The “GranniesRespond” campaign is enroute to the southern border to speak up for justice and decency and family reunification.
They stopped in Reading, PA., and Louisville. Next stop, Montgomery, Alabama.
Check their schedule here. Meet and greet them.
I posted a strong endorsement of Kelda Roys. She is a candidate in the Democratic candidate for Governor of Wisconsin. The leading candidate in the race is Tony Evers, who is currently State Superintendent of Education. Some people think that he would be a strong supporter of education. But, in fact, he has made teachers’ lives worse during his tenure in office. Teachers are deeply demoralized by the combination of Governor Walker and State Chief Evers’ policies.
Read what Tim Slekar wrote about Tony Evers’ record on education. It is very bad, almost as bad as Scott Walker.
From dean of education at Edgewood College and strong public education advocate Tim Slekar.
“Tony Evers has “name recognition.” He can beat Walker. Except…
I know that’s the “theory.” But on his own issue—education—there are serious problems. For me specifically (as dean of a school of education) his Leadership Group’s dismantling and deregulating of teaching licenses because of a refusal to understand the cause of the “teacher shortage” tells me that using sound research to make policy decisions will take a back seat to neoliberal market solutions that actually cause more damage.
Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Making it easier to enter our classrooms as a “teacher” does nothing to stop the exodus. It actually adds to it by further demoralizing the teachers that are still teaching. And that’s the real reason teachers are leaving. They are demoralized.
Excessive testing, educator effectiveness bunk, continued accountability (reform word for teachers are to blame for the achievement gap), expansion of non-public charter schools, and a top down system that denies teachers professional autonomy. And a Broad Academy Fellow (Privatization) as second in command. These are all issues DPI have significant control over but for some reason remain silent or worse supportive of.
And the candidate to take on Walker will not win without the support of the teaching profession. Assuming teachers will support Tony is rejecting their moral compass. They know Walker is horrible but they are also quite aware of the fact that DPI has left them hanging.
Give me a candidate that understands “demoralization.” That candidate will fire up education voters.”
Tim Slekar is supporting Kelda Roys for the Democratic nomination for Governor. I hope you will too!
Ron Packard, previously at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, knows a good thing when he sees it. He was formerly CEO of online charter chain K12 Inc., where he was paid $5 million a year to run the business. Now he calls himself an “educator” and plans to open a new e-school in Ohio. After the collapse of ECOT, which siphoned $1 Billion from taxpayers, you would think Ohioans would say no.
Apparently the lesson educator Packard draws is that the market needs another e-school to replace ECOT.
This one, he says, will be better than ever. Bigger, better, better. And some people will believe him.
Every dollar he gets will be withdrawn from a public school.
When will the legislature ban these faux schools?
Better yet. Limit the owner’s salary to be no greater than that of a superintendent. He will leave.
The National Education Policy Center recently issued a bulletin about the negative results of virtual charter schools. To see all the links embedded, open the NEPC report. Betsy DeVos wants more of these fraudulent “schools” to open.
It is no secret. The news media is full of reports about problems with cyber schools. Some recent examples include:
In January 2018, the nation’s largest virtual school, Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), closed. There was a subsequent failure to determine what happened to 2,300 of 11,400 students. The school shut down after the state of Ohio found that ECOT had overstated its enrollment by more than 9,000 students, resulting in a $60 million overpayment.
The Akron Digital Academy quietly closed last month because it could not repay the state the $2.8 million it owed for failing to correctly track enrollment. Akron Public Schools dropped its sponsorship of the school in 2013 due to problems such as poor student performance.
The state of New Mexico is in the process of shutting down the state’s largest virtual school, also for poor academic performance.
An Education Week resource, updated through 2017, includes hundreds of news stories, state audits, and reports about online schools, many highly negative, dating back to the early 2000s.
Some of the best and most updated information about these schools is provided in the NEPC’s Sixth Annual Report on Virtual Education, titled Full-Time Virtual and Blended Schools: Enrollment, Student Characteristics, and Performance. The report provides a census of the nation’s full-time virtual schools as well as institutions that blend online learning with face-to-face instruction. The report also includes student demographics, state performance ratings and, where available, analyses of school performance measures.
Michigan public radio station WKAR mentioned the NEPC report in a piece about another study that found that a quarter of the 101,000 Michigan students enrolled in online classes did not pass a single one. In an interview with the outlet, Gary Miron, author of the Virtual Education report, said: “We need a moratorium right now; we have to stop. No more growth for the schools; no more schools. The schools that are performing extremely poorly, we have to take sound steps to dismantle them.”
Ed tech-focused EdScoop devoted an article to the NEPC report’s findings, noting that: “While the average ratio in the nation’s public schools is 16 students per teacher, virtual schools reported having close to three times as many, and blended schools clocked in with twice as many.” In a piece about a rural school district that partnered with for-profit virtual education company K12 Inc., NBC News quoted the report’s finding that district-operated online schools tend to perform better than charter school versions. Yet the latter continue to dominate the sector. And despite the highly publicized problems with virtual schools, the sector continues to thrive.
“It’s rather remarkable that virtual schools continue to grow even while study after study confirms that these schools are failing,” Miron told NEPC. “Students are clearly being negatively impacted when they attend these schools, and revenues devoted to public school systems are being siphoned off to the private companies that dominate this sector.”
Why is this happening?
Based on interviews with more than a dozen policymakers, advocates, and researchers, a 2016 Education Week report concluded: The reasons are often a mix of weak state regulations, the millions of dollars spent on lobbying, and the support of well-connected allies.
Jan Resseger reviews the AFT report on “A Decade of Neglect,“ a decade in which states cut funding for public schools and diverted the shrinking pie to charters and vouchers. This state-by-state attack on public schools is the match that ignited the teachers’ strikes and may ignite even more in the future. Teachers will be silent no more. They will vote in massive numbers in November for those who support public schools. Many teachers are running for state legislative offices. Good luck to them!
The new report from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), A Decade of Neglect, is one of the most lucid explanations I’ve read about the deplorable fiscal conditions for public schools across the states. It explains the precipitous drop in school funding caused by the Great Recession, temporarily ameliorated in 2009 by an infusion of funds from the federal stimulus (a financial boost that disappeared after a couple of years), compounded by tax cutting and austerity budgeting across many states, and further compounded by schemes to drain education dollars to privatized charter and voucher programs all out of the same budget.
The report delineates the conditions tangled together over the decade: “While some states are better off than most, in states where spending on education was less in 2016 than it was before the recession, our public schools remain nearly $19 billion short of the annual funding they received in 2008, after adjusting for changes in the consumer price index… The recession ran from December 2007 through June 2009 and prompted a crisis setting off a chain of actions that resulted in significant budget cutting by our state governments. When the recession hit, it devastated state budgets. Job losses, lower wages, the crash in housing prices and the panic in the financial markets all worked to lower state tax revenues, while the demand for government services in the form of unemployment benefits, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and housing and Medicaid assistance drove up expenditures. The Brookings Institution estimated that by the second quarter of 2009, income tax collections were 27 percent below their prior-year levels, and total state taxes were 17 percent lower… The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual report of education indicators recently found that U.S. spending on elementary and high school education declined more than 4 percent from 2010-2014…. Over this same period, education spending on average, rose 5 percent per student across the 35 countries in the OECD.”
Many states also adopted an ideology promising that tax cuts would bring the economy back. Sam Brownback’s Kansas experiment in supply side economics, however, exemplifies the failure to confirm these hopes. In Kansas the economy didn’t improve and state revenues collapsed. Only in the past two years has the legislature there raised taxes—beginning an effort to undo the damage. Overall, according to AFT’s report: “In 2016, 25 states were still providing less funding for K-12 schools than before the recession, after adjusting for inflation… Eighteen of the 25 states that provided less funding for k-12 education reduced their tax effort between 2008 and 2015.” The eight states that cut taxes most deeply were: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Virginia. And, “In 38 states, the average teacher salary in 2018 is lower than it was in 2009 in real terms… According to the Economic Policy Institute, teacher pay fell by $30 per week from 1996-2015, while pay for other college graduates increased by $124. The gap between teachers and other college graduates has continued to widen and deep cuts in school funding leave states unable to invest in their state’s teacher workforce… In 35 states, between 2008 and 2016, the ratio of students to teachers grew.”
Here is an example of the result: “(W)hile some states are doing better than others, no state is really doing well enough. California is a leader on many of the measures used in this report. But there are less than one tenth the number of school librarians as is recommended. Most school districts don’t have a nurse and there are only about a quarter of the recommended number of school counselors.”
Here is the voice of a genuine progressive.
Kelda Roys is running for the Democratic nomination for Governor so she can run against Scott Walker.
The primary is August 14.
She released this letter to teachers.
She really gets it. She speaks to the hearts and minds of all who have suffered the insufferable Walker, who has walked all over teachers, students, and public schools. He has bulldozed the Wisconsin Idea.
Wisconsin needs Kelda Roys.
She writes:
This is a message of hope. A promise to you of what kind of governor I will be, and a heartfelt statement to demonstrate that I hear what you’ve been saying and empathize with what you’ve been experiencing.
Throughout the past eight years, you, your pocketbook, and your profession have been under attack.
You are constantly asked to “do more with less” as a result of the historic budget cuts to your classrooms. Without proper funding, the schools you work in, especially in rural communities, continue to close. You are often forced to “‘teach for the test” as opposed to engaging young minds in the joy of learning and helping develop students’ whole selves. Your class sizes are going up, but your professional autonomy is being ratcheted down.
As a result of Act 10, your collective bargaining rights were eliminated, compensation reduced, and work devalued. Your median salaries have continued to fall: as of the 2015-26 school year, your average pay was more than $10,000 lower than it was before the passage of Act 10. The policies of the Walker administration have done serious harm to Wisconsin’s once-great public education system. A record number of your colleagues have left the profession altogether.
In the numbers-driven, high-stakes testing approach that many school districts are taking, your autonomy is lost. This is bad for you and even worse for students. In the ever-expanding push for “accountability,” teachers are too often punished — never administrators, or politicians who fail to remedy the social and economic injustice that follows students into the classroom. Rather than addressing the teacher retention and pipeline problem by increasing pay and restoring joy to the profession, Walker and the DPI are undermining teacher qualifications by enabling fast-track “alternative” licensing for people without teaching degrees. And the expansion of privatization, from the voucher programs to so-called “independent” charters, steals resources away from our public schools and the kids you serve. It’s no wonder so many teachers feel demoralized and are leaving — your ability to practice the profession you love and teach your students is constantly questioned, challenged, and denied by the very people who should be supporting you.
Despite all this, I am asking you to not to leave.
As a small-business owner, as a mother, and as a proud graduate of Wisconsin’s public schools, I know how critical you are to our state and our future. To attract and retain the best teachers, Wisconsin must become a better state in which to be a teacher — we must invest in public schools and educators.
As governor, I pledge I will do everything in my power to restore the funding our schools deserve, the rights, wages, and benefits you lost, and the autonomy and respect you deserve.
Whom should we believe?
The people Trump appointed to head the FBI, the CIA, Director of National Intelligence, abs Secretary of Homeland Security? They all held a joint press conference today to warn that Russia is planning to attack the 2018 election, as it did in 2016?
But tonight Trump said at a rally that fears of Russia interference are a “hoax.”
Whom should we believe? Him or his administration? Is this a reality show?
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/02/politics/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-pennsylvania-rally/index.html
That was soon after he unleashed attacks on the media.
I am in search of people who were involved in the elections in Jefferson County and Douglas County in Colorado in 2016.
I am looking for a brief write up by a participant about how these communities organized to sweep the school board elections.
I plan to write about the elections in my new book. You can write me at my NYU email:
dr19@nyu.edu
Please contact me if you were involved.
Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick DeVos sponsored a referendum to change Michigan’s State Constitution in 2000 so that the state could fund vouchers for religious schools. Their referendum was overwhelmingly defeated, by 68-32%.
Now the rightwing is trying again, bypassing another referendum (which would be defeated) and sponsoring a law to achieve the same purpose.
ELC JOINS FIGHT TO MAINTAIN MICHIGAN’S CONSTITUTIONAL BAN AGAINST PUBLIC FUNDING OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS
Education Law Center filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief earlier this month in a crucial case before the Michigan Court of Appeals challenging a law that would redirect public education funds to private schools. The challenged statute, which was found unconstitutional and blocked by the lower court, would divert $2.5 million a year from the State’s appropriation of public school funding to reimburse private schools for a wide array of expenses.
Several Michigan entities filed the lawsuit, Council of Organizations and Others for Education About Parochiaid (CAP) v. Michigan, alleging violations of state constitutional provisions prohibiting public aid to nonpublic schools and requiring a two-thirds majority vote of the Legislature to appropriate public funds for private purposes. The legal team representing the plaintiffs includes the ACLU of Michigan and the firm White Schneider.
After entering a preliminary injunction blocking the law, Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens ruled in April 2018 that the statute violated the plain language of Article 8, § 2 of the Michigan Constitution. This constitutional provision, approved by voter referendum in 1970, prohibits the use of public funds to “directly or indirectly” support private schools. Judge Stephens found that the statute “effectuate[s] the direct payment of public funds to nonpublic schools” and “supports the employment of nonpublic school employees.” The State then appealed Judge Stephens’ ruling.
ELC’s amicus brief provides the appeals court with historical context demonstrating that Michigan voters intended to protect the funding of public education and improve the quality of their public school system when they approved the constitutional ban on public funds for private schools.
The amicus brief also highlights the persistent underfunding of Michigan’s public schools and the widening disparities in student performance, as demonstrated by the State’s own studies. Michigan fails to equitably allocate funding and resources to state public schools, with at-risk students, including economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, and students with disabilities, experiencing the most inequitable funding and the lowest academic outcomes.
The amicus brief argues that the challenged statute will exacerbate the underfunding of Michigan public schools by diverting already inadequate funding from public schools to reimburse private school expenses in some of the same categories in which public schools are struggling to meet basic requirements.
Other states have enacted similar laws authorizing “nonpublic school aid” to reimburse private schools for a wide variety of expenditures. In New Jersey, for example, the Legislature allocates over $110 million in public funds in the annual state budget to pay for textbooks, security, nurses and remedial programs in private and religious schools. New York recently enacted a law to reimburse private schools for the salaries of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers.
“Michigan’s public school funding is protected by the constitutional firewall between public tax dollars and private education,” said ELC Executive Director David Sciarra. “It is crucial that the courts not allow the diversion of any funds from Michigan’s chronically and severely underfunded public schools.”
ELC was represented as amicus pro bono by the law firms Paul Weiss and Salvatore Prescott & Porter. As the nation’s legal defense fund for education rights, ELC advocates for fair and adequate public education funding and opposes the use of public funds to pay for or support private schools.
Education Law Center Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 24
For Immediate Release
August 1, 2018
Contact:
Duc Luu, Communications Manager, Public Advocates, 857-373-9118; dluu@publicadvocates.org
Rigel Spencer Massaro, Senior Staff Attorney, Public Advocates, 707-761-5672, rmassaro@publicadvocates.org
New Report Uncovers Systemic Failure by California Charter Schools
to Meet Local Control Obligations
SAN FRANCISCO—A new report by Public Advocates Inc. uncovers a massive failure on the part of California charter schools to be transparent about how they spend millions of taxpayer dollars to benefit high need students, as required by state law. The report also reveals disturbing trends about the availability of public documents and the ability of parents to exercise their legal rights to participate in charter school spending decisions as promised by California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) law. The report, which is the first systematic analysis of charter school Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs) found critical financial and engagement information missing, unavailable, or incomplete at a shocking number of charter schools.
For example, not a single school analyzed for this report properly documented how it was increasing or improving services for high need students, services for which those charter schools received $48.6 million this past year. Even more concerning, two-thirds of that amount was completely unaccounted for. Statewide, charters receive over $900 million annually to increase or improve services for high need students.
“Charter schools are part of California’s public education system. They receive $3.4 billion in public dollars every year and they need to be held accountable for how they spend those funds, just like every other school,” said Senior Staff Attorney Rigel Spencer Massaro.
Public Advocates looked for LCAPs at 70 schools and systematically examined 43 schools in Oakland, Sacramento, Richmond, Los Angeles, and San Jose which had published LCAPs for the 2017-2018 school year. The report found that:
One-third of all charter schools examined had no LCAP online. These public documents were still missing after email requests to the school, its authorizer, and the County Office of Education
More than two-thirds of the state funds generated by high need students—over $30 million—were unaccounted for; of the $48.6 million these schools received specifically for high need students in 2017-2018, there was only documentation for $15.8 million in planned spending
Only 21% clearly measured how they engaged parents in school decision-making, and only 37% described how community engagement impacted their planning process
91% of charter schools examined serving 15% or more English learners did not post their LCAPs in a language other than English
Of the 12 Charter Management Organizations examined in the report and that manage 123 charter schools in multiple cities, 100% adopt LCAPs at a single meeting in a single location, with minimal public comment
Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, commented, “Public Advocates’ newly released report, Keeping the Promise of LCFF in Charter Schools, raises concerns about transparency and accountability in charter schools. The fact that Public Advocates could not get copies of some charter schools’ LCAPs despite multiple requests is beyond troubling. Parents and local communities cannot ensure that student achievement and needs are addressed if the LCAPs are not easily available. The State Legislature should close a loophole requiring traditional public schools, but not charter schools, to post LCAPs on a school’s website.”
Community engagement and transparency are pillars of California’s groundbreaking Local Control Funding Formula law and every parent has a right to know and participate in how their school is spending money.
Abadesa Rolon, a charter school parent in Richmond commented, “We need our charter schools to complete their LCAPs so parents can understand the goals, actions, progress and funding that support student success. I understand how my school is spending S&C funds, but that’s because I’ve asked a lot of questions. Other parents don’t know, because this information isn’t in our school’s LCAP.”
The report calls for expert oversight and improved support over charter school LCAPs, especially when it comes to transparency for funds designated to improve services for high need students. The report also recommends legislation that would hold charter schools to similar standards of transparency and engagement as public schools.
Click here for a copy of the report
Click here for a list of the charter schools examined for this report
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