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Jeff Bernstein

Education Week: Partisan Fights, Budget Cuts Complicate School Funding - 0 views

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    After months of arduous negotiation and partisan squabbling, states across the country have produced budgets for the new fiscal year that in many cases will bring deep cuts to state spending, including money for schools.
Jeff Bernstein

Free Trips Raise Issues for Officials in Education - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Since 2008, the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation's largest educational publishers, has financed free international trips - some have called them junkets - for education commissioners whose states do business with the company. When the state commissioners are asked about these trips - to Rio de Janeiro; London; Singapore; and Helsinki, Finland - they emphasize the time they spend with educators from around the world to get ideas for improving American public schools.
Jeff Bernstein

What Can We Learn From Finland? - Bridging Differences - Education Week - 0 views

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    What makes the Finnish school system so amazing is that Finnish students never take a standardized test until their last year of high school, when they take a matriculation examination for college admission. Their own teachers design their tests, so teachers know how their students are doing and what they need. There is a national curriculum-broad guidelines to assure that all students have a full education-but it is not prescriptive. Teachers have extensive responsibility for designing curriculum and pedagogy in their school. They have a large degree of autonomy, because they are professionals. Admission to teacher education programs at the end of high school is highly competitive; only one in 10-or even fewer-qualify for teacher preparation programs. All Finnish teachers spend five years in a rigorous program of study, research, and practice, and all of them finish with a masters' degree. Teachers are prepared for all eventualities, including students with disabilities, students with language difficulties, and students with other kinds of learning issues.
Jeff Bernstein

Education Week: Judge Sides With Effort to Open Charter Operators' Books - 0 views

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    Taxpayers might soon be able to see how private management companies spend the millions they receive from the public to operate public charter schools and how much they profit. A Franklin County judge ruled that White Hat Management Co.-the for-profit firm of Akron businessman and GOP donor David L. Brennan-is a public official when acting as an authorized representative of a public charter school.
Jeff Bernstein

New School Year Brings Steep Cuts in State Funding for Schools - Center on Budget and P... - 0 views

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    Elementary and high schools are receiving less state funding than last year in at least 37 states, and in at least 30 states school funding now stands below 2008 levels - often far below. These cuts are attributable, in part, to the failure of the federal government to extend emergency fiscal aid to states and school districts and the failure of most states to enact needed revenue increases and instead to balance their budgets solely through spending cuts. The cuts have significant consequences, both now and in the future: They are causing immediate public- and private-sector job loss, and in the long term are likely to reduce student achievement and economic growth.
Jeff Bernstein

Department of Education dodges outside consultant contract oversight in new City Counci... - 0 views

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    The City Council hopes a new bill approved this month will shine a brighter spotlight on the billions of dollars New York City spends hiring outside contractors for city agencies-all of them, that is, except the largest and most expensive, the Department of Education.
Jeff Bernstein

Hedge fund manager readies for battle with NJEA to reform NJ schools | NJ.com - 0 views

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    Imagine you are David Tepper, a 54-year-old guy with $5 billion in the bank. You've played the Wall Street game all your adult life, and you've scored huge wins, over and over. Now what? Tepper, a hedge fund manager who lives in Livingston, has found his answer: He is jumping into the political game in New Jersey, promising to spend huge bucks over the long term to change the state of play on school reform, starting with tenure.
Jeff Bernstein

The Supplement Not Supplant Conundrum - Rick Hess Straight Up - Education Week - 0 views

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    In our last post, we introduced the idea that federal compliance rules can have an unintended effect on what goes on in the classroom by encouraging defensive spending, discouraging comprehensive programs, and creating administrative burdens that take away resources from students. Over the next two days we will give examples of how two seemingly unrelated rules - supplement not supplant, and time and effort - interfere with comprehensive school improvement.
Jeff Bernstein

The Cost of Stupid: Families for Excellent Schools Totally Bogus Analysis of NYC School... - 0 views

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    "Families for Excellent Schools of New York - the Don't Steal Possible folks - has just released an impossibly stupid analysis in which they claim that New York City is simply throwing money at failure. Spending double on failing schools what they do on totally awesome ones (if they really have any awesome ones)."
Jeff Bernstein

Daily Kos: Unions, Education and The Chicago Teachers Strike - 0 views

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    "The Chicago Teachers Union strike, and the recent rallies held in conjunction, speak to a problem larger than the conventional meme of pay increases, tenure, or pensions.  Chicago Teachers want better working conditions. They realize as no other employees might; the environments in which they work fashion the future of our nation.  Our children's education is at-risk."
Jeff Bernstein

Real Reform versus Fake Reformy Distractions: More Implications from NJ & MA ... - 0 views

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    Recently, I responded to an absurd and downright disturbing Op-Ed by a Connecticut education reform organization that claimed that Connecticut needed to move quickly to adopt teacher evaluation/tenure reforms and expand charter schooling because a) Connecticut has a larger achievement gap and lower outcomes for low income students than Massachusetts or New Jersey and b) New Jersey and Massachusetts were somehow outpacing Connecticut in adopting new reformy policies regarding teacher evaluation. Now, the latter assertion is questionable enough to begin with, but the most questionable assertion was that any recent policy changes that may have occurred in New Jersey or Massachusetts explain why low income children in those states do better, and have done better at a faster rate than low income kids in Connecticut. Put simply, bills presently on the table, or legislation and regulations adopted and not yet phased in do not explain the gains in student outcomes of the past 20 years. Note that I stick to comparisons among these states because income related achievement gaps are most comparable among them (that is, the characteristics of the populations that fall above and below the income thresholds for free/reduced lunch are relatively comparable among these states, but not so much to states in other regions of the country). I'm not really providing much new information in this post, but I am elaborating on my previous point about the potential relevance of funding equity - school finance - reforms - and providing additional illustrations.
Jeff Bernstein

New York is no model, Ravitch says | Philadelphia Public School Notebook - 0 views

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    If Philadelphia is looking to New York City as the exemplar of "best practices" for improving schools by organizing them into support networks, it is looking in the wrong place, according to historian and education analyst Diane Ravitch. "New York City has not had any great success," said Ravitch, in town Wednesday for the conference of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. "New York used to boast of dramatic test score gains, but they disappeared in 2010." In that year, the state's Department of Education acknowledged that the cut scores had been dropping on the standardized tests. "All the gains disappeared," she said.
Jeff Bernstein

What Teachers Want | The Nation - 0 views

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    But a review of the best evidence on teachers' sentiments shows that educators are not unhappy because they resent the new emphasis on teacher evaluations, a key element of President Obama's Race to the Top program; in fact, according to a separate survey of 10,000 public school teachers from Scholastic and the Gates Foundation, the majority support using measures of student learning to assess teachers, and the mean number of years teachers believe they should devote to the classroom before being assessed for tenure is 5.4, a significant increase from the current national average of 3.1 years. But polling shows teachers are depressed by the increasing reliance on standardized tests to measure student learning-the "high stakes" testing regime that the standards and accountability movement has put in place across the country and that Race to the Top has reinforced in some states and districts. Teachers are also concerned that growing numbers of parents are not able to play an active role in their children's education, and they are angry about the climate of austerity that has invaded the nation's schools, with state and local budget cuts threatening key programs that help students learn and overcome the disadvantages of poverty.
Jeff Bernstein

John Merrow: A Simple Innovation: Spend The Money Wisely | Taking Note - 0 views

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    Is educational innovation the way to close the achievement gap? A lot of smart people are hoping it will solve the problem. In the past few months I've been around a lot of innovations. I have watched the Khan Academy (and Sal Khan himself) in action, dug into 'blended learning,' Rocketship and KIPP, and looked at some Early College High School programs. I've been reading about new iPad applications and commercial ventures like Learning.com, and teachers have been writing me about how they are using blogs to encourage kids to write, and Twitter for professional development. In many schools kids are working in team to build robots, while other schools are using Skype to connect with students across the state or nation. I've even watched two jazz groups - one in Rhode Island, the other in Connecticut - practice together on Skype! 'Innovation' per se is not sufficient, of course. We need innovations that level the playing field and give all kids - regardless of their parents' income - the opportunity to excel.
Jeff Bernstein

Snapshots of Connecticut Charter School Data « School Finance 101 - 0 views

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    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.
Jeff Bernstein

Fred LeBrun on Andrew Cuomo: Throw grenade, walk away - Times Union - 0 views

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    Public education has been a disaster for Andrew Cuomo, and vice versa. Right from the start of his administration, he's used the wrong tactics, the wrong strategies and the wrong sequences if he had any intention of actually elevating New York's public education system and giving especially stressed urban and rural school districts a much-needed boost.
Jeff Bernstein

Why Activists in the US and Around the World Should be Learning from Montreal Student S... - 0 views

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    The core issues at stake here are the same ones that students and workers around the world are facing right now: austerity and the increasing privatization of education.
Jeff Bernstein

Jefferson charter school budget has $87,500 per student | NOLA.com - 0 views

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    As Jefferson Parish public school officials consider opening more charter schools, they are questioning whether the system's first charter is doing enough to help at-risk students. Jefferson Community School now has seven teachers but just eight students, a ratio that would be the envy of many schools with much larger classes. It has a budget of almost $700,000 this year -- $87,500 per student, if the current enrollment doesn't change, and more than seven times the parish average. In light of such disparities, interim Superintendent James Meza said he has asked Jefferson Community officials to rewrite the school's mission in order to serve a larger segment of the parish's at-risk population.
Jeff Bernstein

Robert Reich - The Attack on American Education - 0 views

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    Less visible are cuts the states are already making in their school budgets. Because these cuts are at the state level they've been under the national radar screen, but viewed as a whole they seriously threaten the nation's future. Here's a summary
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