From the washington Post
by Ed Dionne Jr.
An attack on the right to vote is underway across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we’d condemn it as election-rigging. But it’s happening here, so there’s barely a whimper.
The laws are being passed in the name of preventing “voter fraud.” But study after study has shown that fraud by voters is not a major problem — and is less of a problem than how hard many states make it for people to vote in the first place. Some of the new laws, notably those limiting the number of days for early voting, have little plausible connection to battling fraud.
These statutes are not neutral. Their greatest impact will be to reduce turnout among African Americans, Latinos and the young. It is no accident that these groups were key to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 — or that the laws in question are being enacted in states where Republicans control state governments.
Again, think of what this would look like to a dispassionate observer. A party wins an election, as the GOP did in 2010. Then it changes the election laws in ways that benefit itself. In a democracy, the electorate is supposed to pick the politicians. With these laws, politicians are shaping their electorates.
Paradoxically, the rank partisanship of these measures is discouraging the media from reporting plainly on what’s going on. Voter suppression so clearly benefits the Republicans that the media typically report this through a partisan lens, knowing that accounts making clear whom these laws disenfranchise would be labeled as biased by the right. But the media should not fear telling the truth or standing up for the rights of the poor or the young.
The laws in question include requiring voter identification cards at the polls, limiting the time of early voting, ending same-day registration and making it difficult for groups to register new voters.
Sometimes the partisan motivation is so clear that if Stephen Colbert reported on what’s transpiring, his audience would assume he was making it up. In Texas, for example, the law allows concealed handgun licenses as identification but not student IDs. And guess what? Nationwide exit polls show that John McCain carried households in which someone owned a gun by 25 percentage points but lost voters in households without a gun by 32 points.
Besides Texas, states that enacted voter ID laws this year include Kansas, Wisconsin, South Carolina and Tennessee. Indiana and Georgia already had such requirements. The Maine Legislature voted to end same-day voter registration. Florida seems determined to go back to the chaos of the 2000 election. It shortened the early voting period, effectively ended the ability of registered voters to correct their address at the polls and imposed onerous restrictions on organized voter-registration drives.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, by 6 to 3, upheld Indiana’s voter ID statute. So seeking judicial relief may be difficult. Nonetheless, the Justice Department should vigorously challenge these laws, particularly in states covered by the Voting Rights Act. And the court should be asked to review the issue again in light of new evidence that these laws have a real impact in restricting the rights of particular voter groups.
“This requirement is just a poll tax by another name,” state Sen. Wendy Davis declared when Texas was debating its ID law early this year. In the bad old days, poll taxes, now outlawed by the 24th Amendment, were used to keep African Americans from voting. Even if the Supreme Court didn’t see things her way, Davis is right. This is the civil rights issue of our moment.
In part because of a surge of voters who had not cast ballots before, the United States elected its first African American president in 2008. Are we now going to witness a subtle return of Jim Crow voting laws?
Whether or not these laws can be rolled back, their existence should unleash a great civic campaign akin to the voter-registration drives of the civil rights years. The poor, the young and people of color should get their IDs, flock to the polls and insist on their right to vote in 2012.
If voter suppression is to occur, let it happen for all to see. The whole world, which watched us with admiration and respect in 2008, will be watching again.
ejdionne@washpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-states-are-rigging-the-2012-election/2011/06/19/AGCdB3bH_story.html?wpisrc=emailtoafriend
Monday, July 4, 2011
Sunday, July 3, 2011
In Florida this is how all teachers can expect to be treated
Senate bill 736 strips new teachers of due process. From now all first year teachers will be at will employees their entire careers. -cpg
From the Chicago reader
by Ben Joravshy
On June 25, Mayor Rahm Emanuel invited a group of recent education-school graduates to help change the world by signing up with the Chicago Public Schools. "I hope you stay in the Chicago area because I will continue to do what I think is best in telling the city of Chicago that we have the best-trained, best-educated workforce," Emanuel said in a commencement address to graduates at National Louis University.
To hear the mayor tell it, CPS is a great place to teach. Obviously, he's never met Allison Bates.
Bates was a third-year science teacher at Austin Polytechnical high school on the west side. But earlier this year, she was fired and banned from working anywhere in CPS for the unforgivable sin of—hold on to your hats, folks—not putting her lesson plans in the red folder, as her principal told her.
Allison Bates is a casualty of CPS's "do-not-hire" designation.
Welcome to the bureaucratic nightmare of the Chicago Public Schools' do-not-hire designation, the latest chapter in the city's curious strategy of reforming the schools by making life miserable for the people who teach there.
In 2008 Bates, 35, received her master's degree in education from Dominican University in River Forest and went to work at Austin Polytech, one of three small schools housed in the old Austin high school.
"It's pretty much a neighborhood west-side school," says Bates. "You have your sweethearts—the little girls and boys from the neighborhood who are quiet and want to get their work done. You also have a lot of tough kids—kids with parole officers who can make it pretty hard on you."
As a rookie teacher, she had to learn to take control of her classroom. "I've had some moments," she says. "I've been told to shut the fuck up. I had one kid grab me on the arm and say, 'Move your ass, bitch.' You have to learn how to stand up for yourself."
She thought she was making progress. The principal who hired her, William Gerstein, rated her "excellent" in her evaluations.
But in the summer of 2010, Gerstein was promoted to a job with the central office. And CPS replaced him with Fabby Williams, an interim principal, who moved to Chicago from North Carolina to take the job.
In March, Williams evaluated Bates's performance as "unsatisfactory."
I called Williams to get his side of the story, but he didn't respond to my messages.
According to Williams's evaluation of Bates, her unsatisfactory rating had nothing to do with her ability to manage a classroom or teach science to her students, many of whom are reading on a fourth-grade level. In fact, the evaluation, which is based on Williams's observation of Bates for all of 30 minutes one day, makes no mention of her teaching abilities at all.
Instead, Williams notes that she had not followed his instructions to put printed-out copies of her lesson plans in the red folder that he instructed all teachers to leave in a box in their rooms.
"Based on lack of evidence (data binder and lesson plan binder which teacher is required to have in class daily and should have current materials in them) teacher did not regularly have lesson plans available for lessons taught," Williams wrote in the evaluation.
And why didn't Bates put the lesson plans in the red folder like her boss told her?
"It's just something I didn't get around to doing 'cause I was doing so many other things," says Bates. "In retrospect, I wish I'd have done it. And I have lesson plans. They're in my computer and the principal can read them anytime he wants. I believe in lesson plans. I follow them. I just don't need to print them out and have them right in front of me like I'm reading from a script."
To realize the significance of an unsatisfactory evaluation you need to know a little something about CPS probationary policies, so bear with me, readers.
Basically, probationary teachers—that is, those with less than four years in the classroom—have no tenure rights. They have their jobs on a year-to-year basis and can be fired without much of an explanation.
Moreover, probationary teachers who are given unsatisfactory evaluations and who are not rehired at their schools are slapped with a do-not-hire designation. Principals can hire back teachers evaluated as unsatisfactory, but if they don't, the teachers are essentially banned from ever teaching anywhere in the CPS system.
Traditionally, CPS reserved its do-not-hire designation for really bad people who do really bad things, like abusing their students.
But last year, then-schools CEO Ron Huberman expanded the designation to include probationary teachers with unsatisfactory ratings whose schools decide not to rehire them. So now do-not-hire includes people who don't put their lesson plans in the red folder.
One more time: thank you, Mr. Huberman, for all the wonderful things you did for the schools.
Anyway, Bates met with Williams on March 3 to talk about the evaluation. "I had two questions," she says. "One is, 'What is it about my teaching that you consider so bad?' And the other is, 'Are you planning to hire me back?'
"He told me he hadn't made up his mind about bringing me back," says Bates. "He also told me that I seemed frustrated. I said, 'Of course I am. My kids come in at a fourth-grade reading level. I want them to do better. Anyone would be frustrated. But that doesn't tell me about my teaching.'" She says he didn't have a response.
All told, Williams fired seven teachers, roughly a quarter of the staff. In addition to Bates, four others were probationary teachers who now face lifelong bans. Two of them tell me that Williams's evaluation cited them for not putting the lesson plans in the folder.
On May 16, about 100 students walked out of Austin Polytech in a show of support for the ousted teachers.
Two days later Williams called Bates to his office and handed her a letter from Flavia Hernández, the CPS chief officer for P-12 management, informing Bates that she had been "temporarily reassigned" to an administrative office pending "the result of an investigation of the incident/matter in question." The letter doesn't say what the "incident/matter in question" actually is. Hernández did not respond to my call for comment.
Once he'd delivered the letter, Williams led Bates back to her classroom to get her jacket and purse. "This is a school day and there's students in the classroom," she says. "They're asking me, 'Ms. Bates, where you going?' I could only tell them, 'I got to go.'"
After being escorted out of the school by security, she drove to the Area 19 administrative office. "I never knew why I was reassigned. No one told me what I was charged with or what incident or matter they were investigating. They punished me without telling me my crime."
Eventually, a union official—who filed a grievance on her behalf—told Bates that she'd been accused of inciting the student walkout. "That's ridiculous," Bates says. "The students did that on their own. I had nothing to do with it."
For the last month of the school year, until it officially ended on June 17, Bates reported to work every day at the area administrative office, where she sat at a desk in the corner and read a book. She's now appealing her unsatisfactory evaluation in the hopes of overturning the do-not-hire designation so she can get another job in the system. And she's still paying off the $13,000 she borrowed to get her master's degree.
As for her students, they got a month's worth of substitute teachers. Or, as Mayor Emanuel might put it, they "got the shaft."
Incidentally, Williams is no longer at Austin Polytech—he took a new job as principal at suburban Bolingbrook High School. "The man was here for less than a year and he left everybody's life in shambles," says David Corwin, another probationary teacher at Austin Polytech who was given the do-not-hire designation. "He's gone and we're left to pick up the pieces."
YOU KNOW YOU'RE REALLY OLD WHEN . . .
You're writing about the school-teaching kids of teachers you wrote about years ago. Let me explain:
In the winter of 1995, I noticed a story in the Sun-Times pointing out that six of the ten winners in a citywide high school poetry-writing contest came from Lane Tech.
I read the poems and they were pretty damn good.
Curious about why so many good poets were coming from one school—which back then was primarily known as a technical school—I made a few calls and wound up having coffee at a north side cafe with an English teacher named Randy Bates.
You guessed it—Allison Bates's father.
It turned out that Randy Bates was also Lane's drama coach and he was gearing up to stage a production of The Diary of Anne Frank. I came up with a plan to follow the production from auditions to cast party and write one of those endless epics the Reader used to run in those days.
Alas, a few days before auditions, the principal fired Bates as drama coach and reassigned him from creative writing. Apparently the principal was upset because Bates had complained about safety hazards in the auditorium to Lane's local school council, an oversight body of parents, teachers, and community reps.
A few dozen of Bates's students walked out to protest his hiring, staging a demonstration right in front of the school.
I wrote it up, hammering Lane with everything I had. Randy Bates told me that the assistant principal said to him that if "that newspaper guy" ever came to Lane, "I'll kick his ass."
Fortunately, he never made good on that threat, though I went to Lane every year to watch its Thanksgiving basketball tournament. Good thing I always wore my Groucho Marx mustache.
Randy Bates retired in 2006 and now he's reliving it all with the crackdown on his daughter.
As old teachers will tell you, the more things change at CPS—well, you know the rest.
E-mail Ben Joravsky at bjoravsky@chicagoreader.com. Joravsky discusses his reporting weekly with journalist Dave Glowacz at mrradio.org/benj. Subscribe to their podcast at the iTunes Store.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-public-schools-do-not-hire/Content?oid=4147617
From the Chicago reader
by Ben Joravshy
On June 25, Mayor Rahm Emanuel invited a group of recent education-school graduates to help change the world by signing up with the Chicago Public Schools. "I hope you stay in the Chicago area because I will continue to do what I think is best in telling the city of Chicago that we have the best-trained, best-educated workforce," Emanuel said in a commencement address to graduates at National Louis University.
To hear the mayor tell it, CPS is a great place to teach. Obviously, he's never met Allison Bates.
Bates was a third-year science teacher at Austin Polytechnical high school on the west side. But earlier this year, she was fired and banned from working anywhere in CPS for the unforgivable sin of—hold on to your hats, folks—not putting her lesson plans in the red folder, as her principal told her.
Allison Bates is a casualty of CPS's "do-not-hire" designation.
Welcome to the bureaucratic nightmare of the Chicago Public Schools' do-not-hire designation, the latest chapter in the city's curious strategy of reforming the schools by making life miserable for the people who teach there.
In 2008 Bates, 35, received her master's degree in education from Dominican University in River Forest and went to work at Austin Polytech, one of three small schools housed in the old Austin high school.
"It's pretty much a neighborhood west-side school," says Bates. "You have your sweethearts—the little girls and boys from the neighborhood who are quiet and want to get their work done. You also have a lot of tough kids—kids with parole officers who can make it pretty hard on you."
As a rookie teacher, she had to learn to take control of her classroom. "I've had some moments," she says. "I've been told to shut the fuck up. I had one kid grab me on the arm and say, 'Move your ass, bitch.' You have to learn how to stand up for yourself."
She thought she was making progress. The principal who hired her, William Gerstein, rated her "excellent" in her evaluations.
But in the summer of 2010, Gerstein was promoted to a job with the central office. And CPS replaced him with Fabby Williams, an interim principal, who moved to Chicago from North Carolina to take the job.
In March, Williams evaluated Bates's performance as "unsatisfactory."
I called Williams to get his side of the story, but he didn't respond to my messages.
According to Williams's evaluation of Bates, her unsatisfactory rating had nothing to do with her ability to manage a classroom or teach science to her students, many of whom are reading on a fourth-grade level. In fact, the evaluation, which is based on Williams's observation of Bates for all of 30 minutes one day, makes no mention of her teaching abilities at all.
Instead, Williams notes that she had not followed his instructions to put printed-out copies of her lesson plans in the red folder that he instructed all teachers to leave in a box in their rooms.
"Based on lack of evidence (data binder and lesson plan binder which teacher is required to have in class daily and should have current materials in them) teacher did not regularly have lesson plans available for lessons taught," Williams wrote in the evaluation.
And why didn't Bates put the lesson plans in the red folder like her boss told her?
"It's just something I didn't get around to doing 'cause I was doing so many other things," says Bates. "In retrospect, I wish I'd have done it. And I have lesson plans. They're in my computer and the principal can read them anytime he wants. I believe in lesson plans. I follow them. I just don't need to print them out and have them right in front of me like I'm reading from a script."
To realize the significance of an unsatisfactory evaluation you need to know a little something about CPS probationary policies, so bear with me, readers.
Basically, probationary teachers—that is, those with less than four years in the classroom—have no tenure rights. They have their jobs on a year-to-year basis and can be fired without much of an explanation.
Moreover, probationary teachers who are given unsatisfactory evaluations and who are not rehired at their schools are slapped with a do-not-hire designation. Principals can hire back teachers evaluated as unsatisfactory, but if they don't, the teachers are essentially banned from ever teaching anywhere in the CPS system.
Traditionally, CPS reserved its do-not-hire designation for really bad people who do really bad things, like abusing their students.
But last year, then-schools CEO Ron Huberman expanded the designation to include probationary teachers with unsatisfactory ratings whose schools decide not to rehire them. So now do-not-hire includes people who don't put their lesson plans in the red folder.
One more time: thank you, Mr. Huberman, for all the wonderful things you did for the schools.
Anyway, Bates met with Williams on March 3 to talk about the evaluation. "I had two questions," she says. "One is, 'What is it about my teaching that you consider so bad?' And the other is, 'Are you planning to hire me back?'
"He told me he hadn't made up his mind about bringing me back," says Bates. "He also told me that I seemed frustrated. I said, 'Of course I am. My kids come in at a fourth-grade reading level. I want them to do better. Anyone would be frustrated. But that doesn't tell me about my teaching.'" She says he didn't have a response.
All told, Williams fired seven teachers, roughly a quarter of the staff. In addition to Bates, four others were probationary teachers who now face lifelong bans. Two of them tell me that Williams's evaluation cited them for not putting the lesson plans in the folder.
On May 16, about 100 students walked out of Austin Polytech in a show of support for the ousted teachers.
Two days later Williams called Bates to his office and handed her a letter from Flavia Hernández, the CPS chief officer for P-12 management, informing Bates that she had been "temporarily reassigned" to an administrative office pending "the result of an investigation of the incident/matter in question." The letter doesn't say what the "incident/matter in question" actually is. Hernández did not respond to my call for comment.
Once he'd delivered the letter, Williams led Bates back to her classroom to get her jacket and purse. "This is a school day and there's students in the classroom," she says. "They're asking me, 'Ms. Bates, where you going?' I could only tell them, 'I got to go.'"
After being escorted out of the school by security, she drove to the Area 19 administrative office. "I never knew why I was reassigned. No one told me what I was charged with or what incident or matter they were investigating. They punished me without telling me my crime."
Eventually, a union official—who filed a grievance on her behalf—told Bates that she'd been accused of inciting the student walkout. "That's ridiculous," Bates says. "The students did that on their own. I had nothing to do with it."
For the last month of the school year, until it officially ended on June 17, Bates reported to work every day at the area administrative office, where she sat at a desk in the corner and read a book. She's now appealing her unsatisfactory evaluation in the hopes of overturning the do-not-hire designation so she can get another job in the system. And she's still paying off the $13,000 she borrowed to get her master's degree.
As for her students, they got a month's worth of substitute teachers. Or, as Mayor Emanuel might put it, they "got the shaft."
Incidentally, Williams is no longer at Austin Polytech—he took a new job as principal at suburban Bolingbrook High School. "The man was here for less than a year and he left everybody's life in shambles," says David Corwin, another probationary teacher at Austin Polytech who was given the do-not-hire designation. "He's gone and we're left to pick up the pieces."
YOU KNOW YOU'RE REALLY OLD WHEN . . .
You're writing about the school-teaching kids of teachers you wrote about years ago. Let me explain:
In the winter of 1995, I noticed a story in the Sun-Times pointing out that six of the ten winners in a citywide high school poetry-writing contest came from Lane Tech.
I read the poems and they were pretty damn good.
Curious about why so many good poets were coming from one school—which back then was primarily known as a technical school—I made a few calls and wound up having coffee at a north side cafe with an English teacher named Randy Bates.
You guessed it—Allison Bates's father.
It turned out that Randy Bates was also Lane's drama coach and he was gearing up to stage a production of The Diary of Anne Frank. I came up with a plan to follow the production from auditions to cast party and write one of those endless epics the Reader used to run in those days.
Alas, a few days before auditions, the principal fired Bates as drama coach and reassigned him from creative writing. Apparently the principal was upset because Bates had complained about safety hazards in the auditorium to Lane's local school council, an oversight body of parents, teachers, and community reps.
A few dozen of Bates's students walked out to protest his hiring, staging a demonstration right in front of the school.
I wrote it up, hammering Lane with everything I had. Randy Bates told me that the assistant principal said to him that if "that newspaper guy" ever came to Lane, "I'll kick his ass."
Fortunately, he never made good on that threat, though I went to Lane every year to watch its Thanksgiving basketball tournament. Good thing I always wore my Groucho Marx mustache.
Randy Bates retired in 2006 and now he's reliving it all with the crackdown on his daughter.
As old teachers will tell you, the more things change at CPS—well, you know the rest.
E-mail Ben Joravsky at bjoravsky@chicagoreader.com. Joravsky discusses his reporting weekly with journalist Dave Glowacz at mrradio.org/benj. Subscribe to their podcast at the iTunes Store.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-public-schools-do-not-hire/Content?oid=4147617
Jeb Bush, ignores facts, pushes unsubstantiated claims about education, what’s new
From Scathing Purple Musings
by Bob Sikes
In a blistering review prepared by Dr. William J.Mathis, Jeb Bush’s presentation for the nation’s state lawmakers is said to “make unsupported and unsupportable claims.”
The review was in part sponsored by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. Here is their press release:
EAST LANSING, Mich. (June 30, 2011) — Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s so-called education reforms that he’s pushing through presentations to state
lawmakers rest on unsupported claims and hand-picked evidence, according to a new academic review released today.
Bush’s presentation, “Florida’s Formula for Student Achievement,” was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by William J. Mathis, managing director of Colorado-Boulder’s National Education Policy Center (NEPC). The review was produced by the NEPC with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
Released under the banner of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the Bush presentation claims that six “reforms” — assigning simplistic letter grades to schools; high-stakes testing; imposing newgraduation requirements; bonus pay for teachers; alternative teacher credentialing; and schools of choice —caused gains in fourth-grade reading scores in Florida.
Instead of a comprehensive and objective consideration of the impact of Florida’s policies, Bush’s presentation “is clearly an advocacy tool designed for advancing a particular set of reform proposals,” Mathis wrote in his review. This has resulted in a misleading presentation, with Bush promoting several policies that reputable research has shown to be ineffective or even harmful.
“Fundamentally, Mr. Bush’s presentation is based on the fallacious causal claim that his selected set of loosely coupled reforms introduced in Florida between 1992 and 2011 caused fourth-grade reading score gains,” Mathis wrote in his review. “No evidence is provided to sustain this linkage. Further, this claim ignores the fact that some of the favored reforms were implemented as late as 2010, and some are not yet implemented.”
Moreover, Bush’s presentation resembles and shares graphics with a report by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank whose report has been
repackaged for various states. The Heritage report’s lead author is now on Bush’s staff.
Policymakers should ignore Bush’s salesmanship and look instead to solid, objective research evidence, Mathis said.
Find Mathis’ review and a link to Bush’s presentation at http://www.greatlakescenter.org.Bush’s Michigan presentation is available from the review’s author. A similar PowerPoint presentation from Mr. Bush is available on the web at:
http://www.excelined.org/docs/Oklahoma%20Education%20Presentation.pdf
The Think Twice think tank review project, a project of the National Education Policy Center, provides the public, policy makers and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
The review is also available on the National Education Policy Center website at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-florida-formula
Wow.
As the study focuses on the actual presentation made by Bush, it represents the most focused criticism to date of the former Florida governor. Bush’s vision for Florida’s system on education has been realized through Rick Scott’s pen. With his assertions being so effectively challenged, he’s been called out. With news today that more Florida schools got A’s than every before, its fair to wonder why the state needed even more reform.
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/jeb-bushs-education-foundation-makes-unsupported-claims-ignores-facts-to-push-agenda/
by Bob Sikes
In a blistering review prepared by Dr. William J.Mathis, Jeb Bush’s presentation for the nation’s state lawmakers is said to “make unsupported and unsupportable claims.”
The review was in part sponsored by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. Here is their press release:
EAST LANSING, Mich. (June 30, 2011) — Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s so-called education reforms that he’s pushing through presentations to state
lawmakers rest on unsupported claims and hand-picked evidence, according to a new academic review released today.
Bush’s presentation, “Florida’s Formula for Student Achievement,” was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by William J. Mathis, managing director of Colorado-Boulder’s National Education Policy Center (NEPC). The review was produced by the NEPC with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
Released under the banner of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the Bush presentation claims that six “reforms” — assigning simplistic letter grades to schools; high-stakes testing; imposing newgraduation requirements; bonus pay for teachers; alternative teacher credentialing; and schools of choice —caused gains in fourth-grade reading scores in Florida.
Instead of a comprehensive and objective consideration of the impact of Florida’s policies, Bush’s presentation “is clearly an advocacy tool designed for advancing a particular set of reform proposals,” Mathis wrote in his review. This has resulted in a misleading presentation, with Bush promoting several policies that reputable research has shown to be ineffective or even harmful.
“Fundamentally, Mr. Bush’s presentation is based on the fallacious causal claim that his selected set of loosely coupled reforms introduced in Florida between 1992 and 2011 caused fourth-grade reading score gains,” Mathis wrote in his review. “No evidence is provided to sustain this linkage. Further, this claim ignores the fact that some of the favored reforms were implemented as late as 2010, and some are not yet implemented.”
Moreover, Bush’s presentation resembles and shares graphics with a report by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank whose report has been
repackaged for various states. The Heritage report’s lead author is now on Bush’s staff.
Policymakers should ignore Bush’s salesmanship and look instead to solid, objective research evidence, Mathis said.
Find Mathis’ review and a link to Bush’s presentation at http://www.greatlakescenter.org.Bush’s Michigan presentation is available from the review’s author. A similar PowerPoint presentation from Mr. Bush is available on the web at:
http://www.excelined.org/docs/Oklahoma%20Education%20Presentation.pdf
The Think Twice think tank review project, a project of the National Education Policy Center, provides the public, policy makers and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
The review is also available on the National Education Policy Center website at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-florida-formula
Wow.
As the study focuses on the actual presentation made by Bush, it represents the most focused criticism to date of the former Florida governor. Bush’s vision for Florida’s system on education has been realized through Rick Scott’s pen. With his assertions being so effectively challenged, he’s been called out. With news today that more Florida schools got A’s than every before, its fair to wonder why the state needed even more reform.
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/jeb-bushs-education-foundation-makes-unsupported-claims-ignores-facts-to-push-agenda/
Education, last in the nation is good enough for the Florida Legislature
From the Orlando Sentinel
by Leslie Postal
TALLAHASSEE — Can Florida's courts judge whether the state's public schools are high quality and adequately funded?
Lawyers for the state of Florida argued before an appellate court Thursday that they cannot. But plaintiffs in a sweeping lawsuit filed in 2009 asked a court to do just that, accusing the state of failing to meet its constitutional obligations for "high-quality" public schools.
The lawsuit, whose plaintiffs include three Orlando mothers, asked a court to rule the state in violation of the Florida Constitution and to order a "remedial" plan to deal with school-budget cuts, a faulty school-accountability system and low test scores and graduation rates, among other areas cited as problems.
But at Thursday's court hearing, the state argued the lawsuit amounts to a political argument about education policy that courts cannot decide without infringing on the rights of the Florida Legislature, which makes school law and sets school funding.
Solicitor General Scott Makar asked the First District Court of Appeal to toss out the lawsuit.
Though the state constitution demands "high-quality" schools, it does not set standards by which a court could judge that benchmark, he told a three-judge appellate-court panel.
"How is the court to resolve the matter?" he said. The lawsuit is "all about money and policy judgments," he said.
The state previously lost a bid to get a circuit court to dismiss the lawsuit and is now trying to prevent the lower court from hearing the case by asking for a "writ of prohibition" from the appeal court.
Jon Mills, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, argued the state's request was an "extraordinary" attempt to circumvent usual judicial proceedings and avoid a hearing on a "comprehensive challenge" to deficiencies in Florida's school system.
By the state's argument, Mills said, the amendment voters added to the state constitution in 1998 demanding "high-quality" schools becomes meaningless because "the court can do nothing about it."
The judges asked pointed questions of both sides.
"So if the Legislature chose not to fund education at all, there would be no remedy — other than voting them out of office?" asked Judge William Van Nortwick Jr. while Makar was presenting his case.
Chief Judge Robert Benton II asked Mills if the phrase "by law" in the 1998 amendment meant the question of quality schools "belongs to the Legislature." He also asked a few times, "What kind of remedy do you envision?"
The amendment added by voters to Florida's constitution was pushed by school advocates after a similar school-adequacy lawsuit was dismissed by the courts in 1996. Mills, a former Democratic speaker of the Florida House, helped craft the amendment.
The amendment states that "adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education."
Makar told the judges that the amendment isn't meaningless but that it lays out a "value" for state lawmakers to act on, not a list of specific standards on which a court could rule.
He said it was written that way because a majority of those who put it on the ballot wanted to avoid "litigation unlimited," as seen in other states.
New Jersey's school-adequacy case, for example, dates back decades. That state's supreme court ruled in May that budget cuts were not permissible in the districts that were part of the legal case.
Florida's case was brought by two advocacy groups, including Orlando-based Fund Education Now, and parents and students in Duval and Pasco counties.
It will be costly and time-consuming, the state argued, and its "political nature" is obvious in the "staggering" number of documents the plaintiffs have already requested, which represent an "unprecedented intrusion into the legislative process," state attorneys wrote in their brief to the court.
The plaintiffs, for example, have requested a correspondence, dating back to 2007, between the state education commissioner and the Legislature on budgets, curriculum and education policy.
"The lawsuit will serve as a continual source of distraction to lawmakers and administrative officials charged with setting educational policy in the state," the state's brief says. "The years of needless litigation will never be undone, and the massive costs expended will be lost irretrievably."
But in their brief, Mills and his colleagues argued the lawsuit makes a good case for "broad deficiencies in the public education system that were created in violation of the state's explicit constitutional duty."
And state courts, they wrote, "have both the power and the duty to interpret and enforce Florida's Constitution."
However the judges rule, an appeal of their decision is expected.
lpostal@tribune.com or 407-420-5273
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/0s-florida-schools-lawsuit-20110630,0,7976005.story
by Leslie Postal
TALLAHASSEE — Can Florida's courts judge whether the state's public schools are high quality and adequately funded?
Lawyers for the state of Florida argued before an appellate court Thursday that they cannot. But plaintiffs in a sweeping lawsuit filed in 2009 asked a court to do just that, accusing the state of failing to meet its constitutional obligations for "high-quality" public schools.
The lawsuit, whose plaintiffs include three Orlando mothers, asked a court to rule the state in violation of the Florida Constitution and to order a "remedial" plan to deal with school-budget cuts, a faulty school-accountability system and low test scores and graduation rates, among other areas cited as problems.
But at Thursday's court hearing, the state argued the lawsuit amounts to a political argument about education policy that courts cannot decide without infringing on the rights of the Florida Legislature, which makes school law and sets school funding.
Solicitor General Scott Makar asked the First District Court of Appeal to toss out the lawsuit.
Though the state constitution demands "high-quality" schools, it does not set standards by which a court could judge that benchmark, he told a three-judge appellate-court panel.
"How is the court to resolve the matter?" he said. The lawsuit is "all about money and policy judgments," he said.
The state previously lost a bid to get a circuit court to dismiss the lawsuit and is now trying to prevent the lower court from hearing the case by asking for a "writ of prohibition" from the appeal court.
Jon Mills, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, argued the state's request was an "extraordinary" attempt to circumvent usual judicial proceedings and avoid a hearing on a "comprehensive challenge" to deficiencies in Florida's school system.
By the state's argument, Mills said, the amendment voters added to the state constitution in 1998 demanding "high-quality" schools becomes meaningless because "the court can do nothing about it."
The judges asked pointed questions of both sides.
"So if the Legislature chose not to fund education at all, there would be no remedy — other than voting them out of office?" asked Judge William Van Nortwick Jr. while Makar was presenting his case.
Chief Judge Robert Benton II asked Mills if the phrase "by law" in the 1998 amendment meant the question of quality schools "belongs to the Legislature." He also asked a few times, "What kind of remedy do you envision?"
The amendment added by voters to Florida's constitution was pushed by school advocates after a similar school-adequacy lawsuit was dismissed by the courts in 1996. Mills, a former Democratic speaker of the Florida House, helped craft the amendment.
The amendment states that "adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education."
Makar told the judges that the amendment isn't meaningless but that it lays out a "value" for state lawmakers to act on, not a list of specific standards on which a court could rule.
He said it was written that way because a majority of those who put it on the ballot wanted to avoid "litigation unlimited," as seen in other states.
New Jersey's school-adequacy case, for example, dates back decades. That state's supreme court ruled in May that budget cuts were not permissible in the districts that were part of the legal case.
Florida's case was brought by two advocacy groups, including Orlando-based Fund Education Now, and parents and students in Duval and Pasco counties.
It will be costly and time-consuming, the state argued, and its "political nature" is obvious in the "staggering" number of documents the plaintiffs have already requested, which represent an "unprecedented intrusion into the legislative process," state attorneys wrote in their brief to the court.
The plaintiffs, for example, have requested a correspondence, dating back to 2007, between the state education commissioner and the Legislature on budgets, curriculum and education policy.
"The lawsuit will serve as a continual source of distraction to lawmakers and administrative officials charged with setting educational policy in the state," the state's brief says. "The years of needless litigation will never be undone, and the massive costs expended will be lost irretrievably."
But in their brief, Mills and his colleagues argued the lawsuit makes a good case for "broad deficiencies in the public education system that were created in violation of the state's explicit constitutional duty."
And state courts, they wrote, "have both the power and the duty to interpret and enforce Florida's Constitution."
However the judges rule, an appeal of their decision is expected.
lpostal@tribune.com or 407-420-5273
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/0s-florida-schools-lawsuit-20110630,0,7976005.story
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Are republicans purposely trying to damage the economy?
From the New York Times
by Christina Romer
DEALING with our nation’s gaping budget deficit is going to hurt. So here is a question for policy makers: What would hurt more, raising taxes or reducing spending?
The Republicans who walked out of budget negotiations the other week think they know the answer. They insist that higher taxes would threaten our fragile economic recovery and do serious long-term damage. Better to cut federal spending, they say.
President Obama pressured Republicans last week to accept higher taxes, in addition to reduced spending, as part of a plan to pare the deficit.
The economic evidence doesn’t support the anti-tax view. Both tax increases and spending cuts will tend to slow the recovery in the near term, but spending cuts will likely slow it more. Over the longer term, sensible tax increases will probably do less damage to economic growth and productivity than cuts in government investment.
Tax increases and spending cuts hurt the economy in the short run by reducing demand. Increase taxes, and Americans would have less money to spend. Reduce spending, and less government money would be pumped into the economy.
Professional forecasters estimate that a tax increase equivalent to 1 percent of the nation’s economic output usually reduces gross domestic product by about 1 percent after 18 months. A spending cut of that size, by contrast, reduces G.D.P. by about 1.5 percent — substantially more.
Some in Washington and in the news media have seized on a study I conducted with David Romer, my husband and colleague, that they say shows tax increases having a bigger short-term effect on the economy than spending cuts.
They are mistaken.
Our study, which examined only federal tax policy, found that conventional analysis underestimates the effect of tax changes on the economy substantially. The key problem we address is that changes in taxes are often linked to what is happening in the economy.
A tax surcharge in 1968, for instance, raised taxes because output was rising rapidly and was expected to keep surging. That the economy’s growth rate was about average even after that step might be interpreted as evidence that the surcharge did little. But considering the motive for it, and the fact that the economy had been predicted to continue growing quickly when it was introduced, this tax increase appears to have had a substantial chilling effect on the economy.
If there were a similar study on government spending, it would likely show that spending cuts also have larger effects than conventionally believed. Like tax actions, spending changes are often correlated with other factors affecting economic activity. For example, large cuts in military spending, like those after World War II and the Korean War, were typically accompanied by the end of wartime taxes and production controls. Those probably lessened the economic impact of the spending cuts, leading many researchers to underestimate the reductions’ effects.
There is a basic reason why government spending changes probably have a larger short-term impact than tax changes. When a household’s tax bill rises by, say, $100, that household typically pays for part of that increase by reducing its savings. Its spending tends to fall by less than $100. But when the government cuts spending by $100, overall demand goes down by that full amount.
Wealthier households typically pay for more of a tax increase out of savings, and so they reduce their spending less than ordinary households. This implies that tax increases on wealthy households probably have less effect on the economy than those on the poor or the middle class.
All of this argues against any form of fiscal austerity just now. Even some deficit hawks warn that immediate tax increases or spending cuts could push the economy back into recession. Far better to pass a plan that phases in spending cuts or tax increases over time.
But if federal policy makers do decide to reduce the deficit immediately, reducing spending alone would probably be the most damaging to the recovery. Raising taxes for the wealthy would be least likely to reduce overall demand and raise unemployment.
What about the long-term health of the economy? Here, too, the relative costs of tax increases and spending cuts are often misstated.
Higher tax rates reduce the rewards of work and investing. This can have supply-side effects that lower economic growth over decades.
But a large number of academic studies has found that these effects are relatively small. An excellent survey due to be published in the Journal of Economic Literature found that raising current tax rates by 10 percent would reduce reported income — the end result of work and entrepreneurial effort — by less than 2 percent. That is far less than what was hypothesized by prominent Reagan-era supply-siders like Arthur B. Laffer. He and others postulated that raising taxes 10 percent would ultimately reduce income by more than 10 percent, leading to a decline in tax revenue.
Certain spending cuts may also have small effects on long-run growth. Entitlement spending on Social Security and Medicare could probably be slowed without reducing the nation’s productive ability. But as the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform emphasized in a report in December, such changes can and should be made in a way that protects the most vulnerable Americans.
Government spending on things like basic scientific research, education and infrastructure, on the other hand, helps increase future productivity. This type of spending often produces high social returns, but the private sector is unlikely to step up if the government pulls back. Case studies described in a recent survey found that less than half of the returns from research-and-development spending were captured by the private investor, so corporations shy away from such endeavors. Cutting federal funds for R.& D. would leave a void and could have significant long-run effects on growth.
These long-term considerations, like the short-run concerns, point to a plan for reducing the deficit that combines spending cuts and tax increases. The cuts should spare valuable investment spending. On the tax side, nearly every economist I know agrees that the best way to raise revenue would be limit tax breaks for households and corporations.
The fiscal commission proposed a concrete plan that would trim a wide range of credits and exemptions, including the preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance. It would use part of the revenue to reduce tax rates and the rest to cut the deficit. This would help deal with the deficit while actually improving incentives.
The bottom line is that tax increases should be part of any comprehensive budget plan. Opinion polls suggest that many Americans understand this. It is time for policy makers to accept this economic reality.
Christina D. Romer is an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/business/economy/03view.html
by Christina Romer
DEALING with our nation’s gaping budget deficit is going to hurt. So here is a question for policy makers: What would hurt more, raising taxes or reducing spending?
The Republicans who walked out of budget negotiations the other week think they know the answer. They insist that higher taxes would threaten our fragile economic recovery and do serious long-term damage. Better to cut federal spending, they say.
President Obama pressured Republicans last week to accept higher taxes, in addition to reduced spending, as part of a plan to pare the deficit.
The economic evidence doesn’t support the anti-tax view. Both tax increases and spending cuts will tend to slow the recovery in the near term, but spending cuts will likely slow it more. Over the longer term, sensible tax increases will probably do less damage to economic growth and productivity than cuts in government investment.
Tax increases and spending cuts hurt the economy in the short run by reducing demand. Increase taxes, and Americans would have less money to spend. Reduce spending, and less government money would be pumped into the economy.
Professional forecasters estimate that a tax increase equivalent to 1 percent of the nation’s economic output usually reduces gross domestic product by about 1 percent after 18 months. A spending cut of that size, by contrast, reduces G.D.P. by about 1.5 percent — substantially more.
Some in Washington and in the news media have seized on a study I conducted with David Romer, my husband and colleague, that they say shows tax increases having a bigger short-term effect on the economy than spending cuts.
They are mistaken.
Our study, which examined only federal tax policy, found that conventional analysis underestimates the effect of tax changes on the economy substantially. The key problem we address is that changes in taxes are often linked to what is happening in the economy.
A tax surcharge in 1968, for instance, raised taxes because output was rising rapidly and was expected to keep surging. That the economy’s growth rate was about average even after that step might be interpreted as evidence that the surcharge did little. But considering the motive for it, and the fact that the economy had been predicted to continue growing quickly when it was introduced, this tax increase appears to have had a substantial chilling effect on the economy.
If there were a similar study on government spending, it would likely show that spending cuts also have larger effects than conventionally believed. Like tax actions, spending changes are often correlated with other factors affecting economic activity. For example, large cuts in military spending, like those after World War II and the Korean War, were typically accompanied by the end of wartime taxes and production controls. Those probably lessened the economic impact of the spending cuts, leading many researchers to underestimate the reductions’ effects.
There is a basic reason why government spending changes probably have a larger short-term impact than tax changes. When a household’s tax bill rises by, say, $100, that household typically pays for part of that increase by reducing its savings. Its spending tends to fall by less than $100. But when the government cuts spending by $100, overall demand goes down by that full amount.
Wealthier households typically pay for more of a tax increase out of savings, and so they reduce their spending less than ordinary households. This implies that tax increases on wealthy households probably have less effect on the economy than those on the poor or the middle class.
All of this argues against any form of fiscal austerity just now. Even some deficit hawks warn that immediate tax increases or spending cuts could push the economy back into recession. Far better to pass a plan that phases in spending cuts or tax increases over time.
But if federal policy makers do decide to reduce the deficit immediately, reducing spending alone would probably be the most damaging to the recovery. Raising taxes for the wealthy would be least likely to reduce overall demand and raise unemployment.
What about the long-term health of the economy? Here, too, the relative costs of tax increases and spending cuts are often misstated.
Higher tax rates reduce the rewards of work and investing. This can have supply-side effects that lower economic growth over decades.
But a large number of academic studies has found that these effects are relatively small. An excellent survey due to be published in the Journal of Economic Literature found that raising current tax rates by 10 percent would reduce reported income — the end result of work and entrepreneurial effort — by less than 2 percent. That is far less than what was hypothesized by prominent Reagan-era supply-siders like Arthur B. Laffer. He and others postulated that raising taxes 10 percent would ultimately reduce income by more than 10 percent, leading to a decline in tax revenue.
Certain spending cuts may also have small effects on long-run growth. Entitlement spending on Social Security and Medicare could probably be slowed without reducing the nation’s productive ability. But as the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform emphasized in a report in December, such changes can and should be made in a way that protects the most vulnerable Americans.
Government spending on things like basic scientific research, education and infrastructure, on the other hand, helps increase future productivity. This type of spending often produces high social returns, but the private sector is unlikely to step up if the government pulls back. Case studies described in a recent survey found that less than half of the returns from research-and-development spending were captured by the private investor, so corporations shy away from such endeavors. Cutting federal funds for R.& D. would leave a void and could have significant long-run effects on growth.
These long-term considerations, like the short-run concerns, point to a plan for reducing the deficit that combines spending cuts and tax increases. The cuts should spare valuable investment spending. On the tax side, nearly every economist I know agrees that the best way to raise revenue would be limit tax breaks for households and corporations.
The fiscal commission proposed a concrete plan that would trim a wide range of credits and exemptions, including the preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance. It would use part of the revenue to reduce tax rates and the rest to cut the deficit. This would help deal with the deficit while actually improving incentives.
The bottom line is that tax increases should be part of any comprehensive budget plan. Opinion polls suggest that many Americans understand this. It is time for policy makers to accept this economic reality.
Christina D. Romer is an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/business/economy/03view.html
Data not gut reactions should drive education reform
From the Washinton Times Answer Sheet
by Valerie Strauss
Three thousand high schools across the country serving nearly half a million students had no math classes higher than Algebra 1 in the 2009-10 academic year, and more than 2 million students in about 7,300 schools had no access to calculus classes, according to federal data released this week.
The new Education Department data details the unequal resources available to the poorest and neediest students. Statistics released from what is known as the Civil Rights Data Collection, covering approximately 7,000 school districts and more than 72,000 schools, also showed:
*Schools serving mostly African American students are twice as likely to have teachers with one or two years of experience than are schools within the same district that serve mostly white students.
*Only 2 percent of students with disabilities are taking at least one Advanced Placement class.
*Students with limited English proficiency make up 6 percent of the high school population (in grades 9-12), but comprise 15 percent of the students for whom algebra is the highest-level math course taken by their final year of high school.
*Only 22 percent of local education agencies reported that they operated pre-kindergarten programs targeting children from low-income families.
To hear many modern school reformers tell it, public education’s biggest problem is a bunch of lousy teachers. The new data tells a more accurate story.
The issue of equity in education is central to educator Linda Darling-Hammond’s 2010 book “ The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future .”
With only 1 in 10 kindergarten students from low-income families actually on track to graduate from college, Darling-Hammond, of Stanford University, shows how schools for students who live in low-income homes, students of color, and English language learners often do not have the same access to high-quality teachers, curriculum and resources as wealthier, white students. And she explains what successful systems really look like.
Yet equity is not big on the list of concerns prominent in American school reform. And as long as American school reform concentrates on high-stakes tests and public school teachers are demonized and equity issues are ignored, our problems are only going to get worse.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/new-data-reveals-the-real-problem-in-education/2011/06/30/AGDuYZtH_blog.html?fb_ref=NetworkNews
by Valerie Strauss
Three thousand high schools across the country serving nearly half a million students had no math classes higher than Algebra 1 in the 2009-10 academic year, and more than 2 million students in about 7,300 schools had no access to calculus classes, according to federal data released this week.
The new Education Department data details the unequal resources available to the poorest and neediest students. Statistics released from what is known as the Civil Rights Data Collection, covering approximately 7,000 school districts and more than 72,000 schools, also showed:
*Schools serving mostly African American students are twice as likely to have teachers with one or two years of experience than are schools within the same district that serve mostly white students.
*Only 2 percent of students with disabilities are taking at least one Advanced Placement class.
*Students with limited English proficiency make up 6 percent of the high school population (in grades 9-12), but comprise 15 percent of the students for whom algebra is the highest-level math course taken by their final year of high school.
*Only 22 percent of local education agencies reported that they operated pre-kindergarten programs targeting children from low-income families.
To hear many modern school reformers tell it, public education’s biggest problem is a bunch of lousy teachers. The new data tells a more accurate story.
The issue of equity in education is central to educator Linda Darling-Hammond’s 2010 book “ The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future .”
With only 1 in 10 kindergarten students from low-income families actually on track to graduate from college, Darling-Hammond, of Stanford University, shows how schools for students who live in low-income homes, students of color, and English language learners often do not have the same access to high-quality teachers, curriculum and resources as wealthier, white students. And she explains what successful systems really look like.
Yet equity is not big on the list of concerns prominent in American school reform. And as long as American school reform concentrates on high-stakes tests and public school teachers are demonized and equity issues are ignored, our problems are only going to get worse.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/new-data-reveals-the-real-problem-in-education/2011/06/30/AGDuYZtH_blog.html?fb_ref=NetworkNews
15 of 31 "F" Schools in Florida are Charter Schools
Charter Schools are not some magic fix. They take resources out of public schools and in the case of for profit charter schools put money into the pockets of hedge fund managers. What Thrasher and Scott are doing to the citizens of Florida is a diservice. -cpg
From Scathing Purple Musings
by Bob Sikes
Rick Scott’s pretty pleased with himself will all the ed reform measures he’s signed into law. He wrote this in an Orlando Sentinel op-ed piece last Monday:
With these pieces of legislation, we open doors of opportunity for students with disabilities, create stronger charter and virtual schools, and strengthen Students at failing schools are more likely to drop out, which means they are most likely to have trouble keeping a job. To prevent this tragedy, we are expanding the Opportunity Scholarship program, so students at chronically low-performing schools can choose a better school.
We have redefined what makes a failing school from those that earn an “F” two years in a row, to chronically low-performing schools that are graded either “D” or “F.” That means more students and their parents will be empowered to choose a better school, and with it, a better future parents’ right to choose the best education for their children.
Charter schools, Governor?
Four days after Scott spiked the ball at a charter school in Winter Garden, Florida’s school grades were released. Thanks to the yeoman’s work of a colleague and FB friend, Floridians know that of the 31 failing schools in Florida, 15 are charter schools.
Alachua:
Sweetwater Branch Academy Elementary- CHARTER
Broward:
Imagine School at West Melbourne- CHARTER
Imagine Charter/ N. Lauderdale- CHARTER
Imagine at N. Lauderdale Middle School- CHARTER
Charter School of Excellence at Riverland- CHARTER
Broward Community Charter Middle- CHARTER
Dade:
Lenora Braynon Smith Elementrary- Public
Lawrence Academy Elementary Charter School- CHARTER
Comstock Elementary- CONTROLLED CHOICE
Florida International Elementary Academy- CHARTER
Kelsey L. Pharr Elemntary- CONTROLLED CHOICE
Duvall:
Brentwood Elementary- Public
Highlands Elementary- Public
John Love Elementary- Public
KIPP Impact Middle- CHARTER
West Jacksonville Elementary- Public
Escambia:
AA Dixon Charter School of Excellence- CHARTER
Hamilton:
Central Hamilton Elementary- Public
Hillsborough:
Riverhills Elementary- Public
Mt. Pleasant Standard Base Middle- CHARTER
Lake:
Beverly Shores Elementary- Public
Lee:
Lee Charter Academy- CHARTER
Manatee:
G.D. Rogers Garden Elementary- Public
Orange:
Rio Grande Charter- CHARTER
Kaley Elementary- Public
NAP Ford Community Charter- CHARTER
Palm Beach:
Joseph Littles-Nguzo Saba- CHARTER
Pasco:
Gulf Highlands Elementary- Public
Pinellas:
Maximo Elementary- Public
Melrose Elementary- Public
Volusia:
Community Learning Center East- Public
Scott and the his legislative allies probably never planned for a contingency where a mass failure of charter schools would occur and be subject to their own trigger mechanisms. It even worse than they thought, too, as a report was released last week detailing significant abuse of the McKay scholarship program that was also expanded by Scott’s pen. McKay is for students with disabilities and now includes any child with an IEP.
You would think Floridians would be wary of such questionable expansions. SunRail is currently sucking up the state’s mainstream media oxygen right now. That will soon change as a few of the state’s large newspapers cover education in a responsible way
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/15-of-31-f-schools-in-florida-are-charter-schools/
From Scathing Purple Musings
by Bob Sikes
Rick Scott’s pretty pleased with himself will all the ed reform measures he’s signed into law. He wrote this in an Orlando Sentinel op-ed piece last Monday:
With these pieces of legislation, we open doors of opportunity for students with disabilities, create stronger charter and virtual schools, and strengthen Students at failing schools are more likely to drop out, which means they are most likely to have trouble keeping a job. To prevent this tragedy, we are expanding the Opportunity Scholarship program, so students at chronically low-performing schools can choose a better school.
We have redefined what makes a failing school from those that earn an “F” two years in a row, to chronically low-performing schools that are graded either “D” or “F.” That means more students and their parents will be empowered to choose a better school, and with it, a better future parents’ right to choose the best education for their children.
Charter schools, Governor?
Four days after Scott spiked the ball at a charter school in Winter Garden, Florida’s school grades were released. Thanks to the yeoman’s work of a colleague and FB friend, Floridians know that of the 31 failing schools in Florida, 15 are charter schools.
Alachua:
Sweetwater Branch Academy Elementary- CHARTER
Broward:
Imagine School at West Melbourne- CHARTER
Imagine Charter/ N. Lauderdale- CHARTER
Imagine at N. Lauderdale Middle School- CHARTER
Charter School of Excellence at Riverland- CHARTER
Broward Community Charter Middle- CHARTER
Dade:
Lenora Braynon Smith Elementrary- Public
Lawrence Academy Elementary Charter School- CHARTER
Comstock Elementary- CONTROLLED CHOICE
Florida International Elementary Academy- CHARTER
Kelsey L. Pharr Elemntary- CONTROLLED CHOICE
Duvall:
Brentwood Elementary- Public
Highlands Elementary- Public
John Love Elementary- Public
KIPP Impact Middle- CHARTER
West Jacksonville Elementary- Public
Escambia:
AA Dixon Charter School of Excellence- CHARTER
Hamilton:
Central Hamilton Elementary- Public
Hillsborough:
Riverhills Elementary- Public
Mt. Pleasant Standard Base Middle- CHARTER
Lake:
Beverly Shores Elementary- Public
Lee:
Lee Charter Academy- CHARTER
Manatee:
G.D. Rogers Garden Elementary- Public
Orange:
Rio Grande Charter- CHARTER
Kaley Elementary- Public
NAP Ford Community Charter- CHARTER
Palm Beach:
Joseph Littles-Nguzo Saba- CHARTER
Pasco:
Gulf Highlands Elementary- Public
Pinellas:
Maximo Elementary- Public
Melrose Elementary- Public
Volusia:
Community Learning Center East- Public
Scott and the his legislative allies probably never planned for a contingency where a mass failure of charter schools would occur and be subject to their own trigger mechanisms. It even worse than they thought, too, as a report was released last week detailing significant abuse of the McKay scholarship program that was also expanded by Scott’s pen. McKay is for students with disabilities and now includes any child with an IEP.
You would think Floridians would be wary of such questionable expansions. SunRail is currently sucking up the state’s mainstream media oxygen right now. That will soon change as a few of the state’s large newspapers cover education in a responsible way
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/15-of-31-f-schools-in-florida-are-charter-schools/
Tampa Teachers not sold on Gates Foundation Grant
From the St. Petersburg Times
by Tom Marshall
TAMPA — Hillsborough teachers are sharply divided about the district's nationally watched experiment with the Gates Foundation to boost teacher performance and toughen up how they are evaluated and rewarded.
In a survey conducted last month, fewer than 35 percent of teachers thought the $100 million grant has had a positive impact on the district, had seen positive results firsthand or believed it will be a good thing for them or their school.
In fact, more than two-thirds of respondents didn't think it has had a positive effect or were simply unsure. The numbers provide a rare overview of teacher attitudes at the close of the first year of the seven-year effort funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The good news for the district: Over time, more teachers said they personally felt positive results, according to the anonymous survey, the fourth in a series.
Hillsborough superintendent MaryEllen Elia said this week she was encouraged by that strong growth — a 20-point jump since the first survey in February 2010. But she acknowledged that plenty of hurdles remain as the district moves toward a system where performance, rather than seniority, will eventually determine pay and job success for teachers.
"As we go, we'll say, 'Did we do right, and do we have to make any changes?' " Elia said. "I am accepting of the fact that there can be problems."
About 3,000 out of the district's 12,500 teachers chose to respond to the final survey conducted June 10, and a margin of error was not available.
Teachers union officials said they hadn't seen the survey numbers but weren't surprised by them. Many teachers are reserving judgment until all student test scores that factor into their evaluations are calculated this fall, said Stephanie Baxter-Jenkins, executive director of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association.
"The majority of people I know won't say a lot about it until they see what the scores say," she added.
The four surveys were conducted during a period that spanned Hillsborough's experience with the reform effort. The first, in February 2010, came just months after the district won its grant, while the last was conducted June 10 — before teachers saw any of their final ratings under a new peer evaluation system.
That means the next survey could show more teacher unhappiness if, as expected, the majority of their evaluations drop under the tougher new system.
Officials say the timing of the latest survey, on the last day of school, was unavoidable since teachers would be less available to respond over the summer.
Many of the survey questions focused on teacher awareness of the Gates reforms, and the district's communications office used them as a measure of their success at informing teachers about the process.
In February 2010, just 55.4 percent of teachers said they understood the objectives of the Gates grant. By June, that figure had risen to 83 percent. Seventy-four percent of teachers said they had received "enough information" on the process last month, up 31 points from the first survey.
But the questions about the Gates grant's impact on teachers and their schools showed far more volatility. In the first survey, more than 32 percent of teachers agreed that the reforms would be "a good thing for me and my school." Three months later that figure jumped to 40 percent, before declining to 34 percent last month.
"The results indicate a need for further discussions with our membership so that if there are problem areas, we can work to address their concerns," said Baxter-Jenkins.
Elia said the district has been making adjustments to the evaluation system in response to feedback from administrators, peer evaluators and teachers.
For example, some teachers "didn't like some of the phrases" on the evaluation criteria, Elia said, finding them unclear.
Aron Zions, a teacher at Pierce Middle School and a union representative, said many teachers were dismayed by a term on the evaluation sheet — "developing." It signifies that teachers are just one notch above the bottom rating, "requires action."
Many were shocked to receive such scores after years in a system where the vast majority of teachers were rated satisfactory or outstanding.
"The teacher who wants to be perfect, at some point you have to tell him, relax," Zions said.
Principals are under pressure, too, since they must raise standards in a single year. Teachers whom they once rated perfect, or nearly so, are now hearing that they have room for improvement. And not all principals are proving equally adept at making that adjustment, Elia said.
"We're definitely looking at principal evaluations as well," she said, citing research on the importance of school leadership in teacher improvement.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/hillsborough-teachers-divided-over-education-reform-funded-by-the-gates/1178478
by Tom Marshall
TAMPA — Hillsborough teachers are sharply divided about the district's nationally watched experiment with the Gates Foundation to boost teacher performance and toughen up how they are evaluated and rewarded.
In a survey conducted last month, fewer than 35 percent of teachers thought the $100 million grant has had a positive impact on the district, had seen positive results firsthand or believed it will be a good thing for them or their school.
In fact, more than two-thirds of respondents didn't think it has had a positive effect or were simply unsure. The numbers provide a rare overview of teacher attitudes at the close of the first year of the seven-year effort funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The good news for the district: Over time, more teachers said they personally felt positive results, according to the anonymous survey, the fourth in a series.
Hillsborough superintendent MaryEllen Elia said this week she was encouraged by that strong growth — a 20-point jump since the first survey in February 2010. But she acknowledged that plenty of hurdles remain as the district moves toward a system where performance, rather than seniority, will eventually determine pay and job success for teachers.
"As we go, we'll say, 'Did we do right, and do we have to make any changes?' " Elia said. "I am accepting of the fact that there can be problems."
About 3,000 out of the district's 12,500 teachers chose to respond to the final survey conducted June 10, and a margin of error was not available.
Teachers union officials said they hadn't seen the survey numbers but weren't surprised by them. Many teachers are reserving judgment until all student test scores that factor into their evaluations are calculated this fall, said Stephanie Baxter-Jenkins, executive director of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association.
"The majority of people I know won't say a lot about it until they see what the scores say," she added.
The four surveys were conducted during a period that spanned Hillsborough's experience with the reform effort. The first, in February 2010, came just months after the district won its grant, while the last was conducted June 10 — before teachers saw any of their final ratings under a new peer evaluation system.
That means the next survey could show more teacher unhappiness if, as expected, the majority of their evaluations drop under the tougher new system.
Officials say the timing of the latest survey, on the last day of school, was unavoidable since teachers would be less available to respond over the summer.
Many of the survey questions focused on teacher awareness of the Gates reforms, and the district's communications office used them as a measure of their success at informing teachers about the process.
In February 2010, just 55.4 percent of teachers said they understood the objectives of the Gates grant. By June, that figure had risen to 83 percent. Seventy-four percent of teachers said they had received "enough information" on the process last month, up 31 points from the first survey.
But the questions about the Gates grant's impact on teachers and their schools showed far more volatility. In the first survey, more than 32 percent of teachers agreed that the reforms would be "a good thing for me and my school." Three months later that figure jumped to 40 percent, before declining to 34 percent last month.
"The results indicate a need for further discussions with our membership so that if there are problem areas, we can work to address their concerns," said Baxter-Jenkins.
Elia said the district has been making adjustments to the evaluation system in response to feedback from administrators, peer evaluators and teachers.
For example, some teachers "didn't like some of the phrases" on the evaluation criteria, Elia said, finding them unclear.
Aron Zions, a teacher at Pierce Middle School and a union representative, said many teachers were dismayed by a term on the evaluation sheet — "developing." It signifies that teachers are just one notch above the bottom rating, "requires action."
Many were shocked to receive such scores after years in a system where the vast majority of teachers were rated satisfactory or outstanding.
"The teacher who wants to be perfect, at some point you have to tell him, relax," Zions said.
Principals are under pressure, too, since they must raise standards in a single year. Teachers whom they once rated perfect, or nearly so, are now hearing that they have room for improvement. And not all principals are proving equally adept at making that adjustment, Elia said.
"We're definitely looking at principal evaluations as well," she said, citing research on the importance of school leadership in teacher improvement.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/hillsborough-teachers-divided-over-education-reform-funded-by-the-gates/1178478
Charter schools are good...for Hedge Fund Managers
From the Amsterdam News
by Cyrll Josh Baker
As the controversy about the co-location of charter schools continues to rage throughout the city, another issue has been raised: Hedge funds are making tremendous profits off charter schools while public school students lose already-scarce dollars because of the presence of the schools.
The charter school movement represents only a tiny fraction of the more than one million students in the New York public school system. But because of the charter school presence, hundreds of thousands of regular New York City kids are getting fewer dollars.
In a recent report by the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO), it was revealed that money being spent on charter schools is being diverted away from regular schools. As more charter schools are created, more money is pumped into the charter school movement.
Many charter schools are also getting private sector money that public schools cannot access.
According to George Sweeting of the IBO, money for charter schools is calculated on a per capita basis. A fixed formula is set by the state and the number doesn't change.
"The reason for the charter schools' flow of dollars is because the number of schools and enrollment is increasing," Sweeting said. "However, it's not going up for the coming year."
He added that $13,000-$14,000 is spent per child in charter schools. He also pointed out that charter schools often open with only one or two grades and add more later on. As the schools get larger, more money from the Department of Education is transferred to the charter school.
However, a well-placed source in the hedge fund industry explained the real deal to the Amsterdam News. They said that charter schools have historically been for-profit enterprises backed by private sources, and that hedge funds are playing a key role in moving money.
Hedge funds have gained popularity among investors in recent years because they offer a better return on investment than traditional investments.
"The same people who invest in companies to make money are the same people who invest in charter schools," the source said.
The way it works is this: The money the state uses to build public schools can also be used to build charter schools. The hedge fund folks build schools for less money than the government would. For example, a public school might cost $5 million to build, while a charter school could take that same amount of money and only use $3 million to build. What's left over, according to the source, goes into the hedge funds and their investors.
"Hedge funds are the new source of capital. People who want to make money off charter schools hedge funds because they can't get the money from anywhere else," the source said.
The state pays for charter schools on a per-student basis. Investors who put up the initial funds can double their money after several years.
http://www.amsterdamnews.com/news/article_8379a23e-a298-11e0-b730-001cc4c03286.html
by Cyrll Josh Baker
As the controversy about the co-location of charter schools continues to rage throughout the city, another issue has been raised: Hedge funds are making tremendous profits off charter schools while public school students lose already-scarce dollars because of the presence of the schools.
The charter school movement represents only a tiny fraction of the more than one million students in the New York public school system. But because of the charter school presence, hundreds of thousands of regular New York City kids are getting fewer dollars.
In a recent report by the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO), it was revealed that money being spent on charter schools is being diverted away from regular schools. As more charter schools are created, more money is pumped into the charter school movement.
Many charter schools are also getting private sector money that public schools cannot access.
According to George Sweeting of the IBO, money for charter schools is calculated on a per capita basis. A fixed formula is set by the state and the number doesn't change.
"The reason for the charter schools' flow of dollars is because the number of schools and enrollment is increasing," Sweeting said. "However, it's not going up for the coming year."
He added that $13,000-$14,000 is spent per child in charter schools. He also pointed out that charter schools often open with only one or two grades and add more later on. As the schools get larger, more money from the Department of Education is transferred to the charter school.
However, a well-placed source in the hedge fund industry explained the real deal to the Amsterdam News. They said that charter schools have historically been for-profit enterprises backed by private sources, and that hedge funds are playing a key role in moving money.
Hedge funds have gained popularity among investors in recent years because they offer a better return on investment than traditional investments.
"The same people who invest in companies to make money are the same people who invest in charter schools," the source said.
The way it works is this: The money the state uses to build public schools can also be used to build charter schools. The hedge fund folks build schools for less money than the government would. For example, a public school might cost $5 million to build, while a charter school could take that same amount of money and only use $3 million to build. What's left over, according to the source, goes into the hedge funds and their investors.
"Hedge funds are the new source of capital. People who want to make money off charter schools hedge funds because they can't get the money from anywhere else," the source said.
The state pays for charter schools on a per-student basis. Investors who put up the initial funds can double their money after several years.
http://www.amsterdamnews.com/news/article_8379a23e-a298-11e0-b730-001cc4c03286.html
Florida DOE ignores McKay scholarship corruption
From Scathing Purple Musings
by Bob Sikes
A Miami New Times reporter’s thorough investigation of McKay Scholarship fraud and abuse throughout the state drew a sharp letter of protest from the DOE. Here is a paragraph from Michael D. Kooi’s letter:
It’s also clear that the article’s author is woefully uneducated about the DOE’s oversight as it relates to scholarship-recipient private schools – an understandable byproduct given the fact that he never asked to speak to DOE staff charged with oversight of the McKay program. Had he spoken with them, he would have learned that these schools are required to annually attest to accountability provisions contained in Section 1002.421, Florida Statutes, and failure to do so is an automatic removal from the program for a year. He also would have learned that although site visits to McKay Scholarship schools are limited to three per year, the DOE has developed strong relationships with other agencies such as local health and fire departments as well as state entities such as the Department of Health, Department of Children and Families and Florida Department of Law Enforcement. These relationships provide an additional layer of oversight that is crucial in the absence of a physical DOE presence in each school district.
Kooi seeks to dismiss the article’s evidence with generalities about oversight and intra department cooperation. While he feels he can brush such evidence aside, Senator Steve Wise, who’s committee has oversight over McKay, doesn’t agree.
New Times shared findings from this investigation with state Sen. Stephen R. Wise (R-Jacksonville), one of the co-introducers of the McKay program in 1999. “It’s appalling,” Wise says. “I’m amazed that there’s not more scrutiny about where the money is going.”
“After I get done with you,” he tells a reporter, “I need to talk to my staff director. We need to have some hearings and do whatever we can to make some changes.”
Kooi’s title, Executive Director of Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice, speaks volumes. The existence of such an office ought to send the “pandering to special interests” signal up the flag pole. The term “Choice” has been used far too often by both the left and right for political reasons. I’d recommend to the new ed commissioner drop the last part. The administration of such a worthy scholarship as McKay doesn’t belong in department sullied by partisanship.
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/the-florida-does-curiously-shrill-response-to-mckay-scholarship-abuse/
by Bob Sikes
A Miami New Times reporter’s thorough investigation of McKay Scholarship fraud and abuse throughout the state drew a sharp letter of protest from the DOE. Here is a paragraph from Michael D. Kooi’s letter:
It’s also clear that the article’s author is woefully uneducated about the DOE’s oversight as it relates to scholarship-recipient private schools – an understandable byproduct given the fact that he never asked to speak to DOE staff charged with oversight of the McKay program. Had he spoken with them, he would have learned that these schools are required to annually attest to accountability provisions contained in Section 1002.421, Florida Statutes, and failure to do so is an automatic removal from the program for a year. He also would have learned that although site visits to McKay Scholarship schools are limited to three per year, the DOE has developed strong relationships with other agencies such as local health and fire departments as well as state entities such as the Department of Health, Department of Children and Families and Florida Department of Law Enforcement. These relationships provide an additional layer of oversight that is crucial in the absence of a physical DOE presence in each school district.
Kooi seeks to dismiss the article’s evidence with generalities about oversight and intra department cooperation. While he feels he can brush such evidence aside, Senator Steve Wise, who’s committee has oversight over McKay, doesn’t agree.
New Times shared findings from this investigation with state Sen. Stephen R. Wise (R-Jacksonville), one of the co-introducers of the McKay program in 1999. “It’s appalling,” Wise says. “I’m amazed that there’s not more scrutiny about where the money is going.”
“After I get done with you,” he tells a reporter, “I need to talk to my staff director. We need to have some hearings and do whatever we can to make some changes.”
Kooi’s title, Executive Director of Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice, speaks volumes. The existence of such an office ought to send the “pandering to special interests” signal up the flag pole. The term “Choice” has been used far too often by both the left and right for political reasons. I’d recommend to the new ed commissioner drop the last part. The administration of such a worthy scholarship as McKay doesn’t belong in department sullied by partisanship.
http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/the-florida-does-curiously-shrill-response-to-mckay-scholarship-abuse/
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