Strickland attacks high-stakes testing, tax dollars for charter schools | The Columbus Dispatch

Strickland attacks high-stakes testing, tax dollars for charter schools | The Columbus Dispatch:

Strickland attacks high-stakes testing, tax dollars for charter schools

RANDY LUDLOW | DISPATCH

Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Ted Strickland surrounded himself with teachers this afternoon as he spoke about public education policy at Downtown Columbus High Scho

Democrat Ted Strickland touched on key points of concern to Ohio's public school educators this afternoon amid his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

The former governor seeking to topple Republican incumbent Rob Portman spoke for 24 minutes before a group of teachers gathered at Downtown Columbus High School.

He left them applauding as he denounced "excessive, oppressive" high-stakes student achievement tests and the flow of tax dollars to 'shadowy charter schools." He also called for government bureaucrats to give parents and teachers a greater stake in decisions that affect classroom education.

Strickland, who is endorsed by the Ohio Education Association and the Ohio Federation of Teachers, vowed he would be an "unabashed champion of public education" if Ohioans elect him to the Senate on Nov. 8.

Recalling he pushed for a moratorium on new charter schools as governor, Strickland attacked the privately operated, but publicly funded charter schools that he said robs money from the public K-12 system.

"We must fight to protect and strengthen public education in the face of deliberate and detrimental efforts to privatize our schools," he said.

"Shadowy, sometimes out-of-state, corporations are trying to divert our tax dollars away from our public schools in order to profit from the education of our kids."

Strickland recounted the data-rigging scandal at the Ohio Department of Education to improve sponsor evaluations by omitting scores of online charter schools. And, he spoke of "scandalous E(lectronic) schools" in making an indirect reference to the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow fight with the state over verifying students are receiving the needed hours of instruction.

In the Senate, he promised to pursue initiatives to alter federal standards that led to the flurry of student proficiency testing and promote funding for traditional public schools over charter schools.

The Democrat portrayed Portman as far from a friend of public education, saying the Republican has supported "sending millions of our tax dollars to companies that profit off our children's education."

The Portman campaign released statements of support from several area school board members, a teacher and a career center superintendent.

John McClelland, a New Albany school board member and veteran GOP consultant, criticized Strickland for cutting funds for literacy and pre-school programs, among others, and a reversing a higher-education tuition freeze while serving as governor.

Strickland countered that he was dealing with the "crisis" of a national recession that cratered the economy and tax-take of Ohio and other states, requiring him to balance a budget with less revenue.

He correctly pointed out that Ohio's education system improved during his watch to be ranked fifth best in the nation in one noted study. The Quality Counts report by Education Week a trade newspaper, now rates Ohio 23rd among the states.

rludlow@dispatch.com

@RandyLudlowStrickland attacks high-stakes testing, tax dollars for charter schools | The Columbus Dispatch:

Audio: LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King says she’ll expand school choice 'pipeline' | 89.3 KPCC

Audio: LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King says she’ll expand school choice 'pipeline' | 89.3 KPCC:

LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King says she’ll expand school choice 'pipeline'

Superintendent Michelle King, Mayor Eric Garcetti and other elected officials and dignitaries paid visits to several Los Angeles Unified School District campuses on Tuesday to welcome back the roughly 514,000 students who returned to classes.

That district projection pegs L.A. Unified's student enrollment roughly 13,000 students smaller than it was last year, continuing a decade-long decline.

In part to reverse that trend, King has said she intends to expand access to L.A. Unified's half-dozen "school choice" programs, which allow parents to send their kids somewhere other than their default, neighborhood school.

These choice options — from magnet programs and language immersion schools to transfers and open-enrollments — have been popular for years. In 2013-14, more than 135,000 students exercised school choice; that's roughly one out of every four students in the L.A. Unified that year.

But since then, enrollment's still declined by an estimated 42,000 students.

In an interview with KPCC on Monday, King said parents in some of the vast district's neighborhoods still have trouble accessing choice programs. While she did not offer many details of her solution on school choice, her answers in the interview reveal her conception of the problem.

"All choices aren’t everywhere," King said. "What I learned in having the opportunity to talk to families from across this district, is families want certain things in their area where they can have direct access."

King mentioned the popular dual language programs. She says not every language is available in neighborhoods accessible to everyone.

In a similar way, she noted a student who open-enrolled in an arts-focused elementary school might not be able to matriculate to an arts-focused middle school — simply because there isn't one nearby.

"Even though we have a lot of choice, it wasn’t a pipeline, we couldn’t move from elementary to middle to high and to be able to maintain that theme or area of interest," King said.

Many of the details of King’s plan to expand choice may be included in the strategic plan her staff has said is due out early this fall.

When asked for details about what that choice plan might look like, L.A. School Board president Steve Zimmer said a lot of the work to create instructional pathways that carry students through consistent choice options from kindergarten through high school will happen at the grassroots level.

"We don’t have the grand marquee, shout-it-from-the-mountaintop [plan], but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening,” said Zimmer, "and it actually doesn’t mean that it’s not happening  in a much smarter way.”

This call for more choice within the district comes as the list of public school options Audio: LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King says she’ll expand school choice 'pipeline' | 89.3 KPCC:

KJ's Next Adventure: Still on the Corporate Dole After All These Years | Comstock's magazine

How Oak Park Promise Vows to Improve the Neighborhood | Comstock's magazine:

How Oak Park Promise Vows to Improve the Neighborhood
Initiative aims to develop ‘cradle-to-career’ education pipeline to improve odds for children and teenagers

 This week, the Greater Sacramento Urban League is returning to its Oak Park roots, first with temporary digs on 3rd Avenue and then, in September, the nonprofit organization founded locally in 1968 will open a satellite office on Alhambra Boulevard. “It’s always been a desire to come and be a part of the Oak Park community once again,” says Program Coordinator Tamika L’Ecluse, who also serves as president of the Oak Park Neighborhood Association.

While the Urban League will continue to provide workforce training and job placement at the new site, the focus will be on reducing deaths among black children. In Sacramento County, African American children are dying at two times the rate of other children, and Oak Park is a high-risk neighborhood. The Board of Supervisors has established a steering committee to reduce these deaths by 10-20 percent by 2020. The Urban League will provide education and other resources to prevent perinatal deaths, sleep-related infant deaths, child abuse and neglect homicides, and third-party homicides of youth, L’Ecluse says.

The Urban League is one of roughly 50 public and private partners in the Oak Park Promise Neighborhood, a 15-year initiative — covering 50 blocks and two square miles — to improve the educational, health, employment and housing opportunities of residents. In addition to the higher infant mortality rate, Oak Park has a higher unemployment rate, lower median household income, lower homeownership, lower literacy and shorter life expectancy than the rest of the city.

The group plans to apply for a $30 million (over five years) federalPromise Neighborhood grant through the White House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative, administered by the U.S. Department of Education. While President Barack Obama proposed a budget request of up to $150 million this grant cycle, the actual allocation in 2016 is $30 million to be split among the 5-7 recipients, according to a representative from the department (future funding will have to be approved by Congress each year). Selections will be announced around December.

Mayor Kevin Johnson announced the ambitious proposal during a kickoff event in July at an overcrowded Guild Theater, a venue managed by his nonprofit community development corporation, St. Hope Academy. Johnson has long advocated revitalizing this neighborhood where he grew up. Plenty of residents appreciate the attention he’s paid to Oak Park as shown during a recent Gather — a monthly food event with live music held near the theater. Attendees swarm Johnson to take his photo and shake his hand.

Related: Oak Park Farmers Market opens for its seventh season

But with the mayor embroiled in controversy — longstanding sexual abuse allegations and a judge’s recent ruling that he must release certain emails into the public record following a lawsuit he filed against the Sacramento News & Review — and having decided against running for re-election, the baton will be passed to Mayor-elect Darrell Steinberg when he assumes office in December. Steinberg has promised to carry the momentum forward.

‘Cradle to Career’

The Promise Neighborhoods program grew out of a 2008 visit Obama made to the Harlem Children’s Zone, an anti-poverty initiative focused on children. The federal government launched an effort in 2010 to prompt similar programs around the country, and has provided funding for new or continuing awards every year since.

Oak Park should have an advantage as Sacramento previously received Promise Zone designation (for a larger area including Oak Park, Del Paso Heights and The Avenues south of Fruitridge Road). In 2015, Sacramento was one of eight new zones selected in the second round (there are now 22 recipients total). “There’s no money from this, but it puts you in a position,” Johnson said during the kickoff event. “You play golf? It tees you up. OK, you play basketball? It’s like an assist.” Neighborhood designation, on the other hand, actually means money.

Oak Park Promise’s “cradle-to-career” approach is designed to support each stage of a young person’s life: prenatal; preschool; elementary, middle and high school; college, internships; employment. Seven target schools have been identified, including five in the St. Hope Charter Schools system and two campuses in the Sacramento City Unified School District.

The campuses must be able to track the progress of students over time, providing data from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, says St. Hope CEO Jake Mossawir. St. Hope can capture a large sample size of Oak Park students, as 4,000 students live in the neighborhood and about 2,000 attend these charter schools, Mossawir says, adding that the other two schools serve another 1,000 children. “About 50 percent actually live in the two zip codes that make up Oak Park,” he says. “For students who live in Oak Park, but who attend schools outside of the borders, at non-target schools, they will still receive resources from the grant, which is a requirement.”

The funding would augment St. Hope’s STEM programs, Mossawir How Oak Park Promise Vows to Improve the Neighborhood | Comstock's magazine:

Reading, Writing, and the Common Core State Standards | Center for American Progress

Reading, Writing, and the Common Core State Standards | Center for American Progress:

Reading, Writing, and the Common Core State Standards

• Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF and Scribd versions.

• Download the report: 
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• Download introduction & summary: 
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• Read it in your browser: 
  Scribd

During the 2014-15 school year, more high school seniors read the young adult-oriented books The Fault in Our Stars andDivergent than Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Hamlet, according to a report that tracks what K-12 students at more than 30,000 schools are reading during the school year. These books are generally self-selected, making it not all that surprising that students would prefer to read a contemporaryNew York Times bestseller than a 17th-century play written in early modern English. And while some of the books that students select are thematically targeted to a mature audience, they are not particularly challenging to read for the average high schooler. The Fault in Our Stars and Divergent, for example, have the readability of a fourth- or fifth-grade text in terms of sentence structure and word difficulty.

There is substantial evidence that much of what students are currently reading is not particularly challenging. This lack of complexity in students’ reading and writing is likely undermining their preparedness for college and the workplace. In addition, despite the predominant role that reading and writing serve in other subjects and disciplines, literacy development has long been relegated to the English or reading classroom.

Take the issue of reading complexity. Three of the top five most commonly assigned titles in grades 9 through 12 are To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, and Of Mice and Men. All three books, while classics, are not particularly challenging in terms of sentence structure and complexity. Does that mean that Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which broaches issues of racial inequality should instead be introduced to elementary school-aged children? Most people—including English teachers—probably would not agree. Readability is only one factor when considering the intended audience of a work of literature.

But the difficulty of the reading material to which students are exposed is not inconsequential. An ACT report finds that “performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are likely to be ready for college and those who are not.” This holds true across gender, race and ethnicity, and family income levels.

Yet there is a stark gap between the complexity of texts that high school students are reading and of those that they will confront in college and in their careers. Students reading at the average level of high school texts, for example, may be comfortable with as little as 5 percent of university-level texts and with only one-quarter of the texts that they would encounter in the military or the workplace.

One only need skim the data to see that just a small proportion of students are on the path to graduate from high school ready for college and a career. Only one-third of fourth- and eighth-grade students—36 percent and 34 percent, respectively—performed at the proficient level or higher in reading, according to the most recent data, on the National Assessment of Reading, Writing, and the Common Core State Standards | Center for American Progress:

The So-Called Right to Teach - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher

The So-Called Right to Teach - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher:

The So-Called Right to Teach

The stories seem to be everywhere these days: Crisis-level teacher shortages and how to fillthem.  Need-based fast-track pathways to the classroom, for those who just don't have the time or inclination to, you know, seriously study or practice the complex work of teaching. Questioning the need for teacher licenses or advanced certification. And tiresome, never-ending repetitionsof the old "cash cow" canard--that universities invest little in education research, while allowing anyone with a pulse into programs that should be highly selective.

And now, a new catchphrase: The Right to Teach.

While the terminology is novel, the idea certainly isn't. We've been trying to do education on the cheap since Horace Mann rode around promoting the idea that it would benefit the nation to offer free schooling to every child.

We say we want good schools. We say we want an educated citizenry, and a well-trained, nimble workforce. We even say that we want equity, and justice, for our young.

But we don't. We want a simple, cost-effective solution for keeping children off the streets, providing them with basic literacy and introducing them to compliance. Teaching? A low-level jobs program for technical workers, who can follow a script and relentlessly pursue test scores.

Some so-called reformers are now openly backing away from even rhetorical support for equity, justice, honoring diversity and pursuit of integration. Maybe it's not so bad, they suggest, for kids to go to school with "their own kind." After all, solving the seemingly intractable problems of segregation (read: generational racism) and poverty are just "too expensive."

In other words, let's put poor minority children in for-profit schools with inadequately paid, untrained teachers and call it a day. To everything, churn, churn, churn.

In this country, we are fond of polishing our human rights bona fides--life, liberty, pursuit of something like happiness, or at least contentment. It's our absolute right to speak our piece in a public forum or on TV even if it's loathsome. We have the right to vote, to worship or not, to be treated fairly by the justice system, and to live in the way we see fit, as long as we're not impinging on anyone else's rights.

There are (or should be) other automatic rights--rights that feel pretty shaky, right now, in the best country in the world: The right to clean water, and food. The right to basic health care. The right to personal dignity, and safety.

There is, however, no "right to teach," in a public institution, for compensation. None. Nobody has The So-Called Right to Teach - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher:

The Voiceless LAUSD Parent - Change The LAUSD

The Voiceless LAUSD Parent - Change The LAUSD:

The Voiceless LAUSD Parent

The LAUSD School Board includes former teachers and school administrators. A student representative is also included in an advisory role. However, not one of the seven Board members has a child who is currently enrolled in the District. With this lack of representation is it a surprise that too many parents feel that they do not have a voice in how the District operates?

The formulation of the school calendar provides one example where the presence of a parent on the Board may have made a difference in the decision making process. Once again our children are returning to school in the middle of an August heat wave. The Los Angeles Daily News reports that a survey found that “19,000 of the roughly 54,200 parents and employees surveyed wanted instruction to kick off after the first Monday of September.” These parent complaints seem to crop up every year, but the August start date remains.

Perhaps a parent would ask the bureaucrats questions that could change the debate and save the District legal costs. While the LAUSD’s Division of Special Education continues to deny that they are in the process of closing the special education centers that serve the most severely affected students, many parents have reported that the choice of attending these schools has been taken away from them during the IEP process. As a result, a group of these parents sued the district and received a favorable ruling from the appeals court. Instead of using this as an opportunity to negotiate with the parents, four Board members, including Monica Garcia, voted to appeal. This was clearly a waste of resources as the court did not accept the appeal.

Sometimes it may not be the decision but the implementation that a parent could change. When schools were forced to close last December because of aterror threat hoax, some parents were left scrambling as they tried to retrieve students who had already been dropped off. Some parents had to take the day off from work as the unexpected closure left them without childcare plans. This was in addition to the anxiety that was caused by the alleged threat and a lack of information that was provided by the District. In the meantime, Board Member Monica Garcia joked before a live television interview and saw the crisis as an opportunity to “be a Mexican Oprah.” A parent on the Board might have been better able to anticipate the problems that others would face and suggest ways that they could be accommodated. This parent would also insist that the closure be used as an example to learn by so that the District will be better prepared to handle emergencies in the future.The Voiceless LAUSD Parent - Change The LAUSD:

Schools Matter: Weingarten Coopts United Opt Out National

Schools Matter: Weingarten Coopts United Opt Out National:

Weingarten Coopts United Opt Out National

Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys through "No Excuses" Teaching

Since Randi Weingarten put AFT's full weight behind both the Clinton Campaign and the passage of the charter school and CBE stimulus bill that passed through Congress as ESSA in 2015, AFT has been shopping for a new focus to move attention away from the fact that both AFT and NEA are now entirely on board the corporate education reformer gravy train.

By the summer of 2016, it was obvious that the corporate education unions had glommed on to the civil rights initiatives inspired by Black Lives Matter.  AFT's SOS March and DC Talkathon in July featured a number of high profile civil rights speakers, and the choice of the Lincoln Memorial as staging area was intended to symbolize the folding of education issues within a larger, amorphous social justice context.  If AFT could not pretend to lead a march against corporate initiatives that it supported, it could put some big money behind the largely ineffectual protests of Black Lives Matter.

What has become clear since July is that AFT is still on the move to alter the perceptions of many teachers who believe AFT and NEA both have sold dues-paying members down the corporate revenue river.  As a result, Weingarten and NPE have now managed to coopt the agenda of United Opt Out, which, heretofore, has been the only legitimate organization that has stood, until now, against CorpEd since 2009.  Just as Weingarten took over BATs, she has now neutralized UOO, thus Schools Matter: Weingarten Coopts United Opt Out National:

Op Ed: There’s No Such Thing as a “Public Charter School” - Post News Group

Op Ed: There’s No Such Thing as a “Public Charter School” - Post News Group:


Op Ed: There’s No Such Thing as a “Public Charter School”

By Ann Berlak

This year, more than a quarter of Oakland’s 49,000 students are attending one of its nearly 40 charter schools, far more per capita than anywhere else in the state. 

Is this something for Oaklanders to boast about?

Not long ago I visited a school in Oakland to read to third graders on “Literacy Day.” On 
the way to the classroom I asked my guide if this was a charter or a public school. The 
immediate and decisive response: “We’re a public charter school.”

On June 14th the LA Times informed the public: “Charters are independently operated, free public schools.”

The California Department of Education makes no bones about it: “A charter school is a public school.”

However, the term “public charter school” was developed by a PR firm to reframe the way we understand schooling in relationship to “public” and to democracy.

The campaign has been wildly successful. However, though the term “public charter school” is increasingly ubiquitous, charters are not public schools.

Public institutions—schools, libraries, zoos—are, at least in theory, funded by 
taxes from all the people in its jurisdiction—local, state and national—and are held accountable to and by those people through that fundamental process we in a democracy call voting.

Most public schools are accountable to an elected school board made up of community 
members. Residents of that community have the right to be present at Board meetings, weigh in 
on votes and debates, and access public financial documents.

Charter schools are run by executive boards, committees or corporations whose members often 
live outside the community in which they are located and are not accountable to parents or 
the taxpayers/community members who fund them.

If you don’t like what your traditional public school is doing, you can make your voice heard by 
addressing administrators, voting for new leadership or taking a leadership role yourself. If 
you don’t like what your child’s charter school is doing and you express yourself, you may be 
asked to leave. There is no democratic mechanism for spearheading policy change.

Public institutions are the motors of democracy. Their purpose is to 
promote and preserve the fundamental values of a democratic society: liberty, equality and 
the public welfare or common good.

Public schools recognize that the welfare of everyone’s children and grandchildren is 
intimately linked to the welfare of all. Through support and oversight by the community, 
public schooling is intended to serve the common good and preserve fundamental qualities that sustain 
democracy beyond getting students “college and career ready.” If public schools have not always lived up to their promise then it is necessary to redouble our efforts to have them do so, not to abandon them.

When students leave public schools for charter schools they take their per pupil expenditures –which in California averaged $9,794 last year–with them, leaving public schools with less revenue but the same overhead.

The federal government also spends millions on charters at the expense of public schools. Taxpayers paid one consulting firm nearly $10 million to the U.S. Department of Education Charter Schools. That’s $10 million fewer federal dollars for public schools.

The law forbids local districts, which in California are the main authorizers for new charters, from taking into account the potentially crippling impact of new charters on district financing when considering approving new schools.

So even if you find an excellent charter to send your own child to, you are reducing the chances of every student remaining in the public school having their own excellent education.

Charter schools’ claim they enhance democracy is disingenuous.

The highly touted freedom of individual parents to choose their child’s school comes at the heavy price of reducing two other essential functions of democracy: providing for the general welfare of a society that requires well funded public schools and insuring equal opportunity for all children.

Competing with traditional public schools for space and funding reduces the quality of the remaining public schools, and ignores patterns of clear advantage for the children of savvy parents, thus assuring that some children will be better schooled than others.

Being publicly funded, charters cannot be considered private. However, their private governance and their marginalization of fundamental democratic values disqualify them as public.

The most accurate label for charters is “Publicly–funded private schools.” Don’t let them abscond with our language. There is no such thing as a public charter school.

Ann Berlak is an author and has worked as a teacher and teacher educator. She lives in Oakland.Op Ed: There’s No Such Thing as a “Public Charter School” - Post News Group:

Jersey Jazzman: Useless Testing "Gap" Analyses and the Newspapers That Love Them

Jersey Jazzman: Useless Testing "Gap" Analyses and the Newspapers That Love Them:

Useless Testing "Gap" Analyses and the Newspapers That Love Them

There is so much wrong with this "analysis" by the The Bergen Record of test scores and other outcomes for the 31 "Abbott" districts -- the (mostly) disadvantaged New Jersey school districts that received additional aid for years (although inconsistently) under a series of court rulings. Among other problems:

• As Julia Sass Rubin points out, the authors don't include the charter schools, which are a large portion of the student enrollments in many districts.
• They don't account for changes over time in student characteristics.
• They assume the proficiency rates consistently measure "proficiency" across time, a huge assumption that, to my knowledge, has never been assessed by the state.
• They assume the Abbotts got "extra aid," even though, for years, the amount the districts received was not what the state's own law says they need to provide an adequate education (and that amount isn't close to enough to expect equalized school outcomes anyway).

I could go on, but I want to make a larger point about so-called "gap" analyses, and why any attempt, like The Record's, to judge an education policy's efficacy based on "gaps" is fundamentally flawed.

And I'm going to keep this so simple in can be drawn out in Sharpies (click to enlarge):

 Let's say you have two schools: one in a wealthier area, one is a less-wealthy place. The advantaged school starts off with a higher proficiency rate than the disadvantaged school. As time goes on, the disadvantaged school improves -- but so does the advantaged school. 

After several years, both schools are performing better than they did previously. But the Jersey Jazzman: Useless Testing "Gap" Analyses and the Newspapers That Love Them:

CURMUDGUCATION: Zephyr Teachout Is A Badass

CURMUDGUCATION: Zephyr Teachout Is A Badass:
Zephyr Teachout Is A Badass

Zephyr Teachout is a badass.

You may remember her from the last New York gubernatorial primary, when she humiliated Andrew Cuomo and stomped on his Presidential dreams by making him fight for his life in a primary race that was supposed to be a walk. The Vermont-born law professor is energetic, positive, and a strong voice for public education-- among other things. She's an old-school Democrat, by which I mean she's not dependent on the kindness of hedge fund millionaires. (All of which is why it's one of Randi Weingarten's unforgivable offenses to have conducted last minute phone blitzing for the Cuomo campaign).

Teachout is back at it, campaigning for the 19th District Congressional seat in New York. Teachout's main opposition appeared to be a long-shot GOP John Faso who was trying to fend of GOP Andrew Heaney in the primary-- and then the hedge funders started piling on.

John Faso is a long-time NY pol. He has served as minority leader of the NY State Assembly, and made a run at Governor in 2006. He beat Bill Weld in the primary (yes, the same one who is currently Libertarian VP candidate) but lost to Eliot Spitzer in the general election. Faso is a huge fan of charters and one of the cheif architects of New York's charter laws. And hedge fund guys apparently love him a lot. Robert Mercer, hedge fund manager, contributed half a million dollars to CURMUDGUCATION: Zephyr Teachout Is A Badass: