Education Research Report
Friday, January 11, 2019
Charter School Debate Fueling the Los Angeles Teacher Strike | Time
Charter School Debate Fueling the Los Angeles Teacher Strike | Time
How the Debate Over Charter Schools Is Fueling the Looming Los Angeles Teacher Strike
How the Debate Over Charter Schools Is Fueling the Looming Los Angeles Teacher Strike
More than 30,000 Los Angeles teachers are preparing to strike on Monday for the first time in 30 years due to failed negotiations over school funding, pay raises and classroom sizes. But as they look to mobilize support, teachers are also focusing on the growth of charter schools as a central issue in the nation’s second largest school district.
At a press conference Wednesday night following another day of negotiations, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) President Alex Caputo-Pearl accused district leaders of wanting “to starve our schools in order to justify cuts and justify handing more schools over to privately run charter schools.”
He called for a cap on charter school growth, including it on a list of issues that, while not on the bargaining table now, “absolutely shape the direction of public education in Los Angeles.”
Los Angeles schools Superintendent Austin Beutner has said previously that the contract dispute should not be seen as a referendum on charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated. And he has called claims that he wants to privatize the school district “baseless.” But the issue has become a focal point in the debate over the future of Los Angeles schools, as union leaders accuse Beutner and the city’s Board of Education of favoring charter schools over traditional public schools.
About one in five Los Angeles students now attend charter schools, and charter school enrollment has continued to grow in the past decade as overall enrollment in the district has declined. The city now has more charter schools and more charter school students than any other school system in the country, the Los Angeles Times reported. Most charter school employees are not unionized.
Meanwhile, charter school advocates have been gaining ground in the city. In 2017, outside spending on campaigns for two school board seats topped $14 million in what was described as “the most expensive school board race in U.S. history” — an election that pitted teachers unions against wealthy charter school backers, resulting in a pro-charter majority on the board.
Union leaders and other charter school critics argue that such schools have CONTINUE READING: Charter School Debate Fueling the Los Angeles Teacher Strike | Time
Sacramento City leaders walk out of budget talks with teachers union | The Sacramento Bee
Sacramento City leaders walk out of budget talks with teachers union | The Sacramento Bee
Standoff between Sacramento City school district and teachers flares up
Standoff between Sacramento City school district and teachers flares up
Talks between teachers and the Sacramento City Unified School district aimed at resolving a severe budget crisis have broken down as a dispute between the two parties heats up.
A scheduled meeting between the Sacramento City Unified School District and Sacramento City Teachers Association Wednesday to discuss the union’s proposal to solve the budget crisis ended before it began, after district officials walked out and the teachers union called it a “setup.”
The two were scheduled to meet to discuss cost saving ideas to alleviate a pending financial meltdown, according to a statement by the district.
In December, an independent financial audit identified a $30 million shortfall in the district’s budget, and warned of a possible takeover by the state if the problem was not addressed by November 2019, when money is expected to run out.
The district and the union were scheduled to meet for an hour Wednesday afternoon to discuss their differences, but a dispute about the location of the meeting and the time the two parties arrived derailed the talks before they began.
District officials said Thursday that union officials were late to the meeting, leaving Superintendent Jorge Aguilar waiting. Aguilar left about 20 minutes after the scheduled start time, when no union officials were present, district spokesman Alex Barrios said.
Union officials said Thursday they were in the lobby of the meeting space, and entered the meeting room about 15 minutes after the scheduled start time. An argument with remaining district officials then allegedly ensued, with all parties eventually leaving without conducting the scheduled meeting.
“SCTA leaders showed up late to the designated meeting location,” read a statement from the CONTINUE READING:Sacramento City leaders walk out of budget talks with teachers union | The Sacramento Bee
Decades of Academic Research Support Community Schools Strategy in New York City’s Renewal Schools | janresseger
Decades of Academic Research Support Community Schools Strategy in New York City’s Renewal Schools | janresseger
Decades of Academic Research Support Community Schools Strategy in New York City’s Renewal Schools
Decades of Academic Research Support Community Schools Strategy in New York City’s Renewal Schools
So-called “corporate” school reform has been defined by setting standards and testing students to see if they have met the standards. Rewards and punishments follow for the teachers and schools said to have produced these results. The assumption has been that a school is a closed box that can turn around the lives of the enrolled students—all apart from the fact that students spend only six or seven hours of the day at school. Corporate school reformers said they would disrupt the stasis they thought defined bureaucratic public schools by offering rewards and punishments to motivate teachers to work harder and smarter. Many of these so-called education reformers came from the business schools and employed competition as their primary motivator. And the politicians who followed their advice brought us test score targets to be met and a promise quickly to make every child a winner.
We were warned in advance that this wouldn’t work as we planned. Dr. James Comer at the Yale School Development Program created a multifaceted program to help schools support the most vulnerable children and to engage educators, parents and the community in this process of building trust and strong relationships. In 1997, in his book Waiting for a Miracle, Comer described the results. While his staff and outside evaluators believed that the Comer schools had made important progress in improving the children’s education, Comer wrote: “Our best approximation suggests that after three years about a third of the schools make significant social and academic improvement, a third show a modest improvement which is often difficult to sustain, and a third show no gain.” (Waiting for a Miracle, p. 72) The Comer program suggested that seven years was a more realistic timeline to look for real school improvement.
One of the most artificial aspects of corporate school reform was the setting of achievement test targets and short timelines as a motivator. No Child Left Behind established that all American children in public schools would be proficient by 2014 or their schools and teachers would be punished. As we moved closer to 2014, everybody began to realize that making all CONTINUE READING: Decades of Academic Research Support Community Schools Strategy in New York City’s Renewal Schools | janresseger
On Creativity and The Stories Our Schools Tell Themselves | The Jose Vilson
On Creativity and The Stories Our Schools Tell Themselves | The Jose Vilson
ON CREATIVITY AND THE STORIES OUR SCHOOLS TELL THEMSELVES
ON CREATIVITY AND THE STORIES OUR SCHOOLS TELL THEMSELVES
Around each March, a few students say they can do my job better than me. At the end of the year, I let them mock the adults in the building for a bit before they graduate to high school. A few years ago, however, I decided to flip that challenge and gave them a lesson plan template to work from. They were interested in how they could get their class to learn. They’d create whole poster boards for their lessons and develop PowerPoint projects that they’d use to teach me. In May, they were a few days from presenting and teaching their classes.
A few adults walked in with power and gaze. One of them said, “Does this look like the kids are learning?” The question already prompted disapproval. Instead of asking for my lesson, asking my students, and watching them speak as if the learning was theirs, a few minutes passed by and a whole department and district would be pushed, prodded, berated, and prompted over the years and to this day to the traditional, rote pedagogy that would supposedly raise test scores and, ostensibly, learning.
With only a hint of irony in these adult voices, the call for creativity has rung louder recently. No. Don’t do that.
Creativity continues to float around the educational zeitgeist even as the ropes tighten the noose around our pedagogies. The move to emulate rigorous – the actual meaning of the word – instruction may have had good intentions. We assigned more numbers to what we felt the students learned. Graduation rates. College acceptance rates. Test scores. All of them. If these and other numbers CONTINUE READING: On Creativity and The Stories Our Schools Tell Themselves | The Jose Vilson
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