Archives for category: Funding
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Arkansas: Walton-Funded School Board Refuses to Buy New Science Textbooks

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2018 //
21

The Walton family, which controls most of Arkansas, invested in the purchase of the Pulaski County School Board. At a recent meeting, the board voted 3-2 NOT to purchase new science textbooks to replace obsolete ones. The majority said the district could not afford the $1 million cost, even if stretched out over three years.

The School Board for the Pulaski County Special School District voted 4-2 Tuesday against the immediate purchase of new science textbooks to replace books that are more than a decade old and do not match the state’s new science standards or the district’s science curriculum.

A committee of district teachers, school administrators and others had recommended earlier this year that the district purchase new science books for kindergarten-through-12th grades.

Jennifer Beasley, science program administrator for the district, returned to the board Tuesday with that recommendation but at a newly discounted cost of slightly more than $1 million, and with an alternative option that would spread the purchase of the new science books over three years.

In the first year of the three-year plan, classroom sets of textbooks and digital subscriptions to those books would be purchased for high schools at a maximum cost of $409,544.

Textbooks for middle schools would then be purchased for the 2019-20 school year and for the elementary schools in the following year.

“The committee’s rationale for allowing the high schools to be first to adopt books was that all of our high schools have a D on the state report card,” Beasley told the board, “and committee members agreed it is important for students and teachers to have resources aligned to the new standards.”

The high schools will be teaching to the new state science standards for the first time in this coming school year. The elementary schools incorporated the new standards in the previous two years, Beasley said, and the elementary teachers feel they are better prepared to continue with the instructional materials and lessons they’ve developed. Additionally, the elementary schools typically earned A’s and B’s on the state report card.

The Walton members should have asked their patrons to help out.

Categories Arkansas, Curriculum, Funding, Science, Walton Foundation

CTA to Friends of Public Schools: Support AB 276!

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2018 //
6

The California Teachers Association calls on all friends of public schools to support AB 276, which sets standards for accountability and transparency for charter schools across the state.

Charter Legislation to Stop Waste, Fraud and Abuse Up for Critical Vote

Please take a minute to contact your Senator %%Senator Full Name%% at %%Senator Phone%% and urge %%Her or Him%% to SUPPORT AB 276 by Assembly Member Jose Medina.

As responsible educators and Californians, we need to hold ALL public entities accountable for their use of taxpayer dollars, particularly when it comes to our schools.

The ongoing proliferation of charter schools is hurting students in our neighborhood public schools because of the lack of transparency and accountability, and the disparity in requirements under which charter schools operate.

The Senate Education Committee is set to vote on AB 276, which requires charter school governing boards to comply with laws promoting transparency and accountability to parents and the public in the operation of public schools and the expenditure of public funds; holding charter schools to the same requirements as traditional public schools. However, ALL senators need to hear from you since AB 276 might be up for a floor vote.

It just takes 60 seconds to contact your Senator! Those taking funds away from our neighborhood schools are also contacting lawmakers to pressure them to keep things the way they are, so it is imperative we reach out to our senators now and urge them to STOP this waste, fraud and abuse!

Contact Senator %%Senator Full Name%% at %%Senator Phone%% and urge %%Her or Him%% to SUPPORT AB 276 by Assembly Member Jose Medina.

Recent headlines are mind-boggling!
More than $149 million of waste, fraud and abuse of tax dollars has been documented in California’s charter school environment, hurting our students and communities.

Having private and secret meetings to discuss how tax dollars will be spent is not acceptable.
Too much is at risk when our students are counting on sound financial decisions that will ensure they get the quality public education they need and deserve.

The only ones benefiting from our public schools should be the students, and ultimately our community.
AB 276 prohibits charter school board members and their immediate families from financially benefiting from their schools. Public schools’ conflict of interest laws and disclosure regulations should also apply to charter schools that receive public funds.

Streamlined regulations for charter schools were never intended to grant operators total authority over taxpayer dollars without any accountability.

Show us the money!
We must require companies and organizations that manage charter schools to release to parents and the public how they spend taxpayer money, including their annual budgets and contracts. The public’s business should be transacted in public. Public agencies must take their actions openly and their deliberations must be conducted openly.

We deserve to know how our schools are being run, and our state deserves an education system that is free from unfair advantages and double standards. Companies and organizations that manage charter schools must open board meetings to parents and the public, similarly to public school board meetings.

Read more about AB 276:
Fact Sheet | Letter | Details

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Funding, Privatization, Supporting public schools

Cynthia Nixon Proposes Ambitious Plan to Fund Public Schools: “Schools, Not Jails”

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2018 //
14

Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon released her education plan, which would add funding to reduce class sizes and fully fund schools. Her slogan: “Schools, Not Jails.”

Cuomo spokespeople blasted her for being a front for “parent advocacy groups,”as if that were a bad thing. It’s not.

Cuomo’s education policies are controlled by hedge fund managers, billionaires, and Wall Street advocacy groups. That is a very bad thing.

Categories Billionaires, Cuomo, Andrew, Democrats for Education Reform, Funding, New York

Andrea Gabor: An Education Reform That Worked–and That Needs to Be Revived

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
65

Andrea Gabor writes in the Boston Globe about the remarkable success of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which involved a bipartisan agreement: more funding, equalization of funding, in exchange for standards and assessments. Gabor’s new book, After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, is officially published today. It is a smart book that deeply understands the futility of the corporate reform movement, which substitutes competition for collaboration and guarantees repeated failures.

She writes:

Twenty-five years after Massachusetts passed a historic education reform law that helped make it the gold-standard for American schooling, the Bay State reforms are coming under scrutiny again — and for good reason.

What happened in Massachusetts is actually a tale of two reforms. The first, signed into law on June 18, 1993, was a bipartisan achievement hammered out by a Republican governor and Democratic state legislators, and informed by a vigorous local debate among educators, parents, and business people who agreed on a “grand bargain”: substantially more state spending for schools in exchange for higher standards and increased accountability.

The law worked initially as intended. It infused over $1 billion in extra education funding — mostly to poor communities. Massachusetts achieved top scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. By 2000, the gap between NAEP scores of black and white students had actually narrowed.

But tax cuts, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the mandates of Race to the Top eroded the state’s gains:

A new 2010 education law only made matters worse. While providing a one-time $250 million cash infusion from the Federal government, the law failed to make up for school-funding inequities, yet imposed dire consequences on schools, districts, and teachers who failed to make test-score gains. It also gutted the much-lauded curriculum standards.

It is time to revisit how the original 1993 legislation worked — and why it remains a model worth building on. The law was a response to a decade of property tax cuts that hit poor communities hardest. A successful class-action lawsuit, led by Brockton students, and decided just days before the Education Reform Act was passed, sought to remedy that inequality, arguing that Massachusetts was not meeting its constitutional obligation to “cherish” education for all students — language written into the state constitution by John Adams.

Support for the plan in 1993 was not only bipartisan but had the support of the business leaders.

They were willing to pay more for better schools, and they wanted strong foundation aid for the poorest schools. In a time of charter-mania, charters were capped at only 25 for the entire state.

Erosion of that support in recent years hit Brockton High School, where the rebellion began, extra hard. What was once a miracle story–the failing school that became one of the best in the state–was upended as funding became unequal again.

In recent years, Brockton has struggled to navigate new state and federal mandates, including new teacher evaluations and a common core-aligned MCAS. In 2016, Governor Charlie Baker and his top education officials imposed a charter school on the community against overwhelming local opposition. During the last school year, Brockton ran a $16 million deficit; the town is now exploring a new funding lawsuit.

It is time to restore equitable funding for schools — the aim of an education-funding bill that just passed the state Senate — and to fully realize the vision of the 1993 reforms. This encompassed not just a rich curriculum, but also a robust role for local school-based decision-making and a wide array of accountability measures, and, as the MBAE pointed out in 1993, “not simply results of standardized tests.” All these measures are needed to return schools like Brockton High to their former levels of fiscal and educational sustainability.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Equity, Funding, Massachusetts

Michigan: The Effects of Charters on a State That Once Had Fine Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2018 //
21

It is no secret that the DeVos family controls state education policy in Michigan. As Betsy DeVos has acknowledged, when they make campaign contributions, they expect to see the changes they want.

Since DeVos took control, education in Michigan has been in decline. The state has hundreds of charter schools. Accountability is minimal. DeVos likes it that way. Michigan is the only state where 80% of charters operate for profit. That means less money for instruction because investors come first in a for-profit business.

Last year, the New York Times Magazine ran a very good article about the charter mess in Michigan. It points out that 70% of the charters are in the bottom half of state performance. So much for “saving poor kids from failing schools,” more like privatizing schools for profit without regard to the kids.

“The results have been stark. The 2016 report by the Education Trust-Midwest noted:

Michigan’s K-12 system is among the weakest in the country and getting worse. In little more than a decade, Michigan has gone from being a fairly average state in elementary reading and math achievement to the bottom 10 states. It’s a devastating fall. Indeed, new national assessment data suggest Michigan is witnessing systemic decline across the K-12 spectrum. White, black, brown, higher-income, low-income — it doesn’t matter who they are or where they live.

You will not be surprised to learn that Michigan is systematically underinvesting in its school. Choice is a replacement for adequate funding.

You will also not be surprised to learn that Michigan has a major teacher shortage.

New teachers don’t want to teach in Michigan.

This is why Betsy DeVos, when asked about her home state of Michigan, changes the subject to Florida.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Michigan, Privatization, Teacher Shortage, Teachers

Gerald Coles: Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains to Work Better

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2018 //
71

Education psychologist Gerald Coles reports that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg plan to fund neurological research to find out why poor children’s brains aren’t working well enough to produce higher test scores.

Coles writes:

“Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better.

“Proposing to fund research on the issue, the billionaires reason that not only can executive malfunctioning cause substantial classroom learning problems and school failure, it also can adversely affect socio-economic status, physical health, drug problems, and criminal convictions in adulthood. Consequently, if teachers of poor students know how to improve executive function, their students will do well academically and reap future “real-world benefits.” For Gates, who is always looking for “the next big thing,” this can be it in education.

“Most people looking at this reasoning would likely think, “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?” Not so for the billionaires. For them, the “adverse life situations” of poor students are the can’t-be-changed-givens. Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”

“Cash–rather, the lack of it–that’s the issue: “You can’t fund reforms without money and there is no more money,” he insists. Of course, nowhere in Gates’ rebuke of excessive school spending does he mention corporate tax dodging of state income taxes, which robs schools of billions of dollars. Microsoft, for example, in which Gates continues to play a prominent role as “founder and technology advisor” on the company’s Board of Directors would provide almost $29.6 billion in taxes that could fund schools were its billions stashed offshore repatriated.

“In a detailed example of Microsoft’s calculated tax scheming and dodging that would provide material for a good classroom geography lesson, Seattle Times reporter, Matt Day, outlined one of the transcontinental routes taken by a dollar spent for a Microsoft product in Seattle. Immediately after the purchase, the dollar takes a short trip to Microsoft’s company headquarters in nearby Redmond, Washington, after which it moves to a Microsoft sales subsidiary in Nevada. Following a brief rest, the dollar breathlessly zigzags from one offshore tax haven to another, finally arriving in sunny Bermuda where it joins $108 billion of Microsoft’s other dollars. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has similarly kept its earnings away from U.S. school budgets.”

Categories Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Poverty

Mississippi: What Happens When a State Refuses to Fund Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
13

Mississippi is usually ranked #49 or 50 or 51 on any measure of poverty or funding for schools. Of course, its students have low scores because standardized tests accurately measure family income.

A state that refuses to fund its schools will have high poverty, a poorly educated citizenry and workforce, and a stagnant economy.

In 2015, educators and parents tried to pass a state referendum to force the Legislature to spend more, but a coalition of very wealthy people from inside and outside the state swamped the voters with propaganda and defeated the referendum. The Koch brothers debated a quarter million dollars (pocket change for them) to ensure that poor black and white children in Mississippi did not get enough funding to offer a decent education.

I recently posted Jeff Bryant’s Report on the pending state takeover of the public schools in Jackson, Mississippi. First, they underfund the schools, then they declare they are failing. And officials who can’t provide a decent education anywhere in the state plan to impose their will on the children of Jackson. You can be sure that their solution is charter schools, not more funding.

A teacher in Jackson wrote this comment after she read Jeff’s article.


Diane, you and I have corresponded several times over the years about the conditions in my school in Jackson. I regret to inform you that the conditions of the physical plant are now beyond words. When I was moved from a classroom with carpet that hadn’t been cleaned in years, a room where I fought respiratory and skin ailments for years, I found my new room infected with black mold. It took a few weeks and a trip to the doctor, but I got that mitigated to the point where I can deal with it.

Then over the Christmas holidays, the city of Jackson suffered a cold snap that destroyed the city water system. Jackson Public Schools had to close for a week due to the water crisis. When we resumed classes, our building’s pipes, I believe had also frozen, leading to a re-occurrence of a sewer line break that has literally rendered the main hall and its classrooms a s—hole. About fifteen years ago, the same situation had occurred when I was also on the main hall. Eventually the district dealt with the situation by going under the building to dig out the contaminated soil and re-plumbing the pipes.

I’ve told everyone who will listen, but the situation only got worse until they finally closed the restroom when the new poop was coming from. Even so, there is always a lingering odor of raw sewage which becomes unbearable after a rain and when the temperature warms up. When I was checking out of my room this week, the stench gagged me, and I swelled up with tears because the whole situation is just so surreal.

The facilities manager was in the building and I told him that I had been trying to decide whose office I needed to visit with a box of poop to put on the desk and ask “How would you like to smell this all day every day?” I told him that it would be his office. He assured me that they will address it this summer.

I also told this story to the principal who related that there is the intent to go back under the building, dig the dirt out again, and once more re-plumb the pipes. If it is effective, then it should hold out long enough to get me through to retirement.

Jackson Public Schools announced this week that they will issue a bond to put money into repairing aging buildings. Our building is one of the oldest in the city, with the distinctions of once having been the only high school in the state for African Americans. We’ll see if our building’s problems will be adequately addressed.

It is absolutely true that the power brokers in this state don’t want to pay for African American children to be educated. When Jackson Public Schools mainly educated the children of the power brokers, the schools were just fine. Now that those children are educated in the private and suburban schools, we see those schools excelling. Meanwhile, the students left in tax-poor JPS are languishing in second-world conditions.

My experience leads me to advocate for a new school funding mechanism that does not put schools at the mercy or benefit of their local tax base. Our country is clearly OK with relegating a third of our children to poverty and its consequences or we would have already done something about it.

(Thank you for letting me rant.)

Lorraine

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Koch Brothers, Mississippi, Poverty, Privatization, Racism

Oklahoma: What It is Like to Teach in an Underfunded School

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2018 //
11

Melissa Smith is a teacher at US Grant High School in Oklahoma City and a member of the AFT. She writes here about the effect of dramatic budget cuts on her school.

Unless you are in a school every day, you might not see the results of underfunding education. That is because we open our doors no matter what, and my colleagues and I will do everything we can to make sure our students get the education they deserve. But just because the consequences are invisible doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. Isn’t that the definition of privilege? Thinking something isn’t a problem simply because it might not be a problem for you?

You have probably heard about the recent teacher walkout in Oklahoma. While some of that was about teacher salaries, it was more about the conditions in our schools – conditions that resulted from years of underfunding education.

The Oklahoma City public schools district is the largest in the state, serving about 46,000 students. Because of relentless decreases in funding from the Oklahoma legislature, our district has had to cut almost $40m in the past two years. This has resulted in our fine arts budgets being slashed by 50%, our library media budgets being completely eliminated and district officials being forced to end the school year days early.

Our school system also has 58 classrooms that are “split-level”. This means a teacher is required to teach two different curricula to two different grade levels at the same time in the same classroom. And our teachers do this without the help of a teaching assistant…

Our classes are extremely overcrowded, with 30 and 40 students per class. Some of us don’t even have enough desks for our students to sit in. Coach Aaron McVay, one of our PE teachers, has had classes of more than 80 students. How much learning happens in a class of 80?

Some teachers don’t even have classrooms. They keep their belongings, textbooks and supplies on carts and push them from classroom to classroom, hour to hour. I have been a traveling teacher. Like some of our fellow union members who are adjunct college professors and hold “office hours” in their cars and nurses who travel from school to school, fingers crossed, hoping no one at a school across town will suffer a health crisis, it is almost impossible to be an effective educator while carting your work around…

The cut that hurt most was losing our two maintenance workers, Gerald and Joe, whose positions were eliminated when our district was forced to cut the first $30m in 2017. Gerald and Joe kept our building running. Without them, nothing seems to work. Last August, we had days without air conditioning. It was common for my classroom to reach 90 degrees by 9am. In fact, Cristina Moershel taught her class outside because it was cooler there than in her classroom. Outside. In August. In Oklahoma. She used a dry erase marker on the window to teach calculus while her students sat on the ground.

Our current history textbook is so old that the Oklahoma City bombing only gets a couple of pages in the epilogue
Now, think about how much these problems would be exacerbated if some of this year’s proposed cuts to federal funding were to go through.

Cuts would make it impossible to retain qualified teachers instead of losing them at the rate of almost 400 per month. If there are cuts to federal programs for low-income students or students with disabilities, what else will my school have to sacrifice to provide the services they need? How will these cuts help students graduate and take on the world?

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Oklahoma

Jan Resseger: The Single Best Article About the Oklahoma Teachers’ Strike

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2018 //
9

I had planned to write a post about the excellent article in the New Yorker about the Oklahoma teachers’ strike, but discovered this morning that Jan Resseger, one of my favorite bloggers, beat me to the punch. The article by Rivera Galchen clearly connects the red state anti-tax policies and the underfunding of schools.

She writes:


Watching teachers walk out this spring has startled America in these discouraging times, but nowhere was it as moving as in Oklahoma. The teachers walked out, and, grateful that teachers had figured out a way to expose desperate conditions in the schools, school superintendents and school boards—the management—shut down school for two weeks and walked with their teachers in gratitude. At the statehouse itself the protestors walked into a brick wall. More than just demonstrating what is missing from their classrooms, they showed what decent concern for our children would require of us as citizens and what—across too many of our states—one-party, anti-tax state legislators and governors are quite satisfied to deny.

Rivka Galchen profiles the Oklahoma walkout in this week’s New Yorker magazine. Galchen, who accompanied and learned to know many teachers, reflects on her own experience of the strike and on the lives of teachers she came to know.

Even before the strike when they worried about a possible walkout, members of the legislature proposed a modest raise. But teachers, desperate about the conditions for children in their schools, refused to cancel the walkout. Galchen writes: “Teachers in Oklahoma are paid less than those in West Virginia, which spends forty percent more per pupil than Oklahoma does… In response to the threat of a walkout, the Republican-dominated Oklahoma legislature offered teachers a pay raise of around six thousand dollars a year. It funded the raise with an assortment of tax bills, most of which disproportionately affect the poor—a cigarette tax, a diesel tax, an Amazon sales tax, an expansion of ball and dice gambling, and a five-dollar-per-room hotel-motel tax. The Republicans touted the move as historic, and it was: the legislature hadn’t passed a tax increase since 1990.”

Galchen carefully defines the constraints placed on the state by years of anti-tax governments: “Oklahoma has essentially been under single-party rule for about a decade. The state legislature is eighty percent Republican, and in the most recent midterm elections the Democrats didn’t field a candidate in nearly half the races. Governor Fallin is in her eighth year, and during her tenure nearly all state agencies have seen cuts of between ten and thirty percent, even as the population that those agencies serve has increased. A capital-gains tax break was configured in such a way that two-thirds of the benefit went to the eight hundred wealthiest families in the state. An income-tax reduction similarly benefited primarily the wealthy. The tax on fracked oil was slashed, and when it was nudged back up—it remains the lowest in the nation—the energy billionaire and political kingmaker Harold Hamm, whose estimated net worth is quadruple the budget that the legislature allocates to the state, stood in the gallery of the capitol, letting the lawmakers know that he was watching. Reversing tax cuts is never easy, but it’s almost impossible in Oklahoma. In 1992, a law was passed requiring that any bill to raise taxes receive the assent of the governor and three-quarters of the legislature.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Oklahoma

North Carolina: General Assembly Passes Budget to Hurt Public Schools and Enrich Charters

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2018 //
6

Remember that thousands of teachers from across North Carolina took a personal day to assemble at the State Capitol on May 16 to protest the underfunding of public education?

Maybe you forgot, but you are not alone if you did. The North Carolina General Assembly passed a budget without hearings that is a dagger in the heart of public schools.

It contains plenty of goodies for charter schools and cybercharters.

But it expresses contempt for public schools and their teachers. The extremists now in charge of the General Assembly won’t be content until they have privatized every school in the state.

NBCT teacher Stuart Egan explains the budget here.

Categories Funding, North Carolina
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »