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St. Louis: An Important Democratic Primary Tomorrow: Vote for Congressman Clay

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2016 //
2

Tomorrow, the people of Missouri will go to the polls in the primary. One important election will take place in St. Louis, where a forceful advocate for privatization is trying to unseat Congressman Lacy Clay.

Pay attention to this race. Read below to learn about his opponent, who has never lost a chance to harm public schools.


St. Louis Schools Watch

Watching the Primary Election

By Susan Turk

July 30, 2016—St. Louis– As you know, there is a well-orchestrated national effort to undermine traditional public schools, school districts and the teaching profession using state legislatures. Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (D-University City)is a participant. She describes herself as supporting quality school choice, which is coded speech meaning charter schools and vouchers. She has filed and/or supported legislation for several years now that would harm public education.

During the 2016 session of the legislature Chappelle-Nadal filed SB 764, a bill that would have expanded charter school operation to every provisionally accredited district in the state and in every district in St. Louis and Jackson (Kansas City) counties even fully accredited districts. It also would have expanded the operation of virtual schools. Students in an unaccredited school in any district, even an accredited district could attend virtual schools and students in every district in Jackson County, St. Louis County and St. Louis City could also attend virtual schools whether or not their district was accredited. It allowed students in unaccredited districts and also unaccredited schools in accredited districts to cross district boundaries to attend charter and virtual schools. There is little monitoring of virtual schools. The quality of education they provide is frequently sub par. They offer a choice that can be harmful to children.

The charters could cherry pick the districts in which they would open and require the tuition the state allows that district to charge to out of district students, financially damaging the home district. There are county districts where tuition and revenue per student varies by as much $12,000 per student. Charter school operators do not want to open in Normandy. They know there isn’t enough of a market there to enable a charter school to be financially viable. But if they could open in Clayton or Ladue and import students from other districts, that would be another matter.

The bill also would have required provisionally and unaccredited districts to hold a fire sale of all vacant school buildings in September of 2016 and to auction any that did not sell during that month. That would have stripped districts of their fiduciary responsibility and their ability to sell real estate at the highest prices, maximizing revenue for their students. It also would have stripped districts of capacity to deal with a potential future enrollment increase or need to repurpose buildings due to a fire or other catastrophe. Fortunately, the bill did not get a hearing nor were its provisions amended to other bills. Governor Nixon vetoed bills sponsored by Chappelle-Nadal dealing with inter-district transfer issues 2 years in a row, so the Republican leadership of the legislature has decided to stop sending him legislation on this topic.

In the past Chappelle-Nadal has filed or supported bills that made it easier for students in unaccredited districts to transfer out. The majority of students, approximately three quarters of the students in Normandy and Riverview Gardens, chose to remain in their districts. Those who chose to remain have been robbed of resources by the tuition required from receiving districts which in many cases is higher than the revenue per student received for them. Chappelle-Nadal was fine with that, penalizing the majority of students who chose to remain. The DESE tried to moderate the damaging effects of the transfer law. Chappelle-Nadal, working with Rex Singuefield’s Children’s Education Alliance, encouraged parents to sue school districts if they followed DESE recommendations and barred children from enrolling because of overcrowding. Chappelle-Nadal does not appear to have any concern for those students who have chosen to remain in Riverview and Normandy. She has not advocated for increased resources for them. She appears to think that everyone should leave, not respecting those who choose to remain.

This year she was the only Democrat to vote with Republicans to override the governor’s veto of SB 586. The bill lowered the adequacy target for the foundation formula, the amount of funding required to provide for basic educational needs in our public schools, from $6.700 to $6,100 per student. They did not need her vote for the override. The bill originally passed the senate with all democrats voting for it. There was a carrot in the bill that would fund pre-k for the first time if the legislature ever fully funded the formula, but that was just put there to give legislators cover for voting for it. The other Democrats voted to sustain the governor’s veto, but Chappelle-Nadal has a strict policy of never reversing the way she votes, so she voted with the Republicans to override the veto.

Lowering the adequacy target harms every public school student in the state. The legislature lowered the target because they never fully funded the foundation formula and were tired of having their underfunding of public education pointed out each year. But because of the income tax cut they passed last year it is unlikely they will ever be able to even meet the lowered target. The Republican dominated legislature has shown no interest in improving public education and certainly not in adequately and equitably funding public education.

Chappelle-Nadal has 2 years left in her state senate term but she is challenging 1st district Congressman Lacy Clay in the August 2nd democratic primary. St. Louis Public Schools AFT Local 420 has endorsed Congressman Clay for re-election by the way. The 1st district encompasses the city of St. Louis and most of north St. Louis County.

Oh and last week the 2016 NAACP delegates at the national convention in Cincinnati approved a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Missouri, Privatization, St. Louis

A Christmas Message for Reformers: A School That Really Works!

By dianeravitch
December 25, 2015 //
24

A Christmas message to reformers: Fund what works. Hello, Bill Gates. Hello, Eli Broad. Hello, Walton Family. Hello, John Arnold. Hello, John Paulson. Hello, hedge fund managers. Fund what works.

 

I read this story by Emma Brown in the Washington Post a few days ago. It is such a beautiful story that I decided it should be posted on Christmas Day.

 

Brown reports on the remarkable success of Superintendent Tiffany Anderson in Jennings, Missouri, a town that borders Ferguson and that like Ferguson, is mainly African American and poor. The district has only 3,000 students. What it provides is an exemplar of wrap-around services. Anderson even helps the graduates of her high school find jobs.

 

School districts don’t usually operate homeless shelters for their students. Nor do they often run food banks or have a system in place to provide whatever clothes kids need. Few offer regular access to pediatricians and mental health counselors, or make washers and dryers available to families desperate to get clean.

 

But the Jennings School District — serving about 3,000 students in a low-income, predominantly African American jurisdiction just north of St. Louis — does all of these things and more. When Superintendent Tiffany Anderson arrived here 3 1/2 years ago, she was determined to clear the barriers that so often keep poor kids from learning. And her approach has helped fuel a dramatic turnaround in Jennings, which has long been among the lowest-performing school districts in Missouri.

 

“Schools can do so much to really impact poverty,” Anderson said. “Some people think if you do all this other stuff, it takes away from focusing on instruction, when really it ensures that you can take kids further academically.”

 

Public education has long felt like a small and fruitless weapon against this town’s generational poverty. But that’s starting to change. Academic achievement, attendance and high school graduation rates have improved since Anderson’s arrival, and, this month, state officials announced that as a result of the improvements, Jennings had reached full accreditation for the first time in more than a decade.

 

Gwen McDile, a homeless 17-year-old in Jennings, missed so much school this fall — nearly one day in three — that it seemed she would be unlikely to graduate in June. But then she was invited to move into Hope House, a shelter the school system recently opened to give students like her a stable place to live.
She arrived a few days after Thanksgiving. The 3,000-square-foot house had a private bedroom for Gwen, who loves writing and poetry; a living room with a plush sofa she could sink into; and — perhaps most importantly — a full pantry.

 

She’s no longer hungry. She has been making it to class. She believes she will graduate on time.

 

“I’ve eaten more in the last two weeks than I’ve eaten in the last two years,” Gwen said on a recent afternoon, after arriving home from school and digging into a piece of caramel chocolate. “I’m truly blessed to be in the situation I’m in right now.”

 

There also is a new academic intensity in Jennings: Anderson has launched Saturday school, a college-prep program that offers an accelerated curriculum beginning in sixth grade, and a commitment to paying for college courses so students can earn an associate’s degree before they leave high school.

 

Anderson restored music, dance and drama programs that had been cut, as they so often are in high-poverty schools, finding the money for those and other innovations by closing two half-empty schools, cutting expensive administrative positions and welcoming new grants and a tide of philanthropic contributions. The district was running a deficit of $2 million before Anderson arrived and balanced the budget….

Anderson, 43, has brought rapid change in a manner that is nearly the opposite of the slash-and-burn fierceness of reformers such as Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor who once fired a principal on television. Anderson instead uses a relentless positivity and sense of shared mission.

 

“Hello, Beautiful,” Anderson says, walking school corridors. “You’re awesome,” she says dozens of times each day.

 

“I appreciate you,” she says to the teacher working with a small group of students who are struggling in math, to the second-grader excitedly showing off his research project on dinosaurs, to the teenager who sang a solo in the holiday concert the night before….

 

Philanthropists are giving to Jennings, excited by the story that is unfolding here. The nonprofit foundation that Anderson set up to accept private donations has more than $80,000 in the bank to pay for the shelter, which can house up to 10 homeless and foster children, and for other efforts.

 

The shelter emerged from a 90-year-old dilapidated house with no roof. Anderson charged her senior administrative staff members with overseeing the renovations, and she said she gave them 30 days for work to be completed. Concept to reality in one month.

 

And they did it.

 

“We need to have the urgency for other people’s children that we have for our children, so we move at warp speed,” Anderson said. [Emphasis added.]

 

Reformers, please remember that one line:

 

“We need to have the urgency for other people’s children that we have for our children.” We must be sure that they are well-fed, loved, cared for, treated with kindness, regularly checked by a doctor, and given the security of knowing that they have a future. 

 

That is my Christmas message to reformers: Treat all children as if they were your own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Missouri, Real Education

Missouri: State Takeover of Normandy District Cheats Students

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2015 //
11

When the state of Misaouri took control of the struggling, segregated school district of Normandy, it allowed students to escape to other districts and promised to transform what was left of the Normandy district. The takeover has been a flop.

 

 

Cameron Hensley is an honors student at Normandy High School with plans for college. But this year his school quit offering honors courses. His physics teacher hasn’t planned a lesson since January. His AP English class is taught by an instructor not certified to teach it.

 

The first-period English class is held in a science lab because the room across the hall smells like mildew and lacks adequate air conditioning. Stools sit upside down on the lab tables.

 

On a recent day, Hensley looked at an assigned worksheet. He wrote “positive” or “negative” beside 15 statements, depending on their connotation. “This is pretty easy,” he mumbled.

 

When Missouri education officials took over the troubled Normandy School District last summer, they vowed to help its 3,600 students become more college- and career-ready. About a quarter of the enrollment had already left for better schools under the controversial Missouri school transfer law, extracting millions of dollars from Normandy in the form of tuition payments to more affluent districts.

 

Even so, state education officials promised a new dawn in the district, with new leaders, better faculty and an unprecedented degree of attention from their department in Jefferson City.

 

But Hensley’s experience suggests things have gotten worse for many students who remain in Normandy schools.

 

Hensley, 18, began his senior year to find his favorite teachers gone. Electives such as business classes and personal finance were no longer offered.

 

He has written no papers or essays since fall, he said, aside from scholarship applications. He started reading a novel that the class never finished. Partly because of a lack of electives, he ended up taking fashion design first semester. He has no books to take home. He’s rarely assigned homework.

 

His one challenging class is precalculus.

 

“Last school year I was learning, progressing,” Hensley said. “This school year, I can honestly say I haven’t learned much of anything.”

Categories Missouri, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Missouri Judge Blocks Payment to Common Core Connsortium

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2015 //
9

A judge in Missiuri blocked state payment to the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, agreeing with critics that SBAC is ““an unlawful interstate compact to which the U.S. Congress has never consented,”

Categories Common Core, Missouri, Testing

How Imagine Charter Schools Make $$$

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2015 //
19

Imagine Schools is one of the nation’s largest for-profit charter chains. Its schools were closed down in St. Louis and in Georgia for poor performance, but the corporation is undeterred.

Problems continue, however, as Imagine’s business model doesn’t always pass muster.

Here is the latest, written in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette about Imagine’s legal troubles in Missouri:

“U.S. District Judge Nanette K. Laughrey ruled in December that Imagine Schools Inc. profited from a “double-dealing” lease scheme and that it must pay the local board of the now-closed Kansas City school nearly $1 million.

“The national charter school chain used its own finance company, Schoolhouse Finance, to sell Imagine Renaissance’s two campuses to obtain lower lease rates, according to the suit. While it benefited from the lower rate, it continued to collect taxpayer dollars through the local charter board at the higher rate.

“There is not evidence that Imagine Schools ever told any Renaissance board member how Imagine Schools would benefit from the leases,” the judge wrote.

“The Kansas City Star reported that Imagine Inc. did not appeal the ruling, as the company and the local charter board have reached a confidential settlement.

“The judge’s findings are remarkable for their parallels with the charter operator’s Fort Wayne experience. The company opened the city’s third charter school, Imagine MASTer Academy, at the former YWCA campus on North Wells Street in 2006. Oversight was supposedly provided by the Imagine-Fort Wayne Charter School Inc., a local board once headed by businessman Don Willis, but the board came under fire from its authorizer, Ball State University, for lax oversight.

“Imagine’s local real estate dealings were complex from the start. The YWCA campus was purchased in 2006 by North Wells Schoolhouse LLC, an Indiana company with the same Arlington, Va., mailing address as the for-profit Imagine Schools Inc. The sale price was $2.9 million. The local Imagine school board then subleased a portion of the campus from Schoolhouse Finance, Imagine Inc.’s real estate subsidiary. Schoolhouse, in turn, sold the property to JERIT CS Fund, a wholly owned subsidiary of Entertainment Properties Trust, a Kansas City-based real estate investment trust. The same company owned the Kansas City school at the heart of the lawsuit.

“The REIT, in fact, still lists the North Wells campus among its charter school real estate holdings, although Imagine MASTer Academy – threatened with closing by Ball State – relinquished its charter and reopened as Horizon Christian Academy. Three Fort Wayne Horizon schools collected nearly $2 million in tax-funded vouchers from Indiana last year. An Imagine spokesman said at the time of the switch that Horizon would pay Imagine for operation and facility support under terms of a private agreement. About $3.6 million in state loans made to Imagine were forgiven.”

Funny. Usually you need educators to figure out what went wrong. In the case of for-profit charter chains, you need an accountant and several lawyers.

The editorialist in Fort Wayne noted that this is a cautionary tale that was not told during National School Choice Week.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Indiana, Missouri

Missouri Wants Out of Common Core Testing

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2014 //
12

States continue to distance themselves from either the Common Core or the federally-funded Common Core tests. The following was reported by politico.com:

“DIVORCING ‘SMARTER BALANCED’: Anti-Common Core activists in Missouri activists opposed to the Common Core are revving up their legal fight to pull the state out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Last month, they won a temporary restraining order barring the state from paying membership fees to SBAC. But that order has expired, so they’ve filed motions asking for another such order – or, better yet, for a summary judgment declaring the state’s affiliation with SBAC an illegal interstate compact. The activists know they can’t stop Missouri from administering SBAC this coming spring; state law requires it. But state committees made up of teachers, parents and administrators are writing new standards to replace the Common Core. In future years, the state will be free to pick a new test aligned with those standards. The lawsuit aims to ensure the state can start that process with a fresh slate rather than be tied to SBAC. In the meantime, the activists want to be sure that Missouri is free to set its own cut scores and control test administration without interference from the consortium. “We want local control, which means that we control the test,” plaintiff Anne Gassel told Morning Education.

– Missouri owes Smarter Balanced $4.2 million for the complete package of formative, interim and summative assessments for this school year. The state has already paid a portion of that fee and Sarah Potter, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said it will have to find a way to pay the remainder no matter what happens in court, since the law requires that the SBAC test be used this school year. A renewed restraining order “could impact our membership in the consortium, but we don’t think it will affect our actually buying and administering the test,” Potter said. In the event that the Show Me State’s payments are affected, the consortium is developing a policy for dealing with deadbeat states. Among the issues being discussed: Whether to block states from using the assessments if they fail to pay their bills, Potter said.

– “We are committed to working with the state of Missouri to provide the best tools and assessments to teachers and students,” Smarter Balanced spokeswoman Jacqueline King told Morning Education. “Beyond that, I cannot comment.”

Categories Common Core, Missouri, Testing

Bright Spots in Last Night’s Election

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2014 //
38

At the end of the elections yesterday, there were two very bright spots.

 

First, Tom Torlakson was elected state superintendent of education in California with 52% of the vote, despite the accumulation of millions of dollars for his opponent from people like Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, the Walton family, and other billionaires. It was teachers that re-elected Tom.

 

Second, the proposal to enshrine value-added assessment of teachers into the state constitution in Missouri failed, and it wasn’t even close. Amendment 3 would have ended teacher tenure and put teachers on renewable contracts, with everything tied to test scores. It went down by about 75-25%. This vote showed enormous popular support for teachers.

 

There was not a lot to celebrate, but these were big victories.

 

 

Categories California, Missouri

Missouri: Very Rich Extremist Puts VAM on State Ballot

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2014 //
83

This is the worst constitutional amendment to appear on any state ballot in 2014.

missouriballotissue

It ties teacher evaluation to student test scores. It bans collective bargaining about teacher evaluation. It requires teachers to be dismissed, retained, promoted, demoted, and paid based primarily on the test scores of their students. It requires teachers to enter into contracts of three years or less, thus eliminating seniority and tenure.

This is VAM with a vengeance.

This ballot resolution is the work of the far-right Show-Me Institute, funded by the multi-millionaire Rex Sinquefeld.

He is a major contributor to politics in Missouri and to ALEC.

The Center for Media and Democracy writes about him:

“Sinquefield is doing to Missouri what the Koch Brothers are doing to the entire country. For the Koch Brothers and Sinquefield, a lot of the action these days is not at the national but at the state level.

“By examining what Sinquefield is up to in Missouri, you get a sobering glimpse of how the wealthiest conservatives are conducting a low-profile campaign to destroy civil society.

“Sinquefield told The Wall Street Journal in 2012 that his two main interests are “rolling back taxes” and “rescuing education from teachers’ unions.”

“His anti-tax, anti-labor, and anti-public education views are common fare on the right. But what sets Sinquefield apart is the systematic way he has used his millions to try to push his private agenda down the throats of the citizens of Missouri.”

Categories Missouri, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Teachers, Unions

Good News: Anti-Due Process Group in Missouri Drops Its Campaign This Year

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2014 //
15

Good news for teachers in Missouri.

The group seeking a constitutional amendment to eliminate teachers’ right to due process (aka “tenure”) has decided to abandon its campaign for now. Called Teach Great, the organization hoped to make test scores the key factor in all decisions about teachers.

“The proposed amendment will still appear on the ballot. It seeks to end tenure and require that decisions around the hiring, promoting, firing and laying off of teachers be determined by at least 51 percent on student performance measures.

“Teach Great took on the task of gathering petition signatures and promoting the ideas that are championed by St. Louis financier Rex Sinquefield.” Sinquefield is a billionaire libertarian.

In an earlier post, I wrote that Sinquefield had put up $750,000 to launch the campaign to eliminate teacher tenure.

I wrote at that time:

“Conservative billionaire Rex Sinquefield does not believe that teaching should be a career. He doesn’t think that teachers should have any job security. He thinks that teachers should have short-term contracts and that their jobs should depend on the test scores of their students. He has contributed $750,000 to launch a campaign for a constitutional amendment in Missouri to achieve his aims.

“The campaign, in a style now associated with those who hope to dismantle the teaching profession, has the duplicitous name “teachgreat.org” to signify the opposite of its intent. The assumption is that the removal of any job security and any kind of due process for teachers will somehow mysteriously produce “great” teachers. This absurd idea is then called “reform.” This is the kind of thinking that typically comes from hedge fund managers, not human service professionals.

“Sinquefield manages billions of dollars and is also the state’s biggest political contributor.

“The “Teachgreat.org” initiative would limit teacher contracts to no more than three years. It also requires “teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted, and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system,” according to the summary on the group’s website.”

See? Never give up hope. Bad ideas come and go, and they go away faster when teachers and parents work together.

Categories Missouri, Teacher Tenure

Julianna Mendelsohn, a Hero Teacher, Raising Money to Feed the Children of Ferguson

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2014 //
1

Ken Previti tells the story on his blog about Julianna Mendelsohn, a teacher.

Julianna wanted to help the children of Ferguson.

““As a public school teacher, my first thought is always about the children involved in any tragic situation like this,” she writes. “When I found out school had been canceled for several days as a result of the civil unrest, I immediately became worried for the students in households with food instability. Many children in the US eat their only meals of the day, breakfast and lunch, at school. With school out, kids are undoubtedly going hungry.”

“Julianna is from Raleigh, North Carolina. She knows that all the children in school are our children. The children in Ferguson are our children with their own needs. Our children need many things, and nutritious food is at the top of the list. Julianna’s efforts have raised over $125,000 to feed our children during this crisis.”

Read the post and send whatever you can to feed the children.

Julianna is a hero of public education who, like so many teachers, truly puts children first. She wants to feed them. Please help her.

Categories Honor Roll, Missouri, Teachers
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