California School Districts Sue County for Approving a Charter Under Criminal Investigation - NPE Action

California School Districts Sue County for Approving a Charter Under Criminal Investigation - NPE Action:

California School Districts Sue County for Approving a Charter Under Criminal Investigation

A Press release from:Two Anaheim School Districts Sue Orange County Board of Education Over Approval of ‘Educationally Unsound’ Charter Being Investigated for Fraud

ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA — Anaheim Union High School District and Anaheim Elementary School District filed suit today in Orange County Superior Court, challenging a decision by the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) to approve EPIC charter school, despite it being under investigation for fraud in Oklahoma and despite the school board’s own staff recommendation to reject the petition as “educationally unsound.”

The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction preventing Excellence Performance Innovation Citizenship (EPIC) from continuing to operate its K-12 virtual school, and ordering the Orange County Board of Education to revoke its charter.

“EPIC was illegally authorized by the Orange County Board of Education in violation of the Charter School Act,” AUHSD Superintendent Michael Matsuda said. “The county school board failed to exercise its oversight duty when the flawed petition first came before them. Instead, they approved it with conditions that were never met. The OCBE’s actions have left us with no recourse other than to seek this injunction.”

Supporting the two Anaheim school districts in seeking the injunction is constitutional scholar and founding dean of the UCI Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky.

“In approving EPIC’s petition, the Orange County school board acted California School Districts Sue County for Approving a Charter Under Criminal Investigation - NPE Action:

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Budget Deficit Revealed (Kinda)

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Budget Deficit Revealed (Kinda):

Budget Deficit Revealed (Kinda)

I spoke at the School Board meeting on Wednesday.  One of my topics was the fact that in order to understand the raging budget deficit facing SPS, I was told to file a public disclosure request.  I pointed out to the Superintendent and Board that this was not transparency at its best and if they want support from the community, it might be useful to be open about the situation.

This information  is not some state secret and, in fact, the finance/budgeting folks probably all know the numbers by heart.   

To my surprise, I was sent this information by JoLynn Berge,Assistant Superintendent of Business and Finance. Great but, once again, not specific enough (but, of course, that's by design.)  

I'll first note the obvious for every single one of us adults - when creating a budget, you start with what money you DO have and what you owe/needed spending and THEN you see what is leftover for other things.  The district seemingly operates with what they WANT to do and then moves on to paying for needs.  

This is obvious when you consider the underspending on maintenance of the facilities, both new and old.  This is obvious when the Board votes a COLA for the Superintendent (after giving him a raise the previous year) and yet schools like Northgate don't have money for copy paper.  It's obvious when some Sped students don't get to come to school on a late start weather day because of transportation (I had no idea but this is happening.)

Most of all, when the Superintendent and staff, in the face of all operational problems, puts Strategic Plan initiatives ahead of a well-operating district.  This district will NOT ever move ahead for its students (especially those who are low-income and/or of color) if this district is not well-run.

I do not believe it is well-run and I have thought this for a very long time.
The Times has an editorial on this subject, Seattle School District should take responsibility for budget problems.  They say Nyland has "erroneously" put the full blame on the Legislature.  That was not my read of the letter but yes, the letter certainly laid no blame at the feet of the district.  But the Times goes right after the union, blaming the district for settling the teachers strike by giving them raises.  Amazingly they also call out the high salaries of administrators.  

About 37% of the Seattle School District's projected budget deficit Seattle Schools Community Forum: Budget Deficit Revealed (Kinda):

Teacher Shortages Are Looming, but It Doesn't Need to Be This Way

Teacher Shortages Are Looming, but It Doesn't Need to Be This Way:

Teacher Shortages Are Looming, but It Doesn't Need to Be This Way

Teacher Libby Garland vividly recalls the excitement she felt when she was accepted into the New York City Teaching Fellows Program in 2005. The program's mission, "preparing a group of exceptional teachers committed to a better future for the NYC students who need them most," seemed like a perfect fit, and she was pleased to get a position in the School for Democracy and Leadership in Brooklyn.

The school was then in its second year, and Garland was assigned to teach social studies to tenth graders.

"It was a very idealistic project staffed by a bunch of bright, committed people who saw social justice as central to education," Garland told Truthout. "Everyone, including the principal, really cared about the kids." Despite this, Garland said, problems were immediately evident. For example, it took until late October for the Department of Education to provide Garland with textbooks. "Every night at 9:00 p.m. I'd find myself in Office Max making copies of readings and assignments, paying for them myself," she said. "Everyone in there at that hour was also a teacher."

Eighteen-hour workdays were common. "It was a really brutal lesson," Garland said. "Having smart, dedicated and hard-working teachers is not enough. The school was chaotic. Things rolled along without systems in place -- even something as basic as taking attendance fell through the cracks -- and many of the students simply got caught in the chaos."

By the end of her first year, Garland decided she'd had enough. "The despair I felt, Teacher Shortages Are Looming, but It Doesn't Need to Be This Way:

Stop ignoring early education findings from the 1970s - NonDoc

Stop ignoring early education findings from the 1970s - NonDoc:

Stop ignoring early education findings from the 1970s

Across the nation, the post-election transition period has proven to be just as angry as our bitter election, which is likely to be followed by possibly the most divisive presidency in modern America. Today’s anxiety recalls that of the 1970s, when Watergate, the collapse of the Nixon administration, the fall of Saigon and the 1973 energy crisis launched the deindustrialization of America (which was one of the legacy tragedies that recently culminated in Trumpism).

Although it occurred in October, the Potts Family Foundation and Oklahoma Early Childhood Coalition’s conference offered a message even more important after the election. Keynote speaker Nancy Fishman, deputy director of the public-policy organization ReadyNation, provided at least two more reasons why Americans should stop ignoring a 1970s scientific discovery.

Early education a smart investment, transcends partisanship

First, high-quality early education is the smartest investment Oklahoma can make. Fishman cited data from various sources in her presentation that highlight how returns on investment in high-quality early childhood range from $9 to $16 for every dollar invested. As cognitive science shows, these benefits accrue because 90 percent of brain growth occurs by age 5. Learning gaps appear as early as 9 months of age and, consequently, disadvantaged children can come to school 18 months behind.

For 20 years, public education has been engaged in a bitter edu-political civil war over the Stop ignoring early education findings from the 1970s - NonDoc:

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION: Bystanding Educators + Disrupting the Moral Center

CURMUDGUCATION:

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION:  Bystanding Educators +  Disrupting the Moral Center

Bystanding Educators

48by Peter Greene / 3h

Over at EdWeek, Peter DeWitt asks the question " Have educators been bystanders too long ?" I like the question because it doesn't even waste time asking if educators are bystanders, because, yes, that's what we do. This is probably one of the reasons we don't get more respect from business-folks. In the private sector, you sometimes have to play hardball. You "negotiate" by being non-compliant, l

YESTERDAY

Disrupting the Moral Center

19by Peter Greene / 1d

Sarah Jones at the New Republic yesterday posted a blistering take on technocracy entitled " The Year Silicon Valley Went Morally Bankrupt ." It doesn't address education, but it surely could. She takes us back to 1996, and “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" by John Perry Barlo, a statement of Silicon Valley's manifest destiny to rise over and above the nation that birthed it: Barlo

DEC 08

New Test Rules: Old Baloney

17by Peter Greene / 2d

Yesterday, John King unveiled the Department of Education's final rules for testing under the Every Student Succeeds Act, aimed at spinning the continued emphasis on the Big Standardized Tests. Jennifer C. Kerr of the Associated Press signals that she bought the PR and fumbled the story with her very first sentence: Aiming to reduce test-taking in America's classrooms, the Obama administration rel

DEC 07

What Do The Tests Measure?

83by Peter Greene / 3d

Christopher Tienken (Seton Hall) has solved a mystery. Along with Anthony Colella (Seton Hall), Christian Angelillo (Boonton Township SD), Meredith Fox (Nanuet Union SD), Kevin McCahill (George W. Miller Elementary) and Adam Wolfe (Peoria Unified SD), Tienken has once again answered the question -- what do the Big Standardized Tests actually measure? Put another way, Tienken et. al. have demonstra

ESSA Won't Spur "Best Practices"

9by Peter Greene / 3d

Eric Kalenze, Director of Education Solutions at the Search Institute , is guest-blogging at Rick Hess's EdWeek spot this week. His interest leans towards questions of research and best practices and how any of those things ever hope to line up with actual classrooms. Today he's asking one particularly interesting question-- Will ESSA's Evidence Requirements Spur Actual Best Practices? comes with

DEC 06

Write Your Own PISA Post

14by Peter Greene / 3d

I actually considered a Reaction to PISA Scores post and then decided that I didn't have the heart for this annual exercise in futility, and wiser heads than mine were already on the case. So instead, I'll let you take this little quiz (in, of course, multiple choice form) and in the process create a Choose Your Own Madlibs Fake Journalism story for the occasion. Enjoy! International Testing Auth

DEC 05

Kindergrinder Toxicity

100+by Peter Greene / 4d

The LA Times last week ran this story aimed directly at the feels. It's the tragic cautionary tale of a poor little five year old who arrived at kindergarten only to discover that she was already behind. At a kindergarten screening two months before her first day, she happily chattered about her dog Toodles, her favorite color pink, her Santa Claus pajamas, her nickname Gigi, her outings with dad

DEC 04

How Charter Students Would Benefit from Teacher Unions

16by Peter Greene / 6d

As part of the general "Please don't leave us" hubbub arising from the nominally-Democratic-neo-liberal fear that a bunch of Trump-hating lefties are about to bolt out of the reformster tent, Peter Cunningham over at Education Post ran a big discussion about how unions and charters should maybe be BFFs (you can read my take on the discussion here , here and here ). Arguments included that unions w

ICYMI: As It Sinks In (12/4)

7by Peter Greene / 6d

Share what speaks to you. Amplifying each other's voice is how we cut through the noise, how we make sure that what needs to be heard has a chance to be heard. Oh, and call your Senator and tell him to just say no to Betsy DeVos. The 

CURMUDGUCATION:

Culture Warrior Princess – EduShyster

Culture Warrior Princess – EduShyster:

Culture Warrior Princess

Betsy DeVos’ support for anti-gay groups goes much deeper than the media has reported…

Is there anything left to say about the awfulness of Betsy DeVos, President-Elect Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education? Alas, there is… Not nearly enough has been made of DeVos’ extreme closeness to the extreme fringes of the Christian right. She and her family have spent decades and millions upon millions to help further the reach of organizations like the Family Research Council, known for its *research* into homosexuality, which, by the way, is not a civil right. While media reports have referred in passing to DeVos’s support for Christian causes, they’ve largely glossed over what these causes are and how deeply enmeshed she is in a world that views homosexuality as immoral and abhorrent. Since her position comes with some responsibilities of the civil rights variety, should we maybe be concerned about this?

Remember the big *It Gets Better* campaign from a few years back? The viral video series in which gay grown ups recorded messages of hope and encouragement for students who are being bullied or just enduring life as an American teen won major plaudits and showed how the Interwebs could really be a force for progress. But it Culture Warrior Princess – EduShyster:

Oregon Department of Education risked breach of private student data, audits find | OregonLive.com

Oregon Department of Education risked breach of private student data, audits find | OregonLive.com:

Oregon Department of Education risked breach of private student data, audits find

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy - http://www.studentprivacymatters.org/

 Two separate audits found the Oregon Department of Education didn't do enough to ensure that its huge cache of data on more than 600,000 students remains private.

Hundreds of people in school districts and in state government have access to some or all of that data. That means keeping it safe is a daunting technological challenge.

A report by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General found Oregon at risk of being unable to "prevent or detect unauthorized access and disclosure of personally identifiable information."

A state audit, made public Thursday, also found insufficient security measures to keep confidential student data confidential.

"The department does not provide an appropriate layered defense," auditors wrote.

Neither the state nor federal department issued a notice about the federal audit. The Oregon Department of Education provided it to The Oregonian/OregonLive in response to a public records request.

Oregon Department of Education officials say they have taken careful and technically advanced steps to protect data, and are constantly updating and upgrading those efforts.

Oregon student data in their possession has never been breached, said Susie Strangfield, the department's chief information officer.

But state and federal auditors both identified weaknesses in the steps and procedures the agency has used to ensure cyber security.

Federal auditors named several highly technical details; state auditors disclosed only general information, saying they listed precise problems in a confidential letter to state education department, to avoid flagging them for hackers.

The data doesn't include students' home addresses, health records or discipline Oregon Department of Education risked breach of private student data, audits find | OregonLive.com:

Keeping retirement weird. My mother never asked permission to protest. | Fred Klonsky

Keeping retirement weird. My mother never asked permission to protest. | Fred Klonsky:

Keeping retirement weird. My mother never asked permission to protest.

The March on Washington, 1963. Women Strike for Peace at the White House, 1961.

I can hear my mother’s voice across decades, sitting across the table from her good friend Millie.

“I don’t ask permission to march,” mom would probably say to Millie when she heard that the National Park Service won’t let women march the day after Trump’s inauguration. “I don’t need a permit to protest.”

And Millie would agree, get up to pour another cup of strong coffee from the percolator sitting on the stove, come back and both she and mom would light up another Pall Mall.

And, oh my god. I wouldn’t even post what mom would have said about Trump.

In those days, before the term “sexist pig” came into popular use, mom would call a guy like Trump a male supremacist.

And some other choice words.

When I was 13, I had a job after school delivering the afternoon newspaper to offices along Beverly Boulevard between La Cienega and Fairfax in Los Angeles. When I was Keeping retirement weird. My mother never asked permission to protest. | Fred Klonsky:

Measuring Proficient Teachers Codifies Bad Teaching | the becoming radical

Measuring Proficient Teachers Codifies Bad Teaching | the becoming radical:

Measuring Proficient Teachers Codifies Bad Teaching

Maja Wilson and Alfie Kohn have found themselves in a problematic minority during the accountability era dedicated to standards, high-stakes testing, and the ever-present rubric.

Rubrics, they argue, ultimately fail complex human behaviors such as writing. While rubrics facilitate statistical aspects of measuring human behaviors (such as teaching and learning), by doing so, they also tend to erode the quality of the very behaviors being measured.

As a writing teacher, I can confirm Wilson’s and Kohn’s critiques that student writing conforming to a rubric and thus deemed “proficient” or “excellent” can be and often is quite bad writing. Rubric-based labels such as “proficient” reflect compliance to the rubric, not writing quality.

Wilson, in fact, has demonstrated this by revising a professional and beautiful piece of writing by Sandra Cisneros so that is conforms to a computer-graded system’s criteria for high-quality writing. The result was more than disturbing with the revised work substantially worse but better correlated with what the Educational Testing Service (ETS) has deemed “good.”

While Wilson’s experiment focuses on computer-graded writing, the basis of that is having a generic rubric to determine writing quality, and thus, here we begin to investigate why rubric-driven evaluation of complex human behavior always fails:

• Rubrics reduce the unpredictable to the prescribed.
• To be practical, rubrics often attempt to be generic enough to cover huge categories—such as writing and teaching—and thus failing the reality that poetry writing is significantly distinct from journalism or that teaching second grade is significantly distinct from teaching high school physics.
• When rubrics use terminology that is broad enough to address those varieties, they are useless due to being too vague; when rubrics use terminology that is specific, they are useless because they are unduly prescriptive. If the learning objective is jumping rope, if proficiency is “students jump well,” we have no idea what “well” means, and if proficiency is “students jump 10 times without missing,” that 10 becomes all that Measuring Proficient Teachers Codifies Bad Teaching | the becoming radical:

30 years later, Roosevelt High's controversial clinic sees protests turn to praise | OregonLive.com

30 years later, Roosevelt High's controversial clinic sees protests turn to praise | OregonLive.com:

30 years later, Roosevelt High's controversial clinic sees protests turn to praise

In the beginning, in an old bookroom in the basement of the North Portland's Roosevelt High School, it was hard imagine that someday the protests would turn into praise.

It was 1986, and teen pregnancies were on the rise. The Multnomah County Health Department wanted to try something new: Opening a health clinic inside a school. Clinics had gone up in two other cities, Dallas, Texas, and St. Paul, Minn.

Why not Portland?

But while the logistics went smoothly, said Mary Lou Hennrich, an assistant director at the Multnomah County Health Department at the time, a "furor" took hold.

False rumors abounded about in-school abortions. Protesters threatened to follow Hennrich home. They called her a "devil worshiper."

"I don't think it's that unlike some of the stuff we've got going on right now with Trump and all the rest," Hennrich said.

On Monday, its founders gathered to mark the 30^th anniversary of the first school-based health clinic in the West -- celebrating success that spurred change around the state and helped lay the groundwork for clinics across the country.

In the decades since Roosevelt's clinic opened, 13 have opened in schools in Multnomah County, out of 75 around the state and 2,315 across the nation.

"It wasn't like we all sat down and said we're going to start a movement," Hennrich told The Oregonian/OregonLive. "We saw a need."

Multnomah County chose Roosevelt, she said, because census data showed the area had some of the highest rates for teen pregnancies, low income students and kids without health insurance.

Not all of the clinics offer reproductive services, but many do. Information about reproductive health, including information about abstinence, has come to dominate the narrative about the clinics though officials say it's only a small part of their care.

Mainly, the clinics provide convenient primary care. Regular shots and checkups happen right on campus, meaning kids don't have to miss school. Mental health services are also available.

"It's a model that is this powerful investment in youth and their academic 30 years later, Roosevelt High's controversial clinic sees protests turn to praise | OregonLive.com: