Group items tagged

The future of the fight over public schools has a fresh, highly visible face, and it's called StudentsFirstNY. But the new school-reform supergroup, founded by former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and ex-D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee, is in fact not that new at all. It builds directly one of the biggest lobbying forces in New York State, called Education Reform Now. In the last two years, Education Reform Now and the associated Education Reform Now Advocacy have spent more than $10 million to influence state law on hiring and firing of teachers, as a counterforce to the state's two major teachers' unions. Those funds helped force a change in teacher evaluations that unions had opposed, and also backed Mayor Bloomberg's push for layoffs based on teacher performance in place of the current system, in which the most recently hired teachers must be the first to be let go. The $10 million is as much money as StudentsFirstNY director Micah Lasher - until now, Mayor Bloomberg's chief Albany lobbyist - says the new group will spend to influence the next mayoral election.

Over at The Nation I have a new piece looking at surveys of public school teachers, one of which found job satisfaction at its lowest point since 1989. The most important thing to note is that polling shows teachers are not unhappy because they resent new accountability policies like the more stringent teacher evaluations instituted in response to President Obama's Race to the Top program. In fact, most teachers support using multiple measures of student learning to assess educators, and most believe it should take longer to earn tenure (an average of 5.4 years according to the Gates/Scholastic poll) than it currently does (an average of 3.1 years across all states). 

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a powerful corporate front group that works to pass Big Business-written laws in state legislatures. Following the outcry over the group pushing "Stand Your Ground" laws, at least fifteen major corporations, foundations, and other organizations have decided to end their funding commitments to ALEC. But ALEC has another way of financing itself that doesn't involve private corporations at all. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) is one of ALEC's members at least through 2009 and may well still be a member. NACSA's president and CEO Greg Richmond joined ALEC's Education Task Force around 2009.

The complete cluelessness of our elites knows no limits: "I think (the ultra-wealthy) actually have an insufficient influence," Griffin said in an interview at Citadel's downtown office. "Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system more than ever now owe a duty to protect the system that has created the greatest nation on this planet." [emphasis mine] Hedge-fund billionaires like Griffin have a "duty" to protect the system that made them billionaires off of schemes like credit derivatives - schemes that nearly destroyed our economy. Gosh, too bad no one listens to them...

As states slash education budgets, private foundations have picked up the slack-and pushed some controversial reforms.

In several previous posts I have addressed the common argument among charter advocacy organizations (notably, not necessarily those out there doing the hard work of actually running a real charter school - but the pundits who claim to speak on their behalf) that charter schools do more, with less while serving comparable student populations. This argument appears to be a central theme of current policy proposals in Connecticut, which, among other things, would substantially increase funding for urban charter schools while doing little to provide additional support for high need traditional public school districts. For more on that point, see here. I've posted some specific information on Connecticut charter schools in previous posts, but have not addressed them more broadly. Here, I provide a run-down of simple descriptive data, widely available through two major credible sources.

The state's top education official today defended the Christie administration's proposed changes to the school funding formula, including a plan to spend less money on poor students.

"Producer, stadium developers donate to group backing Villaraigosa's school board candidates," is a piece detailing how fringe right wing billionaire Philip Anschutz has donated at least $100,000 to the Mayor Failure's Coalition for School Reform - a slush fund to elect privatization friendly school board candidates for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

On the board are some of the most well-known and polarizing figures in public education, including Ms. Rhee; Mr. Klein, now a News Corporation executive; and Eva S. Moskowitz, the former councilwoman who now runs a chain of charter schools. Also on the board are former Mayor Edward I. Koch; Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone organization, a network of charter schools; and a number of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, who have served as the movement's financial backers. Aside from promoting changes throughout the state, members of the group hope to neutralize the might of the teachers' unions, whose money, endorsements and get-out-the-vote efforts have swung many close elections.

Spreading at a time of deep cutbacks in public schools, the programs are operating in eight states and represent one of the fastest-growing components of the school choice movement. This school year alone, the programs redirected nearly $350 million that would have gone into public budgets to pay for private school scholarships for 129,000 students, according to the Alliance for School Choice, an advocacy organization. Legislators in at least nine other states are considering the programs.

Matthew Yglesias makes the case against the portion of Mitt Romney's education reform plan that would allow families to receive federal funds directly for Title I services, which include supplemental tutoring and digital courses, rather than receiving those services through their school, calling it "a huge bomb lurking inside the education policy white paper."

Here's my operational definition of screwed for this post. A district is identified as screwed (new technical term in school finance… as of a few posts ago) if a) the district has more than 50% higher census poverty than other districts in the same labor market and b) lower per pupil state and local revenues than other districts in the same labor market. As I've explained on numerous previous occasions, it is well understood that districts with higher poverty rates (among other factors) have higher costs of providing equal educational opportunity to their students. I then tally the percent of statewide enrollments that are concentrated in these screwed districts to determine the share of kids screwed by their state. And here are the rankings… or at least the short list of states that screw the largest share of low income students

In recent years, the casual observer of debates over public education policy might be led to believe that improving teacher quality and ensuring that low income and minority school children have access to high quality teachers has little or nothing to do with the equity or adequacy of financing of schools. The casual observer might be led to believe that there actually exists a sizable body of empirical research that confirms a) that high quality teaches matter, b) that money doesn't matter and c) by extension money has nothing to do with recruiting, retaining or redistributing teacher quality. These arguments, while politically convenient for those hoping to avoid thorny questions of tax policy and state aid formulas, are not actually grounded in any body of decisive, empirical research. Rather, to the contrary, it is reasonably well understood that while teacher quality does indeed matter, teacher wages also matter and teacher working conditions matter, both in terms of the level of quality of the overall teacher workforce and in the distribution of quality teachers.

"I hope over the next several months to compile a series of posts where I look at what states have done to achieve their executive granted waivers from federal legislation. Yeah… let's be clear here, that all of this starts with an executive decision to ignore outright, undermine intentionally and explicitly, federal legislation. Yeah… that legislation may have some significant issues. It might just suck entirely. Nonetheless, this precedent is a scary one both in concept and in practice. Even when I don't like the legislation in question, I'm really uncomfortable having someone unilaterally over-ride or undermine it. It makes me all the more uncomfortable when that unilateral disregard for existing law is being used in a coercive manner - using access to federal funding to coerce states to adopt reform strategies that the current administration happens to prefer. The precedent at the federal level that legislation perceived as inconvenient can and should simply be ignored seems to encourage state departments of education to ignore statutory and constitutional provisions within their states that might be perceived similarly as inconvenient. Setting all of those really important civics issues aside - WHICH WE CERTAINLY SHOULD NOT BE DOING - the policies being adopted under this illegal (technical term - since it's in direct contradiction to a statute, with full recognition that this statute exists) coercive framework are toxic, racially disparate and yet another example of misplaced blame."

"Chicagoans need to understand what is happening to our school system. The mayor and his hedge fund allies are going to replace our democratically-controlled public schools with privately-run charter schools. This will have disastrous results and people need to rise up and refuse. As a parent, do you really want your child wearing a three-piece polyester suit every day to school and pay a fine every time your child's tie isn't on straight?"

At a time when public schools are seeing deep cuts in funding, there's a growing market for companies running online elementary, middle and high schools. The largest for-profit company overseeing these programs in Colorado is Virginia-based company K12 Inc. While public schools are struggling to survive, K12 Inc.-with the support of state tax dollars-is reporting double digit profits. Meantime, it's not measuring up to state academic standards.

A recent lengthy post from the Shanker Blog by Matt DiCarlo got my attention just prior to the Thanksgiving holiday entitled "The Uncertain Future of Charter School Proliferation." The post, and the blog as a whole, are no fan of charter schools, and casts doubt on charters in general on a national scale. Two areas of charter success in the country, the post acknowledges are Boston and New York City, as certain studies show. One factor, Mr. DiCarlo suggests, is that the "market share" of charter schools in these cities is small, so they they can "get a larger share" of "finite sources," presumably private funding. Count me skeptical on that one. Mr. DiCarlo also acknowledges more credibly that successful charter schools devote much greater time teaching and tutoring than district schools, which contribute to the higher charter results in Boston and New York City.

Three West Harlem secondary schools are on the chopping block for poor performance and in danger of being closed. All three schools are, or will soon be, sharing buildings with charter schools belonging to the Success Academy Network. Some in the community think their schools are being sacrificed to allow for the expansion of the well-funded and politically potent Success Academy Network. They say the DOE has not done enough to support the struggling schools. The DOE is "starving these schools so they have an excuse to shut them down," said Noah Gotbaum, a representative for Community Education Council 3 who attended public hearings about the future of all three schools.

Jesse Hagopian, teacher in the Seattle Public School System and Founding Member of Seattle Equality Educators (SEE) was arrested on Monday for standing up for his students.

Though they are still in negotiations over the details, Chicago Public Schools officials are set to sign on to a national intiaitive that encourages stronger cooperation between charter schools and traditional schools, as well as providing equitable district funding for charters. Nine cities have already signed such agreements, called District Charter Collaboration Compacts, which are being promoted and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. According to a Gates press release, on Tuesday, CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and New Schools for Chicago President Phyllis Lockett will join the leaders of school districts in Houston and Baltimore in a conference call in which two new compact cities will be announced. Baltimore's CEO Andrés Alonso has already committed to the compact.