Bankrupting Connecticut – Nothing to see here - Just keep moving - Wait What?

Bankrupting Connecticut – Nothing to see here - Just keep moving - Wait What?:

Bankrupting Connecticut – Nothing to see here – Just keep moving

The Wait, What? Blog was created in January 2011.  Since then, 2,340 articles have been posted to the site.  In turn, the commentary pieces have generated well in excess of $2 million hits.

One of the most constant refrains has been the problems and dangers associated with the excess debt that is dragging Connecticut down and the irresponsible failure of the state’s elected officials – both Democrat and Republican – to deal with that mounting crisis

Initial posts to Wait What? included More on the issues underling Connecticut’s State Employee Pension System (1/25/11) and Connecticut’s state pension fund in its worst shape since the state began saving for pension obligations in the mid-1980s.(2/1/11).

Over the years came additional posts such as;

Look-Out – He’s got our credit card and he is going nuts!  (3/24/15)

WARNING!  WARNING! The state of Connecticut’s Fiscal Health (11/18/14)

Malloy’s “NO TAX” pledge will send Connecticut into the abyss (5/6/14)

The State Budget Gimmick to End all Budget Gimmicks (12/1/14)

Is that your credit card? Why yes, yes it is…. (9/26/13)

Connecticut: The Republic of Debt    (6/19/13)

And many, many more….

The effort to alert, warn and educate citizens about the fact that elected officials are failing to address Connecticut’s extraordinary debt crisis highlights the words of Jonathan Kozel, the great public education advocate and award winning author, who once wrote;

“Now, I don’t expect what I write to change things. I think I write now simply as a witness. This is how it is. This is what we have done. This is what we have permitted.” – Jonathan Kozol

And as if to prove the point, the debt crisis has gotten even worse thanks to the actions and inactions of Governor Dannel Malloy, Lt. Governor Nancy Wyman and the Democratic controlled Generally Assembly.

As if to drive the point home, today’s CT Newsjunkie headline reads, Pew: Connecticut Has One of Highest Public Debt to Personal Income Ratios.  The story reports;

Connecticut has one of the highest ratios of debt to personal income and the fifth highest ratio of state retiree health care liabilities to income, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts report released Tuesday.

The report, which measured each state’s pension, health care and debt costs as a percentage of personal income, put Connecticut’s total liabilities at $67.5 billion dollars or Bankrupting Connecticut – Nothing to see here - Just keep moving - Wait What?:

The 'Intolerable' Fight Over School Money : NPR Ed : NPR

The 'Intolerable' Fight Over School Money : NPR Ed : NPR:

The 'Intolerable' Fight Over School Money

LA Johnson/NPR

"This is an intolerable situation," Sen. Lamar Alexander said last week in a heated speech on the Senate floor.

The Tennessee Republican is chairman of the Senate's education committee, and he's furious with the Education Department. He even gave states some remarkable advice:

"If the regulations are not consistent with the law, I don't believe [states] should follow them," he said. "If the department persists, then the state should go to court to sue the department."

Things could get even more heated today as Alexander, himself a former education secretary, hosts a Senate hearing to spotlight his frustration with the current secretary, John B. King Jr.

Why is he so angry?

The easy answer: Title I. That's the $15 billion the federal government sends to districts to help schools that serve lots of low-income students.

But there's nothing easy — or simple — about this fight.

Alexander and King disagree on how to enforce the new law governing Title I. It says that, to get federal money, districts have to prove a few things — among them, that they're using state and local dollars to provide roughly the same services to kids in poor and non-poor schools alike.

"Basically, schools within a school district have to be similar," says Liz King, director of education policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "The idea here is that if they're not similar, then these federal dollars are just going to fill in gaps." 

Everyone agrees that Title I dollars are not supposed to gap-fill. They're meant to be extra — the technical term is "supplemental" — for low-income kids who need them most. What the sides don't agree on is how districts prove they're not just filling gaps and that state and local resources are being spread fairly.

The current system's not fair, says Secretary King. "What we see, as we look around the country, is districts where they're actually spending significantly more in their non-Title I schools than they're spending in their Title I schools."

The Teacher Salary Gap

Nora Gordon, of Georgetown University, studies Title I and says much of that spending gap between poor and non-poor schools comes The 'Intolerable' Fight Over School Money : NPR Ed : NPR:

Illinois Researchers: School Closures Compound the Problems of Urban Segregation | janresseger

Illinois Researchers: School Closures Compound the Problems of Urban Segregation | janresseger:

Illinois Researchers: School Closures Compound the Problems of Urban Segregation

Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy at the University of Illinois and Jin Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in his department. have published an important paper, The Impact of School Closure on Equity of Access in Chicago in the Journal of Education and Urban Society, where it is available only to subscribers.  However, a short summary, Children in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Are More Likely to See Their Local Schools Close, by Lubienski and Lee has been published in a blog at the London School of Economics.

School closures, justified as one of the turnarounds prescribed as a punishment by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and the Obama administration’s School Improvement Grant program, are among the most troubling manifestations of the test-and-punish school “reforms” with which our society has recently been experimenting. Although the metric used for judging school quality is a school’s aggregate performance on the annual federally mandated standardized test, researchers continue to find that standardized tests correlate more closely with the average income of the families whose children attend the school than the quality of the school—its teachers and its programs. Researchers have also shown that, after their school closes, students cannot always move to a higher scoring school and that school closures remove important neighborhood institutional anchors.

Lubienski and Lee’s new study again confirms that there should be serious concern about school closure as a “turnaround” policy.  And their study questions the rationale too often provided by school districts when they close a school—that the school suffered from under-enrollment:

“Public schools in the U.S. are increasingly being shut down when they have been identified as underperforming on the basis of test scores and graduation rates.  The traditional approach to school closure has been to reduce financial losses caused by empty classrooms and under-enrolled schools…. Indeed, this classic approach to maximizing efficiency is now evident in school closure policies in larger cities which are experiencing out-migration and depopulation. But now it has been combined with the idea of punishing apparent organizational underperformance… In new research, we examine the possibility that school closings shape inequitable access to schools particularly for children in less advantaged neighborhoods…  (O)ur study… raises the likelihood that students in segregated communities have less access to neighboring schools.”  The study focuses on the closure by Chicago Public Schools of 50 schools in the spring of 2013—8 percent of the district’s schools.

In a series of maps, Lubienski and Lee show that in Chicago, “the policy produced a notable change in access in areas with a high density of both African American and Latino American Illinois Researchers: School Closures Compound the Problems of Urban Segregation | janresseger:

CURMUDGUCATION: A War for Education

CURMUDGUCATION: A War for Education:

A War for Education

Those of us who write about education often play the what if game, trying to envision one cool ideal or another, and it's usually a policy tweak here or a structure kluge there. 

But you know what would be cool? If we treated public education like war.

When we decide as a country that war is necessary, we do not screw around. We decided to fight World War II and in six years we spent almost 300 billion dollars-- and that's 300 1940 dollars. We spent over a full whopping third of our GDP. We scraped together every cent from under every couch cushion in the country. 

And even when we aren't exactly all on the same page, our leaders find a way-- even an unscrupulous underhanded way. We were so sneak about Vietnam that without even declaring a war, we managed to spend 100-200 billion (depending on who's counting) over eleven years. That's approaching one trillion 2016 dollars.

And back then we were spendthrifts, drunk on cheap oil and prosperity that seemed indefatigable. Fast forward to, say, Iraq. A more frugal nation with a bigger political concern about things lie budget deficits was sold a $100 billion, two year war. We got eight years at maybe over a trillion. Maybe a lot more.

Here are some things that almost nobody said about these wars:

We just can't afford it. Nobody much suggested that wars should be fought with fewer troops or resources because it was just too pricey. Nobody said that we should pull out because we had CURMUDGUCATION: A War for Education:

The First Rule of Test Club is We Don’t Talk About Test Club | gadflyonthewallblog

The First Rule of Test Club is We Don’t Talk About Test Club | gadflyonthewallblog:

The First Rule of Test Club is We Don’t Talk About Test Club

How can you criticize standardized testing if you aren’t allowed to talk about the tests?

To show why these assessments are bad, you have to be able to mention specific questions on the exams.

But if you do that, you will be violating the test company’s copyright and thus be subject to legal action.

So there will be no discussion of your concerns, no defense of the questions in question. Instead you’ll be threatened to silence.

This is the Catch-22 for teachers, parents and children throughout the nation.

We know the federally mandated high stakes assessments public school children must take are poorly constructed, culturally and racially biased, and ultimately unfair. But if we speak up in public with any kind of specificity, we’re threatened with steep fines. And if we write about it on-line, those articles will be taken down, censored or otherwise disappeared.

This is what happened to Prof. Celia Oyler of Teachers College, Columbia University this week when she posted an anonymous classroom teacher’s critique of the 4th grade PARCC exam on her blog.

Since the article reproduced three live questions from the exam, Oyler received athreatening email from PARCC CEO Laura Slover.

Oyler acquiesced to the CEO’s demand that she remove the PARCC questions, but she did not – as Slover commanded – reveal the name of her source. Oyler is debating legal action of her own against the testing company.

Meanwhile, education bloggers across the country have engaged in civil disobedience by reprinting Oyler’s entire post along with the PARCC questions. Many of these articles have been taken down by Twitter, Facebook or other Internet enforcers.

It’s a sad day in America when free speech is treated so disdainfully.

These PARCC questions are considered private property, but in many important ways they are not. They were developed at public expense. They were funded by taxpayers The First Rule of Test Club is We Don’t Talk About Test Club | gadflyonthewallblog:

Segregation in American schools was outlawed 62 years ago, but it’s on the rise — Quartz

Segregation in American schools was outlawed 62 years ago, but it’s on the rise — Quartz:

Segregation in American schools was outlawed 62 years ago, but it’s on the rise

Decades of research have shown that segregation negatively impacts students, with consequences accumulating throughout their lives.

And yet segregation in US schools is on the rise, according to a damningnew report from the Government Accountability Office.

In 2000-2001, 9% of all public schools (kindergarten to 12th grade) had high proportions of poor and black or Hispanic students. By 2013-2014, that figure was 16%, the report showed.

These schools are disproportionately poor and non-white: 75% to 100% of the students were black or Hispanic and eligible for free or reduced-price lunch—a widely-used indicator of poverty.

Schools with high levels of poverty offer fewer math, science, and college prep courses. While 71% of better-off schools had calculus classes, and 80% offered physics, only 29% of poorer ones had calculus and 55% offered physics. High-poverty schools also had higher rates of students held back in 9th grade, suspended or expelled.

The GAO reviewed nationally representative studies from 2004 to 2014 and found that:

“schools with higher concentrations of students from low-income families were generally associated with worse outcomes, and schools with higher concentrations of students from middle- and high-income families were generally associated with better outcomes.”

In one study, when the average family income of a school increased, the academic achievement and attainment of students of all racial backgrounds improved.

In 2014, a trio of lawmakers asked the GAO to examine racial and socioeconomic isolation in K-12 public schools, and what impact that had on educational equity. Rep. Bobby Scott, one of the members of Congress who requested the report, responded in a statement:Segregation in American schools was outlawed 62 years ago, but it’s on the rise — Quartz:

Voucher pitch unfair | Editorials | www.journalgazette.net

Voucher pitch unfair | Editorials | www.journalgazette.net:

Voucher pitch unfair

Choice supporters' event leaves out public schools

 There are no school vouchers in conservative Texas, where religious leaders stand firm in support of public education.  Pastors for Texas Children was organized to counter school privatization efforts, including vouchers or any policy that diverts public money to private or church use.

In Indiana, however, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice commands the voucher discussion. It was the muscle behind the state’s 2013 voucher law, which Friedman representatives undoubtedly will trumpet at a Thursday evening event at Eddie Merlot’s. Northeast Indiana business and legislative leaders are invited to dine over the foundation’s pitch for taxpayer support of private and parochial schools. Friedman is host for the event, along with the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership, the Regional Chamber of Northeast Indiana and the Dekko Foundation.

Public schools serve 89 percent of Indiana students, but they won’t be represented Thursday night. As with many voucher presentations, this one is behind closed doors and aimed at an influential group.

“It is important for our organization to be informed about initiatives that will or do impact our region,” wrote Regional Chamber Executive Director Vince Buchanan when asked about the organization’s role. “As such, it seems logical that we would invite our stakeholders to participate in an opportunity to learn more about the issue. The Regional Chamber has not endorsed any position other than one to be informed.”

 John Sampson, president and CEO of the Regional Partnership, said the event was an opportunity to learn about “talent-related initiatives.”

“Not everything we do does everyone agree with,” he said, “We still need to take positions to be better informed on this region.”

But regional business and legislative officials won’t be well-informed by the Friedman Foundation’s one-sided case. Since they didn’t bother to invite any public school representatives or advocates, we’ll offer some points certain to go unmentioned:

 • Choice “scholarships” diverted about $115 million from Indiana public schools this year and added more than $40 million in K-12 costs.

• There is no savings. While the per-pupil payments to voucher schools are less than the average per-pupil tuition support for public schools, vouchers increasingly are awarded to families who always intended to send their children to religious schools. They represent an additional cost to taxpayers, not a reduction in an existing expense.

• The 316 voucher schools overwhelmingly have a religious affiliation. 

• In spite of its original billing as an escape route for students in “failing” public schools, more than half of Indiana voucher students have never been enrolled in a public school, and voucher payments flow to schools also labeled as failing by the flawed A-F school grading system.

• Friedman board member Fred Klipsch has donated more than $300,000 to voucher-friendly candidates and organizations since 2010. In a 2013 address to the Catholic Business Exchange, he boasted of his political action committee raising $1.2 million to elect GOP majorities to control redistricting and set the stage for the voucher bill.

• While Friedman’s opinion poll showed 69 percent of Hoosiers support vouchers, Ball State University’s well-respected Hoosier Survey found support for private-school vouchers and charter schools at just 39 percent. Fifty-eight percent prefer their tax dollars go to public schools.

If the Regional Chamber and Regional Partnership truly want their stakeholders to know about Indiana schools and choice, they would be wise to include educators responsible for teaching 89 percent of the state’s students. They might not have the means to host a discussion over prime steaks, but they certainly can offer a broader perspective.Voucher pitch unfair | Editorials | www.journalgazette.net:

Hoosier School Heist TV is Doug Martin's channel featuring videos of his book tour across Indiana speaking on the corporate takeover of public education. Order Hoosier School Heist at http://hoosierschoolheist.com/.

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How Hedge Funders Built the Pro-Charter Political Network - BillMoyers.com

How Hedge Funders Built the Pro-Charter Political Network - BillMoyers.com:

How Hedge Funders Built the Pro-Charter Political Network
School board elections have graduated from quaint races to big-money contests, thanks to well-funded education reform advocacy groups succeeding at the local level.

This post originally appeared at American Prospect.

Not too long ago, school board races were quaint affairs. Even in big school districts, candidates usually only had to raise a few thousand dollars to compete.

But as the movement to marketize public education gained momentum, advocates broadened their focus from the federal level to state and local governments. There, where campaign costs were substantially lower than in federal elections, the well-funded movement could more effectively leverage its political money.

One of the starkest casualties of that strategic shift has been the American school board election. A network of education advocacy groups, heavily backed by hedge-fund investors, has turned its political attention to the local level, with aspirations to stock school boards — from Indianapolis and Minneapolis to Denver and Los Angeles — with allies.

In recent years, this powerful upstart operation has had tremendous, albeit somewhat stealthy, success playing politics at the local level, by cultivating reform leaders in areas with disappointing schools and a baseline desire for change. They have looked to building a state philanthropic infrastructure that can sustain local efforts beyond one election.

The same big-money donors and organizational names pop up in news reports and campaign-finance filings, revealing the behind-the-scenes coordination across organizational, geographic and industry lines. The origins arguably trace back to Democrats for Education Reform, a relatively obscure group founded by New York hedge funders in the mid-2000s.

The Hedge Fund Connection

The hedge-fund industry and the charter movement are almost inextricably entangled. Executives see charter-school expansion as vital to the future of public education, relying on a model of competition. They see testing as essential to accountability. And they often look at teacher unions with unvarnished distaste. Several hedge-fund managers have launched their own charter-school chains. You’d be hard-pressed to find a hedge-fund guy who How Hedge Funders Built the Pro-Charter Political Network - BillMoyers.com:

How We Discredit Teacher Knowledge | The Patiently Impatient Teacher

How We Discredit Teacher Knowledge | The Patiently Impatient Teacher:

How We Discredit Teacher Knowledge

I started this blog with the goal to engage in civil, intellectual discourse befitting the fact that I have “Dr.” in from on my name now. Some things, however, just make my blood boil to the point that the CapsLock may just have to come out. We have reached one of these moments with this article by Robert Pondiscio featured in EducationNext as well as some other sources. The gist of this article one of the many failings of our horribly inept teaching force is that mere teachers are creating or finding their own materials instead of relying on experts to provide expertly designed, expert instructional materials.

Here are some highlights:

“A new study from the RAND Corporation finds that nearly every teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers, 96 percent of secondary school teachers—draws upon ‘materials I developed and/or selected myself’ in teaching English language arts. And where do they find materials? The most common answer among elementary school teachers is Google (94 percent), followed by Pinterest (87 percent). The numbers are virtually the same for math. But don’t blame teachers. These data, for reasons both good and bad, reveal a dirty little secret about American education. In many districts and schools—maybe even most—the efficacy of the instructional materials put in front of children is an afterthought. For teachers, it makes an already hard job nearly impossible to do well. Expecting teachers to be expert pedagogues and How We Discredit Teacher Knowledge | The Patiently Impatient Teacher:

CURMUDGUCATION: Pearson CEO Spreads It On Thick

CURMUDGUCATION: Pearson CEO Spreads It On Thick:

Pearson CEO Spreads It On Thick

EdWeek's Market Brief, a site that unabashedly focuses its gaze on the giant pile of money attached to the education biz, sat down with Pearson CEO John Fallon to unleash a heaping helping of corporate toolspeak. 

Fallon responded to a series of questions from reporters that EdWeek has helpfully organized. So we'll borrow their organizational scheme here.

What is Pearson's biz?

Primarily, Pearson makes giant piles of money. Fallon claims $7 billion annual revenues and "50 percent come from courseware/content, in K-12, higher education, and across the professional space." Thirty percent comes from testing (ten percent of the high stakes variety). The last twenty percent comes from services provided to school and Pearson's own virtual school. So, bigtime education.

Fallon says that a Pearson motto is "content plus assessment, powered by technology, equalizes effective learning at scale." Similar to the sort of thing we all used to write on "why I want to teach" essays back in teacher school. Okay, not that similar, since the Pearson motto doesn't actually mention teaching as part of the plan-- just technology-powered content delivery and assessment. As we have noted before when studying Pearson's Master Plans.

Fallon also said the company’s approach is to “define what we do by the outcome, not by where it happens physically.”

In the Cyber School game

Reporters, apparently in a very diplomatic and polite manner, asked Fallon, "Pearson has bet heavily on cyber-schools through its Connections Academy, among other products. What do you say to customers who are have noticed that cyber-schools are a big poop sandwich?"

Fallon's answer is a Mona Lisa of corporate baloneyspeak.

It’s important to speak in specific rather than general terms…It’s not always the case, but it’s fair to say there’s a disproportionate number of students in virtual schooling who are there because physical schools have failed them in some form or another. So it’s going to be important that we CURMUDGUCATION: Pearson CEO Spreads It On Thick:

 

On the anniversary of Brown v. Board, new evidence that U.S. schools are resegregating - The Washington Post

On the anniversary of Brown v. Board, new evidence that U.S. schools are resegregating - The Washington Post:

On the anniversary of Brown v. Board, new evidence that U.S. schools are resegregating

Thurgood Marshall, who served as the NAACP’s chief legal counsel through Brown v. Board of Education and who later became the first black Supreme Court justice, is pictured in 1958 on the steps of the Supreme Court after filing an appeal in the integration case of Little Rock’s Central High School. Around him are students from Little Rock and their chaperone. (AP)

 Poor, black and Hispanic children are becoming increasingly isolated from their white, affluent peers in the nation’s public schools, according to new federal data showing that the number of high-poverty schools serving primarily black and brown students more than doubled between 2001 and 2014.

The data was released by the Government Accountability Office on Tuesday, 62 years to the day after the Supreme Court decided that segregated schools are “inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional.

That landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education began the dismantling of the dual school systems — one for white kids, one for black students — that characterized so many of the nation’s communities. It also became a touchstone for the ideal of public education as a great equalizer, an American birthright meant to give every child a fair shot at success.

But that ideal appears to be unraveling, according to Tuesday’s GAO report.

The proportion of schools segregated by race and class — where more than 75 percent of children receive free or reduced-price lunch and more than 75 percent are black or Hispanic — climbed from 9 percent to 16 percent of schools between 2001 and 2014. The number of the most intensively segregated schools — with more than 90 percent of low-income students and students of color — more than doubled over that period.On the anniversary of Brown v. Board, new evidence that U.S. schools are resegregating - The Washington Post:

Schools are now ‘soft targets’ for companies to collect data and market to kids — report - The Washington Post

Schools are now ‘soft targets’ for companies to collect data and market to kids — report - The Washington Post:

Schools are now ‘soft targets’ for companies to collect data and market to kids — report

Schools have become “soft targets” for companies trying to gather data and market to children because of the push in education to adopt new technology and in part because of the rise of computer-administered Common Core tests, according to a new annual report. 

The report, titled “Learning to be Watched: Surveillance Culture at School” and published Tuesday by the National Center for Education Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the 18th annual report about  schoolhouse commercialism trends.

It says student privacy is increasingly being compromised by commercial entities that establish relationships with schools — often providing free technology — and then track students online and collect massive amounts of data about them. Then they tailor their advertising to keep the young people connected to them. One important consequence, the report says, is that children who are subjected to “constant digital surveillance and marketing at school” come to accept as normal that corporations play a big role not only in their education but in their lives.

[The astonishing amount of data being collected about your children]

The report says:

Schools have proven to be a soft target for data gathering and marketing. Not only are they eager to adopt technology that promises better learning, but their lack of resources makes them susceptible to offers of free technology, free programs and activities, free educational materials, and help with fundraising. Schools are under relentless pressure to make ever greater use of technology. Our techno-friendly zeitgeist embraces and celebrates the rapid proliferation of education technology in every corner of our lives. In school, teachers are encouraged to integrate technology into their lessons and homework, and to rely on computerized student performance data as a diagnostic tool. State and federal laws now require that schools do extensive data reporting; in addition, the Common Core testing regime requires students to take computerized tests—and therefore to be computer-competent before they approach the tests.

Although some parents try to resist the collection and use of data about their children, the ubiquity of computers makes it easy for children and their parents to accept “constant data gathering and attendance surveillance of children” — and few look through the companies’ “long paragraphs of legalese” to understand what is really going on. Americans are, the report Schools are now ‘soft targets’ for companies to collect data and market to kids — report - The Washington Post: