Group items tagged

Now, regarding the "no evidence" claim, I would recommend reading this article from Teachers College Record, this year, which summarizes a multitude of rigorous empirical studies of state school finance reforms finding generally that increased funding levels have been associated with improved outcomes and that more equitable distributions of resources have been associated with more equitable distributions of outcomes.

He stood alone for months, but now state Sen. Rollie Heath has the backing of two major education groups behind his $3 billion tax-increase proposal. Neither of the groups, however, is the Colorado Education Association, a teachers union that is the most powerful education group in the state and an organization with a well-funded political-action committee.

The city's plan for more than $255 million in federal Race to the Top funds has something for everyone -- especially educrats, data analysts and consultants, a Post review has found.

Late Thursday, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and 13 other senators introduced a bill that proposes the federal government fulfill a decades-old promise to pay 40 percent of the cost of educating students with disabilities, the Council for Exceptional Children's Lindsay Jones tells me.

Wielding power under a new state law to modify union contracts, Detroit Public Schools emergency manager Roy Roberts this morning imposed a 10 percent wage cut on all employees and moved the district to a less costly benefits plan.

As strapped public schools try to squeeze every possible dollar out of their budgets, an unpleasant reality awaits parents: They will most likely have to pay for programs and services that schools once provided free.

Talk about inflating demand for your product. The Success Charter Network, a chain of charter schools headed by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, spent an astonishing $1.6million in the 2009-2010 school year just for publicity and recruitment of new students, the group's most recent financial reports show. The network spent more on publicity and recruitment that year than it did in the previous two years. In 2009-2010, the seven schools operated by the Success network admitted 1,200 new students. That means Moskowitz spent about $1,300 on marketing for every new enrollee.

I've heard it over and over again from reformy pundits. Funding equity? Been there done that. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference. It's all about teacher quality! (which of course has little or nothing to do with funding equity?).  The bottom line is that equitable and adequate financing of schools is a NECESSARY UNDERLYING CONDITION FOR EVERYTHING ELSE!

Five months after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outlined a plan to give principals more autonomy to run their schools, the city imposed what would be the first of five consecutive cuts to the schools' budgets. To make ends meet, principals have trimmed after-school programs, shrunk their support staffs and tightened their schools' use of things like printing paper, markers and Post-it notes. They have dismissed coaches who used to help teachers prepare for their lessons, and teachers whose salaries they could no longer pay.

The gulf between schools educating the well-off and the disadvantaged has never been bigger. And things are only likely to get worse in the coming years

"A good teacher is the most important factor in a child's academic learning" Every time I hear this statement, my blood pressure goes up. I usually respond by saying that yes, a child's teacher is very important. But teachers have a relatively small effect on children's academic success when compared to the effect of out-of-school factors like economic insecurity, poor health care, unhealthy diet, homelessness and all the other ills of society. Educational "reforms" that ignore these factors are tarnished silver bullets, doomed to fail. Years of this type of wishful thinking has diverted Americans from having the undistorted, fact-based conversation we must have before educational outcomes can improve.

The coming education cutbacks have alarmed some regional leaders, including Richard W. Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Board. He noted in the board's quarterly publication Southwest Economy that a recent study ranked Texas "dead last in the percent of the population age 25 and older that graduated from high school, 37th in percent of population enrolled in degree-granting institutions, 35th in academic research and development, and 41st in science and engineering degrees awarded. We can't be happy that we are lagging behind in education," he wrote. 

At the meetings of the National Conference of State Legislatures in San Antonio this week, lawmakers from around the country heard a learned presentation from  education-finance professor James Guthrie of the Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University, purporting to show how the state is not getting its money's worth from  Texas public schools. Defining productivity in terms of the ratio of dollars invested to points scored by Texas students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Guthrie painted a dismal picture of public financial folly-a pattern of  growing investments for little gain that no private business would tolerate. Guthrie dismissed as inefficient state policies and attendant expenditures to reduce class size, provide certified teachers, and retain experienced teachers.

Most say the hardest job in Michigan doesn't belong to the governor, not even Detroit's mayor, but the new emergency manager for Detroit Public Schools. So far, Roy Roberts has asked teachers, students and parents to share in some deep cuts, but tonight Action News Investigator Ross Jones has details on a costly new perk that's raising eyebrows

A ranking Democratic member of the House Education Committee is demanding that the state Department of Education investigate the costs of a charter school rally held in Orlando this week.

The DCPS school year is under way and many students are adjusting to an unfamiliar environment. They're not alone. A surprising number of both teachers and principals are also completing their first month at their new digs. What impact DCPS's high teacher and principal turnover has on students is less than clear, like most things with the school system. Mary Levy is a DCPS budget expert. Her work sheds light on some very dark places. In an extended interview, directly following her Sept. 7 testimony at a D.C. Council hearing on middle schools, Levy discussed DCPS's increasing de facto segregation, Teach for America, charter schools and more. She began by talking about the lack of transparency in the budget, which she says has gotten worse over the years, despite the internet.

America was founded, and has flourished, as a land of opportunity-a place where, by working hard and seizing opportunities, each generation can do better than the last. But this very American notion seems frayed, as the effects of economic recession have taken a terrible toll on our kids and the schools they depend upon.

Video of remarks at AEI.

L.A.'s straight-talking mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, a former teacher union organizer, one of the nation's most influential Hispanic officials, and very likely a future governor of California, visited AEI yesterday to discuss the challenges of urban school reform. I thought it to be exceptionally good stuff; he was vague on key particulars, but I thought he gave admirably honest answers and did a terrific job of modeling how state and local leaders can push past the ideological slogans that soak up most of the oxygen in DC. You can see his remarks here.

It has been nearly 50 years since Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, pulling the curtain back on invisible poverty within the United States. If he were writing today, Harrington would find the same populations he described then: young, marginally educated people who drift in and out of low-pay, dead-end jobs, and older displaced workers, unable to find work as industries transform and shops close. But he would find more of them, especially the young, their situation worsened by further economic restructuring and globalization. And while the poor he wrote about were invisible in a time of abundance, ours are visible in a terrible recession, although invisible in most public policy. In fact, the poor are drifting further into the dark underbelly of American capitalism.