Want some coffee with that?

Details are still a little sketchy, but apparently a school board member and a teacher's assistant got into it late Wednesday night in the Hempstead school district offices (in Long Island), with the school board member claiming the teacher's assistant hit him with a coffee cup. She says she was tackled by the guy while she was removing some personal items from the office, the night after schools Superintendent Susan Johnson was fired (replaced with Nathaniel Clay, who was fired from the same job last year). It's crazy out in Long Island. But who says summer isn't exciting?

More on Arizona For-Profiteers

This EdWeek article (via eduwonk) clears up questions raised in a previous post:

Arizona, which experts describe as having the nation’s least-restrictive charter law, appears to be the only state in which for-profit companies hold the charters for schools.

In other words, there are no other for-profit schools receiving federal funds, because in no other state do for-profits hold the actual charter to the school (they just serve, for instance, a management role). EdWeek reports that the House has voted to overturn the Education Department's decision to withhold federal Title I and IDEA funds from for-profit charter schools. But unless I am wrong, and I am never wrong, providing those funds to a for-profit entity is against the law.

Does anyone know any more about this than I do?

NYU: Union busting under "the cloak of July"

Apparently, wrath was unleashed at a "town hall meeting" on grad student unions at NYU yesterday (which I would have attended, had it not been smack in the middle of the day).

NYU

Charters and Unions, revisited (and not for the last time!)

this piece on charters and vouchers in today's nytimes is not the most enlightening thing you will ever read on the subject, but it does end in a thought-provoking way with a quote from the very colorful Tom Mooney of the Ohio Federation of Teachers:

In states like Ohio that permit private companies to govern whole chains of charter schools, the unions have fought them bitterly.

"Charters and vouchers are equal on our agenda," said Tom Mooney, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. "We consider charters more insidious right now, because they've grown larger, but vouchers could grow, too."

Why is the UFT in New York City embracing charters (to some extent) while the OFT sees them as equally evil as vouchers? Maybe it's a public/private thing. It would be hard to call charter schools in NYC an effort at privatization when the schools are so obviously public -- they look like public schools, feel like public schools, and many are even housed inside public schools. In Ohio, however, where you have big companies like White Hat Management that exist to profit off of these schools, charters feel like much more of a threat.

Or maybe it isn't a public/private thing, but an impact thing. New York State is not the kind of stronghold for for-profit management companies that Ohio is, but you still have very vocal protesters in Albany, where the charter schools have simply drawn a very significant number of students away from non-charter public schools.

Get Physical! (But keep drinking Coke ....)

Coca-Cola, long criticized for enticing schools into selling their products in schools through lucrative "pouring rights," will now be promoting exercise in schools, NYT says.

The school of bloggers were having this debate last night: would companies like Coca-Cola do things like this if they weren't seeing dips in profits (or at least waning public confidence in the company)?

Personally I think that companies are able to "control" what people think and how people shop only as long as the public has confidence in them. That is why they work so hard to give people warm, positive associations with their brand name. Look at this quote from the Coke executive:

"This program is about education, not selling product," Ms. White said. "It would be disingenuous to sell product through a program like this."

I think that once the public decided that selling high-calorie drinks in schools is harmful to kids, there was some sort of power shift. Now schools know that Coke needs them as much as they need Coke.

Dawn breaks over marblehead

Or, as they used to say in Hebrew, "finally the coin drops into the pay telephone." According to this AP story, Spellings is hinting that maybe "Adequate Yearly Progress" isn't really a measure of "progress," and that maybe all students achieving proficiency by 2012 isn't really the most realistic goal. I can hear the collective "DUH" that must have been running through the brains of the AFT gathering where she gave this talk -- people like Bella Rosenberg in the President's office have been saying this for a long, long time.

Another "DUH" moment in a great op-ed in today's New York Times. Normally I wouldn't find myself in such agreement with someone whose professional alliances include Checker Finn and Nina Rees, but he is right in this case. And he is saying what, again, people like Bella Rosenberg have been saying for a long, long time: it's the suburban schools that are going to be the downfall of NCLB.


Update: This article in the Atlanta Journal shows why keeping the disaggregation of scores is so, so important. The school in the article, Riverwood, is very similar to the high school I went to in suburban Atlanta. My school provided an excellent education -- to primarily white, upper-income, honors and magnet students. The article gives us a hint to why suburban parents could weaken NCLB to the point of irrelevance:

A school's reputation can affect property values and spur education-minded families to enroll their kids in private schools or move to other districts.

new york is so cool

from the New York Sun:

'Fast Food Nation' To Become Textbook at Health High School

A public school in Manhattan, the High School for Health Professions and Human Services, plans to purchase more than 1,000 copies of "Fast Food Nation," an expose of America's fast-food industry, by muckraker Eric Schlosser.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education, Margie Feinberg, said the book would be used in addition to more conventional textbooks to enhance the school's health-oriented curriculum. The high school, which has an enrollment of 1,559 students, will probably be using Mr. Schlosser's text in multiple grades.

Undocumented immigrants get tuition break in Kansas

In a potentially precedent-setting case, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging a Kansas law (passed in 2004 by the state legislature) that allows undocumented immigrants who went to high-school in Kansas to pay in-state tuition at state universities on Tuesday. According to this Kansas City Star article, the lawsuit (brought by a group of out-of-state students and financed by the friendly folks at FAIR) was seen as a test case since at least 7 other states have similar laws. The growing movement among states to allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition shows that the pressure is mounting for sensible immigration reform (at least when it comes to denying smart kids the opportunity to succeed), and it is not limited to liberals in blue states.

Crazy cap action in Ohio

100 new charter schools were set to open this fall in Ohio, but as of last week when the new budget was passed, only 30 will be allowed to open, according to this AP story.

What is odd to me is the way they are choosing these 30 schools: by lottery. Lotteries are okay for choosing students, but wouldn't you want to pick the 30 strongest candidates out of 100 schools? Or at least the 30 schools most prepared to open in September?

Charters in Ohio are getting a lot of attention these days, probably primarily because they have been so popular and therefore are making a serious dent in non-charter public school enrollment.

More on Business and charter schools

The school of bloggers have just acquired The Emancipatory Promise of Charter Schools, whose foreword relates back to yesterday's musings about Business and charter schools.

The foreword was written by Herbert Gintis, co-author of the very important Schooling in Capitalist America, which set out to show that “education plays a major role in hiding or justifying the exploitative nature of the U.S. economy.” In tEPoCS, Gintis starts to sound like the staunchest conservative voucher proponents (or maybe they sound like him?):

The bottom line is that defenders of the monopoly public school system are simply throwing up smokescreens to hide the simple fact that teachers are loathe to submit themselves to the United States labor market -- a market that most Americans are obliged to live with and that has turned out to strongly benefit consumers.

And then he says something, in an effort to defend the non-stellar average test scores of charters relative to non-charter public schools, that completely threw me for a loop:

Indeed, my work with Samuel Bowles has shown that test scores are not the major way schools affect the future wages and life chances of their students. It is likely that such factors as good citizenship, ability to take orders and complete tasks, and having a long time horizon are what schools really pass on to their charges in addition to cognitive skills.

What?? Isn't this the same guy who argued that schools perpetuate class systems in the U.S. because Business compels them to turn out good workers (who can "take orders and complete tasks") at the expense of really developing their brains?

Gintis, you confuse me. I will post more once I finish the book.

Santorum on public schools

"By asking the right question, we can see that when it comes to socialization, mass education is really the aberration, not homeschooling. Never before in human history have a majority of children spent at least half their waking hours in the presence of 25 to 35 unrelated children of exactly the same age (and usually the same socio-economic status), with only one adult to keep order and provide basic mentoring. Never before and never again after their years of mass education will any person live and work in such a radically narrow, age-segregated environment. It’s amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools." (It Takes a Family, 386)

(Via CapitolBuzz Via Andrew Sullivan Via thebellman )

SANTORUM

Going to college? DREAM on

Here is another great article about our failing (and increasingly ridiculous) immigration system, this time from the Boston Globe. A 18-year undocumented immigrant from Massachusetts was awarded a four-year scholarship at any state university because of her high test scores, but this was later rescinded once state officials found out about her immigration status. As the author of the article so rightly says,

"So much for celebrating the building blocks for success and the American dream. Romney says, tough luck if you are smart, hardworking, and the child of illegal immigrants."

It's beyond me why anyone wants to keep smart, high-achieving kids like this one out of college. Does anybody really think that denying in-state tuition and scholarships to undocumented immigrants will make any potential immigrants think twice about coming here to work? Or are policies like these motivated by fear? Despite the increasingly widespread movement in favor of the DREAM Act and state laws (see this previous post) to allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition, it seems like the power of fear is growing.

It's interesting that Mass. Gov. Romney is bashing undocumented immigrants now - this article in the Economist shows how his campaign to end gay marriage in Massachusetts is closely linked to his anticipated run for the presidency in 2008. Here in New York, presumed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has gone to the right on immigration, claiming that she is "adamantly against illegal immigrants." It's unfortunate that the way to get ahead in politics (particularly in the red states) is to blame immigrants for our problems. It will be interesting to see if an increased Latino turnout in places like the Southwest will prove Hillary wrong.

we made it to the Carnival!

thanks to the education wonks for linking to us in today's carnival of education! the carnival is basically a potluck smorgasbord of the week's edu-blog postings, and takes place each week at a different site.

Conn. Business -- Fomenting class conflict?

An article in the New Haven Register (via CSLC) discusses CT business involvement in promoting legislation good for charter schools this year.

Business involvement in school reform has always fascinated me. In college I wrote a term paper about PA business leaders' involvement in getting the state's charter law passed. My belief was that business leaders are attracted to charter schools because they try to mimic business practices and values, because they are traditionally affiliated with anti-union forces, and because they can instill these values into their future work force.

But when I interviewed Bob O'Donnell, who now runs the PA Charter School Resource Center but who was Speaker of the House in PA at the time the charter law was coming into being, he quickly relieved me of the idea that Business would support initiatives like charter schools out of a desire to create a pliant future work force, because charters put power into the hands of parents (particularly poor and minority parents) -- basically, they rock the boat, something Business never wants to happen. He also scoffed at the idea that Business is really that organized and has that much foresight that they would lobby for education policies that would help indoctrinate the kind of workers they're going to want in 15, 20 years.

I still don't have it all figured out. But if New Haven business leaders were as influential in the CT legislature on behalf of charters as this article suggests, then maybe O'Donnell's theory needs some revisiting.

Report cards officially become a campaign issue

Yesterday, Democratic frontrunner Fernando Ferrer criticized Mayor Bloomberg for failing to provide sufficient translation services to parents. Here is an excerpt from the New York Sun article:


The leading Democratic mayoral candidate, Fernando Ferrer, said yesterday that Mayor Bloomberg has not done enough with regard to translation and interpretation services to help immigrant parents become more involved in their children's education."
Translation is an integral part of a public school education," Mr. Ferrer said after marching, flanked by 20 Hispanic parents, to P.S.116 in Bushwick, Brooklyn. "Bloomberg still won't take responsibility for parents who desperately need translation services so that they can play an active role in their children's education."
Mr. Ferrer said Mr. Bloomberg's new Translation and Interpretation Services Unit, created last September, was "understaffed and underfunded." Mr. Ferrer then repeated his statement in Spanish.
According to a report referred to by Mr. Ferrer and released yesterday by the nonprofit group Make the Road by Walking, 25% of all New York City parents are excluded from their children's education by language barriers. If elected mayor, Mr. Ferrer said, he would "first try to keep the promise Mike Bloomberg made - to spend $10 million on translation and interpretation services."
According to Mr. Bloomberg's campaign spokesman, Stuart Loeser, the mayor has already invested that $10 million, with the allocation of the last $7.5 million announced last month. "We're already hard at work on this," Mr. Loeser said.


It's good that Ferrer is raising this issue - I think that Bloomberg is on the right track with the recent increase in funds for the centralized translation office, but much more needs to be done so non-English speaking parents can feel comfortable at school and begin participating in their child's education. Although I don't see how spending a few million more dollars (which seems to be what Ferrer is suggesting) more will do the trick - there needs to be a firm commitment to provide these services in all schools (many schools in Western Queens aren't getting any help at this point), which is what the Education Equity Act would do. Still, I think that NYC Educator's comment on a previous post that this issue will go away after the election is probably correct. Unless of course Bloomberg or Ferrer (more likely) are elected because of a high Latino or immigrant turnout. But even then it will still be an uphill battle.

A good bill thwarted by a very bad law

As relayed by the Boston Globe, a recent report points out a barrier to affordable housing that had not occurred to me before. The expert they interviewed explains it well:

''The fear is that if they build affordable housing and children live in that housing, the cost of schooling those kids in those homes would outweigh the amount of money in property tax brought in from those homes," said Barry Bluestone, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University and a coauthor of the study. ''There would be more costs over and above what is generated in revenue. Which means they would have to raise money in some other ways, or spend less per child. No municipality wants to do that."

The inadequate supply of affordable housing is a notorious glitch in the housing market, and governments typically have to provide incentives to developers to build it -- something Boston is particularly good at, despite the barrier presented by the cost of education.

Bottom line: One more reason local funding of schools is a bad, bad idea.

What would Uncle Milton think?

I'm late in discovering this story and haven't had time to read other blog posts about it, so sorry in advance. But i had to say something about the expansion of the voucher program in Ohio.

The governor has led the drive for an expansion of the voucher program to give a voucher to students in districts classified as being in Academic Watch and Academic Emergency. This is nonsensical, because you are making the consequence of an accountability system be transferring students to schools that are unaccountable.

However, and let this not be construed as a flagging of my opposition to vouchers, this particular program does have a couple of interesting twists:

• Volunteer service option: The amount of each voucher is small, from $4,000 to $5,000 depending on the child's grade. Usually the argument goes that this will force low-income parents into sending their children to parochial schools, many of which have just as many problems as many public schools. Under this law, however, schools are required to offer parents the option of paying the difference between the voucher and tuition through volunteer service.
• Assessment: Schools will be required to administer state achievement tests to voucher students.

Why the compromise? I think what is emerging is proof of something Eduwonk mentioned in this (excellent) post, that "Vouchers are the stalking horse for charters." Meaning, that it's the charter model that is making the most sense to the public and to legislators.

Still DREAMing

A quick update on Marie Gonzalez, the undocumented immigrant from Jefferson City, Missouri featured in a Washington Post article last week (blogged about at Eduwonk and on this site also). Marie, a honors student in high school, was facing deportation (the orders were for today, July 5) along with her parents. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Marie was granted a stay of deportation for one year on July 1st. Great news! Unfortunately, her parents are still scheduled to be deported, although MO Senator Jim Talent is apparently on the case.

The Post story, and some well-timed protests in NYC, LA and Jeff City, seem to have generated a lot of attention about Marie's situation in particular and on the 65,000 undocumented immigrants that could be helped by the DREAM Act, which potentially could put young immigrants like Marie on a path towards citizenship (and allow them to attend college). Still no word on when the Bush administration will begin supporting sensible immigration reforms that would help families like Marie's.

Can't read your child's report card?

A lot of parents in New York can't, because the Dept. of Ed is still sending report cards home only in English. Even though only one in four parents in NYC is not proficient in English, and even though Joel Klein and Bloomberg keep talking about how important parent participation is, there is no word on the status of the Education Equity Act (past blogs about the Act here and here). Bloomberg has increased funding for a central translation unit by $5 million, but although it is a positive step, more needs to be done (although on a positive note, NCLB transfer forms are being sent out this summer in Spanish and English). The City Council's inaction on this issue isn't stopping some parents from protesting, according to the New York Sun:

HISPANIC PARENTS PROTEST ENGLISH REPORT CARDS AT CITY HALL
A group of 40 Latino parents from Brooklyn and Queens held a protest yesterday in front of City Hall, calling on Mayor Bloomberg to support Intro. 464, the Education Equity Act, and demanding legislative action to defend the rights of immigrant parents before the beginning of thenext school year in September. The protesters delivered a letter to the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, with copies of their children's report cards printed only in English. More than 25% of all New York City parents cannot read or speak English.
"We have made a priority of translating report cards into other languages and expect to provide them during the next school year," a spokesperson for the Education Department, Michele McManus Higgins,said. According to Ms. Higgins, last month the city agency announced a comprehensive expansion of translation and interpretation services, including $7.5 million in additional support to provide increased translation and interpretation services for regional offices and schools across the city.

New school funding system in Missouri

According to this Kansas City Star article, Missouri just passed a law that guarantees that $6,117 in state and local funds will spent on each student in the state. School districts with low tax rates (I'm guessing mostly rural districts) will be required to raise them to meet minimum state levels. Gov. Matt Blunt (R) says that education spending will be increased by $800 million over the next 7 years. Critics, including the National Education Association, argued that the state had not identified where the increase in funding is going to come from (it's definitely not coming from taxes under Blunt, who hates raising taxes so much that he is trying to gut Medicaid in Missouri) and that the impact of some districts was not considered.

It's obviously hard to know what the impact of this law will be, but the goal to make education spending more equitable is certainly a step in the right direction. And while I'm skeptical of anything Blunt does, shifting the burden of funding from localities to the state is probably a good thing.