Satire alert: Norman Scott, a retired teacher turned film-maker (producer of “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman) has decided that the NFL referee fiasco presented a golden opportunity.
The golden opportunity was a chance to rib the New Teacher Project, which is quick to demand the ouster of experienced teachers and to replace them with inexperienced teachers.
Bill Moyers is releasing a documentary this weekend about ALEC, the far-right group that writes model legislation to promote the parent trigger, charters, vouchers, alternate certification, virtual schools, and anything else you can think of that will privatize public education.
Here is a newsletter about his show with useful links:
Subject: The Origami: Parent Triggers, NFIB Exposed, the Fiscal Cliff and the NFL
This is the Progressive States Action Origami newsletter. (Remember, we take all of the state policy and political news and fold it into something beautiful for you to look at and use!)
On to the latest in state politics and policy…
“Parent Trigger” Laws In Spotlight
On September 28th, a slick Hollywood film called “Won’t Back Down” will be released nationwide. The film purports to show “so-called ‘Parent Trigger’ laws” as a way to help our country’s public schools. In reality, the film completely distorts the facts about the controversial policy, which is no surprise since the film was produced by a conservative billionaire aligned with the Koch Brothers, distributed by Rupert Murdoch and backed by Michelle Rhee.
Update on ALEC
This week on Moyers and Company: “The United States of ALEC.” Find out when the show will air in your local market (if you go to the website of this organization, you will find a link that will allow you to see when the show will air).
At http://www.alecexposed.org you will be able to find the other companies affiliated with ALEC as of 2011 and the corporations that have recently cut ties with the “shadowy corporate front group.”
If you like http://www.alecexposed.org, you should check out the newly launched http://www.NFIBexposed.org and learn about how the so-called “voice of small business” has deep financial ties to Karl Rove and other extreme conservatives.
Election Updates of the Week
While “twelve states already have tuition equity laws on the books” and ten more moved proposals forward this year, voters have never been able to directly vote on the issue. In November, Marylanders will be the first to do so and two recent polls show overwhelming support for the issue from both white and African-American voters.
Americans’ level of trust in their state governments is at its highest level since the beginning of the financial crisis, but it varies significantly by region and partisan affiliation.
Governor Sam Brownback and his allies are continuing their efforts to make Kansas into the “conservative utopia” that we’ve told you about before. This week they held a fundraiser with several lobbyists “with close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council.”
Missouri Representative Stacey Newman won her primary election on Monday. Newman was also the winner the first time the election was held last month, but a “do-over” was ordered after it was discovered that some voters in the district received the wrong ballots from election authorities.
Legislative Session and Policy News
With apologies to our friends in Seattle, the atrocious call in Monday’s Seahawks-Packers game has prompted New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney to introduce legislation banning replacement referees from NFL games in the state. We think Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker might actually agree with that idea, after he called “for the return of the NFL’s locked-out unionized officials” earlier this week.
State Legislators to Congress: Don’t solve the federal deficit by slashing state budgets
Conservatives in the United States Senate are already planning ways to undermine any deal to avoid the coming “fiscal cliff.” It’s now more important than ever for state legislators to take action.
State legislators are signing a letter to urge Congress to find a better solution. Legislators can read and sign on to this letter here. Legislators can also join us for a webinar – featuring the White House and pollster Celinda Lake – on how the fiscal cliff will affect state budgets and what state legislators can do about it.
Where we’ve been and where we’re going
We’ll be in Kentucky later this week.
Weekly college football prediction
As you may have noticed, we’re huge college football fans at Progressive States Action. This week we’ll be watching Ohio State play Michigan State in Lansing. If the Spartans can find a way to score, they may upset Braxton Miller’s Buckeyes.
As always, you’re encouraged to join our daily updates on Twitter @PSAction.
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Washington, DC 20036
The California Legislature passed a bill to reduce the importance of test scores in calculating school quality, and Governor Jerry Brown signed it into law. Until now, the Academic Performance Index was based 100% on test scores. Now it will count for 60%.
Hope, hope, hope that future legislation will reduce it to 25%.
In a brilliant column, Bill White of the Lehigh Valley News compares Governor Tom Corbett’s education policies to carpet-bombing of Vietnam. The goal nearly half a century ago was to “bomb Vietnam back into the stone age.” White says that Corbett is doing the same with public education with his program of budget cuts, charter schools, and voucher proposals, which have thus far produced layoffs, program cuts, falling test scores, and soaring class sizes.
It seems that the Governor’s goal is to drive parents out of public education and into charters or to demand vouchers to escape the mess the Governor is creating.
Charter advocates always say that charters are truly accountable because if they fail, they are closed. That is not the case in Pennsylvania. Once charters are opened, it is expensive and difficult to close them:
The state law is a nightmare. To revoke the charter of a troubled school, the home district must potentially engage in a lengthy legal battle in which local taxpayers must pay for lawyers on both sides. Once a charter school is approved and operational, the law allows it to continue receiving tax dollars even if it loses its school building, lays off its teaching staff or is in the midst of revocation hearings.
I’m not blaming Corbett for the shortcomings of this law, which passed in 1997. I do fault him for policies and priorities that are dragging down public schools, ultimately stacking the deck for more parents to pursue charter schools and other forms of non-public education, which, if his proposals for education “reform” are enacted, will divert even more money from public schools.
To no one’s surprise, the latest Ohio report card shows that charter schools perform about the same as public schools. They actually show less value-added growth than the state’s traditional public schools, but are about the same as the Big 8, the urban districts. Remember that charters are touted as a silver bullet. The evidence accumulates that they are not. They extract money from public schools, perform no better, and are leading to what: a dual school system, with both systems publicly funded, one regulated, the other deregulated. In Ohio, charters are especially obnoxious because many operate for-profit, not for better education, not for kids.
When the news broke that the Camden, New Jersey, had rejected four charters, their reasons for doing so were not clear. This article in the Philadelphia Inquirer provides some more detail and context.
The charters had powerful political support: Not only from Governor Christie but from George Norcross, whose foundation was in partnership with KIPP to create a five-campus school that would enroll as many as 3,000 students.
The largest application came from the partnership of the Norcross Foundation Inc., a charity created by the family of Donald Norcross and his brother George E. Norcross III; the charitable foundation of Cooper, which George Norcross chairs; and one of the nation’s largest charter-school operators, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). George Norcross is a managing partner of the company that owns The [Philadelphia] Inquirer.
The four proposals would have a large financial impact on the district:
Companies could build and operate the schools and receive from each student’s home district up to 95 percent of the amount the district would have spent for that student.
The effect of the new schools on the existing district factored into some board members’ decisions Wednesday, they said.
Between $18 million to $22 million for each proposal would be diverted from the district in per-pupil costs, according to a quick estimate by the district business administrator, Celeste Ricketts. Because the Renaissance proposals could mean the shift of more than 4,000 students from the district and result in consolidation of schools, Ricketts said, she could not estimate the total loss or cost to the district if the proposals went through.
I am not clear how many students are enrolled in Camden, but it is not a large district. It sounds as though the board was invited to outsource its responsibilities, its students, and its budget to private operators. Just the kind of thing Governor Christie likes.
UPDATE: A reader informed me that Camden has an enrollment of about 13,000 students. The charter proposals would have drained away almost 1/3 of the district’s enrollment and a large part of its budget. No wonder the board said “no, thanks” and defied the power structure, both Republican and Democrat.
If you read only one article today, read this one. Save it. Read it again. This is a must-read.
John Kuhn is superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt school district in Texas. He was the first person named on this blog as a hero of American education. If you read this, you will understand why.
A reader suggested I add John Kuhn’s great speech to the SOS March in Washington in 2011. It is here.
In this post, he nails the difference between charter schools and public schools. He agrees that much more is needed to help the students who are failing. But he explains exactly why the current crop of faux reform proposals is wrong.
A small example of the thinking in this brilliant essay about the lives of students and teachers and schools:
I believe fervently that Michelle Rhee and an army of like-minded bad-schools philosophizers will one day look around and see piles where their painstakingly-built sandcastles of reform once stood, and they will know the tragic fame of Ozymandias. Billion-dollar data-sorting systems will be mothballed. Value-added algorithms will be tossed in a bin marked History’s Big Dumb Ideas. The mantra “no excuses” will retain all the significance of “Where’s the beef?” And teachers will still be teaching, succeeding, and failing all over the country, much as they would have been if Michelle Rhee had gone into the foreign service and Bill Gates had invested his considerable wealth and commendable humanitarian ambition in improving law enforcement practices or poultry production.
A reader in Indiana appeals for help to stop the ALEC-inspired takeover and privatization of public education in that state:
Tony Bennett is the lead character in Alec’s plan to privatize public education. Alec has always been populated by nearly every Indiana state senator and representative, but these past few years have seen Indiana overly represented with State Representative Dave Frizzell as president of the board of directors and a Senator Jim Buck as a member of the board. The recent education reform laws were word for word the laws that Alec wrote several years ago. Tony Bennett and these radical conservatives have set the stage for a disgusting takeover of public education. They know that Mike Pence will be elected governor and with a GOP legislature they will implement a school corporation take over law. With that in hand they will take over Indianapolis Public Schools and possibly try for Gary and Fort Wayne. These people are worse than disgusting; they will say anything to discredit and dismantle public education to see their dream of bringing in corporate education. Sadly there are some Democrats that help with this such as former Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson and several Dem legislators who have bought into the Arne Duncan style of Democrats for Education Reform. Indiana is being sucked into a black hole and the educators are screaming for help. We need national attention which would bring some bigger dollars to help Bennett’s opponent, Glenda Ritz get elected. Diane help us, please spread the word of this dire situation!
Jersey Jazzman takes note of the media hysteria about those NFL referees who replaced the experienced, unionized referees. Even Governor Scott Walker was upset when the inexperienced referees made a call that led to a loss by the Green Bay Packers.
Do we need “Referees for America” to step in when the unionized referees go on strike? Apparently the football lovers of America say no.
Maybe experience and qualifications matter.
And remember how the media piled on teachers in Chicago for their outrageous salaries? Was it $56,000, $74,000?
Well, a reader sent this important information:
The refs make $150,000 for 6 months of part time work. They want $200,000. I haven’t seen those numbers thrown around in the media. Every time they talked about the teachers in Chicago they threw out the bogus $74,000 average salary. Then some pundit would always add they only worked 8 months out of the year as well. Everyone bemoaned the greedy overpaid teachers.
I was watching Morning Joe yesterday and Joe Scarboro, who couldn’t get enough of trashing the teachers in Chicago last week, was up in arms over the greedy NFL owners refusal to pay for experienced refs.
StudentsLast suggests the future of teaching in this essay.
Things are so nutty these days that I must warn you. This is satire.
Diane Ravitch's blog 