Response to Class Action Lawsuit - Year 2014 (CA Dept of Education)

Response to Class Action Lawsuit - Year 2014 (CA Dept of Education):

California Department of Education and State Board of Education Issue Joint Statement on Class Action Lawsuit

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and State Board of Education President Michael Kirst issued the following joint statement in connection with a class action lawsuit, Cruz et al. v. State of California, filed today in Oakland.

"California's education system is in the midst of a historic effort to shift authority over decision making to local school districts, empowering them to determine how best to meet the needs of the students they serve.

"While neither the California Department of Education nor the State Board of Education has had an opportunity to review the specific claims made in today's suit, we believe continuing to implement California's Local Control Funding Formula—rather than shifting authority to Sacramento—is the best way to improve student achievement and meet the needs of our schools, and we will resist any effort to derail this important initiative through costly and unnecessary litigation.

"We encourage the ACLU to continue to communicate with us at the state and, more importantly, to work with local school districts about the best ways to support local students and improve educational outcomes."

# # # #

Tom Torlakson — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5206, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

 

ACLU Sues California For 'Equal Learning Time' : NPR Ed : NPR

ACLU Sues California For 'Equal Learning Time' : NPR Ed : NPR: ACLU Sues California For 'Equal Learning Time'California high school students Briana Lamb and Cristian Gaspar are named in the ACLU's equal learning time lawsuit.ACLU SoCal/Public CounselThe American Civil Liberties Union today filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that high poverty schools in California are denying students the learni

by mike simpson / 4h

Significantly altered transitional kindergarten bill passes in the Senate | EdSource Today

Significantly altered transitional kindergarten bill passes in the Senate | EdSource Today:

Significantly altered transitional kindergarten bill passes in the Senate

May 29th, 2014 | Add a Comment | 
By Lillian Mongeau

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on pinterest_shareMore Sharing Services

A bill that would make public pre-kindergarten available at no charge to children from California’s lowest-income families passed the state Senate today and heads to the Assembly for debate there.

First introduced with much fanfare in January, SB 837 expands the pre-kindergarten program known as transitional kindergarten. It has been touted as a top priority by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg despite little interest on the part of Gov. Jerry Brown.

“This is at the top of the list. I can’t think of anything more important,” Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said at a news conference announcing the new bill in January.

Transitional kindergarten is a public school program for children who turn 5 in the first few months of the school year. Originally, the bill sought to expand transitional kindergarten to serve all 4-year-olds the year before they enrolled in kindergarten. Changes to the bill language announced last week and introduced yesterday would make transitional kindergarten a targeted program for children who qualify for free or reduced price lunch under the federal poverty guidelines (under $44,000 annual income for a family of four), rather than a universal program.

“This pared down version of the original bill would still cover one half of the 4-year-olds in California, because half of them are low-income,” Steinberg told the Senate during debate today.

Under the new guidelines, 234,000 children are expected to qualify for the program each year, double the current program enrollment. The expanded transitional kindergarten program, to be re-named “California Pre-Kindergarten Program,” is the largest part of a Senate budget proposal that would increase spending on early education every year for the next five years. The existing California State Preschool Program, which serves 3- and 4-year-olds from families making up to 70 percent of the state median income (an annual income of $52,959 for a family of four), would also be expanded under the proposal. Child care vouchers for low-income working families would also increase.  In the first year of the five-year rollout, the Senate’s “Fair Start” budget proposal would Significantly altered transitional kindergarten bill passes in the Senate | EdSource Today:

Guest: Waiver loss shines light on absurdity of No Child Left Behind | Education Lab Blog | Seattle Times

Guest: Waiver loss shines light on absurdity of No Child Left Behind | Education Lab Blog | Seattle Times:

Guest: Waiver loss shines light on absurdity of No Child Left Behind

Posted by Dan Magill

Dan Magill

I am not bothered about losing our state’s No Child Left Behind waiver. In fact, this may be one of the best things to happen to education in Washington since standardized testing wrapped its shackles around us last decade.

Losing this waiver is good because it finally exposes No Child Left Behind for the utter foolishness that it is.

Here’s the letter I would send to parents if I worked in the state superintendent’s office:

Dear Mr. And Mrs. Colbert:

We must inform you that your child currently attends a school that has been labeled “failing” or “needs improvement” according to the No Child Left Behind Act.

According to the law, you now have the option of switching your child into a school that is not failing. Unfortunately, because 99 percent of schools in the state have received this label, you’ll have to move out of state to find one.

Otherwise, the instant you enroll your child at a new school, we will send another letter, identical to this one (costing us additional postage and printing), informing you that your situation has not changed.

Therefore, we ask you to consider keeping your child enrolled at his/her present school. In the event of any changes to the law, your school’s status may also change at any moment. By next week, it may turn out to be one of the best in the state.

But right now, under current definitions, it is an utter disaster.

Regards,

OSPI

Any system that can result in a 99-percent failure rate reveals only its own failure to properly evaluate and predict what is possible.

Under No Child Left Behind, with its 32 demographic groups that all have to show constant year-over-year growth, if even one group fails, the entire school goes down in flames.

That’s why we see some of the top schools in the area, such as Lincoln High School in Seattle, receiving the “failure” label. If one tiny sub-group, say special-education white students, doesn’t show adequate progress, the entire school is a failure. The 1 percent can bring down the 99 Guest: Waiver loss shines light on absurdity of No Child Left Behind | Education Lab Blog | Seattle Times:

NYC Public School Parents: 20 million student records put at risk by ConnectEDU's bankruptcy -- & what lessons if any have tech enthusiasts learned from the inBloom debacle?

NYC Public School Parents: 20 million student records put at risk by ConnectEDU's bankruptcy -- & what lessons if any have tech enthusiasts learned from the inBloom debacle?:

20 million student records put at risk by ConnectEDU's bankruptcy -- & what lessons if any have tech enthusiasts learned from the inBloom debacle?

ConnectEDU was one of the three data dashboard companies chosen by the NY State Education Department to receive a statewide set of personal student data through the inBloom data cloud, as part of their "EngageNY Portal."  Now ConnectEDU has announced it has gone bankrupt, despite receiving a $500,000 grant from the Gates Foundation less than a year ago.  Until recently, Ted Mitchell sat on its Board of Directors, formerly the head of the New School Ventures Fund, and the recently confirmed Under Secretary to Arne Duncan at the US Department of Education.

The assets of ConnectEDU, including 20 million personal student records, are being bought by a venture capital company called North Atlantic Capital.  Now the FTC is stepping in, to try to block the handing over of all these personal records.  According to Education Week:

The potential sale of 20 million student records by ConnectEDU, an ed-tech company that filed for bankruptcy in April, has prompted the Federal Trade Commission to step in to protect the student data, the agency announced Friday.

ConnectEDU, a 12-year-old Boston-based company, provides interactive tools to help K-12 and post-secondary learners make academic and career decisions. In its privacy policy, ConnectEDU promised that—prior to any sale of the company—registered users would be notified and have the ability to delete their personally identifiable data.

Now, the FTC said that promise appears to be compromised by the potential sale of the company's assets, including the student data, to North Atlantic Capital, a Portland, Me.-based venture capital fund. As a result, the commission—by a vote of 5-0—authorized its consumer protection bureau to write a letter to the bankruptcy court that will rule on the asset sale.

The letter indicates that the terms of the sale of the company and its subsidiary Academic Management Systems Inc. in NYC Public School Parents: 20 million student records put at risk by ConnectEDU's bankruptcy -- & what lessons if any have tech enthusiasts learned from the inBloom debacle?:

solidaridad: Marshall Tuck's legacy of institutional racism at Markham MS so bad, that U.S. Congress expresses concern

solidaridad: Marshall Tuck's legacy of institutional racism at Markham MS so bad, that U.S. Congress expresses concern:

Marshall Tuck's legacy of institutional racism at Markham MS so bad, that U.S. Congress expresses concern

Marshall Tuck's legacy of institutional racism at Markham MS is so bad, that congresspeople are now concerned. Representative Janice Hahn wrote LAUSD to contact the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS) about safety and push-out concerns that are the legacy of Marshall Tuck's unilateral leadership style and hierarchy of administration. Tuck was also known for shutting down Ethnic Studies, Heritage Language, and Dual Language Immersion Programs.

Marshall Tuck's legacy of institutional racism at Markham MS so bad, that congresspeople are expressing con...

On the “Success” of a 100% Charter Recovery School District | deutsch29

On the “Success” of a 100% Charter Recovery School District | deutsch29:

On the “Success” of a 100% Charter Recovery School District

May 29, 2014

On May 29, 2014, Lindsey Layton of the Washington Post wrote this article on the conversion of the state-run New Orleans Recovery School District’s (RSD) conversion to charters.

I would like to clarify a few of Layton’s glossy statements about RSD.

Let us begin with this one:

The creation of the country’s first all-charter school system has improved education for many children in New Orleans.

Layton offers no substantial basis for her opinion of “improvement” other than that the schools were “seized” by the state following Katrina.

Certainly school performance scores do not support Layton’s idea of “improvement.” Even with the inflation of the 2013 school performance scores, RSD has no A schools and very few B schools. In fact, almost the entire RSD– which was already approx 90 percent charters– qualifies as a district of “failing” schools according to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s definition of “failing schools” as C, D, F schools and whose students are eligible for vouchers.

The district grade for RSD “rose” to a C due to a deliberate score inflation documented here  and here.

The purpose of vouchers is to enable students to escape “failing” schools. Ironic how the predominately-charter RSD has the greatest concentration of such “failing” schools in the entire state of Louisiana.

On to another Layton whopper:

In the tumult after the hurricane, the state seized control of 102 of the city’s 117 schools — the worst performers — and created the appointed Recovery School District to oversee them, while letting the Orleans Parish School Board run the On the “Success” of a 100% Charter Recovery School District | deutsch29:

California Districts Stumble on CORE Waiver, Ed. Dept. Finds - Politics K-12 - Education Week

California Districts Stumble on CORE Waiver, Ed. Dept. Finds - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

California Districts Stumble on CORE Waiver, Ed. Dept. Finds

By Lesli A. Maxwell on May 29, 2014 4:34 PM

Crossposted from the District Dossier blog

By Lesli A. Maxwell

The California districts that won a special reprieve from portions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act are falling short on several key pieces of their waiver agreement, and, in some areas, made major changes to their plan without first getting permission from the U.S. Department of Education.

In an undated monitoring report posted on the website of the California Office to Reform Education (or CORE, as the coalition of districts is called), Education Department officials flag several problems with the districts' adherence to the first-of-its-kind waiver. They include delays and changes to how the districts are dealing with their lowest-achieving schools. (I searched for the monitoring report on ed.gov, and it's either buried somewhere or not yet published.)

The CORE districts that won the waiver late last summer are Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sanger, San Francisco, and Santa Ana. Sacramento was also part of the original group, but withdrew from participation earlier this spring over deep divisions that the waiver had caused between the district and its teachers' union.

Earlier this month, CORE requested an extension of the one-year reprieve for the seven remaining districts, and along with it, a delayed timeline for fully implementing teacher-evaluation systems (which will be unique to each district but with shared guidelines) by the 2016-17 school year. That timeline is outside what the Education Department has greenlighted for any state waiver recipient, with the exception of Illinois, where the waiver was hung up on the issue for over a year. 

As part of its review of the CORE waiver, Education Department officials visited four of the eight districts in February: Fresno, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Sacramento (which dropped out two California Districts Stumble on CORE Waiver, Ed. Dept. Finds - Politics K-12 - Education Week:

Tennessee Commissioner Huffman’s Machiavellian Methods? |:'

Tennessee Commissioner Huffman’s Machiavellian Methods?

 Following up on two of my most recent posts, the first about Commissioner Huffman’s (un)inspiring TEDxNashville talk in which he vociferously celebrated Tennessee students’ recent (albeit highly questionable) gains on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores, and the second about Huffman’s (and the Tennessee Department of Education’s) unexpected postponement of the release of its state-level (TCAP) standardized test scores — test scores that were, by law, to account for 15 to 25 percent of Tennessee students’ final grades – it seems a few more “behind the scenes” details surrounding what is going on in Tennessee might also explain the state’s current situation (see other “behind the scenes” details in the first aforementioned post).

We also now know that in Tennessee, on the grade 12 NAEP the state ranks among the lowest in the nation. We also now know that in Tennessee, before the 4th grade NAEP tests were taken, the state withheld an inordinate proportion of (low-scoring) students in the 3rd grade which (likely) caused (or at the very least helped to produce) the (purportedly) artificial gains observed in grade 4. Tennessee is not the first to have done this, however (see Boston College Professor Walter Haney’s article about the “Texas Miracle” that also occurred on then Governor George W. Bush’s watch here).

These “behind the scenes” explanations, unfortunately for Huffman, explain more of the gains than the casual observer might realize, although Huffman is likely counting on only casual observations being made, as it is this “unassailable evidence [emphasis added]Tennessee Commissioner Huffman’s Machiavellian Methods? |:

The Dismissive Attitude Toward Parents by Education Reformers is Stunning | Missouri Education Watchdog

The Dismissive Attitude Toward Parents by Education Reformers is Stunning | Missouri Education Watchdog:

The Dismissive Attitude Toward Parents by Education Reformers is Stunning

inShare

A 100% rate of stopping “anti-reform” legislation by these special interests (grasstops)

The above graphic comes from the Louisiana Department of Education with mention of groups supporting educational reform ideas: charter schools, TFA, increased teacher accountability via the tracking of student data, common core.  However, education reformers  supporting these reforms (administrators, bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, think tanks) have forgotten what the word “public” in “public education” means.  There is the implied assumption that “grassroots” demands include all the reforms listed above, but that isn’t a valid assumption.  These are reforms not to provide better education, these are reforms designed to create a “human capital market”.  Here is another graphic from the same publication:

(click on graphic to enlarge)

I don’t see taxpayers and parents on this list as being consulted on how education should be delivered.  This is all about creating a policy environment, human capital market, a political climate to deliver on the needs of CMOs (Charter Management Organizations).  These groups and individuals have determined what children need, not the educators or taxpayers who have to The Dismissive Attitude Toward Parents by Education Reformers is Stunning | Missouri Education Watchdog:

ACLU Sues California For 'Equal Learning Time' : NPR Ed : NPR

ACLU Sues California For 'Equal Learning Time' : NPR Ed : NPR:

ACLU Sues California For 'Equal Learning Time'

California high school students Briana Lamb and Cristian Gaspar are named in the ACLU's equal learning time lawsuit.

ACLU SoCal/Public Counsel

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that high poverty schools in California are denying students the learning time they need to succeed. The problem is so great and so pervasive, the lawsuit claims, that it violates the state constitution. "We just celebrated the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Ed, and some of these schools are in worse shape than those in Topeka," says ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum, referring to the district that gave the landmark case its name.

The lawsuit names students including Briana Lamb as members of the class. In the fall of 2012, when Lamb showed up for her junior year at Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles, she says her schedule was full of holes. "I had four 'home' periods, and one 'service,' " she said. A home period means just that: the student must go home. During a service period, sometimes you help teachers do photocopying or pass out papers. Lamb says that at other times it just means sitting around. That meant Lamb had actual classes for just a few hours a day—not enough to graduate on time. "It made me nervous," she said. "I knew exactly what classes I needed to be in to finish my 11th grade requirements." But it took weeks ACLU Sues California For 'Equal Learning Time' : NPR Ed : NPR:

 

A Dress Code Double Standard? #YesAllWomen Answers 'Yes'

Social media respond to the deadly attacks near the University of California, Santa Barbara with a conversation about women, how they're viewed, and sexual violence.» E-Mail This

200+ 34min 

10 Belief Statements About Student Discipline | Connected Principals

10 Belief Statements About Student Discipline | Connected Principals:

10 Belief Statements About Student Discipline

by Chris Wejr • May 29, 2014 • 0 Comments

CC Image from Charlie Baker https://flic.kr/p/aTHCev

As I continue my journey in the first 4 months at James Hill elementary, I wanted to share my beliefs around student discipline with the staff.  Although my views continue to evolve and grow through formal and informal learning and school/home experiences, I want to be transparent about the lens I look through around student discipline.  At a recent staff meeting, I took the time to share these brief belief statements with staff:

1. “Kids do well if they can…. if they could do well, they would do well.”(Dr. Ross Greene)  Behaviour is a skill. When a child struggles with reading, we provide interventions and differentiation to support and teach. When a student struggles with behaviour, we also need to support and teach… and then we teach some more.  Many students do not do well living in a grey world so, as with all learning, students need clear models and criteria (ex. criteria) of what effective behaviour looks like.  By focusing on skills, I am not saying that we do not use consequences;  however, when we use consequences, they must be logical and not punitive. We must be investigators of the skills that students lack to be successful and then work to teach those skills.  (See video below from Greene.) Create the conditions for student success.
2. Start with strengths.  We must create the conditions for students to see and feel real success. We cannot wait until a student is on a long string of setbacks before we talk about what the students strengths and interests are… include these in their learning from the start!  These strengths should be embraced and never used as a carrot to be dangled or taken away.  If a child’s strength is working with younger students, put it in their schedule.  This will help build confidence and give them a sense of purpose and positive identity at school.
3. Students need to belong.  We ALL need to belong.  If a student is consistently being sent out of class or moved from school to school, how can we expect a sense of belonging?  I realize that there are some students whose behaviours can pose a safety concern and we must look at and balance each student’s needs… but we must maintain the goal of creating a sense of belonging in the classroom.
4. Students need to know they matter.  Take the time to connect with kids.  Find out their strengths and interests.  Find out who they are.  Take the time to show the students that you do care about their life beyond the classroom.  Differentiation is not just about teaching at a child’s level, it is also about including their strengths and interests.
5. Focus on self-regulation and self-control skills.  If a student cannot sit still, they are telling us they need to move.  Yes, sitting still is a skill but it is also developed more easily for some.  If a student has meltdown, there are likely many opportunities to intervene (that occur prior that point) to help teach the student the skills needed to 10 Belief Statements About Student Discipline | Connected Principals: