Voters in Los Angeles yesterday turned down Measure EE, which would have raised $500 million yearly for schools. The measure required a 2/3 yes vote, but didn’t win a majority. It would have been funded mostly by taxes on commercial properties, and the LA Chamber of Commerce mounted a campaign to defeat it.
It would have funded smaller classes, nurses, social workers, librarians, arts and music.
What a crying shame.
If you care about the kids, you have to do right by them.
Jeff Bryant explains here why Democratic candidates will have to make a choice between raising teacher pay and funding charter schools.
Up until recently, candidates spoke only about pre-K and postsecondary education.
But the time has come to set forth their ideas for K-12.
In Florida, the choice is stark.
Voters pass tax increases dedicated solely to funding their local public schools, but the Legislature wants to compel them to share any tax increases with charter schools, whether they want to or not.
He writes:
A recent law passed by the majority Republican Florida state legislature and signed by newly elected Republican Governor Ron DeSantis will force local school districts to share portions of their locally appropriated tax money with charter schools, even if those funds are raised for the express purpose of increasing teacher salaries in district-operated public schools. (Charter schools in Florida, as in many states, do not receive funds that are raised through bond referendums, mill levies, or other forms of local funding initiatives.)
Florida teachers have openly opposed the new law, and local school districts have taken it to court to have it overthrown. But given this new law, it’s not at all hard to imagine a scenario, even at the national level, where Democrats pushing to increase funds for teacher pay will have to confront an expanding charter school industry—and now voucher programs—that would claim their portion of that money to use as private institutions for whatever purposes they wish.
“The problem with charter schools isn’t that they’re competing with public schools; it’s that they’re supplanting public schools,” says Justin Katz in a phone call. Katz, who is president of the Palm Beach County Classroom Teachers Association, recently helped organize a rally in West Palm Beach where more than 200 teachers and public school advocates showed up to voice their opposition to distributing funds raised by local tax increases to charter schools.
The protest “was very specific, local, and personal,” Katz explains, because voters in the county had approved $200 million in funding for their schools in a measure that specified increases could be used for teacher raises in traditional public schools and not for funding charter schools.
The referendum was overwhelmingly approved by more than 72 percent of voters. But under the proposed new law, a proportional share of 10 percent, or about $20 million a year, would have gone to the county’s 49 charters. Only a final hour amendment in the state’s Senate averted the loss, when the bill was altered to apply to future bond referendums only.
The language of the referendum that was passed was “crystal clear,” Katz says, that money raised by the bond efforts would not go to charter schools. But the loophole being used to argue for charters to get their share is the use of the term “public schools.”
The new law is “an effort to redefine what are public schools,” he says, in order to give charter schools a right to claim a portion of any publicly raised education funds, regardless of the intent for raising the money. He fears that once charters claim that right, private schools in the state’s school voucher programs will claim it too.
Resident of Los Angeles: Vote for Measure EE on June 4.
Measure EE is not “just another tax.” It will bring in $500 million every year in ongoing funds, and is what the teachers and the community fought so hard to get through the strike. LA, don’t leave the job you started on the picket lines unfinished!
Measure EE is desperately needed to give local neighborhood schools the resources to educate children and reduce class sizes. Measure EE will bring the funding we need locally to recruit and retain quality staff and offer our students a well-rounded education, including:
—Lower class sizes
—More arts and music classes
—Cleaner, safer schools
—School nurses and librarians
—Guidance counselors and mental health services for students
—Support for students with disabilities and special needs
Supported by UTLA, Mayor Eric Garcetti, SEIU 99 and others (full list here https://www.yesonee.org), the measure needs 66.7% to pass on June 4. Every vote will count in what is expected to be a low turnout election.
This is common sense. Businesses and corporate landlords will pay more than 70% of this tax. Homeowners would pay only 18%. The owner of a 1,200-square-foot home would pay $208 annually, and the owner of the 73-story US Bank Tower would pay $229,206 annually.
Because the cost will be carried by those who can most afford it, those same corporations are pushing an aggressive, vitriolic NO campaign, led by the LA Chamber of Commerce. Joined by corporate lobbyists and landlords who have funneled more than $1.5 million to get Measure EE to fail. The No campaign’s chief organizers, LA Area Chamber of Commerce CEO Maria Salinas, stated publicly at the February 28, 2019 LAUSD Board Meeting that the Chamber would have supported Measure EE if it were drafted as a regressive tax, meaning that that the owner of a 1 million square foot skyscraper would be assessed the same amount as the owner of a 1,500 square foot house. Measure EE is applied per square foot — so that skyscraper-owners pay more than homeowners.
Decades of chronic underfunding of LAUSD schools have come at a steep price, especially for the students LA schools serve, who are overwhelmingly children of color from low-income families. Schools should not be forced to choose between keeping the library open, funding arts and music classes, or having a school psychologist every day. Even though California is the wealthiest state in the nation, it ranks 44th in the country in per-pupil funding.
The choice is simple: Either LA residents step up and vote yes on Measure EE on Tuesday, June 4, or they sit this out, and students suffer.
Call the Chamber today and tell them to stop the vicious attacks on Measure EE!
Chamber of Commerce 213-580-7500
Follow the money is a basic principle.
To understand an organization, see who funds it.
Take Teach for America.
It presents itself to the public as a noble charity.
Unfortunately, it promotes the bad idea that anyone with five weeks of training can teach. That has the effect of undermining teaching as a profession.
Does anyone believe that five weeks of training is adequate to become a doctor or lawyer or architect or engineer?
TFA supplies the workforce for a large proportion of charter schools, 90% of which are non-union.
TFA simultaneously undermines the teaching profession and teacher unionism, which assures that teachers have rights and voice in the workplace.
Who would promote these goals? .
This is a terrific documentary, created by professional filmmakers at Stone Lantern Films. It will be shown in Spanish and in English. If you want to show the documentary in your community, contact the filmmakers by email, listed below.
MEDIA ALERT
____________________________________________________________________________________
THE UNITED FEDERATION OF TEACHERS HOSTS SPECIAL SCREENING OF THE ACCLAIMED DOCUMENTARY “BACKPACK FULL OF CASH”
EXPLORING THE REAL COST OF PRIVATIZING AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Narrated by Academy Award-winning actor, Matt Damon
BACKPACK has screened over 360 times in 39 states and nine countries
— including nine film festivals
WHO: Sarah Mondale and Vera Aronow, BACKPACK filmmakers; Nicholas Cruz, United Federation of Teachers; James Rodriguez, College Goal New York Coordinator; NYC teachers; parents of NYC students; NYC students; members of the community
WHAT: The United Federation of Teachers will host a special screening, in English and Spanish, of the acclaimed documentary BACKPACK FULL OF CASH. As the next election season kicks into high gear, education is at the forefront and BACKPACK is serving as a powerful tool to inform parents, teachers and community members about the reality of market-based education “reform,” and its impact on American public schools and the 50 million students who rely on them. BACKPACK was made by the team that produced the award-winning PBS series, SCHOOL: The Story of American Public Education. The Bronx event will be free for members of the community.
Public RSVP at: https://uft.wufoo.com/forms/qqwn5z81x5qcqo/
WHERE: UFT Bronx Learning Center, 2500 Halsey Street, The Bronx, NY 10461
WHEN: Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Press Call: 4:00
PRESS RSVP: Natalie Maniscalco / Retro Media
Natalie@retromedianyc.com / 845.659.6506
For more information about the film, upcoming screenings, downloadable photos, trailer and other resources, please visit http://www.BackpackFullofCash.com
Official Website: http://www.BackpackFullofCash.com
Email: info@backpackfullofcash.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/backpackfullofcash/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/backpackthefilm
Instagram: @backpackthefilm\
To Register for screening:
Bruce Baker of Rutgers University reviewed three policy briefs produced by the pro-charter, pro-choice Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and found them to be “generally superficial and misleading.” The apparent intent of these briefs was to influence the policy debate in California, in which Governor Newsom and the Legislature are considering whether to take into account the fiscal impact of charters on public schools. Baker’s review was sponsored by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado.
Reviewed by:
Bruce D. Baker University of Colorado Boulder
May 2019
Executive Summary
The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), based at the University of Washington, Bothell, recently released a series of three policy briefs on the financial impact of charter schools on nearby school districts in California. The briefs arrive at a time when a Task Force convened by California Gov. Gavin Newsom is deliberating on these exact matters. CRPE’s founder, Paul Hill, was a key source of testimony to the task force, serving as an expert viewed as “sympathetic to charter schools.”
The three briefs make note of the task force in their introduction and are seemingly intended to inform these ongoing debates over charter school financing and expansion in the state of California. The briefs are as follows.
The first brief acknowledges that over the long run, California charter school expansion has resulted in some district enrollment decline. But the brief contends that this decline has been modest and in recent years is no longer occurring. Further, the report asserts that whether charter schools expand or not, many districts will face continuing enrollment decline and “the financial challenges it brings” (p. 10).
The second brief lays out a set of figures showing charter school enrollment shares and comparing this to county-assigned classifications of district fiscal distress. It concludes boldly that (a) there is no relationship between charter enrollment share and host district fiscal distress; (b) instead, fiscal distress is most often caused by financial mismanagement; and (c) fiscal distress is too important to get wrong.
The third brief first asserts that there are benefits to, but few if any tangible costs associated with, charter schooling in California. Those benefits are illustrated by reports of differences in test score gains for children in some urban California charter schools versus matched peers in host districts. The brief also cites a handful of studies to support its contention that charter expansion also benefits, or at least does not harm, children in host district schools. Finally, it notes other potential benefits for children enrolled in charter schools, for which quantifiable values are more difficult to assign, including: “The option to choose” (p. 4).
On the potential-costs side of charter expansion, the third brief provides a short list, including, (a) lacking/losing economies of scale, (b) transfers/fiscal impact, (c) capital costs, (d) educating high-cost students, and (e) social cohesion and societal concerns. The authors then dismiss these five concerns, offering the conclusion that there are “few quantifiable costs to charter schooling” in California (p. 6). Yet they provide little analysis or reference to any valid, rigorous analysis by any other researchers.
Robin Lake, Ashley Jochim, Paul Hill, and Sivan Tuchman wrote these briefs and qualify their work with identical wording: “Given the time constraints for informing the commis- sion’s and legislator’s questions, we were limited to data available from earlier studies and from federal, state, and local databases, as cited in the three briefs” (p. 2 of each brief).
These limitations did impair the usefulness of the briefs, but other problems are also evi- dent. The first brief is misleading in its assertion that charter enrollment growth is not to blame for district enrollment decline. It is, and has been for some time, whether in districts with declining, stable or growing overall student enrollments. The brief also attempts to minimize the import of the considerable role played by charters in districts’ enrollment loss, offering up the non sequitur that enrollment loss can arise from other sources as well. The second brief relies on overly simplistic comparisons of charter enrollments and county-assigned “fiscal distress” classifications to conclude that there is no association between charter enrollments and fiscal distress. The contention here is that there can’t be an illness if the patient isn’t dead. In order to rely on this problematic approach, the brief erroneously dismisses a significant, more rigorous, detailed, peer-reviewed and published body of research that illustrates the fiscal impact of charter schools on host districts, and how those fiscal impacts may lead to fiscal stress. The third brief, which presents itself as an analysis of costs and benefits, merely touts the benefits of charter schooling as tangible while being entirely dismissive of numerous known and often measurable costs. Taken together, the briefs are useful only in pointing to some important issues that policymakers should consider; their analyses of those issues are, however, generally superficial and misleading.
Finance experts in Pennsylvania warned that the costs of charter schools and cyber charters threaten to bankrupt as many as 500 school districts.
Finance experts with the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials (PASBO) said lawmakers must change the way charter costs are assessed to local school districts or accept that some school districts are not going to be able to continue to bear the cost of paying hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of dollars in charter school tuition.
The call for change comes as the General Assembly weighs a variety of bills aimed at altering the way the state regulates and finances charter and cyber charter schools that now enroll about 140,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
Hannah Barrick, of the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officers, said charter school costs, which are borne almost entirely by local school districts, totaled $1.8 billion last year and accounted for 37 cents of every new dollar raised in local property taxes.
In some school districts, the costs are even higher.
Enrollment in Pennsylvania’s charter schools grew dramatically over the last decade, increasing from about 78,000 students in 2009-10 to 140,000 this year.
Along with that growth, school districts have seen the bill for charter school tuition grow by double digits five out of the past eight years.
Charter schools, promoted as a free option for public school students whose families wish to look outside their districts, are funded by the students’ local school districts. Tuition is calculated using a complex formula that requires each district to pay charter school fees based on the local district’s cost per student per year. Across the state, those figures ranged from $7,600 to $18,500 per mainstream student to $15,100 to $48,000 per special education student.
Pennsylvania has about 1.7 million students. Supplying choices for 140,000 students (8%) in schools that are of mixed quality threatens to bankrupt the state’s school finance system.
Has it occurred to the lawmakers in Pennsylvania that running a dual school system, both publicly funded, is an insane idea?
Our good friends who lead Pastors for Texas Children—the Revs. Charles Foster Johnson and Charles Luke—have great news to report from the Lone Star State. It was a bipartisan victory for five million children, their teachers, and their public schools!
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Thousands of public school teachers in Los Angeles went on strike in February, demanding basic services for their students: smaller class sizes (many classes have more than 40 students), classes in the arts and music, a librarian and nurse and other support staff in every school. The strike won broad public support. The teachers won an agreement from the school board.
Now comes the hard part: Paying for the agreement.
On Tuesday June 4, voters in Los Angeles will go to the polls and vote on Measure EE.
It is a parcel tax that would raise $500 million additional dollars every year for the public schools for the next twelve years.
Please show up and vote for Measure EE.
The money is desperately needed to provide the students of Los Angeles the schools they need and deserve. Why should they attend schools that are deteriorating, where the library is open only on occasion or not at all, where a nurse is available once a week, a guidance counselor has hundreds of students, and a school psychologist is available never?
Please show up and vote for Measure EE.
California is one of the richest states in the nation, with a roaring and dynamic economy.
But California spends less on education than most other states. Shockingly, it is on par with Kansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
Los Angeles spends far less than other big cities on its students.
Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez met with Superintendent Austin Beutner and UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl at an elementary school in the school library, which is closed two or three days a week.
He wrote:
“The two most powerful people in Los Angeles public education are like a tag team now, practically completing each other’s sentences.”
California, he wrote, “ranks at the top in wealth and near the bottom in funding per pupil.”
What would EE cost the taxpayer? The owner of a 1,500 square foot home would pay an additional $240, twice as much for a house twice as large. About 82% of the revenue would come from commercial, industrial and apartment building owners, while senior homeowners (over 65) and disabled homeowners are exempted from the tax.
Who is fighting EE? The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which opposes taxes and apparently opts for an undereducated workforce; the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is also opposed, that being the organization responsible for Proposition 13, which undermined school funding in 1978 by setting strict limits on property taxes. The Chamber prefers a regressive flat tax, one that is the same for the owner of a small house and the owner of a skyscraper.
Beutner and Caputo-Pearl pointed to business leaders who understand that the future success of Los Angeles depends on the success today of the students in the city’s public schools and who support EE.
Measure EE includes strict accountability requirements, meaning an independent financial audit to assure that every dollar goes to the schools for the intended purposes of reducing class size and providing needed services, such as nurses, counselors, and librarians.
Measure EE needs a two-thirds majority to pass, and that’s a high bar, but other cities in California have met it. Beutner listed them: Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Monica, and Torrance.
The people of Los Angeles cheered the teachers when they struck and marched in the rain. They honked their horns and gave them thumbs-up because they were doing what was best for their students.
Now comes the voters’ turn.
Will they too stand up for the children who are the future of Los Angeles?
Will they agree that every school should have a working library, a school nurse, a psychologist, and reasonable class sizes?
Will they agree that all children deserve equality of educational opportunity?
Tuesday June 4 will be a decisive day for the children of Los Angeles.
They are OUR children.
If you live in Los Angeles, please vote and urge your friends, family, and neighbors to vote.
Vote as if your future depends upon it.
It does.
Former Vice President Joe Biden released his education plan yesterday.
He pledges a dramatic increase in federal funding for education.
The plan is notable for what it does not say.
It does not say anything about the failed strategies of Race to the Top.
It does not say anything about charter schools, which was a major focus for the Obama-Duncan program. Will he repeal the failed federal Charter Schools Program or will he give his approval to continue funding corporate charter chains like KIPP, IDEA, and Success Academy?
It does not say anything about testing, nor does it say anything about revising the federal “Every Student Succeeds Act,” which mandates annual testing. Will Biden support the continuation of the ESSA law?
It does not say anything about evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, which was a favorite Duncan policy. States bidding for Race to the Top billions changed their laws to adopt this punitive and wrong-headed policy. Will he oppose this practice or let it slide?
It makes no reference to the Common Core, which had the enthusiastic support of the Obama administration, which was legally prohibited from funding it, but which supplied $360 million to create two Common Core testing programs, PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Is Biden for or against it.
In sum, I like everything he said. But I wonder about what he didn’t say. He ducked all the tough issues, most of which are the legacy of the Bush-Obama era, of which he was a part.
Biden clearly prefers to duck the contentious issues. I hope that they will be posed to him in town halls.
We need to know where he stands on all the issues that matter to students, parents, teachers, and schools.
