Archives for the month of: April, 2023
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Missouri: State Senate Restores Funding for Public Libraries!

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2023 //
16

Good news! After Republican legislators in the state House defunded the state’s libraries for daring to sue the state to overturn a censorship law, the State Senate restored the libraries’ funding of $4.5 million. Yes, there are some sane Republicans in Missouri.

JEFFERSON CITY — The chief Senate budget writer said he plans to restore state funding for Missouri’s public libraries that was stripped out of the House version of the state’s spending plan.

Sen. Lincoln Hough, R-Springfield, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Tuesday that the panel will place $4.5 million back in the budget, which covers spending for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

“There is no way that money is not going back into the budget,” Hough told the Post-Dispatch.

The restoration could mark the second reversal of a House budget prioritythat has stirred controversy under the Capitol dome. Hough and Senate President Caleb Rowden earlier said they oppose Republican language in the House blueprint that would prohibit the state from spending tax dollars on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives….

The library money was removed from the House blueprint by House Budget Chairman Cody Smith and backed by the Republicans who control the chamber last week. He cited a lawsuit by two library groups to overturn a new state law banning sexually explicit material in school libraries.

The ACLU, the Missouri Association of School Librarians, and the Missouri Library Association in February asked a judge in Kansas City to find the law unconstitutional or clarify how and when it applies.

Smith, R-Carthage, believes the state shouldn’t subsidize the lawsuit by giving public libraries money.

Hough’s hometown library district, which covers Springfield and Greene County, would receive an estimated $368,000 if the money is restored.

Hough said libraries serve multiple purposes in communities, allowing people to not only get books, but internet service, job assistance and programs for adults and children.

“Libraries are an important resource for so many people,” Hough said.

Categories Censorship, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Missouri

Who Funded the Mayoral Candidates in Chicago?

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2023 //
10

Full accounts of fundraising and sources are not yet available, but here’s what we know so far:

NBC said a few days before the election that Paul Vallas raised $19 million, while Brandon Johnson raised “nearly $11 million.”

https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/high-dollar-donations-fueling-johnson-and-vallas-in-chicago-election-how-might-that-influence-the-next-mayor/3109471/?amp=1

Chalkbeat Chicago reviewed the donors. Johnson’s money came mainly from unions (CTU gave him $2.2 million) and 8,000 individual contributions. Vallas’ funding came mainly from financiers and supporters of charters, vouchers, and TFA.

https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2023/3/31/23665374/chicago-mayors-race-campaign-donations-paul-vallas-brandon-johnson-teachers-union-betsy-devos?_amp=true

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Funding, Unions, Vouchers

A Great Day for Chicago! Brandon Johnson Elected Mayor!

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2023 //
44

Against all predictions, Brandon Johnson was elected Mayor of Chicago!

Right up to the last minute, the polls showed Paul Vallas with a lead of 2-5 points. Vallas ran as a law-and-order candidate. He raised money from Betsy DeZvos and other billionaires, including Ken Griffen. Vallas outspent Johnson. Vallas has a long history of privatizing schools.

Johnson ran on a platform of investing in education and social services to improve people’s lives.

No one expected this upset!

This is great news for the people of Chicago!

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Chicago, Education Reform, Elections, Privatization, Supporting public schools

A Great Day for Democracy in Wisconsin!!!

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2023 //
15

The Koch brothers funded the Republican takeover of Wisconsin in 2010 and the election of Scott Walker as governor. Walker quickly cracked down on unions and stripped them of their rights. He pushed vouchers. He attacked Wisconsin’s great public university system. Meanwhile, the Republican legislature gerrymandered the state to guarantee control of the legislature. The state is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, but Republicans control both houses of the legislature.

That is why many observers considered the election of a new State Supreme Court to be the most important election in the nation. After the retirement of a Republican justice, the Court was split 3-3.

A liberal—Janet Protasiewicz—ran against a conservative—Dan Kelly. The liberal won. This means that the Court will have a Democratic majority.

The two biggest issues likely to be resolved by the Court are abortion rights and gerrymandering. The new Court now has the votes to restore abortion rights that were withdrawn by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision. It is likely that a lawsuit will challenge the deeply unfair gerrymandering of the state, and the new majority is sure to insist on a fair reapportionment.

A great day for democracy!

Categories Dark Money, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Freedom, Unions, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Texas: Vouchers Will Soon Come to a Vote in Legislature: Write, Call, Speak Out!

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2023 //
2

Governor Gregg Abbott has pushed very hard for vouchers to fund religious schools, homeschooling, and anything else that calls itself a school. Texas has a state constitution that requires public schools, but voucher advocates abandon the language of state constitutions when they get in the way of their goal.

We know from experience that most vouchers will be used by students already enrolled in private or religious schools. We know that the cost of funding kids already in private schools will be enormous. More than 300,000 students attend private schools in Texas. Add in home schoolers, and you are looking at an annual cost of nearly $3 billion before any public school student has asked for a voucher.

We know from research studies that most of the public school kids who take vouchers will drop out of their religious school and return to their public school far behind their peers.

No group has been more effective in fighting to preserve public schools than Pastors for Texas Children. They have mobilized rural Republicans to stand strong for their public schools, which are the hub of their community.

PTC released the following report today:

Call and Write Your Senator and Representative TODAY!

The SB 8 education savings account voucher bill will likely pass out of the Senate Education Committee today or tomorrow, then go to the Senate floor for a vote. It’s been astonishing that the bill has been stalled in the Senate for the past week! As you know, the Texas Senate, under the leadership of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, has long supported private school vouchers. Contact your State Senator anyway! Our job is to influence and educate them!

Vouchers stop and die in the Texas House of Representatives. They will vote on Thursday on an amendment to the budget bill preventing public money from funding private schools. Here it is:

Call and email your State Representative before Thursday and urge him or her to support the Herrero Amendment prohibiting private school voucher funding.

You can find their Austin office numbers here.

PTC pastor Rev. Julio Guarneri, the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in McAllen, has written a powerful letter to his state senator. It gives us all a good, succinct script for our talking points as we contact our policymakers.

It’s our job before God to speak truth to power. God bless us all as we bear witness to God’s truth and justice this week!

 

Senator Hinojosa,

I hope you had a good weekend. I attempted to call you on the phone this morning but you were in a meeting and I know this is a busy week for you. I hope to still be able to talk to you over the phone but in the meantime, let me share with you what I am calling about.

I am the Lead Pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in McAllen. I am also currently serving as president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas (Texas Baptists), to whom the Christian Life Commission relates. And I am with Pastors for Texas Children as well.

I am writing you in regard to SB 8 (Education savings account/school voucher bill). As a Baptist, as a pastor, and as a religious leader, I am opposed to SB 8 for several reasons. My conviction is that church and state should be separate. A free church in a free state is our ideal. Thus, I do not believe tax dollars should be used to fund religious education. Public tax dollars should be used for public schools. Religious causes should be supported by donations from private individuals.

There are only two choices for religious schools who receive help from tax credits. They either receive oversight from the government, which violates the separation of church and state, or they receive the benefit without accountability, which is wrong.

Furthermore, this measure seems to mostly benefit middle to upper class families, leaving lower income families either without enough of a tax credit to afford a private school or with an underfunded public school system. We will do a disservice to Texas if we leave lower income families at an educational disadvantage.

I know you have historically opposed school vouchers and I am thankful for that. I respectfully ask you to hold your position. As a religious leader I believe it is the right thing.

Please do not hesitate to call me or email me.

May you have a blessed Holy Week and a Happy Easter!

For our Texas children and our Texas future,

Julio S. Guarneri, Ph.D.

Calvary Baptist Church

McAllen, Texas

Pastors at the Capitol

DONATE TO PTC

 

PO Box 471155, Fort Worth, Texas, 76147

Check out our website  

 

Categories Accountability, Courage, Education Industry, Equity, Funding, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Philadelphia: “Abbott Elementary” and the Real Story Behind Charters

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2023 //
18

Peter Greene turned his blog over to an experienced journalist who covered education in Philadelphia for years. What’s the real story behind the outraged reaction by the charter lobby to “Abbott Elementary”?

Bill Hangley, Jr., is a free lance writer who worked the education beat in Philadelphia, and as such he has some thoughts about the charter scene in Philly as reflected through recent episodes of Abbott Elementary. I’m pleased to present his guest post on the subject.

Hangley writes:

America’s school-choice lobby can relax: when ABC’s Abbott Elementary returns this Wednesday [April 5], the plot will hinge on teacher qualifications, not charter school takeovers.

That’s good news for a community that’s used to being taken seriously – very seriously. Wherever charter supporters go, they usually have friends to defend their interests. But the choice lobby wasn’t represented in the Abbott writers’ room. Nobody stood in the way as the hit sitcom raked charters over the comedy coals, presenting them as cynical, counterproductive, and even absurd.

Unsurprisingly, the charter lobby didn’t like what America saw. “No one likes being vilified,” said Debbie Veney of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “It’s pathetic … to criticize the schools that succeed,” tweeted Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform.

As a journalist who covered Philadelphia’s charters for years, I expected to see people like Veney and Allen vigorously defend their industry. That’s what they’re paid to do.

I just wish somebody would pay them to take a good hard look in the mirror. Because as merciless as the sitcom’s portrayal of district-charter relations may have been, to me it looked far more accurate than charter supporters care to admit.

Admittedly, some might say I’m biased. As a reporter for WHYY News and the late, great Public School Notebook, I saw the ugly up close. In over a decade on the beat, I saw politicians meddle and school boards dissemble. I saw underperforming charters stay open while district-run schools shut down. I heard officials beg repeatedly for relief from costly charter payments that drain district budgets.

And I saw the real-life versions of the charter takeover featured in Abbott’s recent episodes. The sitcom version was funny. The real-life version was downright cruel.

In what our school district dubbed the “Renaissance” process, Philadelphia asked school communities to pick sides and fight it out. What America just saw on television, I saw a decade ago in places like Steel Elementary and Muñoz-Marín Elementaryand Wister Elementary and Martin Luther King High.

It was brutal. Parents were asked to choose between imperfect schools they knew and blue-sky promises from well-dressed “providers” they’d never met. The resulting campaigns were every bit as impassioned and intrigue-riddled as any other Philadelphia election. I did my best to cover them fairly, and interviewed countless parents. Plenty were willing to consider a charter, for plenty of reasons.

But the question that came up most often: “If our school’s not good enough, why don’t they just fix our school?”

I had no answer, and the School District of Philadelphia never really did either.

That’s what rings the most true for me about Abbott’s charter episodes: the underlying absurdity of offering “choice” as a solution to an underfunded system. How do you fix one school by opening another? Especially when the old schools have to pay for new ones?

Please open the link and read the rest of his piece about how deeply ingrained charters have become in Philadelphia. it’s no laughing matter, in light of how neglected and underfunded the public schools are.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Funding, Humor, Philadelphia

Pennsylvania: Urban Superintendents Call for Charter Reform, End to Unfunded Mandates

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2023 //
8

The superintendents in 29 districts near Philadelphia joined to call for charter funding reform and an end to unfunded mandates.

With a new governor, state budget hearings underway and a court ruling on their side, superintendents from 29 urban school districts held press conferences Tuesday to call attention to the need for charter reform, inequities and school safety in urban schools.

Five Philadelphia-area superintendents spoke at Upper Darby High School as part of the caucus of Pennsylvania League of Urban Schools press conference, to call attention to the need for charter reform and funding inequities that are dramatically impacting children who attend urban schools.

The 29 districts teach over 300,000 students in the state.

Christopher Dormer, superintendent of Norristown Area School District and president of the PLUS caucus, said superintendents were speaking for students who have been underfunded and underserved for far too long.

Putting a face to one of those students, Dormer spoke about first grader Estefania, one of 140 students identified as an English learner. Her school has only three English language development teachers to help in 25 classrooms.

Dormer said his district has more than 1,550 English learners, a population that has grown by 104% in the past 10 years. The district has 31 professional staff members, with 50 students for each certified teacher.

Dormer said the district has been funded in an unconstitutional manner and districts like his have had to make difficult financial choices over the past 20 years. He said those choices have led to cutting staff, curtailing programs and raising local property taxes just to survive.

Dormer noted that when districts do receive funding outcomes are different. Over the past two years, his district has received $8 million in additional funding through the program Level Up.

“This has allowed us to significantly reverse the trend of cutting positions over the decade,” Dormer said. “Just these past two years we’ve added back 60 new staff positions … to reduce class size at all levels and we were able to hire reading specialists for the first time to serve our elementary schools.”

His district has seen an increase in reading proficiency thanks to the increased funding, but it is still shortchanged by $10 million a year.

Dormer also took aim at charter school funding and noted that more than 92% of the 500 school boards statewide have adopted resolutions supporting reform to Pennsylvania’s charter school law.

“If that doesn’t say bipartisan support, I don’t know what does,” Dormer said. “This isn’t about choice, this isn’t about competition, and this is about a charter funding formula that boosts the payment of cyber charter tuition and special education tuition significantly above the real costs that are incurred by charter and cyber charter schools to provide educational and specialized services.”

Unfunded mandates

Dr. Dan McGarry, Upper Darby superintendent agreed, saying forced cuts and reduction of public education, an increase in unfunded mandates along with the rise and expansion of cyber charter schools significantly altered public education in the state beginning in the mid-2000s.

McGarry said at one point districts were reimbursed by the state for the tuition cost of charter schools but that was changed. He said that the cost is over $8 million in Upper Darby to the budget and the district sends out $11 million to charter schools.

The overwhelming majority of students in Pennsylvania are enrolled in public schools, but the legislature lavishes funding on charters and Cybercharters.

Either the legislators don’t care about the future of their state or they got big campaign donations from the billionaire charter funders or Cybercharter lobbyists.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, English Language Learners, Funding, Pennsylvania, Virtual Charter Schools

Missouri: GOP Votes to Defund Public Libraries

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2023 //
28

Republicans in Missouri, ascendant in the Legislature, voted to defund public libraries in the state because librarians objected to censorship and filed a lawsuit. There are 399 public libraries in the state. The bill has not yet been approved by the State Senate yet, so there’s a chance that the cuts might be reversed. PEN reported that nearly 300 books have already been withdrawn from circulation in response to censors.

Late Tuesday night, the Missouri House of Representatives voted for a state operating budget with a $0 line for public libraries. While the budget still needs to work its way through the Senate and the governor’s office, state funding for public libraries is very much on the chopping block in Missouri.

This comes after Republican House Budget Chairman Cody Smith proposed a $4.5 million cut to public libraries’ state aid last week in the initial House Budget Committee hearing, where Smith cited a lawsuit filed against Missouri by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU-MO) as the reason for the cut.

That will teach them a lesson! Reading is dangerous! Stay home and watch unfiltered porn on your computer, and you don’t need to learn any new words. Why read a book when you can get the real deal at home and be completely illiterate?

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Extremism, Funding, Librarians, Libraries, Missouri, Stupid

Win or Lose, Know This About Paul Vallas

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2023 //
37

This article by three scholars—Pauline Lipman, Camika Royal, and Adrienne Dixson—closes the book on Paul Vallas’ record in education. It was published in Truthout.

Vallas’s solution for struggling schools was a corporate-style, top-down accountability system of high-stakes tests, test-prep teaching and punishment for failure — an experiment on Chicago’s Black and Brown children that set the stage for national education policy under George W. Bush. Schools that failed to meet test score targets were put on a warning list, on probation, or reconstituted by Vallas’s central office.

Counter to research consensus, based on their scores on a single test, tens of thousands of students were sent to summer school, held back a grade for as long as three years, prevented from 8th grade graduation, or assigned to remedial transition high schools where a pared-down curriculum of math, English and world studies revolved around intensive test preparation.

It was typical for schools, particularly in Black communities, to spend up to one quarter of the school year drilling for tests in reading and math. Music and art were cancelled and social studies began in May — after testing. Engaging, culturally relevant classes were turned into test prep. In some schools, Test Best and Test Ready booklets were the curriculum for weeks. CPS Office of Accountability staff told me that when Vallas left in 2001, 59 schools — mostly Black — were using mandated Direct Instruction, in which teachers read scripts and students respond with scripted answers. Not surprisingly, under this regime test scores went up. However, a 1999 National Research Council assessment expert “concluded that Chicago’s regular year and summer school curricula were so closely geared to the [standardized test] that it was impossible to distinguish real subject mastery from mastery of skills and knowledge useful for passing this particular test.”

Turning schools into test prep factories — and punishing and publicly shaming “failing” schools, students, teachers and parents in Black communities — took a toll. Some of the most dedicated and revered teachers left the system. For example, in one Black elementary school Lipman worked with, from 1997-2000, 26 of 37 teachers left, to be replaced by a succession of inexperienced teachers and interns. An award-winning teacher at the school explained that they couldn’t live with the ethical crisis of Vallas’s policies; for both teachers and students “it’s like a hammer just knocking them down.” A 2000 University of Chicago study reported nearly one-third of eighth graders retained in 1997 dropped out by fall 1999. In 2000, Parents United for Responsible Education won a civil rights complaint against CPS under Vallas for adverse discriminatory impact of the retention policy on Black and Latinx students. Expulsions, particularly of Black students, also surged, as documented in a 2001 Chicago Reporter article titled “Alternative education: Segregation or solution?”

When test scores flattened in 2001, Vallas left. But the system he set up of ranking and sorting schools based on an inappropriate use of standardized tests, and disregarding the historical disinvestment and racism schools had suffered, laid the foundation for almost 200 school closings and turn-arounds and the education market that followed. These school closings, 90 percent predominantly Black, devastated Black communities in particular. Vallas’s electoral campaign focuses on fighting crime, but the disruptions from the school closings that were a major factor in the destabilization of Black communities can be traced back to Vallas’s reign at CPS.

Please open the link and read the full article.

If Vallas should win, the students and teachers of Chicago will endure the failed policies of the past two decades.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Curriculum, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Race, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Vallas, Paul

Tennessee: GOP Threatens to Expel 3 Democratic Legislators Who Joined Anti-Gun Protest

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2023 //
17

The statehouse in Nashville, Tennessee, was surrounded by parents and students demonstrating in favor of gun control and against the GOP-controlled legislature’s protection of guns. The protest follows the murder of three children and three staff members at the Coventry School in Nashville.

Three Democratic members of the legislature joined the protest, chanting with the protestors.

The GOP leadership threatened to expel the Democrats. The speaker of the House absurdly claimed that the three Democrats were encouraging an insurrection.

Parents and children held signs and shouted chants during a large protest at the Tennessee capitol last week following a deadly school shooting. And while no one was arrested or injured, Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton is comparing the demonstration to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

During the House Floor session on Thursday — days after the Covenant School shooting — Reps. Gloria Johnson, D-Knox, Justin Pearson, D-Memphis, and Justin Jones, D-Nashville, stood up and chanted with protestors in the gallery.

Pearson and other Democrats attempted to acknowledge the large group of protesters during session, but were told to stick to the subject of the bill by Speaker Cameron.

“We listened to them and helped to elevate the issue that they are demanding justice for,” said Pearson.

House Speaker Cameron Sexton said their actions were more than a breach of decorum, comparing it to the January 6th insurrection in remarks to outlets.

“Two of the members; Representative Jones and Representative Johnson, have been very vocal about Jan. 6 and Washington, D.C., about what that was,” said Sexton. “What they did today was equivalent, at least equivalent, maybe worse depending on how you look at it, to doing an insurrection in the State Capitol.”

Sexton warned that there will likely be consequences for the trio.

“It could be removal of committees; it could be censorship; it could be expulsion from the General Assembly. Anywhere in between,” said Sexton.

Leaders in the Democratic caucus are defending their colleagues. Nashville Democrat John Ray Clemmons says he believes Speaker Sexton is exaggerating.

“You show me the broken windows, you show me anyone who went into the speaker’s office and put their chair up on his desk and trashed his office, you show me where a noose was hanging anywhere on the legislative plaza,” said Clemmons, citing damage committed during the Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths before and after the event.

The three rebellious Democrats were stripped of their committee assignments. Their member badges were deactivated. Their telephones were disconnected.

In a press conference Monday, Jones says Sexton is more focused on politics than addressing last week’s mass shooting.

“We are members, who are standing in the well, telling our speakers and our colleagues that kids should not be murdered in school,” Jones said, “and rather than address that issue, the speaker has spent more time on Twitter this weekend talking about a fake insurrection than he did about the deaths of six people including 9-year-old children.”

It is not yet clear if the lawmakers will face expulsion. Sexton has not commented on whether they will face further discipline.

A tweet:

Three Tennessee Democrats have been stripped of their committee and subcommittee assignments by the Republican dominated legislature for speaking out against gun violence in the wake of the Nashville shooting that killed three children.

Democracy is dead in Tennessee.

@Sethaweitz

Rep. Gloria Johnson, one of the three Democrats, tweeted:

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Guns, Guns in Schools, Nashville, Parents, Republicans, Resistance, Safety, Tennessee
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