Archives for category: Virginia
Newer Entries »

Virginia: Speak Out Against This Awful Legislation Now!

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2015 //
3

Rachel Levy sent out an alarm about terrible legislation proposed in Virginia.

Evidently the Republicans in the legislature have been taking their marching orders from ALEC. ALEC wants deregulation of schools. It would like a free market in education, with charters, vouchers, and public schools chasing dollars and students. ALEC doesn’t believe that local school boards will approve enough charters, so ALEC recommends that governors create commissions that can override local resistance to charters. Thus ALEC prefers Big Government and is quite happy to crush local control.

There are other parts of this legislation and other bills that are odious. Unfortunately, a bill to decrease the number of required state tests was defeated.

If you live in Virginia, now is the time to get active. Let your elected representatives hear you!

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Teachers, Technology, Computers, Testing, Virginia

Virginia: Governor McAuliffe, Please Let the OEI Disappear

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2014 //
13

Blogger Rachel Levy sends out an alert to everyone in Virginia: Please contact Governor McAuliffe and ask him not to appeal the court decision saying that the state’s plan to take over low-performing schools violates the state’s constitution. The decision stopped the state from creating an anti-democratic bureaucracy called the Opportunity Educational Institution.

Levy writes:

“I am urging you to contact Governor McAuliffe’s administration (804-786-2211) to tell him to let the court’s ruling stand. The OEI is bad for democracy, it’s bad for local control, it’s bad for public education, and it will add another layer of expensive and superfluous bureaucracy. If people want charter schools in their local communities, let them work that out among members of their local community, via a democratic process and under the umbrella of the local school division; charter schools and privatization should not be imposed from up high by the state.”

She wrote last year:

“There’s no evidence that state takeover of struggling schools and districts helps. In fact, the evidence is at best mixed. The Governor and his policy allies are basing this approach on the system in New Orleans, which thus far has not proven successful. That Virginia would use as a model a city that hasn’t had much educational success doesn’t make sense. Michigan has also turned many public services over to the private sector, including the schools of Muskegon Heights. So far, that approach has been a disaster.

“Elliminating democratic institution and processes in a democratic society is not a cure for dysfunction or low test scores. Certainly, mass failure on the SOL tests signals a problem, but before the state blames and disenfranchises school communities, it really needs to figure out what that problem is and then target its resources accordingly. While many majority poor schools do just fine on standardized tests, I think we all know that the schools with low standardized test scores are often majority poor. Last I checked, being poor isn’t a reason to disenfranchise communities and hand their schools over to outsiders.”

Categories Closing schools, Virginia

Peter Dreier: Brat is the Worst Kind of Libertarian

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2014 //
67

Peter Dreier of Occidental College writes that David Brat, who beat Eric Cantor, is the worst kind of libertarian. He is so far to the right that he doesn’t believe in any minimum wage. He is a follower of Ayn Rand. Imagine electing a man to Congress who doesn’t believe in government. Dreier predicts Brat will be a reliable ally of crony capitalism and big banks, all celebrating selfishness. He may be against the Common Core, but this is a man who should be defeated. What kind of society ignores festering social and economic problems?

His opponent is Jack Trammel. Both Brat and Trammel are professors at Randolph-Macon University.

Categories Virginia

Virginia Court Declares State Takeovers Unconstitutional

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2014 //
12

A Circuit Court judge in Virginia declared unconstitutional a law that created a state takeover board for low-performing schools. Wonder if this was ALEC legislation?

According to a release from the National School,Boards Association:

“A Circuit Court judge has struck down a state school takeover board that would have stripped local school boards of their authority over low-performing schools, ruling in favor of the Virginia School Boards Association (VSBA) and the City of Norfolk school board.

“Norfolk Public Schools and VSBA sued the state last fall, arguing that the state’s Opportunity Educational Institution (OEI) and its governing board, established by then-Governor Bob McDonnell and the Virginia General Assembly to take over schools deemed to be chronically low performing, violated the state’s constitution.

“This ruling is an important affirmation of the Virginia Constitution’s intent that localities hold the responsibility for their public schools,” said VSBA Executive Director Gina G. Patterson. “With that being said, there is still much work to be done to ensure that all of our schools are successful.”

“The OEI and the OEI Board were created by the state legislature in its 2013 session to take over the supervision of schools that were denied accreditation and to require documentation and information about schools that had been accredited with warning for three years. The legislation also granted the OEI Board the authority to vote to take over the supervision of any school accredited with warning for three years. The legislation creating the OEI and the OEI Board purported to make the OEI “a statewide school division” and the OEI Board “a policy board in the executive branch of state government.”

“The school board of a school taken over would have been required to transfer to OEI not only the local funds required by the state-mandated Standards of Quality, but also any local funds appropriated to the school division of residence in excess of the state-mandated amount.

“The VSBA and the Norfolk School Board argued that the law violated Article VIII, Section 7 of the Constitution of Virginia, which provides that “the supervision of schools in each school division shall be vested in a school board.”

“The OEI board was a policy board under the executive branch of government and an education institution falling under Title 23 of the Code of Virginia, which relates to institutions of higher education. Further, the lawsuit argued that the legislation establishing the OEI board violates Article VIII, Section 5, of the Constitution of Virginia, which provides that the State Board of Education shall create school divisions. The General Assembly, not the Virginia Board of Education, created the OEI board as a statewide school division.

“Norfolk School Board Chairman Kirk Houston said, “We are pleased with the ruling. We value our strong partnership with Virginia elected and appointed leaders, however, state takeover of schools was not going to be a magic formula for addressing challenges with student achievement, particularly in high-poverty schools. In Norfolk, our community is focused on creating school environments that maximize all children’s academic potential, with consideration for all of their unique needs.”

“Since the lawsuit was filed, more than 100 school boards and municipal governing boards, including Norfolk’s City Council, passed resolutions supporting it.”

Categories Virginia

Guest Blog: Rachel Levy Questions Why Richmond, VA, Hired TFA

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2013 //
21

Editor’s note:  While Diane is on a somewhat reduced blogging schedule, she has invited members of the Education Bloggers Network, a consortium of people who blog about education issues on the national, state or local level to contribute to her blog.  If you are a blogger who supports public education and would like to join the Education Bloggers Network, contact Jonathan Pelto Jonpelto@gmail.com.

This guest blog is written by Rachel Levy

With a vote of 5-2 (with two members absent) the Richmond School Board has decided to contract with Teach for Americato hire up to 30 teachers. I’ve already written in great detail about how the Teach for America model is problematic hereand then here and about why TFA is not right for the K-12 public school students of Virginia here, so I won’t repeat what I said there.

In the meantime, here is the reporting out of RPS leadership:

“It’s another tool in our recruitment tool box,” said Kristen Larson, 4th District, who voted in favor of the program during a School Board work session Monday. “We know we have a hard time hiring, and we need to look at all paths.”

In Richmond, they will fill as-yet-determined hard-to-staff positions. 

The school system typically has to fill 200 to 300 teacher positions a year, but in recent years it has had a hard time finding enough qualified candidates. This school year began with about three dozen positions open. Some have been filled by long-term substitutes while others remain unfilled.

“We have a lot of work to do in how we attract and retain teachers,” said School Board Chairman Jeffrey Bourne, 3rd District. “Teach for America is injecting some creativity and some new thinking into the hiring process. 

“I don’t think this is an ‘either/or’ situation. It’s an all of the above. There’s room here for different approaches.”

This is very disappointing, especially after the RPS School Board has seemed to be on the right track in so many other ways. They are trying to strengthen and diversify opportunities for Richmond children while staying under the umbrella of the public, democratic system and while involving leaders with expertise in education. Unfortunately, in this case a majority of the School Board has decided come out from under the umbrella and fork over $150,000 ($5,000 per corps member = $150,000) to TFA to hire inexperienced and untrained people to be teachers.

However, this is not surprising since TFA’s chief lobbyist in Richmond has been diligently working the RPS School Boardas well as Governor McDonnell’s administration for quite a while. Furthermore, at least one School Board member in particular has been eager to hire TFA. And I don’t live in Richmond proper and can’t say how many residents have protested the idea of having TFA corps members teaching in Richmond. Perhaps parents have stood up and asked for them.

I do question, however, the nature of their recruitment problem and the extent to which TFA can aid that or ameliorate their retention problems. RPS should really find out how and why they have a recruitment and retention problem first and then propose solutions. If your car is not working for some reason, bringing in a rental car for a few weeks is not going to fix it. If the School Board  wants help with retention, TFA is not the organization to turn to. TFA leadership states unabashedly that they are fine with their corps members only staying two or three years, that getting them exposure to challenging classrooms is step one on a ladder to working in the education reform industry. And according to TFA watchdog and former corps member Gary Rubinstein, about 10% of TFAers don’t even make it through their very first year of teaching.

There also have been questions raised about the process by which this decision has been made. According to RPS parent and Alliance for Progressive Values member Kirsten Gray, there was no public hearing on the matter, almost no effort to publicize the matter, no review of research on TFA’s effectiveness or lack thereof, and no evidence that there is a shortage and no positions open on the website. However also according to Gray, TFA was voted in with an amendment that caps the TFAers to 10% of the hard to staff schools and the amendment also requires the Richmond School Board to come up with a policy on how to use and place corps members. The way I see it, that’s at least one way to pilot TFA and to minimize potential damage at least. But two School Board members, Kristen Larson and Glen Sturtevant, voted against the amendment and perhaps they’ll work to remove it.

Finally, I also have my own personal experience to share which makes me question if there’s a true shortage and how TFA will help with RPS’s human resources issues. In Spring 2011, I was at a social function and I happened to be seated at the same table with a very high ranking RPS administrator. When I mentioned that I was a Social Studies and ESOL teacher and that I would be applying to area school systems including RPS, they told me the market was fairly tight and that my best bet, if anything, was to apply for an ESOL positions. I did, in fact, apply to RPS later that spring. However, I never heard anything back, not even to receive an e-mail confirming my application had been received, until September 19th when I got an e-mail letting me know they might need an ESOL teacher. Well, by then, I had already taken another job (and I had been contacted by two other area school systems with no shortages)–it was nearly a month after school had started. 

Now, I’m no super star of a teacher but I do have a B.A. from a highly-ranked liberal arts college, I have a master’s degree in education, and a current Virginia license. I am dual-certified including in a hard-to-staff area, I have strong references, and several years of teaching experience, including five in ESOL in Virginia. I wonder how many other people with qualifications such as mine have applied to RPS in recent years. The problem there is not lack of “creativity” or lack of qualified applicants; it’s lack of competence, disorder, and a lack of, um, hiring. TFA’s presence won’t change that. 

Those concerned about the impending contract between TFA and RPS should ask for information and for more transparency about the contracting process. They should also ask that citizens get the same access to public officials that TFA has had. They should also ask for a hearing where evidence both of the shortage and rationale behind hiring TFA would be presented. Finally, they should sign this petition which states opposition RPS’s contracting with TFA (and make sure you read the comments there, too). 

This blog has been cross-posted from: http://allthingsedu.blogspot.com/2013/11/tfa-comes-to-rva.html

Categories Teach for America TFA, Virginia
Newer Entries »