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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

PA Students First PAC Campaign Finance Report From 9/18/12 through 10/22/12


Daily postings from the Keystone State Education Coalition now reach more than 1700 Pennsylvania education policymakers – school directors, administrators, legislators, legislative and congressional staffers, PTO/PTA officers, teacher leaders, members of the press and a broad array of P-16 education advocacy organizations via emails, website, Facebook and Twitter.

These daily emails are archived at http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.org
Follow us on Twitter at @lfeinberg


If you want legislators who support public education then please support these candidates with your time, your money and your votes.

Education Voters Action of PA 2012 General Election Endorsements

Education Voters Action of Pennsylvania Published on September 17, 2012
We are very pleased to announce our first of two rounds of endorsements for the 2012 General Election.  Based on a review of available information, including written materials, public statements, voting records and candidate interviews, Education Voters has decided to endorse the following candidates with a goal of having more legislators who support public education in public office.
These candidates recognize that if our economy and our communities are going to improve and remain strong that it starts with our students.  We need strong policymakers in Harrisburg that are willing to stand up for our values, so we ask that you support public education by supporting these candidates on November 6th!
http://www.edvotersaction.org/2012/09/17/2012-general-election-endorsements/


Western Pa. school districts hit Web to lure students, save money

TribLive by Rossilynne Skena Monday, October 29, 2012, 12:01 a.m.
In addition to their daily work teaching in front of rooms full of students, Norwin School District teachers Peggy Bryan and Brian Fleckenstein have adopted online classrooms.
They’re two of many local educators who are teaching virtual classes as school districts grapple with a costly exodus of students to cyber schools. The districts are pitching in-house online courses in an effort to lure students back, retain the ones they have and save money.
Every school district in Westmoreland County offers some e-learning component, and that commitment is “pretty unique,” said Tim Hammill, supervisor of educational technology integration services at the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit. Almost every district has established programs through the intermediate unit, a countywide education consortium.
Read more: http://triblive.com/news/2749066-74/students-district-cyber-student-districts-norwin-online-burrell-intermediate-program#ixzz2Arr8qm1V 

“If we Race to The Top, then we compete. We do not collaborate.
If we work only on teacher practice, and not children’s full lives, then we – at best – only improve a small percentage of a child’s day.
If we blame educators, then we demoralize the very people we claim to want to help.
If we blame educators, we drive people away from the critical profession.”

Education Has It’s Own “47%” Scapegoat

Christopher Lehmen’s Blog October 29, 2012
Education has been having it’s own dramatic “47%”ing for sometime now.  You see, as the story goes, the reason why education is “failing” is because educators just “don’t care enough.” A small percentage of amazing teachers believe in kids, the tale continues, but most, especially those who work in high poverty schools, do not believe in the children they serve, their expectations are too low, and they in fact do not know how to teach. 
http://christopherlehman.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/educations-own-47/

“If you don’t count the chamber of commerce and the three rich guys (Marcus, Gaby and Cousins), Georgians contributed $30,615 to the cause. That’s 1.4 percent — by any measure, hardly a groundswell of in-state support for the charter amendment.”
Carpetbaggers dump $1M more into Georgia charter-school campaign
Atlanta Unfiltered By JIM WALLS Oct. 26, 2012
Just this month, Walmart heiress Alice Walton and other out-of-state interests dumped more than $1.1 million into the campaign to allow more state-chartered public schools in Georgia, new campaign finance filings show.
Families for Better Public Schools, the largest of the pro-charter committees, filed papers at noon today showing it had sunk another $1.28 million in October into the campaign for the proposed amendment to Georgia’s constitution. Voters will decide Nov. 6 whether to accept or reject Amendment One, which would allow the state to charter schools over the objections of local school systems.
Walton, the committee’s largest single donor, kicked in $350,000 on top of the $250,000 she’d given previously.  Other big donors disclosed in the committee’s latest filing were:
  • San Francisco billionaire Doris Fisher, widow of The Gap founder Donald Fisher, $250,000
  • Students First, a Washington advocacy group, $250,000
  • Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, $250,000
  • Peter Islands Resort CEO Richard Gaby of Atlanta, $100,000
  • J.C. Huizenga, founder of a national charter-school management firm, $25,000
  • Wall Street investment manager Joe Bridy, $25,000
  • Atlanta developer Tom Cousins, $20,000
http://atlantaunfiltered.com/2012/10/26/carpetbaggers-dump-1m-more-into-charter-school-campaign/

In case you have been offline due to the storm, here’s KEYSEC coverage of carpetbaggers who dumped $400K more into Pennsylvania legislative races in the past month.  Noteworthy were $100K to EITC sponsor State Rep. Christiana (R-15 Beaver), $50K to voucher proponent Senator Anthony Williams (D-8 Philadelphia. Delaware) and $50K to Brian Munroe, who is challenging State Rep. Bernie O’Neill (R-29 Bucks), a strong supporter of public education.
PA Students First PAC Campaign Finance Report  From 9/18/12 through 10/22/12
http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.blogspot.com/2012/10/while-you-are-waiting-for-hurricane.html

Powerful Coalition Opposes NCLB Waivers in New Jersey
Education Week Living in Dialogue Blog By Anthony Cody on October 30, 2012 7:30 AM
A remarkable coalition of individuals and organizations, many of them with deep roots in the African American and Latino communities, is calling upon the Department of Education to abandon plans to implement new policies associated with NCLB waivers in the state of New Jersey.
In the past, some leaders in the African American and Latino communities have supported NCLB, believing it would result in improved outcomes for students. The Department of Education has relied on this support to press its case that closing schools on the basis of test scores is in the interest of students. This letter reveals a different stance on the part of these leaders.
Rosie Grant, Program Director at the Paterson Education Fund, explained their stance in a press release issued two weeks ago: 
“We understand that the waivers were an effort to free states from the impossible targets set by NCLB. Unfortunately, here in New Jersey, it is clear that the NCLB waiver is being used by the NJDOE to apply measures that are much more damaging than NCLB would have been, particularly for low-income Black and Latino children.”
Dozens of civil rights and community organizations joined Ms. Grant in signing a letter that explained their concerns. Here is the letter, complete with the latest list of signatures.

Caution Urged in Using 'Value Added' Evaluations

Education Week By Sarah D. Sparks Published Online: October 25, 2012
Top researchers studying new “value added” or “growth index” models for measuring a teacher’s contribution to student achievement completely agree on one thing: These methods should be used in staff-evaluation systems with more caution than they have been so far.
That area of agreement emerged in an Aug. 9 meeting that drew together a who’s who of a dozen of the nation’s top education researchers on value-added methods—in areas from education to economics—to build, if not consensus, at least familiarity within a disparate research community for value-added systems. The U.S. Department of Education’s research agency, which organized the forum, today released the proceedings of the meeting, as well as individual briefs from each of the experts.

EVALUATING WHAT WORKS IN BLENDED LEARNING

Education Week October 30, 2012
Blended learning—the mix of virtual education and face-to-face instruction—is evolving quickly in schools across the country, generating a variety of different models. This special report, the second in an ongoing series on virtual education, examines several of those approaches and aims to identify what is working and where improvements are needed.

Which state has the best public schools?

Washington Post Answer Sheet Blog by Valerie Strauss on October 30, 2012 at 9:00 am
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has boasted repeatedly that the public schools of Massachusetts, the state where he was once governor, are “ranked number one of all 50 states.” Yet an annual state ranking by Education Week has given the top spot to Maryland for four straight years. So which state has the best schools? Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C., takes a look at this question. A version of this post originally appeared on the institute’s blog.

Kalamazoo economist Tim Bartik offers TEDx talk on 'Can preschool save the economy?' (video runtime 15 minutes)

Michigan Live By Julie Mack | jmack1@mlive.com 
on October 29, 2012 at 4:44 PM, updated October 29, 2012 at 4:45 PM
KALAMAZOO, MI -- A new 15-minute TEDx video features Tim Bartik, a senior economist for the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Researchin Kalamazoo, summarizing the arguments on why early childhood programs can build stronger local economies. 

National Education Policy Center

Charter Sponsor is Very Successful

Diane Ravitch October 30, 2012
Vavan Gureghian runs a successful charter school called the Chester Community Charter School. The school is nonprofit, but Mr. Gureghian supplies its good and services through his for-profit company and collects millions of dollars as a management fee. Meanwhile the local Chester Upland public schools–whose funds pay for the students in the charter school–is in bankruptcy and under the control of a Governor-appointed “chief recovery officer.” Poor Chester Upland has been controlled by the state for most of the past decade,  yet gets blamed for the fiscal insolvency that the state has deepened and may now use as an excuse to eliminate its public schools.
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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

School choice has been very very good for State Rep. Christiana


Daily postings from the Keystone State Education Coalition now reach more than 1700 Pennsylvania education policymakers – school directors, administrators, legislators, legislative and congressional staffers, PTO/PTA officers, teacher leaders, members of the press and a broad array of P-16 education advocacy organizations via emails, website, Facebook and Twitter.

These daily emails are archived at http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.org
Follow us on Twitter at @lfeinberg


If you want legislators who support public education then please support these candidates with your time, your money and your votes.

Education Voters Action of PA 2012 General Election Endorsements

Education Voters Action of Pennsylvania Published on September 17, 2012
We are very pleased to announce our first of two rounds of endorsements for the 2012 General Election.  Based on a review of available information, including written materials, public statements, voting records and candidate interviews, Education Voters has decided to endorse the following candidates with a goal of having more legislators who support public education in public office.
These candidates recognize that if our economy and our communities are going to improve and remain strong that it starts with our students.  We need strong policymakers in Harrisburg that are willing to stand up for our values, so we ask that you support public education by supporting these candidates on November 6th!
http://www.edvotersaction.org/2012/09/17/2012-general-election-endorsements/



EITC expansion sponsor State Rep. Jim Christiana (R-15 Beaver) who reportedly received $170K from pro school choice PACS earlier this year, was rewarded with another $100K during the past month.  State Senator Anthony Williams, who received over $6 million from the pro voucher PACS during his unsuccessful run for Governor, got another $50K this past month.
While you are cleaning up from Hurricane Sandy, take a look at what “Tropical Storm Betsy” has dumped into Pennsylvania political campaigns recently
Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children dropped $400K onto PA’s Student first PAC.
Students First PAC then reported that they spent $534K from Sept 18th through Oct. 22nd

“Missing entirely from this quantification is a sense of what really matters in education: real student learning (not just learning how to take standardized tests). Well rounded knowledge outside basic reading and math skills. (Where is art, music, science, history?) Character development. Citizenship. The building score misses the point of education. Yet the state intends to make these scores public and then evaluate teachers on them.
Which begs the question, why does the Department of Education plan to exempt charter schools from this teacher evaluation plan? Charters are quite fond of claiming they are public schools, so why shouldn’t building scores apply to them?”
Evaluating What?
Yinzercation Blog — OCTOBER 29, 2012
If only they spent this much time worrying about adequately funding our schools. The state Department of Education just released a complicated new formula for evaluating teachers that will take effect next fall. One of the new components is a “building score” that will account for 15% of each teacher’s evaluation. That score includes a variety of measures, including students’ PSSA scores, graduation rates, attendance, and whether or not the school offers Advanced Placement courses. Half of every teacher’s score will be based on direct observation, 20% will come from locally developed factors (approved by the state), and 15% from “correlation data based on teacher level measures.” [Post-Gazette, 10-29-12] Whatever that means.

Measuring the worth of a teacher?
L.A. Unified School District's Academic Growth Over Time measurement system, based on students' progress on standardized tests, spurs debate over fairness, accuracy.
By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times October 28, 2012, 6:28 p.m.
How to measure the worth of Los Angeles math teacher Kyle Hunsberger?
The teacher at Johnnie Cochran Jr. Middle School works 60-hour weeks, constantly searches for new teaching ideas and makes every minute count in class. During a fast-paced review of square roots and perfect numbers, he punctuated explanations with jokes, questioned his students to check their understanding and engaged them in group work.
His principal, Scott Schmerelson, praises him as a leader who heads the math department and started a campus program to give struggling students extra help.
Some of his students say he's the best math teacher they've ever had — a caring, funny mentor who explains well, pushes on homework and most of all believes in them.
"He always tells us nothing will stop us from learning and nothing will stop him from teaching us," said Edwin Perez, a gregarious 12-year-old, as three of his classmates nodded.
Yet, according to a key measure of teacher effectiveness used by the Los Angeles Unified School District, Hunsberger is average.

 

High schools with core courses produce more successful students

Post-Gazette By Kathryn Juric  October 30, 2012 12:09 am
Kathryn Juric is vice president of The College Board's SAT Program (www.collegeboard.org).
When it comes to education policy in the United States today, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: The structure of course work matters.
As states move to implement the Common Core State Standards, the positive impact that core course work and advanced study can have on college readiness is already evident in the SAT performance of recent high school graduates throughout Pennsylvania and the nation.
According to The College Board's 2012 SAT Report on College and Career Readiness, which was released this month, students who completed a core curriculum in high school did significantly better on the SAT than those who did not. A core curriculum is defined as four or more years of English and at least three or more years of math, science and social science or history.

Virtual Ed. Advocates See Potential in Common Core

Education Week By Ian Quillen Published Online: October 15, 2012
Perhaps no segment of educators is more enthusiastic about the transition to the Common Core State Standards than those who work in virtual schools or in blended learning environments that mix face-to-face and online instruction.
With the standards’ emphasis on deeper learning, collaboration, and applied knowledge, some proponents of online education suggest their adoption could lead to the passage of policies that are more friendly to effective online learning. Meanwhile, many online programs are already practicing the other changes inherent in common-standards adoption, such as the use of computer-based online assessments.

The Writing Revolution

The Atlantic October 29, 2012
For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.

Chester Upland Charter Sponsor Is Very Successful

Diane Ravitch’s Blog October 29, 2012 //
Vahan Gureghian runs a successful charter school called the Chester Community Charter School. The school is nonprofit, but Mr. Gureghian supplies its good and services through his for-profit company and collects millions of dollars as a management fee. Meanwhile the local Chester Upland public schools–whose funds pay for the students in the charter school–is in bankruptcy and under the control of a Governor-appointed “chief recovery officer.” Poor Chester Upland has been controlled by the state for most of the past decade,  yet gets blamed for the fiscal insolvency that the state has deepened and may now use as an excuse to eliminate its public schools.
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Monday, October 29, 2012

While you are waiting for Hurricane Sandy, take a look at what “Tropical Storm Betsy” has dumped into Pennsylvania political campaigns recently


While you are waiting for Hurricane Sandy,
take a look at what “Tropical Storm Betsy”
has dumped into Pennsylvania political
campaigns recently:

Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children
dropped $400K onto PA’s Student first PAC.

Students First PAC then reported that they spent
$534K from Sept 18th through Oct. 22nd

Source: PA Students First PAC
Campaign Finance Report
 From 9/18/12 through 10/22/12



Contributions Received:


Name
Date
 Amount
American Federation for Children PAC
092012
 $300,000.00
American Federation for Children PAC
101112
 $100,000.00



Expenditures


Name
Date
 Amount
Citizens for Jordan Harris
092012
 $    1,000.00
Friends to Elect Vanessa Brown
092012
 $    1,000.00
Committee to Elect Ronald G Waters
092012
 $    1,000.00
Friends of Maria Donatucci
092012
 $    1,000.00
Friends of George Dunbar
092012
 $    1,000.00
Susan Helm for State House
092012
 $    1,000.00
Friends of Thaddeus Kirkland
092012
 $    1,000.00
I'm for Knowles Committee
092012
 $    1,000.00
Friends of Justin M Simmons
092012
 $    1,000.00
Friends of Marcy Toepol
092012
 $    1,000.00
Friends of Todd Stephens
092012
 $    2,000.00
Friends of Warren Kampf
092012
 $    2,000.00
friends of Dan Truitt
092012
 $    2,000.00
Friends of Nicolas Micozzie
092012
 $    2,500.00
Committee to Elect John Taylor
092012
 $    2,500.00
Friends of John McNally
092012
 $    2,500.00
Smucker for Senate
092012
 $    5,000.00
Friends of Kevin Boyle
092012
 $    7,500.00
Friends of Brendan Boyle
092012
 $  12,500.00
Williams for Senate
092112
 $  50,000.00
Friends of Bill Toal
100312
 $    2,500.00
Friends of Mike Ludgig
100312
 $    2,500.00
Citizens for Jim Christiana
100312
 $  25,000.00
Senate Republican Campaign Committee
100312
 $150,000.00
Friends of Raja
100312
 $    7,500.00
Committee to Elect Janet S Anderson
100312
 $    7,500.00
Friends of John McNally
100312
 $    2,500.00
Citizens for Jim Christiana
100312
 $  25,000.00
Citizens for Jim Christiana
100312
 $  10,000.00
Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania PAC
100312
 $  15,000.00
Friends of Tim Houser for PA Senate
100312
 $    5,000.00
Vote Munroe
100512
 $  15,000.00
Friends of Brendan Boyle
100512
 $  12,500.00
Committee to Elect John Maher
101012
 $  25,000.00
Citizens for Jim Christiana
101012
 $  15,000.00
Susan Helm for State House
101612
 $    1,000.00
Friends of George Dunbar
101612
 $    1,000.00
Friends of Todd Stephens
101612
 $    2,000.00
Anne2012
101612
 $    2,000.00
Friends of Perry Hamilton
101612
 $    2,500.00
Citizens for Jim Christiana
101612
 $  25,000.00
Vote Munroe
101612
 $  35,000.00
Friends of Michael See
101612
 $    5,000.00
Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania PAC
101612
 $  10,000.00
Senate Republican Campaign Committee
101612
 $  10,000.00
Democrats for Education Reform
101812
 $  12,500.00
Friends of Perry Hamilton
102212
 $  10,000.00
Total Amount

 $534,500.00

Here's a link to prior postings on Students First PAC 
and American Federation for Children:
http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.blogspot.com/2012/03/follow-money-students-first-pac-from.html


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