Group items tagged

On the one hand you've got billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates, pouring money into reshaping public education into whatever model they think best-and because they're billionaires, they must know best about everything, right? On the other hand you've got the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), spreading toxic, corporate-authored model legislation around the states to push for anti-immigrant laws, voter disenfranchisement laws, anti-sick leave laws and more. Except, wait. This isn't an on the one hand, on the other hand situation-they're the same hand, spreading the influence of the very wealthy not just in what politicians get elected, but what laws get passed. And Bill Gates' foundation is honoring that shared goal with a $376,635 grant to ALEC

Perry Zirkel filled in for Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post blog, The Answer Sheet, a couple days ago and wrote a provocative post about the law v. lore in teacher tenure. Perry (who I love is jumping on blogging - what a perfect medium for him) makes some great points that the law of teacher tenure is not as ironclad against dismissing teachers as most educators assume. I teach this to my future administrators all the time. Perry also makes a good point that litigation resulting from dismissal cases frequently goes the district's way. Certainly, as is almost always the case, the law is geared to support the school in these cases. So, as is always the case with Perry, he makes some great points and actually points to data to back it up.  But, I have 2 small issues with how Perry frames this issue and a different recommendation as to how to achieve the desired result. 

The 2012 "Education Reformers" - They bully, they're arrogant and they appear to believe that the law applies to others but not them. As Michelle Rhee and the other out-of-state "Education Reformers" pour into Connecticut to join their allies in the effort to Governor Malloy's ill-conceived "Education Reform" bill you'd think they'd recognize the importance of following Connecticut's laws. But apparently these "Education Reformers" either believe they are above the law on simply don't care if they get fined for violating the lobbyist rules we have in place.

As many as 20 states have considered enacting parent trigger laws, which would let parents who are dissatisfied with the way a school is being run, turn it into a charter, replace the staff, or even shut it down, if 51 percent of the school's families agree. The laws - which have been passed in various forms in California, Connecticut, Mississippi and Texas - have generated controversy and even inspired a movie to be released this fall. Do these laws give parents the first real power over their children's education? Or do they put public schools in private hands and impede real improvements?

The state House rejected a voucher bill last night, but concerns remain about the charter law changes Governor Corbett proposed as part of the bill. In this guest blog post, Susan DeJarnatt and Theresa Glennon, professors of law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, describe the proposed changes and their shortcomings.

Federal and state laws hold schools accountable for the achievement of all students, including those who have disabilities such as Mattox. In South Carolina, that means all third- through eighth-grade students must take the state Palmetto Assessment of State Standards. Few exceptions are permitted, and Sarah Johnson, Mattox's mother, believed it would hurt her son to take an exam for which he was unprepared. School officials said that would violate state and federal laws, but Johnson refused to do what she said amounted to putting the law before her son.

New York State's heralded anti-bullying law is about to go into effect July 1. But the state Board of Regents recently took some teeth out of the law, known as the Dignity Act, when it said that charter schools don't have to provide in-class instruction to schoolchildren about the dangers of discrimination and harassment, leaving their students without a key protection from bullying.

Minnesota parents who teach their children at home feel like they have received a promotion. "The state is recognizing the validity of home education," Lorna Cook of Willmar said of a new law that frees homeschoolers from most of the bureaucracy of old laws. "To those of us who are home educators, the statistics show that, overall for home education, parents are doing a pretty good job."

Quietly marching to its own drummer, Washington State has mostly turned its back on the education reform movement that is sweeping much of the rest of the country.  Washington is one of nine states that does not have a charter school law.  Our state has defeated charter laws three times at the ballot box - two were citizen initiatives and one was a referendum to repeal a charter law passed by our legislature.  In between those votes, five more bills were introduced and rejected in our Legislature. 

"The world's largest private-sector employer and the country's most prominent conservative entertainment company have teamed up to sponsor a fundraiser called "Teachers Rock." Backed by Walmart and Anschutz Film Group, the August 14 event will feature live performances from musicians like Josh Groban and appearances from actresses like Viola Davis; it will be broadcast August 17 as a CBS special with messages from actresses like Meryl Streep. And it will promote the upcoming feature film Won't Back Down, Anschutz's entry in the "education reform" wars. Won't Back Down is reportedly a highly sympathetic fictional portrayal of "parent trigger" laws, a major flashpoint in debates over education and collective bargaining. Under such laws, the submission of signatures from a majority of parents in a school triggers a "turnaround option," which can mean the replacement of a unionized school with a non-union charter. Such laws have been passed in several states, but due to court challenges, the "trigger" process has never been fully implemented."

As New York City parents and teachers struggled Monday to make sense of recently published schoolteacher rankings, education officials considered making future releases illegal to protect a fragile truce on a new statewide system. Legal experts said a series of court rulings have made it increasingly clear that statistics-based portions of teacher evaluations are public information, unlike those of police officers, firefighters and other public workers specifically protected under state law. Only a change in law, experts said, would change that. Shielding teacher rankings from public view is likely to become a new pressure point in the debate over how to measure the effectiveness of teachers, lawmakers and officials said Monday. Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, which sets education policy, said that while she backs using tests scores to hold teachers accountable, she would support changing state law to hide their rankings from public view.

The 2010 law that established a new framework for the evaluation of New York educators was a complex piece of legislation, and last week's agreement to clarify and refine that law with additional legislation added another layer to that complexity. The complexity is unavoidable. It is important to have evaluations based on multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, just as it is important to evaluate students based on multiple measures of their learning: more measures and more forms of evidence produce more robust, more accurate and fairer evaluations. Further, multiple measures allowed New York to avoid placing inordinate weight on standardized exams and value-added algorithms, as other states have done to very negative consequences. And it was essential that the bulk of the evaluations be established locally through collective bargaining, with the law only providing a general framework. These objectives necessarily led to a high level of complexity.

In 2010, California enacted education legislation known as the "parent trigger." The legislation empowers parents of children at schools that have failed to meet annual yearly progress for at least four years to change the administration, convert the school to a charter, or shut it down completely if they gather signatures from at least 51% of parents at the school. Similar legislation exists in Mississippi and Connecticut, but has failed to become law in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, and Maryland. Parents at McKinley Elementary in Compton Unified - a school that only met yearly progress once in the last eight years -were the first in the nation to "pull the trigger" and remain the sole group to do so to date. As a result of their action, the State of California required the district to hire a "direct assistance intervention team," and later, an attempt by parents to convert the school to a charter was rebuffed by the school district on technical grounds. A case is currently pending in Los Angeles Superior Court. Many school reformers believe that this law puts the interests of children ahead of teachers and helps to save children in failing schools before the clock runs out. Many education professionals, among them the president of the California Federation of Teachers, view the law as a "lynch mob provision," intended to dismantle the public school system. The politics of the "parent trigger" are confusing, with the lines between conservatives and liberals often blurred. This debate will examine the arguments in favor and in opposition to this reform, focusing on the experience to date in California and developments in other parts of the country where similar legislation is being considered.

Late this Friday afternoon, only 4 days before the law was scheduled to go into effect, word came that a judge in Missouri has issued an injunction against implementation of the Missouri anti-social networking (Facebook) law between teachers and students. Here is a local story on it (thanks to my good friend Dave Doty @canyonsdave). Also, thanks to the Missouri State Teachers' Association, who filed the suit, for following up on twitter with their press release.  First, this is just a preliminary injunction. This is not a final judgment and the matter is still to be decided. 

It looks like pressure from multiple directions has achieved one victory in the larger battle to prevent a new version of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) from being as test-obsessed as the current law. This victory increases the odd of a new law being a realistic and useful tool for school improvement.

New education reforms often translate into big money for private groups. Following the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, states paid millions of dollars annually for companies to develop and administer the standardized tests required under the law. Companies also cashed in on a provision mandating tutoring for students at struggling schools. Now, a movement to overhaul the teaching profession is creating another source of revenue for those in the business of education. More than half of states are changing their laws to factor student test scores into teacher evaluations and adding requirements for the classroom observations used to rate teachers. The main intent of the new laws is to identify which teachers are doing a good, bad, or mediocre job and to help them improve. One early outcome of such recent legislation, however, is a booming market that sells services and products to help states and school districts scrambling to meet the new standards.

NCTQ has made some big changes to our TR3 database, where you can compare the local policies and state laws governing teachers in over 100 school districts in the United States.  This database allows you to compare districts on almost any factor that affects teachers. We've pulled this data from state laws, teachers' contracts, school board policies, school calendars, salary schedules, and teacher evaluation handbooks and more. We've sorted through thousands of documents so you don't have to.

Behind the unusual outcome is a series of state laws designed specifically to empower public charter schools and guarantee them classroom space in public school districts, many of which historically have been unwelcoming and unfriendly to charter schools. In Capistrano, however, these same state laws - including one that guarantees charter schools "reasonably equivalent facilities" - have forced the school district's hand, experts say, creating an unusual and unfortunate situation where the school board was compelled to choose an independently run charter school over a district-run school.

A judge handed a state teachers' union a victory Monday in the group's challenge of a law pushed by Gov. Bobby Jindal to let public schools waive certain regulations, declaring the law unconstitutional on multiple fronts.

Headlines from Alabama tell us that the latest "education reform" there is making sure we know exactly how much the state is spending to educate the children of "illegal" immigrants. According to a new law, parents are required to present documentation when registering their children to attend school. While the law does not require school officials to turn in the names of "illegals," it has sparked widespread fear among immigrant parents, and many have withdrawn their children from school. Meanwhile, Texas governor Rick Perry's poll numbers in the Republican primary have fallen after he said that members of his party who do not support free education for students who are undocumented "have no heart."