California High School Dropout Rate

 SACRAMENTO—Graduation rates among California's public school students are climbing and dropout rates are falling, with the biggest gains being made among English learners and the state's largest minority groups, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announced today. (at cde.ca.gov) June 27,2012.

More than three quarters, or 76.3 percent, of students who started high school in 2007 graduated with their class in 2011. That is up 1.5 percentage points from the 2010 graduation rate. Larger gains were seen among Hispanic and African American students at 2.2 and 2.3 percentage points respectively, with the biggest increase being among English learners at 3.8 percentage points. The graduation rate for socioeconomically disadvantaged students climbed nearly 2 percentage points, from 68.1 to 70 percent.

"Every graduate represents a success story in one of the most effective job and anti-poverty programs ever conceived, our public schools," Torlakson said. "These numbers are a testament to the hard work of teachers and administrators, of parents and, most of all, of the students themselves. While they are a great illustration of all that is going right in California schools, they should also remind us that schools need our support to continue to improve so that every student graduates prepared for college, a career, and to contribute to our state's future."

Beyond the 76.3 percent graduation rate and the 14.4 percent dropout rate, the remaining 9.3 percent are students who are neither graduates nor dropouts. Some are still enrolled in school (8.6 percent). Others are non-diploma special education students (0.4 percent), and some elected to pass a high school equivalency exam.

http://www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr12/yr12rel65.asp

Randi Weingarten, Netroots Nation

It takes a couple of minutes for her to get to the issue, but it is worth the wait. She talks about teacher led school improvement. 

Are charter schools public? Diane Ravitch

Are charter schools public?

I noted in my blog last week that the visionaries of the charter school idea—Raymond Budde of the University of Massachusetts and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers—never intended that charter schools would compete with public schools.

Budde saw charters as a way to reorganize public school districts and to provide more freedom for teachers. He envisioned teams of teachers asking for a charter for three to five years, during which time they would operate with full autonomy over curriculum and instruction, with no interference from the superintendent or the principal.

Shanker thought that charter schools should be created by teams of teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decisionmaking and participatory governance. He imagined schools that taught by coaching rather than lecturing, that strived for creativity and problem-solving rather than mastery of standardized tests or regurgitation of facts. He never thought of charters as non-union schools where teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students.

Today, charter schools are very far from the original visions of Budde and Shanker. Few are run by teams of teachers. Most are managed by for-profit corporations or by nonprofit corporations with private boards of directors. The charter reflects the aims of the corporation, not the aims of its teachers. Most charters are non-union and rely on young teachers who work long hours and leave after a few years, thus keeping costs low. Many have high executive compensation. Charters have a high rate of teacher and principal turnover. Clearly, charters do not "belong" to the professionals who work in them, but to the corporation and its directors, who hold the charter.

Which raises the question of this blog: Are charter schools public schools? They say they are. But what we now see is that they are public when it comes to collecting tax money, but not in most other respects.

In New York state, the charters went to court to fight audits by the state comptroller; they argued that they are nonprofit educational institutions, not public agencies. They said that only their authorizers had the power to audit them, not public officials. The state law was amended to give the comptroller the authority to audit their use of public monies.

In Chicago and in Philadelphia, charter schools fought efforts by their teachers to unionize on grounds that they were not public schools and thus were not subject to state labor laws. The charter school in Chicago argued in court that it was a private school, not a public school, and thus not subject to the same laws as public schools.

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a charter school in Arizona was a private nonprofit corporation, not a state agency, when it was sued by an employee who had been discharged. In this case, a federal court agreed with the charter school that charters are not public schools when it comes to the rights of their employees.

Bruce Baker at Rutgers University, who has written thoughtfully about charters, recently considered whether charters are public or private or neither. Charters, he points out, can limit their total enrollment; can admit students only on an annual basis and not accept any mid-year; and "can set academic, behavior, and cultural standards that promote exclusion of students via attrition."

Baker writes:

"Imagine a community park, for example, that is paid for with tax dollars collected by all taxpayers in the community, and managed by a private board of directors. That board has determined that the park may reasonably serve only 100 of the community's 1,000 residents. The amount of tax levied is adjusted for the park's capacity. To determine who gets to use the park annually, interested residents subscribe to a lottery, where 100 are chosen each year. Others continue to pay the tax whether chosen for park access or not. The park has a big fence around it, and only those granted access through the lottery may gain entrance. Imagine also that each of the 100 lottery winners must sign a code of conduct to be unilaterally enforced by the private manager of the park. That management firm can establish its own procedures (or essentially have none) for determining who has or has not abided by the code of conduct and revoke access privileges unilaterally."


Today, charters say that they are public when it suits their purpose (getting the same amount of money as public schools), and they say they are not really public when they want to escape the accountability and transparency that accompany the receipt of public funding. Some have a large budget to market their wares. (Regular public schools have no money for marketing.) Some use marketing to create demand so that they can get more charters.

Charters are typically more segregated than the district in which they are located. Some are all-black; some are Muslim-themed; some are centered on other specific cultural groups. Some charters are not for minorities or the poor. Wealthy parents in Los Altos, Calif., opened a charter for their children, which takes space and money away from the remaining public schools of the community. Parents at that charter school are expected to make a gift of $5,000 annually for each child.

The issue is complicated. But I find it hard to refer to charter schools—as they have evolved—as public schools. If they are for-profit, they should not be called public schools. There is simply no precedent in American history for a profit-making public school with stockholders. All public money allotted to a public school should be spent by the school and in the school on teaching and learning, on bringing the students to school, and on maintenance of the facility.

If charters are nonprofit but subcontract the management of the school to a for-profit corporation, they are not (in my view) a public school. This is a dodge that some entrepreneurs have come up with to make money from tax receipts.

If a charter sponsor is involved in complicated real-estate transactions that profit the sponsor, then the school is an accessory to private profit-making and not a public school.

I am also concerned about the selectivity and attrition rates in many charters, which suggests that they pick and choose in ways that enable them to be competitive, but lessens their "publicness." There are selective institutions within public education, but their selective nature is in the open.

I will think about this more. I have met some thoughtful charter leaders who are trying to serve the needs of children, not corporate sponsors; who do not skim the best and forget the rest; who do not push out low-performing kids. But my sense is that they are not typical.

Like Bruce Baker, I think we need to develop a typology. Just because some group says its school is a public school doesn't make it one. Just because it gets public tax dollars doesn't make it a public school. We need to think more about what we mean by "public."

What concerns me most is the possibility that policymakers are promoting dual school systems: a privileged group of schools called charters that can select their students and exclude the ones that are hardest to educate; and the remaining schools composed of students who couldn't get into the charters or got kicked out. I wonder also whether it is wise in the long run to create one set of schools that is free from regulation and a competing set of schools that is subject to ever tighter regulation. What is the endgame? Is it our goal to undermine public education so thoroughly that teachers and students alike turn away from it?

It's been almost 60 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Have charters become a quiet way of reversing the Brown decision of 1954? I worry that we are slipping back into deeply ingrained patterns, based sometimes on race, sometimes on class, sometimes on ethnicity. We must think long-term and ask where we are heading.

Diane

- Diane Ravitch

California Schools Under More Stress | California Progress Report

California Schools Under More Stress | California Progress Report

Common Core School Standards

Backer of Common Core School Curriculum Is Chosen to Lead College Board

By Tamar Lewin : New York Times

David Coleman, an architect of the common core curriculum standards that are being adopted in nearly all 50 states, will become the president of the College Board, starting in October.

Editors note: Common core standards is what the politicians talk about while cutting school budgets.  Such standards do not teach a single student.

“There’s no reason on earth for common core standards and these tests that we’re wasting billions of dollars on,” said Stephen Krashen, an emeritus education professor at the University of Southern California. “The problem is poverty, poverty, poverty. Middle-class children who go to well-funded schools do very well, but even the best tests, the most inspiring teachers, won’t mean anything if the kids don’t have enough to eat.”

Proposal to close 25% of Philadelphia Schools

Reposted from Rethinking Schools.

by Jody Sokolower
Philadelphia teachers and parents—and educators throughout the country—were horrified a few weeks ago when Thomas Knudsen, the School District of Philadelphia’s chief recovery officer, unveiled a five-year plan to close 64 schools (25 percent of the system), move 40 percent of students into charters, slash the central office to 20 percent of its former capacity, and divide the rest of the district into “achievement networks” run by third-party operators.
Mayor Michael Nutter said the district faced near “collapse” and that the plan was something Philadelphians needed to “grow up and deal with.” Can you believe that city officials later admitted that the charters and achievement networks wouldn’t actually save the district any money?
We are proud that one of the voices of sanity and resistance came from Helen Gym, a Rethinking Schools editorial associate and longtime parent activist in Philly. We are reposting her open letter to Knudsen here—not only because it analyzes so articulately what is happening and what is at stake in Philly—but also because Philly is not alone. Similar “saving the district from collapse” scenarios have already played out or are in progress in cities as widespread as New Orleans, Detroit, and Chicago.

Commentary: You’re not speaking to me, Mr. Knudsen

by Helen Gym
I am the mother of three children in District and charter schools in this city. I have been actively involved in stopping good schools from decline and helping low-performing, violent schools turn around. I believe in the essential role that a high-quality public school system plays and have fought for that vision. My 7th grade son will soon have outlasted four superintendencies, including yours. And I’m here to tell you that you’re not speaking to me.
You’re not speaking to me with this brand of disaster capitalism that tries to shock a besieged public with unproven, untested, and drastic action couched as “solutions.” You’re not speaking to me when you invoke language like “achievement networks,” “portfolio management,” and “rightsizing” our schools – and say not a word about lower class sizes or increasing the presence of loving support personnel or enriching our curriculum.
You’re not speaking to me when you plan to close 25 percent of our schools before my son graduates high school. You’re not speaking to me when you equate closing down 64 schools – many of them community anchors – as “streamlining operations,” yet you’ll expand charter populations willy-nilly despite a national studyshowing two-thirds of Philly charters are no better or worse than District-managed schools.

What you need to know about ALEC

by Diane Ravitch

ear Deborah,
Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.
This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.
ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the "Stand Your Ground" legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald's, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy's, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there's still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.

Teacher "Performance" Assessment, PACT

There is a New York Times article today about Resistance to Outsourcing Teacher Licensing.  Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest

... Student teachers at the University of Massachusetts are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by the education ...

May 6, 2012 - By MICHAEL WINERIP - Education - Article - Print Headline: "Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest"

A group of faculty and students at UMASS Amherst are resisting the assessment system developed and used in California, known as PACT. In the article Prof. Raymond Pecheone of Stanford and others claim there is no organized resistance to this testing.

To the contrary.  A group of faculty and students in the CSU have consistently resisted this testing as invalid and not reliable.  Here is a record of some of this resistance.

https://sites.google.com/site/assessingpact/

Duane Campbell.  Democracy and Education Institute. 

CSU Faculty vote to authorize state wide strike

Faculty Union in California votes to authorize a strike. Would be the first system wide strike in state history.

California State University faculty voted to  approved a measure to give their union leaders the power to authorize a strike next fall that could delay the beginning of school for thousands of students across the 23-campus university system.  The CSU is the 23 campus system of California.  The University of California does not have a faculty union with collective bargaining recognition although some of its staff and employees belong to unions.

A powerful 95% of the  faculty voters agreed that the CSU’s instructional faculty, should initiate rolling walkouts if the CSU administration continues to demand concessions.

Equally as impressive was the turnout, with 70% of CFA members voting to send an unmistakable message to Chancellor Charles B. Reed – state austerity is killing higher education in California.

Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association, said, “Today, the faculty has spoken loud and clear – we have had enough of the way in which they are being treated by the CSU administration.”

Worried About School Funding, Most Favor Tax Increase—For the Rich | California Progress Report

Worried About School Funding, Most Favor Tax Increase—For the Rich | California Progress Report

Save Our Schools: SOS

By Deborah Meier,
Dear Diane,
HELP!!! SOS!!! "Reformed" schools are literally becoming reform schools for the poor. It's a sign of "the future" as some people envision it. Although, of course, these are not the schools for the reformers' kids.
Mitt Romney "declared that this century must be an American century," and President Barack Obama insists that "anyone who tells you that America is in decline ... doesn't know what they are talking about." Well, it's hard to argue with Romney since his "must" is a preference, not a prediction. But I do worry about Obama's statement because it contains truth, and it covers up a potential falsehood. (See "America's Place in the New World," by Charles A. Kupchan in The New York Times.)
But why should we care if we're first? (See last week's letter!) If the first is a nation we respect, being second is just fine. What we care about is the health and welfare of our nation's people and their future prospects both economically and politically, not our place in somebody's ranking system. We might also like a president who hopes for the best for other nations' people, too. And, while American business may not be in decline, it has the advantage of transferring its own future health and welfare to almost any nation it chooses. The American people have a harder time following suit. Indeed, global business has no country. Our inventiveness won't help if we off-shore the production of the inventions "made in America"—to nations that operate with 19th century sweat-shop wages and working conditions.
Under our unequal circumstances (99/1) it seems hard to envision how we will once again have an economy that works for everyone, not just the top 1 percent. And given the options of who might replace us, democracy doesn't seem likely to be the winner either way. Our own democracy is fast crumbling—and for the very same reason: the inequality of power in our society run amok ... and fueled by fear.
So, Kupchan may be right that "the democratic, secular, and free-market model" challenged by state capitalism and religious fundamentalism will succeed in dominating the 2lst century.
As Henry A. Giroux writes in the Truthout blog:

"Under such circumstances, all bets are off regarding the future of democracy. Besides a growing inability to translate private matters into public concerns, what is also being lost in the current historical conjuncture is the very idea of the public good, the notion of connecting learning to social change and developing modes of civic courage infused by the principles of social justice. Under the regime of a ruthless economic Darwinism which emphasizes a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, concepts and practices of community and solidarity have been replaced by a world of cutthroat politics, financial greed, media spectacles, and a rabid consumerism."

Is there another way?
Yes. That's why I'm stuck trying to both hold onto the idea of "public space" and a public to go with it! Public education is one of several much besieged institutions that may soon disappear—think about replacing post offices and our local letter-carriers. Consider, too, an army made up of mercenaries, and who knows? Private police? Firefighters? Libraries? Highways? Where can "we" go to "hang out" together?
In schools (that) we trust *—that "belong" in some direct form to "we the people"—is part of my answer. So go read the book by that name, especially Chapters 9 and 10 on scaling up reform for democracy. Do you have a suggestion on a book laying out why we need public police, firefighters, libraries, et al?
Of course, the present system is not all it should be, re. democracy, especially for minority groups, and in our much too large urban districts with their tendency to become centralized in the hands of the local elite. Few are the mayors or appointed school board members who send their own kids to their local schools.
See also Will Standards Save Public Education? which I wrote in 2000 (foreword by Jonathan Kozol). I agree with virtually everything I said there, except that I was oblivious to the attack on the idea of a public system itself. I wasn't yet noticing what lay ahead, and now that it's so front and center, could it be too late?
The future is not yet written—when it is, there will still be those of us fighting for the next future. Which reminds me, read No Citizen Left Behind by Meira Levinson—a forthright defense of schools as institutions for teaching about democracy and justice. Democracy was never a foregone conclusion. It's perhaps amazing that it remains a lively option, if not a foregone conclusion.
Many of us will be in Washington, D.C., from Aug. 3-5 (thanks to Save Our Schools) to once again show our support for public education and to produce an education agenda that we can share at both upcoming conventions. Over the coming months I'll try to keep folks informed about how it's shaping up, with input, we hope, from one and all. Will you be joining us?
Can we build a response that doesn't rest on fear, but rather on hope?
Deb

Hired Guns on Astroturf- Fake School reform ...

Dissent Magazine - Spring 2012 Issue - Hired Guns on Astroturf..

Dissent Magazine - Spring 2012 Issue - Hired Guns on Astrotur...

Joan Barkan

If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled “education reform movement.” As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They’ve gone political as never before—like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers’ unions. 

Devolution of a Movement

For the last decade or so, this generation of ed reformers has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools: establishing nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, hiring business executives to run school districts, and calculating a teacher’s worth based on student test scores. Along the way, the reformers recognized the value of public promotion and persuasion (called “advocacy”) for their agenda, and they started pouring more money into media outlets, friendly think tanks, and the work of well-disposed researchers. By 2010 critics of the movement saw “reform-think” dominating national discourse about education, but key reform players judged the pace of change too slow.

Read the detailed analysis of Michelle Rhee and other "reformers" who are making millions off of "school reform." 

Flunking the Test | American Journalism Review

Flunking the Test  | American Journalism Review
How the media fails on school coverage.

Dreams Are For Everyone

Public Education is about score manipulation

by Paul Karrer. Teacher. Monterrey.
http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2012/03/public-education-is-too-much-about.html

Chicago School Reform

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has produced a remarkable document describing a vision for schooling that is truly equitable and high-quality.  The plan addresses, head-on, the historic inequality in education and refuses to compromise on quality. 

The Chicago Teachers Union argues for proven educational reforms to dramatically improve education of more than 400,000 students in a district of 675 schools. These reforms are desperately needed and can head Chicago towards the world-class educational system its students deserve.

The following are essential:

1.     Recognize That Class Size Matters. Drastically reduce class size. We currently have one of the largest class sizes in the state. This greatly inhibits the ability of our students to learn and thrive.

2.     Educate The Whole Child. Invest to ensure that all schools have recess and physical education equipment, healthy food offerings, and classes in art, theater, dance, and music in every school. Offer world languages and a variety of subject choices. Provide every school with a library and assign the commensurate number of librarians to staff them.

3.     Create More Robust Wrap-around Services. The Chicago Public Schools system (CPS) is far behind recommended staffing levels suggested by national professional associations. The number of school counselors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists must increase dramatically to serve Chicago’s population of low-income students. Additionally, students who cannot afford transportation costs need free fares.

He’s looked at life from both sides now – or has he? Arne Duncan claims the high ground, but school clinics still face needless obstacles | Economic Policy Institute

He’s looked at life from both sides now – or has he? Arne Duncan claims the high ground, but school clinics still face needless obstacles | Economic Policy Institute

Night of Outrage: Thousands Protest NYC School Closings « Talking Union

Night of Outrage: Thousands Protest NYC School Closings « Talking Union

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

At the Department of Education, Warm Snow Falls Up - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

At the Department of Education, Warm Snow Falls Up - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

Secretary Duncan and Project RESPECT

Billed as a new initiative to rebuild the teaching profession and elevate teacher voice, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s new RESPECT Project (which stands for Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching) seeks to involve teachers and principals in a national conversation about teaching. The work builds on the more than 100 roundtable discussions that the Department of Education’s Teaching Ambassador Fellows have had with fellow teachers across the country and will continue to have throughout the year.
 
During a teacher town hall to launch the RESPECT Project, Duncan outlined his goals for revamping the teaching profession, which include

▪                Improving teacher preparation programs;

▪                Dramatically increasing teacher salaries and tying pay to job performance, skills, and demonstrated leadership ability;

▪                Establishing career ladders that allow for advancement and leadership opportunities without requiring teachers to completely leave the classroom;

▪                Improving professional development and providing teachers more time for meaningful collaboration;

▪                Providing teachers with greater classroom autonomy balanced with more accountability; and

▪                Implementing evaluation systems based on multiple measures, rather than just test scores.

Michelle Rhee tells her tale

Courtesy of Monty Neill at Fair Test.  Long, but worth reading, especially the suggestions at the end on how to more successfully reframe the debate:
 
Rhee's Framing of the Debate on Education
On the evening of February 7, Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of DC public schools and the public face of the opaquely funded StudentsFirst, addressed an audience of some four thousand people at the Paramount theater in Oakland. This lecture was one of a number of lectures purchased as a series, and did not imply any particular interest in Rhee or in education by the older and relatively affluent crowd attending, the sort of crowd one finds at similar series, whether theater, ballet, or classical music.

As I have never heard Rhee speak before, I cannot say that she tailored her talk to this particular audience, but given her consummate skills as a public speaker, I would be very surprised if she had not.

The lecture was divided in three parts. First, Rhee introduced herself
and described her leadership of the DC public schools; next, she outlined her fundamental principles about education; finally, she answered questions from the audience.

In the first part, Rhee established her persona: a mix of unprepossessing
but feisty "Korean lady," finding herself unaccountably charged with the
management of DC public schools and concerned only for the good of the
children. Her narrative of her three years as DC chancellor, a position
for which she had no qualifications or experience, framed her dictatorial
and disruptive tenure as the story of a plain speaking firebrand who
sliced through every piece of red tape and obstruction to transform
institutional corruption into a working school system. Rich in anecdote
and short on facts, the main point of the story was to set up Rhee as a
concerned citizen who was out of patience with a dysfunctional system and
whose arbitrary and devastating actions (performed under the aegis of
Mayoral control) were not a violation of the democratic rights of parents
and teachers and children, but the necessary and heroic actions of a
woman more concerned with the good of the children than with the interest
of other "adults" involved in the educational system. Someone listening
closely might have wondered why schools were failing quite so badly
since, in fact, they had been following the kill and drill NCLB model for
close to a generation. Listeners might have also wondered about her
assertions as to how much money is being lavished on these failing
schools. But facts are little things, and Rhee's aim to tell a "Mr Smith
Goes to Washington" story largely succeeded. In this story, her lack of
expertise and experience prove that she is not part of the education
insiders responsible for the education crisis.

Millionaires should pay their taxes

 by Duane Campbell

California needs additional revenue to fund schools and to invest in the future.  A tax plan known as  The Millionaires Tax has been   proposed by the California Federation of Teachers and the Courage Campaign to increase revenues to pay for vital services.   It was assigned the official title "Tax To Benefit Public Schools, Social Services, Public Safety, And Road Maintenance," on Friday, Feb.2,   by California  Attorney General Kamala Harris.

A report of the California Budget Project notes that  “measured as a share of family income, California’s lowest-income families pay the most in taxes. The bottom fifth of the state’s families, with an average income of $12,600, spent 11.1 percent of their income on state and local taxes.  In comparison, the wealthiest 1 percent, with an average income of $2.3 million, spent 7.8 percent of their income on state and local taxes.”

The Millionaires  Tax  plan, of  the California Federation of Teachers and the Courage Campaign would raise taxes by three percentage points on income above $1 million and five percentage points on income over  $2 million.    Analysts say the proposal would generate $4 billion to $6 billion annually.  Signature gathering for the plan will begin within weeks.

The plan competes  with Gov. Jerry Brown's tax initiative, which would raise income taxes on earners starting at $250,000 for single filers, as well as increase the statewide sales tax by a half-cent.

Demonstrators Protest Michelle Rhee and corporate agenda

“Silent” protestors with their mouths taped shut  confronted Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and corporate education proponent Michelle Rhee as they entered a  carefully promoted and controlled  discussion about education issues at the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria, 828 I St, in Sacramento on Wednesday, January 25.

Demonstrators held a news briefing with local media outlets.  The Sacramento Bee did not cover the demonstration.  This protests occurs as Wall Street corporations and foundations are funding not only the privatization of education.  The protestors set up a ‘gauntlet” of protestors with their mouths taped shut –something Rhee admitted to doing to her noisy students when she was a teacher. She later said some of the students were hurt when they removed the tape.

The “Town Hall” organized by Rhee and Johnson gained positive press coverage on local news channels.  They covered Rhee’s views and the advocacy group without describing her connections to right wing groups.

Why do many reporters not report on the realities of the corporate sponsorship of  one group of  “school reformers”?

Conference: Attack on Public Education

CONFERENCE
The Attack On Public Education
And Privatization
January 22 (Sunday), 2012, 10:00 AM -5:00 PM
Laney Theater, Laney Community College
900 Fallon Street, Oakland, CA 94607
Free

There is a national systemic organized plan for the total priva-
tization of public education through the use of multi-billion-
aire supported non-profits such as the Gates Foundation, Broad
Foundation and the KIPP Foundation to place paid lobbyists into
governmental positions on school boards and other government
agencies.
At the same time, the privatization of the University of California
and the CSU system through corporate regents and trustees who
are profiting from these public institutions is a growing scandal.
This conference will look at how the destruction of public edu-
cation is taking   place in California, who is doing it and how to
stop it and defend the right to a public education for all working
people.

The Death and Life of the American School System

The Death and Life of the Great American School System

             Educational historian Diane Ravitch will make a presentation in Sacramento on Jan. 20, 2012 sponsored by local CTA affiliates- that is good.  The public needs this conversation and teachers need this support.  The Bee story on Jan 12 unfortunately uses a misleading headline- Testing Critic to address teachers. The issue is testing and more.  And, the public needs to consider what is happening to their schools- not only teachers.

            The Bee  article by Melody Gutierrez is reasonable, while the general reporting on education in national newspapers, magazines and television leaves much to be desired.   Ravitch’s book and her presentations will offer a small but important counter story.

Why do many reporters not report on the realities of school change?

  They too often  rely upon the wisdom of selected “spokespersons” and other elites. 

They have been sold a framework of  a corporate view of accountability. Corporate sponsored networks and think tanks such as the the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Broad Foundation,  the Bradley Foundation, the Pacific Research Institute,  and the Olin Foundation provide “experts” prepared to give an opinion on short notice to meet a reporters deadline.  Most reporters assume that these notables are telling the truth when in fact they are promoting a particular propaganda such as in the film “Waiting for Superman”.  Who do they not talk with?  They fail to interview experienced teachers and professionals who have worked for decades to improve the quality of inner city schools.

Corporations Sell Out Schools

Selling Schools Out

By Lee Fang
Posted on November 17, 2011, Printed on January 9, 2012
http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/corporateaccountability/1580/

If the national movement to "reform" public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of "virtual schools" — charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet — as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits.

But as recently as last year, the radical change envisioned by school reformers still seemed far off, even there. With some of the movement's cherished ideas on the table, Florida Republicans, once known for championing extreme education laws, seemed to recoil from the fight. SB 2262, a bill to allow the creation of private virtual charters, vastly expanding the Florida Virtual School program, languished and died in committee. Charlie Crist, then the Republican governor, vetoed a bill to eliminate teacher tenure. The move, seen as a political offering to the teachers unions, disheartened privatization reform advocates. At one point, the GOP's budget proposal even suggested a cut for state aid going to virtual school programs

Lamenting this series of defeats, Patricia Levesque, a top adviser to former Governor Jeb Bush, spoke to fellow reformers at a retreat in October 2010. Levesque noted that reform efforts had failed because the opposition had time to organize. Next year, Levesque advised, reformers should "spread" the unions thin "by playing offense" with decoy legislation. Levesque said she planned to sponsor a series of statewide reforms, like allowing taxpayer dollars to go to religious schools by overturning the so-called Blaine Amendment, "even if it doesn't pass…to keep them busy on that front." She also advised paycheck protection, a unionbusting scheme, as well as a state-provided insurance program to encourage teachers to leave the union and a transparency law to force teachers unions to show additional information to the public. Needling the labor unions with all these bills, Levesque said, allows certain charter bills to fly "under the radar."

Privatization & The War Against California Teachers-Fired CTC Attorney ...

See this and other posts about how California teachers are "evaluated."

The Assault on Teachers' Unions

The Assault on Teachers’ Unions

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

Teachers’ unions are under unprecedented bipartisan attack. The drumbeat is relentless, from governors in Wisconsin and Ohio to the film directors of Waiting for “Superman” and The Lottery; from new lobbying groups

like Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst and Wall Street’s Democrats for Education Reform to political columnists such as Jonathan Alter and George Will; from new books like political scientist Terry Moe’s Special Interest and entrepreneurial writer Steven Brill’s Class Warfare to even, at times, members of the Obama administration. The consistent message is that teachers’ unions are the  central impediment to educational progress in the United States. Part of the assault is unsurprising given its partisan origins. Republicans have long been critical, going back to at least 1996, when presidential candidate Bob Dole scolded teachers’ unions: “If education were a war, you would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy. If it were a patient, it would be dying.” If you’re a Republican who wants to win elections, going after teachers’ unions makes parochial sense.

Romney touts dismantling of bilingual education

by Leslie Maxwell

Romney Touts Role in Dismantling Bilingual Education in Mass.

The Iowa caucuses are just a few days away and Mitt Romney, at least as of this morning, appears to be the frontrunner in the first contest of the 2012 presidential nomination sweepstakes.

For those of you trying to make a decision about the GOP candidates based on their education policies and philosophy, you can get a lot of insight on Romney over at Politics K-12, where Alyson Klein details the candidate's thinking about schooling by parsing a chapter from his book "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness."

Two pages in that chapter get into Romney's view on bilingual education vs. English immersion, which is interesting but not terribly surprising.

While he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney said he kept hearing that students were graduating from high schools in his state without being fluent in English. Those anecdotes were coming to him in the months after Massachusetts voters had passed a ballot initiative to curtail bilingual education in the state.

Astonished by this, the then-governor set about examining the state's bilingual education programs and asking questions about their effectiveness. He said the data were "scant" on whether bilingual programs produced better outcomes for students than English immersion programs. He picked up the phone and "called principals in California," where bilingual education had mostly been replaced with English immersion. The principals he talked to told him English immersion was better for students learning the language.

A Nation's Education Left Behind | Common Dreams

A Nation's Education Left Behind | Common Dreams

Diane Ravitch

Against National Tests - Stephen Krashen

Against National Standards and National Tests
Stephen Krashen
to appear on: TOPed.org, Thoughts on Public Education in California
December, 2011

The movement for national standards and tests is based on these claims: (1)  Our educational system is broken, as revealed by US students' scores on international tests; (2) We must improve education to improve the economy; (3) The way to improve education is to have national standards and national tests that enforce the standards. 
 
Each of these claims is false. 

(1) Our schools are not broken. The problem is poverty. Test scores of students from middle-class homes who attend well-funded schools are among the best in world. Our mediocre overall scores are due to the fact that the US has the highest level of child poverty among all industrialized countries (now over 21%, compared to high-scoring Finland’s 5%). Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and lack of access to books, among other things. All of these negatively impact school performance. 

(2) Existing evidence strongly suggests that improving the economy improves children's educational outcomes. Yes, a better education can lead to a better job, but only if jobs exist. 

(3) There is no evidence that national standards and national tests have improved student learning in the past.
 
No educator is opposed to assessments that help students to improve their learning. The amount of testing proposed by the US Department of Education in connection to national standards, far more than the already excessive amount demanded by NCLB, however, is excessive and will not help learning. 

Additional budget cuts coming this week

Additional state budget cuts to higher education, k-12, and other services are predicted for this week.

They are called Trigger Cuts. They may well reach k-12. 

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/12/12/4116082/californias-financial-forecast.html

Current tests, ludicrous, dysfunctional

Parents. Would you force your kids to take these tests?
WHEN AN ADULT TOOK STANDARDIZED TESTS FORCED ON KIDS
Washington Post "The Answer Sheet" Blog -- December 5, 2011
By Marion Brady

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school
systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to
do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and
reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids
are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for
condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer
miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school
board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good
relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness
to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t
done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago,
realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much
of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now
thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote. “The math section had 60
questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten
out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system,
that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block
of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a
bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours
toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion
operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data
related to those responsibilities.

Why School Choice Fails

Natalie Hopkinson.

IF you want to see the direction that education reform is taking the country, pay a visit to my leafy, majority-black neighborhood in Washington. While we have lived in the same house since our 11-year-old son was born, he’s been assigned to three different elementary schools as one after the other has been shuttered. Now it’s time for middle school, and there’s been no neighborhood option available.

Meanwhile, across Rock Creek Park in a wealthy, majority-white community, there is a sparkling new neighborhood middle school, with rugby, fencing, an international baccalaureate curriculum and all the other amenities that make people pay top dollar to live there.

Such inequities are the perverse result of a “reform” process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.

My neighborhood’s last free-standing middle school was closed in 2008, part of a round of closures by then Mayor Adrian Fenty and his schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. The pride and gusto with which they dismantled those institutions was shameful, but I don’t blame them. The closures were the inevitable outcome of policies hatched years before.

How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools | The Nation

How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools | The Nation

Defend California public education

Please sign and forward out widely the Open Letter to Defend CA Public Education:

http://www.change.org/petitions/open-letter-defend-ca-public-education

This Open Letter is an indispensable tool to reverse the attacks on public education in California. It gives the authorities an ultimatum: either cede to our demands or we will begin a massive wave of actions beginning on February 1, 2012.

Please help us gather hundreds of thousands of signatures -- including from all major labor, student, and community organizations -- by forwarding this out widely. Moreover, please begin organizing on the ground to make February 1, 2012 the start of the largest, most united, and most powerful wave of actions California has yet seen.

(This Open Letter was first adopted by the Nov. 15 General Assembly of Occupy Cal, the largest GA in the history of the U.S. Occupy movement, with more than 5,000 students, faculty, and campus workers. For more information, contactcaloccupation@gmail.com )

California and NCLB

State Schools Chief Torlakson Issues Statement on NCLB Waiver

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson issued the following statement today regarding the State Board of Education's initial discussion of whether to seek a waiver* from the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act:

"I commend President Michael Kirst and members of the State Board of Education for their thoughtful discussion today, and their willingness to examine both the benefits and the costs associated with the extensive conditions California would have to meet to seek a waiver of the provisions of No Child Left Behind.

"As a state, we are being asked to make wholesale changes that would affect the operation of every school—with very little time and no new resources—all to receive temporary respite from a law that, thankfully, Congress is in the process of rewriting.

"I continue to believe that the best answer for addressing a bad law is to replace it with a good one. However, recognizing the immediate need for relief among so many schools, the State Board will continue to examine the option of applying for a waiver in a manner that reflects the state's priorities, timetables, and budget constraints."

Rally to Defend Your Education