How to fix our public schools?

[boutons_deux]

yeah, like for-profit charter schools are a solution (aka, tiest possible teachers and tiest possible education for the highest possible price)

and in total, privatized secrecy:

North Carolina Tells Charter-School Chain It Can’t Keep Administrator Salaries Secret

The schools’ management company, which receives millions in public funds each year from the schools, says that the salaries paid to school administrators should be considered a trade secret.

The North Carolina State Board of Education has issued a warning to a charter-school chain for failing to comply with an agency order to disclose the salaries of school administrators. The schools have been put on "financial probationary status," which could lead to sanctions if their board does not comply within 10 business days.

This is the same charter-school chain, Charter Day School, Inc., that ProPublica wrote about last month. As we reported, the four charter schools channel millions in public education dollars each year to for-profit companies owned by the schools' founder, businessman Baker Mitc . One of the for-profit companies, Roger Bacon Academy, is paid to run all the day-to-day operations of the schools. As we wrote:

Roger Bacon Academy functions as the schools' administrative arm, taking the lead in hiring and firing school staff.

It handles most of the bookkeeping. The treasurer of the nonprofit that controls the four schools is also t he chief financial officer of Mitc 's management company. The two organizations even share a bank account.
Mitc 's management company was chosen by the schools' nonprofit board, which Mitc was on at the time — an arrangement that is illegal in many other states.

Charter schools, which are privately run but government-funded, often outsource back-office functions to private companies. At issue between North Carolina and Mitc 's charter-school chain is the extent to which regulators can demand to know what happens to public dollars once they move into the coffers of a private company.

State officials say they have the right to ask for information related to the schools' activities and programs – and that includes salaries of any employees assigned to work at them. Other charter schools in North Carolina have complied and turned over this information. Mitc 's schools are the only ones that have not.

http://www.propublica.org/article/no...ailynewsletter

[CosmicCowboy]

What Happens to Test Scores When Teachers Are Paid $125,000 a Year?

The Equity Project Charter School opened in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan five years ago, with a fairly simple concept: get rid of extra administrative positions and pay teachers a lot of money—a base salary of $125,000 plus benefits and potential bonuses after two years of teaching. (A New York City public school teacher with five years of experience, by comparison, makes between $64,009 and $75,796.) Even the principal would earn less than the teachers to ensure that the school would be able to rely only on public funding, other than the cost of the school facility and its technology system.

The research group Mathematica Policy Research tracked the experiment at the middle school (fifth through eighth grade), and recently released an analysis, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, of the school’s effectiveness during its first four years. The result: students gradually achieved significantly higher levels of learning, with a major leap during their fourth year, equivalent to more than one and a half grade levels for math and nearly half a year for English.

The data was drawn from standardized testing, comparing students who were demographically and academically similar in surrounding neighborhood schools:

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TEP Students Additional Years of Learning in Math, English Language Arts, and Science
Mathematica Policy Research

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Even though the Equity Project students fared better compared to their peers at surrounding schools, the Wall Street Journal notes that only 43% of the school’s eighth-graders passed state math exams in 2013. A pretty low number, though a considerable improvement compared with the 26% city-wide pass rate.

Another big difference with the Equity Project, aside from the outsize salaries, is that the school looks for experienced teachers—the median teaching experience was 6 years—compared with charter schools that tend to recruit young teachers with less experience.

But the Equity Project’s teachers are still relative newbies compared to surrounding public schools, which have a median teaching experience of 13 years.

The Equity Project’s inclusive strategy meant that teachers became a big part of the school and developing curricula—

there was no assistant principal for the first two years, and

teachers are very much a part of the student disciplinary process.

For example, one form of punishment for a student who speaks disrespectfully to a teacher is for that student to spend the whole day with the teacher. It also means, though, that the teachers are working more than they might at another school.

Their work includes administrative duties, classes of about 31 students in fifth through seventh grades, professional development classes, a six-week summer ins ute, and stringent performance indicators that dictate whether a teacher may return. Those include taking no more than three personal days and five sick days per year, as well as performance on student and peer surveys. The teachers were very well-compensated and received benefits, but they were not union employees, as is typical of charter schools, and they were not tenured (a topic that’s been controversial in general when it comes to teaching).

And that resulted in turnover—a lot of it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education...a-year/382340/

so the students made serious improvement, and it's still early, but the teachers had too many non-teaching chores, so too much turnover. So the adjustments needed are clear.

It appears they got to cherry pick the teachers which cherry picked the results.

Better quality teacher = better results

higher paid teachers across the board not = to better results

[boutons_deux]

It appears they got to cherry pick the teachers which cherry picked the results.

Better quality teacher = better results

higher paid teachers across the board not = to better results

duh, of course. Why pay $125K/year to teachers who aren't carefully screened, selected, qualified, committed? ing duh

if K-12 teaching was seen as a prestigious, respected, well-paid career, it would attract superior teachers, selected from a large pool of candidates.

But the Repug/VRWC strategy is to defund public schools, underpay/overwork/union-bust/trash K12 teachers so the taxpayer money gets re-distributed to for-profit scam charter schools and Christian madrasas.

[pgardn]

How to fix public schools? Not possible.

Fix parenting and public schools will be awesome.
So many parents at udes towards public school is, " you take em and pass em because I can't handle them", especially HS. I challenge anyone on this board to volunteer as a tutor and ask to sit in a wide variety of classes and then talk with the teachers. It is so obvious which students have parents who care more about education than babysitting.

Next hire more teachers. 180 kids to keep track of and actually grade papers properly is basically impossible. That is standard for NISD HS teachers. And there are basically some very good schools in that district, Brandies, Health Careers, O'Connor, Clark. But they can't keep up.

[pgardn]

duh, of course. Why pay $125K/year to teachers who aren't carefully screened, selected, qualified, committed? ing duh

.

If this was accomplished and you take those teachers, put them in a high socioeconomic area where parents have benefitted from education, success is assured. There are some public schools that have this model. Not 125k necessarily, but serious money based on cost of living in that area.

[byrontx]

The assumption is that public schools are bad. That is not necessarily the case, my son's school is excellent within the parameters it operates ($0 library budget, 10 yr. iMacs for the kids, etc.). For the most part, its the parents that seem to be lacking. Too many kids are not getting the help and support they should at home. On top of that, the school is pretty much starved on money, the library budget has been zero dollars for three years in a row now. So you underfund schools then beat the out of them when you do not get the results you want? You want to blame teachers because they are an easy target?

The reality is that our increasingly complex society and markets are placing more demands on our education system at the same time Republicans have under funded them. On top of that, a lot of parents want to park the kids in front of the electronic baby-sitter (TV) and be a bunch of lazy asses. Quality teachers are needed more than ever and we need to pay them accordingly.

[Infinite_limit]

[boutons_deux]

"markets are placing more demands on our education system"

wages are stagnant, there is over-supply of job seekers demanding jobs

Contrary to the corporate lie, there are plenty of US engineers available but the BigCorps prefer the much cheaper H1B engineers/techs imported from Asia, that's why BigCorps have been pushing for years to greatly increase BY MANY TIMES the annual H1B visa quota.

BigCorps, through their financing of VRWC stink tanks and laundered-money PACS, have been trashing teachers to bust their union as a source of Dem funds, and trashing/defunding public schools (Banksters' Great Depression devastated tax revenues, was an opportunity for the predators to go after K-12) to get taxpayer $100Bs transferred/redistributed from public schools to for-profit, non-union, ty-teacher charter schools and Christian madrasas, while LYING that for-profit schools are the solution to their K-12 crisis.

BigFinance offers the very best science and engineering grads from the best universities huge starting salaries and bonuses to keep their corrupt businesses as corrupt as possible. Imagine if the same talent went to work in the productive Real Economy.

[z0sa]

How to fix our public schools: fix our parents.

[Nbadan]

Everybody thinks they know a simple fix to our education system...there are no easy fixes...but a good place to start is returning discipline into the classrooms and holding kids accountable for bad choices...

[dbestpro]

A good place to start is to make the schools safe. When kids are not in fear of other kids, the schools tend to well. No matter how much money you throw in the pot, kids will not do well when they go to school and live in fear of other students.

[TDMVPDPOY]

if u notice most public schools in rich suburbs =>elite schools>>>>>>>>>>private/public schools in poor area

now why cant those other public schools put up the same standard as the one in the rich suburb? is it due to govt funding? private/community funding?

[RandomGuy]

It appears they got to cherry pick the teachers which cherry picked the results.

Better quality teacher = better results

higher paid teachers across the board not = to better results

Well, at the kinds of salaries they offer, they can increase the number of willing teachers out of the supply pool to choose from.

Supply and demand dictates that you generally get what you pay for.

I would be willing to bet that not only are their teachers more experienced than average, they are probably better overall for their experience level.

[boutons_deux]

When a Wildlife Rehab Center Regulates Charter Schools: Inside the Wild World of Charter Regulation

Nestled in the woods of central Minnesota, near a large lake, is a nature sanctuary called the Audubon Center of the North Woods. The nonprofit rehabilitates birds. It hosts retreats and conferences. It’s home to a North American porcupine named e as well as several birds of prey, frogs, and snakes used to educate the center’s visitors.

It’s also Minnesota’s largest regulator of charter schools, overseeing 32 of them.

Charter schools are taxpayer-funded, privately run schools freed from many of the rules that apply to traditional public schools. What’s less widely understood is that there are few hard-and-fast rules for how the regulators charged with overseeing charter schools are supposed to do the job. Many are making it up as they go along.

Known as “authorizers,” charter regulators have the power to decide which charter schools should be allowed to open and which are performing so badly they ought to close. They’re supposed to vet charter schools, making sure the schools are giving kids a good education and spending public money responsibly.

But many of these gatekeepers are woefully inexperienced, under-resourced, confused about their mission or even compromised by conflicts of interest. And while some charter schools are overseen by state education agencies or school districts, others are regulated by en ies for which overseeing charters is a side job, such as private colleges and nonprofits like the Audubon wildlife rehabilitation center.

One result of the regulatory mishmash: Bad schools have been allowed to stay open and evade accountability.

“Almost everything you see come up as charter school problems, if you scratch past the surface, the real problem is bad authorizing,” said John Charlton, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education.

In 2010, an investigation by the Philadelphia Controller’s Office found lavish executive salaries, conflicts of interest and other problems at more than a dozen charter schools, and it faulted the authorizer – the School District of Philadelphia’s charter school office – for “complete and total failure” to monitor schools. In 2013, more than a dozen Ohio charter schools that had gained approval from various authorizers received state funding and then either collapsed in short order or never opened at all.

“Considerable state funds were lost and many lives impacted because of these failures,” the Ohio Department of Education wrote in a scathing letter last year to Ohio’s charter-school regulators. The agency wrote that some authorizers “lacked not only the appropriate processes, but more importantly, the commitment of mission, expertise and resources needed to be effective.”

Aside from such dramatic implosions, it’s hard to tell how many authorizers are doing at this important public function. They’re generally not required to say much about the details of their decision-making.

http://www.propublica.org/article/in...ent=&utm_name=

for-profit charter schools!

"non-profit" charter schools that outsource almost everything to for-profit contractors!

[boutons_deux]

Charter Program Expansion Looms, Despite Probes Into Mismanagement and Closed Schools

As Congress stands poised to increase funding for the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year federal Charter Schools Program by a whopping 48 percent, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has uncovered that the U.S. Department of Education's Office of the Inspector General has major nationwide probes underway into closed charter schools and suspected waste and financial mismanagement within the program.

The program is designed create and expand “high-quality” charter schools, but it has been repeatedly criticized by the watchdogs at the department's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in the past precisely because there is no way of knowing whether the money has gone to “high quality” schools.

With the vote looming in the U.S. Senate on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act containing the provisions expanding the charter schools program, Department of Education officials have assured stakeholders that the problems with millions disappearing down black holes is a thing of the past.

Last week, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan calling for more disclosure to the public of information on the impact and track record of the program. Federal officials responded through theWashington Post saying that the department has stepped up its monitoring activities and efforts to hold states responsible. The message was: all is well in federal charter land.

But the fact that the OIG has found reason to launch major probes this year tells a different story.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...closed-schools

[Nbadan]

A good place to start is to make the schools safe. When kids are not in fear of other kids, the schools tend to well. No matter how much money you throw in the pot, kids will not do well when they go to school and live in fear of other students.

I don't think most kids feel physically unsafe...unless by 'safe' you mean alienation, teasing, and bullying....but kids have been doing this for decades

[Nbadan]

I would be willing to bet that not only are their teachers more experienced than average, they are probably better overall for their experience level.

There is the real problem.....better teachers work for better districts, with kids who may or may not need their experience set of skills.........and the problem only gets worse if you hold teachers accountable by compensating them based on student scores....if your an experienced teacher, why would you ever work in a poor district where some years your scores will be high and some years your scores may be low depending on the kids you get and their 'issues' ....when you can work at a better district where your scores will be much better and your job safe...

[boutons_deux]

"I would be willing to bet that not only are their teachers more experienced than average, they are probably better overall for their experience level."

yes, charter school "teachers" get paid less, fewer or no benefits, which always attracts the better, more experienced to jobs than higher paying jobs with benefits. You're bet is a sure thing.

[Nbadan]

"I would be willing to bet that not only are their teachers more experienced than average, they are probably better overall for their experience level."

yes, charter school "teachers" get paid less, fewer or no benefits, which always attracts the better, more experienced to jobs than higher paying jobs with benefits. You're bet is a sure thing.

You would be surprised...some teachers will take a cut in pay just to be able to teach nothing but the better kids....

[boutons_deux]

Growing Evidence that Charter Schools Are Failing

In early 2015 Stanford University's updated CREDO Report concluded that "urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS peers."

This single claim of success has a lot of people believing that charter schools really work. But there are good reasons to be skeptical. First of all, CREDO is funded and managed by reform advocates. It's part of the Hoover Ins ution, aconservative and pro-business think tank funded in part by the Walton Foundation, and in partnership with Pearson, a leading developer of standardized testing materials. CREDO director Margaret Raymond is pro-charter and a free-market advocate.


questioned CREDO's statistical methods: for example, the study excluded public schools that do NOT send students to charters, thus "introducing a bias against the best urban public schools."

harters Are Underperforming

The inadequacies of charter schools have been confirmed by other recent studies, one of them by CREDO itself, which found that in comparison to traditional public schools "students in Ohio charter schools perform worse in both reading and mathematics." Another recent CREDO study of California schools reached mixed results, with charters showing higher scores in reading but lower scores in math.

In a study of Chicago's public schools, the University of Minnesota Law School determined that "Sadly the charter schools, which on average score lower that the Chicago public schools, have not improved the Chicago school system, but perhaps made it even weaker."

In general, as concluded by the nonpartisan Spencer Foundation and Public Agenda, "There is very little evidence that charter and traditional public schools differ meaningfully in their average impact on students' standardized test performance." Another report from Data First, part of the Center for Public Education, stated that "the majority of charter schools do no better or worse than traditional public schools."

But there's a lot of data that leans toward "worse" rather than "better." A Brookings report showed underperformance in Arizona's charter schools. An In the Public Interest group found that an analyst for the District of Columbia "could not provide a single instance in which its strategy of transferring a low-performing school to a charter management organization had resulted in academic gains for the students." The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that "Students in most Minnesota charter schools are failing to hit learning targets and are not achieving adequate academic growth." Over 85 percent of Ohio's charter students were in schools graded D or F in 2012–2013.

In the much-heralded New Orleans charter experiment, the Investigative Fund found that "eight years after Hurricane Katrina...seventy-nine percent of RSD charters are still rated D or F by the Louisiana Department of Education."

Charters Won't Tell Us What They're Doing

Performance aside, charters have other serious issues. The Nation called them "stunningly opaque...black boxes." Indeed, the federal government has spent billions on charter development without basic forms of accountability, even for the causes and details of school closings.

The charter system is so unregulated that oversight often comes from whistleblowers who feel disturbed enough, and courageous enough, to report abuses.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/06/growing-evidence-charter-schools-are-failing

[sickdsm]

if u notice most public schools in rich suburbs =>elite schools>>>>>>>>>>private/public schools in poor area

now why cant those other public schools put up the same standard as the one in the rich suburb? is it due to govt funding? private/community funding?

Would it be that rich suburbs parents are more likely to push their kids at home and expect more?

[Slutter McGee]

Only liberals would think that closing failing schools is a bad thing.

ter McGee

[boutons_deux]

Sherrod Brown pushes for charter school accountability and transparency

The Charter School Accountability Act would:

Improve accountability by strengthening transparency and disclosure measures for charter schools. It would require both independent financial audits and public disclosures about important financial information, like charter do ents, performance agreements between the school and its authorizer, the school’s program and mission, student discipline policies and processes, and annual student and teacher attrition rates. The bill also requires disaggregated data on information on disciplinary actions, student recruitment, admission, and retention.

Increase state educational agencies’ charter school accountability measures.The legislation would require that states have performance standards for charter school authorizers, data on charter school closures, denials of renewals, and canceled charters. States must also have the authority to suspend or revoke a charter school’s authorization based on poor performance or violating policies. Additionally, states must have clear conflict of interest laws for school employees and establish fiduciary duties for officers, directors, managers, and employees of charter schools.

The bill would also require community buy-in "in the planning, opening, and operation of charter schools."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...28Daily+Kos%29

Let's see how enthusiastic you public-school-destroying rightwingnuts are about CLOSING FAILING CHARTER SCHOOLS

[boutons_deux]

Only liberals would think that closing failing schools is a bad thing.

ter McGee

Only rightwingnuts would think that they think

[boutons_deux]

Colorado Supreme Court Rules Using Public School Money For Private Religious Instruction is Uncons utional

In 1786 Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote, that like Founding Father James Madison, he believed in designing a bill for religious freedom that, “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever;” particularly using tax dollars.

That sentiment is part and parcel of the “Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment, and yet over 229 years later evangelical Republicans are compelling taxpayers to support religious worship in private schools despite it is a blatant violation of the U.S. Cons ution.

Last week, in a decision sure to be appealed to the conservative Vatican-5 on the Supreme Court by the religious right and evangelical Republicans, Colorado’s highest court ruled that a county’s so-called “Choice Scholarship Program” violates the Colorado Cons ution because it uncons utionally diverts public school funds to private, religious schools.

The Court’s ruling specifically cited Article IX, Section 7 of the state Cons ution and explained, “This stark cons utional provision makes one thing clear: A school district may not aid religious schools. Yet aiding religious schools is exactly what the voucher program does.”

http://www.politicususa.com/2015/07/...iticus+USA+%29

vouchers for Christian Taliban charter schools are as much a FRAUD as rightnwingnut "social welfare" orgs are not political.