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Archives for the month of: January, 2018
shareholders want Big Tech to be accountable for its toxic effects on young children, just as Big Tobacco was compelled to pay for tobacco addiction,
“The iPhone has made Apple Inc. and Wall Street hundreds of billions of dollars. Now some big shareholders are asking at what cost, in an unusual campaign to make the company more socially responsible.
“A leading activist investor and a pension fund are saying the smartphone maker needs to respond to what some see as a growing public-health crisis of youth phone addiction.
“Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or Calstrs, which control about $2 billion of Apple shares, sent a letter to Apple on Saturday urging it to develop new software tools that would help parents control and limit phone use more easily and to study the impact of overuse on mental health.
“The Apple push is a preamble to a new several-billion-dollar fund Jana is seeking to raise this year to target companies it believes can be better corporate citizens. It is the first instance of a big Wall Street activist seeking to profit from the kind of social-responsibility campaign typically associated with a small fringe of investors.”
Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker and the state legislature expanded the voucher program despite its failure in Milwaukee. To zealots, evidence doesn’t matter. In some small communities, the voucher money is subtracted from the local public school to subsidize students already enrolled in religious schools. The many will see their education impoverished to subsidize those who never attended public schools. Others are fearful that the fabric of community life will be injured by this diversion of public dollars and civic support to private schools. Walker is a favorite of the Koch brothers, which may explain his eagerness to destroy public schools. The Koch’s backed him as a candidate for president in 2016, but he didn’t last long. His love of vouchers is destabilizing communities across the state.
“When Superintendent Sue Kaphingst moved to Chilton less than a year ago, she marveled at how the northeastern Wisconsin community rallied around its local school district.
“Nestled to the east of Lake Winnebago about 75 miles north of Milwaukee, Chilton and its 3,900 residents felt cohesive. Football stars acted in the high school musical. Parents, students and school board members created a yarn art installation on the Chilton Middle School lawn to demonstrate that they were all connected. The high school theater was built with millions from a local family who owned pet supplies company Kaytee Products.
“But there’s a new development here and in other communities across Wisconsin that will test those ties: school vouchers. Four years after the GOP-led Legislature approved a statewide voucher program, the number of private schools registered to receive taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies has sharply increased. Together with the longstanding Milwaukee voucher program and the more recent Racine voucher program, close to 300 private, predominantly religious schools from Lake Superior to the Illinois border are poised to receive taxpayer funding for an estimated 33,750 students this fall, according to Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget.“For the first time, the Chilton School District could face either an enrollment drop because children will use a voucher to attend the local Catholic school they couldn’t otherwise afford, or more likely, the district will have to raise taxes to fund vouchers for children who already attend the private school.
“Together, the state’s voucher programs are expected to cost about $263 million in 2017-’18, according to Walker’s budget proposal.
“While President Donald Trump is pitching to boost federal spending on school choice programs by $1.4 billion — a down payment on his promise of $20 billion — Wisconsin is already demonstrating the complexities of expanding private-school choice to exurban America. Now that private schools outside of densely populated Milwaukee and Racine can tap into voucher funding, new tensions are bubbling up between religious conservatives eager to offer more students a religious-based education and district advocates who fear losing resources to private schools now competing for the same pot of public dollars.
“There’s only so much money,” said Kaphingst, the Chilton superintendent. “You’re taking from one for the other.”
Illinois adopted a DeVos-style tax credit plan as part of a school funding deal, and corporations and the rich lined up to collect credits from taxation, which in turn pays for private and religious schools.
The plan reduces tax revenues, obviously, to fund non public schools.
What a disgrace!
Bruce Rauner is the Donald Trump of Illinois.
Mercedes Schneider has the latest on the teacher who was arrested and cuffed in Vermillion Parish, Louisiana.
La. Teacher Thrown to Ground and Cuffed At School Board Meeting
News reports said that Trump reserves the hours until 11 am for watching cable news and tweeting. It is called “executive time.” Apparently he spends several hours daily watching TV, then golfs on weekends.
The fabulous and divine Bette Midler tweeted about this.
The rightwing, anti-union Walton Family Foundation has funded a group called Innovate to push charter schools as the solution to achievement gaps in San Francisco.
Innovate targets Black and Latino families and peddles the hoax that charters have the secret formula for closing achievement gaps that are rooted in poverty.
“Innovate is a South Bay-based group founded in 2013 and describing itself as a “nonprofit organization whose mission is to build the parent and community demand for world-class public schools, and to accelerate the growth of these schools, particularly for low-income students and students of color.”
“Fair enough. But achieving this end has, reliably, taken the form of agitation for charter schools. The organization is generously funded by pro-charter outfits such as the Walton Family Foundation, which has put hundreds of millions of dollars into bankrolling taxpayer-funded, privately operated schools nationwide. Innovate’s own founding documents state that its raison d’être is to “focus on education reform that will support the creation of new charter schools and innovative district schools, parent choice, and strong systems of accountability.”
“Prior to turning its eyes to the north, Innovate won contentious battles in the San Jose area, besting opponents claiming that charter schools are cannibalizing the public system. They began quietly cultivating black and Latino parents in the Bayview and Mission two years ago, but it’s only in the last several months that this has garnered much attention. The organization began saturating area residents’ social media feeds with links to its report claiming San Francisco schools are the very worst in all of California for poor students of color.
“(The district disputes Innovate’s use of the data — but there’s no way to make the stats look good; generations of minority parents have complained that San Francisco’s schools have failed them, and the gaping achievement gap shows no indications of narrowing in the short term.)
“Innovate’s report is titled, “A Dream Deferred,” a Langston Hughes reference lost on few. Also lost on few is the exquisite quality of this document’s online form, which allows readers ample opportunity to share it with elected officials — and share their personal data with Innovate — at the push of a button.
“Innovate’s most recent tax forms indicate it grossed more than $4 million in 2015 alone, and its slick materials, excellent website, and a communications staff dwarfing the San Francisco Unified School District’s are indicative of that.”
Innovate implied that it has the support of the NAACP, but failed to mention that the state and national NAACP have called for a moratorium on new charters. They used the words of Amos Brown, the head of the local NAACP, and he was unhappy.
““You can tell everybody you see, whether in hell or heaven, that it is not my position to support Innovate and their move for charter schools,” Brown told us. “I want to make it crystal clear to those people: They are not to use my name in support of no charter school! I don’t appreciate this one bit.”
”Mission Local has heard many such stories: Innovate staff packing public meetings and clapping and shouting at the right times; Innovate employees crashing seminars intended for parents, participating in them, and scouting for recruits; Innovate staff trying to gain entry into community organizations.
“These are tactics more befitting campus Marxists or Lyndon LaRouche acolytes than a multi-million-dollar nonprofit with dozens of employees and a coterie of extremely wealthy backers. But the strategies employed by scrappy ideological groups do work — and can be even more effective when you have big bucks on-hand to pay professional organizers.”
Innovate is preying on parents’ hopes and fears. You can be sure that parents will never hear about the many failed charters that litter California, Tennessee, Nevada, Michigan, and other states.
Apparently there are places in the U.S. that never heard of the First Amendment and its guarantee of freedom of speech. Vermillion Parish in Louisiana is one of them. A teacher was arrested for speaking out against the renewal of the superintendent’s contract. Probably, if she were a parent, no one would have touched her. But she was a teacher and she was treated like dirt.
I hope the NEA, the AFT, the ACLU, or some other group hires a lawyer for her.
“The Vermilion Parish School Board is comprised of eight members. For the better part of two years, four members were in favor of renewing Puyau’s contract and four were against. On November 20th of last year, one of the board members against the contract renewal, Luddy Herpin, passed away. The board president, Anthony Fontana, took advantage of the situation and brought an interim member who would support the contract before the board for approval to fill the seat until an election can be held. The appointment passed with a 4/3 vote.
“On January 8, 2018, the board held a special meeting to vote on the contract renewal and provide Puyau with a $38,000 raise. The teachers of Vermilion Parish filled the room in opposition. The teachers of this parish have not received a raise in ten years. Puyau was hired as superintendent in 2012; however, the district has maintained a rating of B, or above, since the inception of the school grading system.
“One of the teachers present, Deyshia Hargrave, was given permission to speak to the board on the issue. After she finished speaking, she sat down. Chatter and protests could be heard among the board members and the attendees. At some point, President Fontana addresses Hargrave, who is seated to his right, directly. She stands to respond. Fontana is distracted by the increased chatter to his left and comments to the effect that things are getting out of hand. At that exact moment, the City Marshall officer on duty enters the room. Seeing Hargrave standing and speaking, he approaches her and asks her to leave. In disbelief that she is being asked to leave while responding to a question directed at her, Hargrave initially resists. After realizing what is going on, she walks out of the room, and into the hallway, with the officer where he pushes her to the floor and handcuffs her.
“Meanwhile, this publicly elected board sits quietly and allows this to happen not only to a taxpaying citizen engaged in a public meeting, but a teacher employed in their district who is calmly explaining why the raise is opposed.”
A fascinating article in The Atlantic (h/t Dienne) reports the view of many neurological scientists that power causes brain damage.
One said that those influenced by power acted as though they had a traumatic brain injury, “becoming more impulsive, less risk-averse, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.” A neuroscientist in Canada said that power impairs a specific neural process that is the cornerstone of empathy.
Sound familiar?
The Education Law Center reports that the New Jersey legislature plans to give Camden’s public schools to out-of-state charter chains. Camden is one of the most impoverished small cities in the state. Public assets will be handed over to private entities, a blatant grab of public funds.
January 8, 2018
A NJ Senate bill pending in the lame duck legislative session would allow the State-operated Camden district to turn over operation of most, if not all, of its enrollment and schools to three out-of-state charter groups: New York-based KIPP and Uncommon and Philadelphia-based Mastery charter networks.
Under special legislation enacted in 2011, the Camden school district has approved the operation of 12 elementary, middle and high schools by KIPP, Uncommon and Mastery, closing several district schools in the process. Under the law, the three charter chains have also secured pre-approval from the NJ Department of Education and the Camden district to enroll over 9,000 Camden students, or more than 60 % of Camden’s total enrollment, and open 16 additional schools.
The NJ Senate bill would amend the existing law by expanding the scope of the geographical area in Camden where KIPP, Mastery and Uncommon can expand from specific Camden neighborhoods to the entire city.
Another amendment in the bill would eliminate the requirement that the charter chains can open schools only in new or substantially reconstructed buildings financed by the charters themselves. Instead, they would be allowed to expand to any building newly constructed or renovated in the last five years, including district schools. This opens the door to the takeover of buildings with improvements financed by the NJ Schools Development Authority (SDA) under the court-ordered Abbott v. Burke school construction program.
The SDA has approved the demolition of Camden High School and has authorized construction of a new, $130 million Camden High for the district.
In a January 5 statement prepared for the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, Education Law Center urged lawmakers to reject the Senate bill, expressing serious concerns including a potential turnover of the new Camden High to either KIPP, Uncommon or Mastery.
“The Senate bill will permit the State-operated Camden district to transfer, after construction by the SDA, the new Camden High School to either the KIPP, Uncommon or Mastery charter chains,” David Sciarra, ELC Executive Director and counsel to Camden school children in the landmark Abbott litigation, wrote in ELC’s testimony. “It would be a flagrant fraud upon the Abbott court rulings, the Abbott school construction program, the SDA, and NJ taxpayers if the SDA builds Camden High as a district public school, only to have the district then hand the brand new facility over to a non-public, private entity.”
ELC also opposes the bill because the amendments, taken together, would delegate to KIPP, Uncommon and Mastery the authority to serve the vast majority of Camden students, fueling the Camden district to close even more schools.
“This bill green-lights the State-operated Camden district to close not just a few, but all or most district-operated schools, and then consign all or the vast majority of Camden students to attend a KIPP, Uncommon or Mastery-run school,” Mr. Sciarra added in the testimony. “The bill delegates the authority and responsibility for the education of most, if not all, Camden school children to three private charter chains, with scant accountability to Camden parents, residents, voters and taxpayers.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 