Lindsay Wagner reports in NC Watch that a judge in North Carolina said it was okay to dispense $10 million for private school vouchers before the courts rule on whether vouchers are constitutional. The far-right legislative leader Thom Tilles said the budget for vouchers would grow by another $800,000.
Do you think President Obama or Secretary Duncan will speak out against this diversion of public funds to private and religious schools?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No.
Er…no
Here is the same story before this green light presented on Art Pope’s think tank’s blog:
http://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2014/04/03/court-of-appeals-refuses-to-lift-injunction-blocking-opportunity-scholarships/
And more on it here:
http://www.carolinajournal.com/articles/display_story.html?id=11261&__utma=1.61891427.1406747837.1406747837.1406747837.1&__utmb=1.5.10.1406747837&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1406747837.1.1.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=(not%20provided)&__utmv=-&__utmk=23636538
I had my six month dental appointment this morning and the dentist and her staff have not heard of the Machiavellian Common Core rank and yank White House agenda for public education in the U.S.
They were all ears a I filled them in. The dental hygienist will be talking to her brother and sister in law who have two young children in grade school.
I think that answers the question? The White House and DOE prefer operating in the shadows with an ignorant and fooled public. I think Arne Duncan and his puppet masters may be losing sleep over BAT and the other resistance groups sprouting across the country.
Word of mouth is powerful and will, in time, trump the controlled PR through the traditional media.
For sure, the White House and the puppet masters are trying to figure out how to muzzle mouths.
Just a quick note: The Common Core, while needing improvement, is not in itself a bad thing — they’re standards, only. What is maddening to educators are the accessories and abysmal implementation attached to the Core. Who objects to students learning to capitalize the first letter of the first word in a sentence? Or learning to read a non-fiction piece, be able to state an opinion or identify the author’s opinion, and support one’s thesis with solid evidence? The standards are simply standards, many decades old (I used them in Advanced Placement classes as well as regular classes.). They are not lesson plans, nor teaching strategies.
NO, they are NOT standards… they are objectives for curricula.
A real rubric, the genuine criteria for enabling learning was already established by Harvard research, funded my Pew as the National Standards Research and called : The Eight Principles of Learning”
These principles make learning possible, and 4 are for teachers,and 4 for ADMINISTRATOR’S SUPPORT!
The real national standards have DISAPPEARED from the national stage as if they had not cost zillions and actually been proven to be the necessary ingredients that must be in place for sills and knowledge to be acquired BY THE EMERGING INTELLIGENCE OF THE HUMAN MIND.
I know this, because I was part of the research. It boggles mu mind that Gates pulled it off, got people to see his list of ‘must do’ objectives as STANDARDS.
it boggles my mind that most teachers do not know an objective for learning, form a standard for excellent teaching!!!
Starting in 1999, six years before I retired, California’s legislature mandated standards for the state curriculum. When the thick, coffee-table sized paperback came out for English covering every grade level, every English teacher was given a copy and then the English department met to plan how to implement standards at the high school that came with a list so long and detailed for each grade level that there was no way to teach it all, because there weren’t enough days in the school year. The same thing was happening for math and other departments.
To deal with that challenge, the teachers of each department met several times to analyze the results of the previous year’s standardized state tests and identify areas where we need to improve the most. Eventually, the English department at the high school where I taught broke down by grade level to define the standards that we would focus on in addition to what we were already doing right—according to the results of the previous year’s standardized results. The next step was to meet, again in grade level groups, and brainstorm and share methods that would work best to achieve the best results.
Then when Obama and Bill Gates forced and bribed the national Common Core standards on the states before they were even written, California signed on board and threw out a decade’s worth of work on its own state standards where all the stakeholders had been involved to improve and implement that program.
For the six years between 1999 to 2005 that I was part of that process in California not one teacher at the school where I worked stood up and protested or comp alined. We took our job seriously and saw the standards and the methods used to imperilment them seriously.
Compare that decade in California to the process used to implement the Bill Gates and Obama’s (seriously flawed) Common Core standards.
In addition, there was no Bill Gates Machiavellian “Rank and Yank” method to fire teachers and close schools based on the results. The standards and the test were a transparent system where even students could go online and see the standards for each grade level. Although the tests were kept secret to deal with cheating, the results of the test were made public and used by teachers to plan curriculum and collaborate in teacher teams to improve methods of teaching to deliver the standards to students.
None of this has been done with the national Common Core standards.
The US could have just taken what California and several other states were doing and used that as a foundation instead of turning to a private sector HUGE UK corporation and Bill Gates to do it in secret while spreading hundreds of millions of dollars around to bribe just about everyone they could, and then keep it secret at every step of the way while cutting out teachers, parents and students so no one would never see the results.
I wonder if anyone in California’s department of education and state legislature is kicking themselves for trashing a decades worth of collaborative work on developing and implementing the state standards to jump on the sinking ship of the Machiavellian national Common Core standards implemented by Bill Gates and UK’s Pearson.
Non issue in NC now.
CCSS is gone.
We are focusing on other issues.
Joanna,
From what I’ve been reading here, the NC list to focus on is rather long even if Common Core is out of the way. But then, everything may change for the better after the election.
Agree.
I thought they only got rid of it in name? If they didn’t return the federal $ then won’t NC create standards that are very similar to CCSS with a different name?
Wait until the new details emerge of the NC legislature’s 7% raise, where veteran teachers will see the smallest increase, then after losing longevity pay, will actually receive a pay DECREASE after six years of frozen salaries. Our republican legislature continually reminds us of their lack of respect for experience.
$adly it’$ all about the $$$$$.
Around here, if an experienced teacher wants to move to another school in the same system he or she will find out that years on the job are a liability and younger less expensive hires are often the way to go.
http://www.wral.com/document-outlines-teacher-pay-raises-in-budget-deal/13853974/
This just posted – it suggests no pay decrease so we shall see.
“Do you think President Obama or Secretary Duncan will speak out against this diversion of public funds to private and religious schools?”
Fat chance, anymore than they’ve spoken out about the declining investment in public schools.
Ed reform is a political coalition. Voucher proponents are an integral part of that coalition. I think they would have lost private and religious schools as a part of the political coalition with the unlimited expansion of charters if they hadn’t also made provisions to subsidize private and religious schools. This is political horse-trading. Everyone in the ed reform coalition gets everything they want. Private and religious schools will survive the unlimited expansion of charters. because the state is making sure they survive.
The only schools that are unrepresented are public schools. There was and will be absolutely no consideration given to how this massive expansion of charter and voucher schools affects existing public schools. It’s as if our schools have absolutely no value, are not even worth a moment’s consideration. I’d be surprised if public schools were even mentioned in the “debate” in NC.
Whoever said public schools were “political orphans” was 100% on target.
You got your charter advocates and you got your voucher advocates and there’s the “accountability” people and the anti-labor people and the Common Core people and on and on.
What’s missing from this ed reform political coalition? Advocates for existing public schools.
A question: Who contributed to that judge’s campaign? This sounds like a “follow the money” situation.
Please. They’re not vouchers. They’re “opportunity scholarships”
Ed reformers are very good at marketing, I give them that. They’re also really good at figuring out how not to pay taxes. Tax-dodging and marketing. That’s some “skill set”.
I wondered what you-all thought about this:
Click to access IO_Horizon_72914.pdf
It’s an analysis of an Ohio charter school’s state scores compared to their ACT scores. Generally, public schools that score well on the state measure also score average or above on the ACT. No big mystery there, right? But that’s not really true of this school in the Horizon chain. They do well on the state measure but poorly on the ACT.
Wow!
Wouldn’t be because of “gaming” the state score???
(Which they can’t do on the ACT-not that either is worth a hill o’ beans anyway when it comes to assessing the teaching and learning process.)
Cross posted with commentary at the end at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/UPDATED-Court-rules-schoo-in-General_News-Decision_Rules_School-Reform-140730-963.html#comment503687
Wow:
“Expulsions from district-run schools are only part of the story. Charter schools expelled 307 students in the 2012-2013 school year—63 percent of all those expelled—even though charters only enroll 12 percent of all students. (The 2012-2013 data is the latest available.) No data are available to show how many charter students are referred for expulsion or go through the hearing process.”
http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/news/2014/07/28/66068/threatened-expulsion
No – ask yourself Where do the Obama daughters go to school? Do you think they are going to speak out against this? Have they helped teachers in NC with any of this? I think we all know the answer. For the past 12+ years teachers in NC have been the target of increased insurance costs, increased deductibles, decreased insurance options – none of this is new in the past couple of years – go back and check your insurance options in 1998 vs 2002 – see a difference? You will.
This is kind of like saying, let’s keep the old locomotive moving on a single railroad track until it gets hit with the other one coming from the other side, and cause a head-on collision.
If I remember my math phobic school days, there used to be a math problem like that. “If train A leaves Detroit at 3:00 going 65 mph and Train B leaves New York…” It was scary then too;^)
Fix the headline…spelling for “Constitutionality.” — hd3