teachers to work in the toughest schools, and they expect all students to achieve at
The tragedy for our all our children may be that once the Humpty Dumpty of public education falls and is shattered it may never be put back together. -- Edie Shanker
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