Maybe that’s one reason Chris Christie became the most unpopular governor in the state. He constantly bashed teachers and public schools.
As Daniel S. Katz says, good riddance to Christie.
New Jerseys want to support their public schools, not privatize them.
Margaret Good won a special election to the Florida House yesterday. Supporting public education was one of the major planks in her platform. She flipped a seat in a district Trump won in 2016.
When will the Democratic Party wake up and realize that nearly 90% of families enroll their children in public schools and are opposed to privatization?
Betsy DeVos has energized resistance to the privatization movement. She has stripped away the mask of Democratic support for privatization. She supports charters and vouchers. Trump supports charters and vouchers. Charters are the gateway drug to vouchers. Democrats who support charters are supporting DeVos’ agenda.
It is not just teachers who oppose DeVos and her privatization plans. It is parents, grandparents, citizens. Ninety percent of Americans went to public school. The U.S.is the most powerful nation in the world. We should thank our public schools.
If you don’t like DeVos’ plans to eliminate public schools, join the Network for Public Education. Join us in Indianapolis in October.
One day it was open. The next day it closed. Gone.
That’s a charter school for you!
http://www.kcra.com/article/sacramento-charter-school-shuts-down-without-warning/16754549
A Rocketship Charter in Nashville was slated to be part of the state’s failed Achievement School District but it closed a few months after opening.
The school expected to enroll 190 students but only 50 signed up. Demand isn’t there for a school once hailed as a national model.
To add to the woes of Rocketship charters in Nashville, the IRS filed a lien against their property because of unpaid taxes of about $19,000.. Rocketship officials said it was a clerical error.
In a major ruling for school integration, the 11th Circuit Federal Appeals Court ruled that Gardendale can’t split away to form its own district because its motives were to resegregate.
“A federal appeals court ruled today that Gardendale can’t form its own school system and agreed with a judge’s finding that racial motives were involved in the attempt to split from the Jefferson County system.
“It’s a ruling Gardendale plans to appeal.
“The three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered that U.S. District Court Judge Madeline Haikala rescind the part of her order from last year that allowed Gardendale to secede over a three-year period from Jefferson County schools and form its own system.
“Circuit Judge William Pryor, a former Alabama Attorney General, wrote the opinion.
“The district court (Haikala) found that the Gardendale Board acted with a discriminatory purpose to exclude black children from the proposed school system and, alternatively, that the secession of the Gardendale Board would impede the efforts of the Jefferson County Board to fulfill its desegregation obligations,” according to the 11th Circuit opinion. “Despite these findings, the district court devised and permitted a partial secession that neither party requested.”
This is a major setback to the movement for resegregation.
It is a relief to see a federal court once again defending justice.
Now, on to the U.S. Supreme Court, which once ruled consistently to uphold the Brown decision but has backed away recently.
Many readers have complained that their comments were blocked. I have complained repeatedly to WordPress, to no avail. The Happiness Engineers at WordPress (really!) proposed that you contact them directly for support:
They told me that I had a long list of banned words on my blacklist (e.g., porn, Nike [a regular spam item], etc.), that it might have stopped innocent comments. Like if you commented on your favorite porn or Nikes or clock parts.
I have eliminated the blacklist altogether, so now the onus is on them to find out why some comments never get posted.
Tulsa has trouble finding and retaining teachers. It may be due to the fact that Oklahoma has low teacher pay, perhaps the lowest in the country.
The district is responding to the teacher shortage by creating its own TFA-style teacher-training program, with five weeks of preparation for people with a bachelor’s degree. In only five weeks, candidates will be able to step in as teachers of elementary and secondary schools, as well as special education classes.
The program has applied for but not yet been approved by the state.
It is a nail in the coffin of the teaching profession, as is TFA. If people can become full-fledged teachers in five weeks, then teaching is not a profession. How would the people of Oklahoma feel about qualifying their doctors, lawyers, and accountants with a five-week training program?
The superintendent of the Tulsa city public schools is Deborah Gist, who previously achieved a level of national notoriety when she was State Commissioner of Education in Rhode Island. In 2010, Gist backed up the local superintendent in impoverished Central Falls when she threatened to fire every member of the staff of Central Falls High School because of low test scores (including the lunch room staff and the custodians). That event coincided with the release of “Waiting for Superman” and the Gates-driven movement to blame all the ills of urban education on “bad teachers.” Gist, like Rhee, enjoyed a measure of fame for her “get Tough” attitude toward teachers.
Stephen Dyer writes that ECOT will argue in court tomorrow that it should be paid for kids that were not there.
The Philadelphia Inquirer posted an editorial saying it is time to revise the charter school law, written 20 years ago.
The charter-school law, over 20 years old, has never been revised to improve accountability or performance.
Charters were intended to create and spread innovations into traditional public schools, but the evidence they have done so is scarce, and study after study has found charters trailing traditional public schools in key areas of performance.
The latest of those studies, from Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth, calls for stricter accountability measures for charters’ performance and renewals.
Last year alone, public school districts paid $1.5 billion for students attending a charter – out of their full budgets. And every action the state has taken – taking away reimbursements to the districts for those costs, being less than rigorous in oversight, and pushing an approval process that would take further control out of the districts – has created two separate education systems that too often work against each other.
Diane Ravitch's blog 