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South Carolina Teacher: Merit Pay Is a Bad Joke

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2013 //
24

Patrick Hayes is a third-grade teacher in Charleston, South Carolina, who is bravely battling those who are destroying public education and the teaching profession in the guise of “reform.”

South Carolina has one of the highest numbers of children living in poverty, which is a reliable predictor of poor academic performance. But reformers don’t talk about poverty. They talk about “bad” teachers, “lazy” teachers, teachers who need to be incentivized with a bonus to do their job.

In this newspaper article, Hayes thoroughly debunks these slanders against the teachers he works with daily.

He writes:

”

“Nobody envies Charleston County School District leaders.

“How would you recruit, retain, and motivate teachers with salaries below those of comparable districts?

“Would you start with an approach that teachers have told you they don’t like?

“Would you gamble on one with an extensive record of failure?

“The district’s plan to replace its current pay structure with merit pay is just such an approach.

“Merit pay appeals to many people. They just aren’t CCSD teachers. In a survey, only 1 percent responded favorably.

“Somehow, a system that teachers distrust is supposed to attract, retain and motivate them.

“CCSD’s plan goes further than just dangling bonuses. By 2015, it would withhold promised salary increases and make teachers hit targets to win them back.

“It would also use unreliable data to threaten their jobs.

“Working in schools for 18 years, I’ve never noticed a motivation problem.

“Most teachers come early and stay late, trundling out to their cars with armloads of work.

“Some get better results than others. All of them care deeply about how things turn out.

“That’s probably why merit pay has failed to raise student achievement each of the many times it’s been tried.”

Teachers won’t profit from merit pay, but Mathematica Policy Research will.

Even though MPR knows how flawed “value-added” rankings are, how they fluctuate from year to year, it is being paid $2.9 million to design a test-based accountability system for the teachers of Charleston.

By the way, as Hayes points out, only three states have a higher child poverty rate than South Carolina.

Forget about that. It is time to give a fat contract to find and fire those bad teachers.

Categories Merit pay, Poverty

Daniel Wydo Disaggregates PISA Scores by Income

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2013 //
86

Daniel Wydo, a teacher in North Carolina, sent this analysis of 2012 PISA:

Here’s what the mainstream media will NOT tell you about 2012 PISA. When comparing U.S. schools with less than 10% of students qualifying for free/reduced lunch, here’s how U.S. students (of which almost 25% are considered poor by OECD standards and of which nationally on average about 50% qualify for free/reduced lunch) rank compared to all other countries including one I chose to purposely compare – Finland (of which about 5% are considered poor by OECD standards):

*Shanghai is disqualified for obvious reasons.

Science literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=556 [1st in the world]

Finland – ranked 4th in the world

Reading literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=559 [1st in the world]

Finland – ranked 5th in the world

Mathematics literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=540 [5th in the world]

FInland – ranked 11th in the world

The NCES also disaggregated the mathematics data further based on seven total proficiency levels (Below Level 1, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, Level 5, and Level 6). The outcomes, as expected, were perfectly aligned with what we would expect in terms of the levels of poverty our students endure. For example, on the mathematics literacy scale, U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced lunch had 94% of students score at a “Level 2” proficiency or above (a “Level 2” proficiency equates to being able to use basic mathematics in the workplace), whereas schools with more than 75% free/reduced lunch had 54% of students score at a “Level 2” proficiency or above, of which 46% of the 54%, scoring at a “Level 2” proficiency or higher, scored at a “Level 2” or “Level 3” proficiency with only 6% scoring at a “Level 4” proficiency, 2% scoring at a “Level 5” proficiency, and so few scoring at a “Level 6” proficiency, the reporting standards were not met. Virtually no students from schools with less than 10% free/reduced lunch ranked at the “Below Level 1” proficiency (reporting standards were not met), and a mere 5% were ranked at “Level 1” proficiency. On the flip side, a whopping 46% of students in schools with more than 75% of free/reduced lunch scored at a “Level 1” proficiency or at “Below Level 1” proficiency (28% and 18% respectively).

The dissagregated data for science and reading, based on the various proficiency levels, followed the example set in mathematics, although maybe not quite to the extent of variability when comparing schools with less than 10% free/reduced lunch to schools with more than 75% free/reduced lunch..

This is not a new phenomenon. For every administration of PISA and TIMSS, when controlling for poverty, U.S. public school students are not only competitive, they downright lead the world. Even at home nationally, when controlling for poverty, public school students compete with private school students in Lutheran, Catholic, and Christian schools when analyzing NAEP data. This is my own synopsis of the Braun (2006) study using large samples of NAEP data and using HLM to compare private school students to public school students:

In 4th grade reading (after adjusting for student characteristics – so an apples to apples comparison can be made based on SES and other student characteristics) it’s a wash – there is no difference in scores between the private schools and the public schools. In 4th grade mathematics, after adjustments, public schools outperformed private schools significantly. In 8th grade Reading, after adjustments, private schools outperformed public schools significantly, with the exception of Conservative Christian schools, which performed similarly to public schools, both of which were outperformed by Catholic and Lutheran students. In 8th grade mathematics, it’s another wash except for a very important caveat. While Catholic schools followed the trend with and without adjustments, Lutheran school and Conservative Christian schools didn’t. Lutheran schools were significantly higher, increasing the average among private schools, while Conservative Christian schools were significantly lower, decreasing the average among private schools.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.asp

One has to wonder why our media continues to barely report the connection between child poverty and their performance at school. The school reformers want nothing to do with it other than to claim there are miracle schools and teachers out there, although upon further analysis these are the schools that usually game the system and do a ‘data dance’ – most namely, charter schools.

The reports continue to be all about our failing or “mediocre” schools and incompetent teachers. I like the simple observation made by researchers in the past – if the argument is to be made that U.S. public schools and teachers are failing, then we have huddled all of our incompetent teachers and principals in our urban and rural schools, for they are the ones that struggle or “fail” – this is evidenced in the PISA data I provided and appears at every turn when outcomes are disaggregated based upon child poverty. Or are our urban and rural schools and teachers “failing” or “struggling” any more than our urban or rural police forces? Response times are higher in urban and rural areas (for different reasons), and crime rates are higher in our urban areas, so does this mean that our urban and rural police officers are failures? Can you imagine police unions if we were to erase officer tenure, step ladder structure for pay increases, LIFO, and bust their unions – and then demonize them because they can’t seem to solve the crime problems of our urban areas? Can anyone say value-added modeling for police officers estimating their effects on crime rates during their beat? The difference between police officers and teachers, specifically in this analogy, is that we are push-overs, ah-hem, I mean caretakers.

Categories International, Poverty, Testing

Bruce Baker on PISA and Poverty and Petrilli

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2013 //
17

Bruce Baker has this habit of introducing facts, evidence, and sharp analysis–as well as humor–to controversial issues.

Here is take on PISA Day (drum roll, please). It begins like this:

“With today’s release of PISA data it is once again time for wild punditry, mass condemnation of U.S. public schools and a renewed sense of urgency to ram through ill-conceived, destructive policies that will make our school system even more different from those breaking the curve on PISA.

“With that out of the way, here’s my little graphic contribution to what has become affectionately known to edu-pundit class as PISA-Palooza. Yep… it’s the ol’ poverty as an excuse graph – well, really it’s just the ol’ poverty in the aggregate just so happens to be pretty strongly associated with test scores in the aggregate – graph… but that’s nowhere near as catchy.”

Read the whole post.

Today, he posted again, this time to chide Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for discounting the importance of poverty. Petrilli referred to Occam’s Razor to explain relatively poor math performance by U.S. students. Occam’s Razor is the proposition that ““among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.”

Relying on Occam’s Razor, Petrilli writes:

“So what’s an alternative hypothesis for the lackluster math performance of our fifteen-year-olds? One in line with Occam’s Razor?
Maybe we’re just not very good at teaching math, especially in high school.”

Baker invents a new principle: Petrilli’s Hammer. Or in other words, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Read the post. It is vintage Bruce Baker.

Categories International, Poverty, Testing

“Education Malpractice” in New York City

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2013 //
25

Laurel Sturt was a fashion designer who decided to give up her career and become a Teaching Fellow. She was motivated by a desire to help children and make a difference, as most teachers are.

In an interview in the Atlantic, she explains what happened to her. Her experience is not unique, but it is important that it appears in a mainstream publication.

Laurel Sturt was a 46-year-old fashion designer in New York City whose career trajectory took an unlikely shift one day on the subway. A self-proclaimed social activist, Sturt noticed an ad for a Teaching Fellows program. Then and there, she decided to quit her job in fashion design and shift her focus to her real passion: helping others. She enrolled in the two-year program and was assigned to teach at an elementary school in a high-poverty neighborhood near the South Bronx.

She wanted to be a social activist but she arrived as No Child Left Behind and Mayor Bloomberg’s similar program took effect. This is how she described what she saw:

I saw a lot of problems with all the testing, with all the slogans everywhere, as if you were in North Korea or something. It was very strange. … It was all about achievement through test scores. I resented the fact that we were test-prepping them all the time and we couldn’t give them a rich, authentic education.

And she learned the reason for the “achievement gap” or “opportunity gap”:

It was a very poor neighborhood with a lot of English-language learners who knew little or no English. With poverty comes this condition called Toxic Stress. It explains why the children were so difficult to handle, needy, and so behind in learning. When your dad is in prison or your mom is on drugs, or your mom drank alcohol when you were a fetus, if you didn’t sleep the night before because you were allowed to play video games all night, or maybe there was a shooting, your cognitive ability is harmed. It rewires their brain so they’re unable to employ working memory, which is what you use when you’re learning. We’re charged with being the parents of these kids, being the friends, the mentors. Teachers are given all these social responsibility towards children that aren’t ours. It’s a failure of the system to address the poverty that creates the achievement gap.

Having been enticed by the subway ads to make a difference, she signed up, she did her best, but she eventually left teaching. Why?

I saw that no matter what I wanted for the kids, it wasn’t going to happen. The system purported to be supporting students just wasn’t there. They need remediation, tiny class sizes, one-on-one attention—they need parenting, basically. Their parents are affected by the same Toxic Stress that they are, and it repeats itself in a cycle from parent to child. In America, the wealthiest school is going to get ten times more funding than the lowest one. For every dollar my school was getting, one in the suburbs was getting ten dollars. That’s huge. The kids come in disadvantaged, and they’re subjected to this disadvantaged school. My school was completely third-world. And through it all, it completely negated your life outside school. It was so exhausting. To teach anyway means to be giving, to deliver something. You’re giving out, giving out, giving out. And when you come up against these natural obstructions because of poverty, and then the lack of support from the administration, it’s just too much.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, New York City, Poverty, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Paul Karrer: My Students Are Not Coddled

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2013 //
15

Paul Karrer teaches fifth grade in a low-income community in California.

He writes:

Frank Bruni’s New York Times piece “Are Kids Too Coddled?” basically states tougher education standards like the Common Core may require a tough love that some parents and educators don’t like. So some parents are opting their kids out of testing.

Mr. Bruni is a journalist not an educator and it shows. He’s done a very harmful fluff piece on parents who “coddle” their young kids. He misses the many valid points that testing is a total waste unless it is diagnostic for kids. It should not be used for teacher evaluations. It is a destructive input into our educational system because it is subtractive to the content of what we teach. High stakes testing only causes test preparation. Plus, it sucks money out of the classroom.

Mr. Bruni is most fortunate that his life experience is around the sheltered, pampered, and the entitled. But even so, the conclusions he draws are incorrect. Even the entitled know testing is basely wrong, but testing and more testing for those who reside in the clutches of poverty is criminal.

Putting aside my first impulse to deeply insert some number two pencils (erasers first will be my humane gesture) in Mr. Bruni’s ears, I’d like to comment on coddling and reality for the vast majority of us in schools with children swaddled in the luxurious lap of desperate poverty.

Two weeks ago we had parent conferences – my cherubs are ten or eleven years old. A nice age. One parent confided that her child wore a diaper. (I hadn’t noticed – AH HA… THAT’S WHY THE CHILD WEARS BAGGY PANTS ALL THE TIME. )

Later, another parent had her kids spinning around me during our conference. One is on meds (not something I like or recommend) turns out the parent is a recovering meth addict, only the recovering part is in much doubt.

At last year’s conference an Anglo mom brought in her three children. All incredibly low performers, with low attendance rates, and low ability. In the middle of the conference her cell phone rang. For a milli-second this annoyed me. The youngest of the girls beamed at me, “Dad’s ready to cross.”

“Cross?” I asked.

“Yup, he’s at the frontier.”

“Frontier?”

The mom interrupted her daughter, “We are at the girls’ teacher conference. Her teacher is here.” The mom addressed me, “Their dad says hello.”

The mom refocused on the call, “When you going? Ok..we love you and will pray for you.”

She turned her phone off and couldn’t eyeball me. “Their dad was deported. He’s in the Mexican desert ready to make an illegal crossing on the frontier…the border.”

The girls are all 100% US citizens as is the mom. They linked up with their dad days later, but live on luck’s flip and poverty’s edge. They also moved….again.

Coddle….no, Mr. Bruni we don’t coddle our kids very much. I wish we could. But I hug them a lot…it keeps me from crying.

Categories Common Core, Poverty, Students, Testing

Paul Thomas: Grit and “No Excuses” Not Enough

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2013 //
23

Paul Thomas of Furman University has emerged as one of the most eloquent voices on behalf of children in poverty. In this essay, linked by Maureen Downey in the Atlanta Journal-Consitution, Paul explains why “grit” and “no excuses” are not enough to overcome the burdens of poverty.

Paul says that the reformers’ narrative is not only wrong but misguided because it distracts public attention from the root problems of poverty and segregation.

Categories Charter Schools, Poverty

Another Hedge Fund Billionaire Who Wants to “Save” the Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2013 //
43

Paul Tudor Jones was featured in an article in Forbes magazine.

Raised in Tennessee, he is now worth $3+ billion and has decided that his new mission in life is to save the public schools.

He has decided to start his mission in New York City.

He has so many misconceptions about public education that I hardly know where to begin.

Please, dear readers, is there one of you who will send Mr. Jones a copy of Reign of Error?

He doesn’t seem to know that New York City’s public school system has just gone through a decade of “creative disruption” at the hands of a far bigger billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, than Mr. Jones.

He doesn’t seem to know that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world, and that our public schools are not failing.

He thinks that charter schools have demonstrated that they can close the achievement gap between the poorest kids and the richest kids.

His foundation–the Robin Hood Foundation–raised $81 million in one night, much of it for charter schools.

He doesn’t seem to know that charter schools on average do not outperform public schools unless they exclude low-performing students.

He thinks that the Common Core “was our Sputnik moment,” because it showed we don’t measure up to other developed countries. He seriously doesn’t know what he is talking about.

He doesn’t seem to know that Common Core was not our Sputnik moment, because it is only now being implemented and proves nothing except that state officials can set the passing mark wherever they want.

He doesn’t seem to know that we are #1 among the advanced nations of the world in child poverty.

He doesn’t seem to know that income inequality is at its highest point since the days of the robber barons.

Please help this man.

I am sure he means well.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, New York City, Poverty

Bill Mathis On the Vermont Success Story

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2013 //
22

Remember the song, “Kids! What’s the Matter with Kids Today?” from “Bye, Bye, Birdie?”

Watch this. It’s wonderful, and it reminds of how every generation thinks that the younger generation is rotten and declining.

Bill Mathis is a former superintendent in Vermont and now serves as a member of the state board of education. He has steadily opposed the Bad News Club, which constantly bashes the schools and the younger generation, which every generation decries. In this post, he patiently explains that Vermont has exceptionally successful schools. After citing the examples of improvement, Mathis writes:

“As for the greatly lamented “unprepared” college students, only the top scoring 45% enrolled in higher education in 1960. Today, 73% of Vermont children attend higher education — although fewer graduate. As we dip deeper into the pool, we are comparing different cohorts.

Then, there’s the “school failure” industry. Charter school advocates, test manufacturers and politicians profit by manufacturing bad news. They are ably assisted by the media. For example, with the release of the latest national assessment scores, instead of touting the record high scores, ABC led with the theme of “not good enough.” The media did not report that the standard is set so high that no nation in the world could have even half their students meet it.”

Mathis cites the challenges that face Vermont schools. He concludes that “The increasing income gap represents the greatest of problems for our society and our schools. Pretending that adopting higher standards and more tests, by themselves, will close the achievement gap is an irrational distraction.”

This is a hugely important point. Raising standards and adding on more tests do not create jobs, do not feed hungry children, do not narrow the income gap, which is a scandal across our society.

 

 

 

Categories Poverty, Testing, Vermont

Los Angeles: Why the Title I Funding Formula is Unfair

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2013 //
9

The blogger known as “Red Queen in LA” responds to a petition she posted here, asking the Los Angeles school board not to remove those schools in which 40-49% of students are poor from their source of Federal funding, called Title I. She also notes that charter schools receive Title I funding even if they have a tiny proportion of students below the poverty line.

 

She writes:

 

Mike, did you read the essay highlighted above? This one:http://redqueeninla.k12newsnetwork.com/2013/11/07/enacting-economic-equity/

It may not add more of the hard information you are looking for, but it is certainly available. Allow me to try to address some of the issues you raise.

Most important, is the presumption that funding the 40-49% poverty concentration (pc) schools will necessitate “robbing Peter to pay Paul” — or as you put it: “I am sure the schools with a poverty rate more than 50% would not be happy with the proposed change, losing some of their Title I funds, in order to also include the 40-50% range.”

I’ll get to a substantive argument against this point in a moment. But from an emotional vantage, which is what you are channeling when you say ‘I am sure the schools …would not be happy with…’, let me just state for the record that my own child attends a 50%+ school and I am more than happy with this change. This is just one family at one school, and obviously isn’t very weighty in some sense. But it is not the case that everyone is strictly aligned regarding this according to what happens to be in their very own pocket. No way. This is a question of distributing title I funds equitably to children and schools that *need it*. And it is a question of challenging the presumption that we cannot “afford” this equitable distribution.

So here’s the more important argument: these 40-49% schools can be funded with the title I monies to which they are entitled *without taking a single solitary dime from any current title I school — that is from any school of 50%+ pc*. This resolution does not seek to instruct how the policy would be implemented because this is not in the purview of the board (this is perhaps debatable but is at least a conservative reading of the balance of power). However, from looking at past budgets, it is hard to see why monies that are currently going to title I schools directly need be in any way affected.

The amount of money needed to provide supplemental title I funds to schools of 40-49% poverty concentration is less than $1.4M.

By studying past budgets the following appears to be true. Note that attempts to request numbers from the district to clarify this research have all been rebuffed. But to the best of our understanding, the amount of money budgeted for _administrative_ title I costs last year (these have not yet been budgeted for the coming year we just counted for title I-eligibility, so this contrast is an estimate as it uses figures from two different years) is *five* times higher than the entire additional amount needed for these 40-49% schools. The amount of money budgeted for _indirect_ costs is *six* times as great as what is needed for these schools. And the amount of money budgeted for _”Other”_ programs, *including monies carried over from the previous year that were _just never spent to ameliorate poverty at all_*, is approximately *seventy-nine* times that $1.4M needed to provide schools of 40%-49% poverty concentration with title I funds. The amount of title I funds devoted to “Other” programs rather than being given to the kids in need at our schools directly, was $110.4M in 2012-13. That’s fully >>_34%_<< of LAUSD’s entire 2012-13 $328.7M title I “receipts” (the district “bills” the state for title I funds, which come ultimately from the federal government). More than one-third of the title I funds received by LAUSD from the federal government for the purpose of supplementing academic needs among our economically disadvantaged children, did not go to our kids directly.

More questions: “don’t the feds decide what poverty level Title I funds go to?”. No, they do not. The guidelines are quite loosely provided about some stringent limits. Schools with pc above 75% must receive title I funds. Schools with pc down to 35% may receive title I funds. How the local educational agency chooses to distribute funds within these outer limits is up to them. LAUSD has a long history of funding title I schools with pc from 40-65% at 75% the rate of funding for schools of pc 65%+ (that is, the per capita funding rate is less in schools of lower poverty concentration). This resolution seeks to return that historical distribution that was altered in the wake of the aftermath of title I distributions that were temporarily inflated as a result of federal stimulus funds, that LAUSD failed to budget for the cessation of. Please see the above-referenced article for a lot of references to the title I rules and history.

You also ask: “What is being done with the money saved by changing the threshold from 40% to 50%? Going to pet projects of Deasy?” ….. Please see the “more substantive” response above. It would be awfully nice to know what that $110.4M “Other projects” is for. Some of it includes funds carried over between years. This may not be legal. What the rest of it is for, is entirely unclear. It would be nice if the LAUSD budget office received several thousand inquiries regarding this. Ours have gone unanswered. Why the federal government is not more curious about the disposition of their monies is also rather unclear to me. There was a federal audit recently of title III monies; perhaps the auditors should expand their scrutiny?

You claim that upon halting title I distributions to schools of 40-49% pc the money saved “…didn’t go to Deasy. It meant that more Title I funds went to those schools where 50% or more of the students families are considered poverty level.” With all due respect I must ask: how do you know? When funding was cut for the 40-49% schools, the resulting per capita rate for both 65%+ and <65% pc schools both remained higher than prior to the artificially augmented stimulus years. There has been an unbroken ramping up of per capita title I funds yearly. In what way does it seem that unspent 40-49% funds went to augment 65%+ funds? In fact, during every one of these years before and after the cessation of 40-49% pc title I funding, the yearly carryover in title I funds was adequate to cover the amount needed to fund the 40-49% schools. In what way does money saved in this way equate to augmented funds for 65%+ schools?

I agree there are two sides to this issue. But they are not staked out across a divide between schools. All schools are in the same boat here; we are all educating children of very limited means. And the title I-eligible students in schools of 40% pc are just exactly as poor as the children in schools of 80% pc. An argument could be made that the students attending schools of middling poverty concentration could need comparatively more rather than fewer anti-poverty funds to level their own particular playing field. I have not seen this argument made theoretically or explicitly but it is certainly commented about among families informally; this is what it feels like to us in “the field”. And yet note that the funds which would be disbursed to the 40-49% schools are a fraction that dispersed to the 65%+ schools anyway (25% fewer funds per capita go to schools <65% pc).

As for the reputation of the two sponsoring board members, recall that this is a complicated world we live in. I have had some conversations with the one “we like” that caused quite a bit of consternation in terms of what “we like”. That’s just me and YMMV, but sometimes it does not serve well to look deeper for motivation. Sometimes one just treats the symptoms.

Conversely, the sponsoring board member “we do not like” (and I *so* do agree with you here!!!), is nevertheless sponsoring a resolution that increases educational equity. I may disagree with most everything she does in general and in specific. But here, for whatever reasons, she is, IMHO, right. And I choose not to look deeper than the immediate action on the surface. If I did, and did not fight for this resolution, thousands of children would be ill-served. If I did, and did not fight for this resolution, we might miss the opportunity to shed some light on those $110.4M worth of “other programs”. Some greater accountability for title I funds would be rather excellent. Taxpayers across the nation will benefit from that.

But as I said, I do agree there are two sides to this issue, but I did not complete the explication of where they fall. They do not fall on either side of this 50% threshold. That would be pitting friend against friend. Again, the children of poverty on either side of this divide are just as poor regardless of the divide. And the monies do not have to come from one to support the other.

No, the divide is between the children in our schools, the children who are *entitled to these funds*, and the adults disbursing these funds somewhere, anywhere other than _to these children directly_. The problem is with the opacity of the LAUSD budget, and the near-impossibility of following its money. Perhaps there is not enough money and we’re all just f-ed. But until the LAUSD budget office explains that carryover that is larger than the funds needed for the 40-49%, or explains the “other programs” or releases a full and detailed line-item accounting of title I funds, I will be hard-pressed to see any division other than that which delineates the children of LAUSD from the central administration of LAUSD.

Finally, you mentioned that ‘most of the 40-49% schools are located in the valley’. At the time of defunding that was true; 23 schools were defunded of which — can’t find my notes for the precise figures on this but perhaps another will chime in with them — many if not most were indeed in the valley at this time. However subsequently, most of these valley schools became independent charters for the express purpose of receiving these title I funds directly from the state. LAUSD is no longer “billed” by these schools for title I funds; they receive them directly from the state. These schools are gone from the LAUSD system, as a direct result of this defunding move. For this current year there are just 16 schools in the 40-49% pc category. 1 is in LAUSD2, 8 in LAUSD3, 4 in LAUSD4, 1 in LAUSD5, 1 in LAUSD6, 1 in LAUSD6. You are correct that the majority of schools fall in the valley, though the actual number of affected students are very nearly equal in LAUSD3 and LAUSD4. No matter, the point is: support is more complicated than a simple accounting of number and location of schools.

Finally, note this lovely little factlet. While LAUSD is pretzeling itself over this issue of poverty concentration and some sliding point at which desperate need is pinpointed, charter schools blithely bill the state for per capita title I funding *completely independent of poverty concentration*. That’s right, if you’re a charter school of 2000 and 3 of your students are title I-eligible, you’ll receive those title I funds for the asking.

So there’s another divide. But it’s not between the +/- 50% poverty concentrated.

Please Mike and any/everyone else — please follow the links in this article for some primary sources on poverty I funding:http://redqueeninla.k12newsnetwork.com/2013/11/07/enacting-economic-equity/

Please ask more questions if necessary.

Please sign this petition:https://www.change.org/petitions/lausd-board-members-stop-taking-money-away-from-our-kids-please-vote-for-educational-equity-and-achievement-for-all-title-i-students-resolution-on-11-12-13

And please come out to the board meeting this Tuesday at 4pm to request that LAUSD stop robbing the 40-49% “Peter” to pay for the LAUSD downtown-administrator’s “other projects-Paul”.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Los Angeles, Poverty

Sirota: Make War on Poverty, Not Teachers

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2013 //
43

David Sirota points put the facts that most educators acknowledge: poverty is a far more potent threat to academic success than “bad” teachers or unions. The bugaboos of the loon right have become the basis for federal policy, and it is taking its toll on teacher morale.

Categories Poverty, Teachers and Teaching, Unions
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