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Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Ohio: Where Theft of Public Money is OK | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ohio: Where Theft of Public Money is OK | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Ohio: Where Theft of Public Money is OK



Bill Phillis, former deputy Commissioner of Education in Ohio, runs the Equity and Adequacy Coalition.
Highway robbery is legal in the Ohio charter industry
The charter industry has been largely deregulated from the beginning. The charter promoters and operators have had unrestrained freedom to use public money recklessly and dumb down educational opportunities for children. This industry is not a part of the common school system but it is a bloated parasite extracting valuable resources from the public system.
It is legal or not illegal in Ohio’s charter industry:
For a for-profit charter school company to hold title to real estate, furniture, equipment and other tangible assets that were purchased with public money
For a charter school board to pay a company allied with their for-profit management company $700,000 per year rent to house 150 students
For a charter school of 600 students to pay $185,000 in year for marketing and promotion
For an online charter school operator to siphon off funds set aside to educate students to operate other private companies that personally benefit the charter operator
For a charter operation to help subsidize a worldwide religious movement
For charter school board members to serve without being a citizen of the United States
For non-profit charter sponsors and charter school boards to pay outrageously high salaries and benefits that would not be tolerated in the public common school system
For a person with no training or experience in education to operate a charter school
For the presence of nepotism and contractual relationships that would not be tolerated in the public common school system
For a charter operator to buy legislation via obscene levels of political contributions
For charters to spend unlimited amounts of funds on marketing and promotion
For charter operators to operate in the dark and be shielded from public exposure regarding illegal activities
The list goes on and on…
Children in public school districts are being robbed of educational opportunities by the transfer of more than $7 billion from districts to the failed charter industry over the past 15 years; yet, state officials allow this fraud on the public to go on and on and on.
Under pressure from the public, the 131st General Assembly passed legislation that will rein in some of the abuse now authorized by law. But big money from the charter industry, ineptitude of the Ohio Department of Education and the $71 million federal grant to expand charters will work together to fatten this failed industry.
The only hope is for the public common school community and advocates to band together to demand the end of this debacle that has utterly failed.
William Phillis
Ohio E & A
Ohio E & A | 100 S. 3rd Street | Columbus | OH | 43215
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PSAT score delay spells more bad news for Connecticut SAT mandate - Wait What?

PSAT score delay spells more bad news for Connecticut SAT mandate - Wait What?:

PSAT score delay spells more bad news for Connecticut SAT mandate
Connecticut high school juniors and their parents – LOOK OUT!
The new Connecticut state mandate that all 11th graders take the NEW SAT this coming March is getting more absurd by the day.
Last spring, in the face of mounting opposition to the unfair, inappropriate and discriminatory Common Core Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test, Governor Dannel Malloy and the Connecticut General Assembly made decision to drop the Common Core SBAC test mandate for high school juniors (while keeping it in place for grades 3-8), and mandating, instead, that all 11th graders take the new Common Core SAT as part of their junior year requirements.
The decision to use the NEW Common Core SAT will extremely ill-conceived.
The Malloy administration then quickly signed a multi-million deal with the College Board to provide the NEW SAT to all high school juniors, promising that this requirement would open the doors for more students to go to college.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
The scam was a farce from the beginning.
The truth is that the NEW SAT is being rolled out for the first time this March.  No student, teacher or school administrator has ever seen the new version of the test and it certainly isn’t aligned to Connecticut’s 11th grade curriculum.
What little is known about the NEW SAT is that it will test and judge students on content PSAT score delay spells more bad news for Connecticut SAT mandate - Wait What?:
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School Reform, Passion and Mic Drops | Cloaking Inequity

School Reform, Passion and Mic Drops | Cloaking Inequity:

School Reform, Passion and Mic Drops



 The definition of “Drop the Mic” from the classic Eminem Hip Hop film 8 mile is…

Calling someone out so hard that you just walk away indisputably victorious.
A few days ago I had the opportunity to visit Annapolis, MD for the Maryland State Education Association (MSEA) policy conference. MSEA’s second annual policy conference featured a discussion of the policies, issues, and challenges that face public education, policymakers, stakeholders, and educators. The panels focused on testing, reform strategies to close gaps, education issues, and projecting future trends in public education.
Our panel was entitled “Forecasting the Next 10 Years of Public Education.” The moderator was Liz Bowie from the Baltimore Sun. The other two panelists were Jennifer King Rice (University of Maryland) and Richard Kahlenberg (Century Foundation).
Maybe I was a little more passionate than usual.

I think it is important for communities to draw the clear distinctions between the top-down, private control reforms of the last ten years and the potential for community-based, democratic reform for the next ten years.
Please Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog to share this discussion with others.School Reform, Passion and Mic Drops | Cloaking Inequity:
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Twitter: @ProfessorJVH
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Guest Blog: Renaissance at Rogers High School - Lily's Blackboard

Guest Blog: Renaissance at Rogers High School - Lily's Blackboard:

Guest Blog: Renaissance at Rogers High School

By John C. Stocks, NEA Executive Director
Rogers High School is located in the poorest ZIP code in the state of Washington. It serves 1600 students, of which at least 200 are homeless. The student population is very diverse: African American, Hispanic, Native American, and Caucasian, as well as a large number of recent immigrants from the Marshall Islands who are fleeing the effects of global climate change and the former Soviet Union who are fleeing oppressive and war-torn homelands.
Rogers High School was a Student Improvement Grant (SIG) school and has been assisted by Washington Education Association (WEA) and NEA Priority Schools.
Led by Lori Wyborney, this year’s Washington State Principal of the Year and a former WEA local union president,in the last five years, Rogers High School has boosted its graduation rate from the high 40s to an impressive 86 percent.
Rogers is also where National Council for Education Support Professionals (NCESP) President and Spokane EA Vice President Debby Chandler oversees student attendance.
Recently, I visited the school again and toured the building with Lori, Debby, Jenny Rose (Spokane EA President) and Shelley Redinger (Superintendent of Spokane Public Schools).
I met students, custodians, food service workers, attendance secretaries, athletic coaches, guidance counselors, library media specialists, instructional coaches, assistant principals, student intervention specialists, English language learner support professionals, classroom teachers and the school security officer.
The student-centered culture of the school was always ‘top of mind’ in every conversation – a testament to the leadership of Lori, Debby and other staff leaders.
I spent time in a classroom of ‘at-risk’ students run by a veteran teacher named Barb, a Rogers High alum herself who still lives in the neighborhood. As faculty sponsor of the student Gay-Straight Alliance, Barb has worked with at-risk students for more than 25 years. Debby and Barb also partner with parents of ‘at-risk’ students to build plans for their children’s success. They go out into the neighborhood visiting with families and persuading students to come to school with the goal of helping them earn a high school diploma. These two NEA members are beacons of hope for many disinterested ‘at-risk’ students who would otherwise dropout. Debby and Barb are a big part of the key to Rogers’ amazing turnaround in graduation rates.
With assistance from NEA Priority Schools and Minority Community Organizing and Partnerships, Debby and Barb plan to train more Rogers staff to participate in the student home visit program.
The school has fostered deep and meaningful relationships with the surrounding community and is becoming a beacon of light for many families and students who had given up on education. Students from the neighborhood who have received scholarships to the prestigious Gonzaga Preparatory, but find it unwelcoming, are coming back to Rogers every quarter.
An interesting outgrowth of Rogers’ focus on excellence is something that happened Friday night. After 39 years of never making a football playoff game and over a recent decade of never scoring a touchdown, the Rogers High School football team won its first playoff game. The successful season is attributed by many as being the result of its focus on academic excellence and graduation. Students are coming back to Rogers, finding a Guest Blog: Renaissance at Rogers High School - Lily's Blackboard:



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How should schools respond to anti-Muslim actions against students? - The Washington Post

How should schools respond to anti-Muslim actions against students? - The Washington Post:

How should schools respond to anti-Muslim actions against students?

Students took part in a Texas Muslim Capitol Day rally at the Texas Capitol in Austin earlier this year. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)


The call by Donald Trump, the presumed frontrunner in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, to ban Muslim immigrants for an unspecified period of time, and recent terrorist attacks by Muslims in Paris and California have put Muslim Americans in an uncomfortable spotlight. Muslims report that hate speech and violence against them are on the rise, though many instances are not formally reported or prosecuted.
The FBI recently released new hate crime statistics from 2014, and an analysis of the latest available data for victims of reported single-bias hate crime incidents showed that:
• 48.3 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offenders’ bias against race.
• 18.7 percent were targeted because of bias against sexual orientation.
• 17.1 percent were victimized because of bias against religion.
• 12.3 percent were victimized because of bias against ethnicity.
• 1.6 percent were victims of gender-identity bias.
• 1.4 percent were targeted because of bias against disability.
• 0.6 percent (40 individuals) were victims of gender bias.
Among the 1,140 people reported to have been victimized because of their religion, 56.8 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias and 16.1 percent were victims of anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias. But again, those figures speak to reported incidents, and many are never reported.
Such behavior does not stop at the school door, with a number of groups of students now targets of aggression, including blacks, LGBT students and some immigrant groups. This post deals with aggression toward Muslim students and what schools can do help relieve it.
It was written by  Thea Renda Abu El-Haj and Sigal Ben-Porath. Abu El-Haj teaches at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. A Palestinian American, she grew up Iran and Lebanon, and her family is from Jerusalem. She recently published the book “Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American youth after 9/11.” Ben-Porath teaches at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is Israeli and grew up in Paris and Jerusalem. In 2006, she published “Citizenship under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict.”
By Thea Renda Abu El-Haj and Sigal Ben-Porath
A sixth-grade Somali Muslim girl was attacked in her New York City public school. Several boys beat her and tried to pull off her headscarf while calling How should schools respond to anti-Muslim actions against students? - The Washington Post:
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How students reacted when their beloved school librarian was let go - The Washington Post

How students reacted when their beloved school librarian was let go - The Washington Post:

How students reacted when their beloved school librarian was let go



Students at a public school in Chicago were furious when they learned that their beloved librarian, Sara Sayigh, had to leave because her position was being cut by the school district because of budget problems. Not only was her library a safe place for academic and extra-curricular activities, they also knew that she was one of only three full-time librarians left in Chicago’s more than 45 majority-black high schools. So last week the students protested, sitting down in the hallway outside the library, refusing to go to class and instead, read books. Call it a “read-in.”












The library is located at the DuSable High School campus on Chicago’s South Side, which houses several high schools — and serves both the Daniel Hale Williams Prep and the Bronzeville Scholastic Institute. Sayigh has been heading the library for more than a dozen years, but she just learned that her position was being cut. Why? A school system spokesperson said that every year the district adjusts school funding levels at this time based on enrollment, and that the position was cut because of lower-than-expected enrollment. The district at the moment has a $1.1 billion structural deficit and a $500 million functional deficit for this school year. The spokesperson said in an e-mail:
“While we would love to see skilled librarians at every school, the simple fact of our massive budget crisis puts that goal out of reach – especially as we try to keep teachers in classrooms. CPS is facing a $1.1 billion budget crisis, and we’re working with our state leaders to end an unfair funding system that gives some of the poorest children in the state only $3 for every $4 children in other districts receive. In fact, Chicago students are 20 percent of the state’s enrollment, but receive only 15 percent of the state’s education funding. Until we fix that unfair system, we’ll do everything we can to protect our classrooms.”
It isn’t likely, though, that the students will get their librarian back though the How students reacted when their beloved school librarian was let go - The Washington Post:
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Affirmative Action exists because the US educational system was built for white kids - Quartz

Affirmative Action exists because the US educational system was built for white kids - Quartz:

IT’S A WASP’S WORLD

Affirmative Action exists because the US educational system was built for white kids



 I was recruited to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, one of the top private schools in the United States, as a black-Korean kid from Ohio. The group A Better Chance (ABC) brought me there in 1986. I still had to apply, however, though I got in and matriculated because of their massive needs-based financial aid package. Andover had taken it upon themselves to affirmatively act upon a desire to have diversity in its student body.



I was a pretty smart kid, but no prodigy. I got all As in everything throughout my three years at a public middle school, but still struggled a bit when I started at Andover. I maintained a B+ average there while being an orchestra nerd who played the cello on an instrument lent to me by the school—a veritable Stradivarius compared to what I had had at home.


But I learned I wasn’t any slower than most of my white classmates, many of whom had been in good schools since they were in kindergarten. Frankly, I was actually a good deal quicker than a lot of them—not so much with numbers, but with words and ideas. So I got fed into the same fast track of privilege that basically only WASPs had been enjoying for generations, and got into Brown University in 1990 pretty easily.


Was I an affirmative action checkbox for them? Probably. Did I need the leg up? Probably not. But it was the ‘90s and that’s the way it worked back then.


But I never bought into the idea of being a so-called “Affirmative Action baby.” And that’s the one thing Stephen Carter got right in his book by same name. The accusation of being at Andover or Brown because of AA was a particularly niggling one, something that was always there in the back of my mind, attempting to undermine my intellectual confidence. I connected with that element of the book, but never bought that as a reason to remove Affirmative Action exists because the US educational system was built for white kids - Quartz:
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Emailed threats to NY, LA highlight worries schools face - Yahoo News

Emailed threats to NY, LA highlight worries schools face - Yahoo News:

Emailed threats to NY, LA highlight worries schools face 



LOS ANGELES (AP) — When it comes to assessing threats, New York City and Los Angeles schools likely have more experience than most other districts in the country.
But their reactions were dramatically different Tuesday to the same threat of a large-scale jihadi attack with guns and bombs — LA canceled its classes while New York dismissed the warning as a hoax.
The divergent responses from the nation's two biggest K-12 public school systems reflected what many in school security know: That deciding whether or not a threat is credible is hardly a mathematical process and the stakes in staying open or closing are high. It is one that school district officials around the country have weighed heavily in the wake of school shootings and threats.
Across the nation, small and large districts regularly encounter the challenge of deciphering threats, complicated today by more sophisticated technology that can make them harder to trace.
Even when a threat is determined to be a hoax, the consequences can be a severe, with the safety of thousands of children, millions of dollars in school funding, and the message each decision sends on the line.
It's extremely rare for a major U.S. city to close all its schools because of a threat and it reflected the lingering unease in Southern California following the attack that killed 14 people at a holiday luncheon two weeks ago in San Bernardino.
Bomb Threat Shutters 2nd Largest School DistrictPlay video
Bomb Threat Shutters 2nd Largest School District
"If this was not ISIS, not a terror organization, they're nonetheless watching," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Meet the Press Daily." "And if they come to the conclusion that they can literally mail it in, call it in and disrupt large cities, they're going to take advantage of that."
A 2014 analysis by National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm, found a 158 percent increase in the number of threats schools received over the previous year. About 37 percent of the threats were sent electronically and nearly a third resulted in schools being evacuated. Nearly 10 percent of the threats closed school for at least one day.
Ken Trump, president of the firm, said schools leaders faced with a threat they don't believe is credible sometimes let community anxiety rule the decision to evacuate or close, even though children might be safer in school than sent home where they could be left unsupervised.
"It's often better to keep them in school," he said.
In LA, the threat came in the form of an email to a school board member. Authorities in New York reported receiving the same "generic" email and decided there was no danger to schoolchildren. Mayor Bill de Blasio concluded the threat contained "nothing credible." New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said that it looked like the sender had watched Emailed threats to NY, LA highlight worries schools face - Yahoo News:
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