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
Thank you to the 121 PA
House Members who decided to Stand Up For Public Education. If your State Rep. was one of them please
thank them for their support.
If you are
one of the many who tell me that you don’t have your morning coffee without that
daily fix of Keystone State Education Coalition news - thanks!
Please be
advised that I will be offline on Monday, October 22nd.
Pennsylvania
They've
contributed nearly $9 million to their causes since '11
Post-Gazette By Bill
Heltzel / PublicSource October 21, 2012 12:07 am
Ten wealthy
Pennsylvanians, including a husband supporting his wife for political office
and a gay man seeking equality, contributed nearly $9 million to their favorite
candidates and issues since 2011. PublicSource,
working with the Investigative News Network, identified the 10 biggest campaign
contributors in the state using state and federal campaign databases.
….Most are from the
eastern part of the state. Only one, Richard Mellon Scaife, is from Pittsburgh
……Charter school
management executive Vahan Gureghian gave $132,035 to the Montgomery County
Republican Committee and $110,000 to the Republican Committee of Lower Merion
and Narberth.
Joel Greenberg and
Arthur Dantchik are partners in Susquehanna International Group, which has used
lessons from poker to build a successful broker-dealer firm. The two men spent
$446,000 on groups that support vouchers for private schools such as charter
schools. In 2010 their Students First political action committee contributed
$4.9 million to pro-voucher gubernatorial candidate Anthony Williams, who lost
in the Democratic primary election.
Capitolwire: Unions, school boards and
House GOP uproar derail charter school reform.
By Peter L. DeCoursey & Kevin Zwick Staff Writers
Capitolwire, October
18, 2012
HARRISBURG (Oct. 18) – A deal between Republican
legislative leaders and Gov. Tom Corbett to pass a compromise charter reform
bill fell apart Wednesday due to suspicions by members of House GOP leaders and
aggressive lobbying by education groups.
Administration officials and Senate GOP leaders
were at a loss to explain what had happened.
EDITORIAL:
Education should be Legislature’s top priority
Now that
our illustrious state Legislature has completed its final three-day session
before breaking so they can all concentrate on getting re-elected, it might be
a good time to a look at what they accomplished.
The Campaign for Our
Public Schools: What You Need to Do Now
Diane Ravitch’s Blog October 20, 2012
The Campaign for Our
Public Schools was a spontaneous effort to gather the candid views of
educators, parents, students, and concerned citizens about the state of public
education policy today. On October 3, everyone reading this blog was invited to
write a letter to President Obama expressing their ideas.
In a brief, two-week
period, nearly 400 letters were submitted. There were many that were eloquent,
many that were heartfelt, many written from personal experience.
No one was paid to
solicit letter-writers or to write letters. No one who worked to bring the
letters together was paid. This was an earnest and completely volunteer to
carry the views of concerned citizens to the President.
Not a single letter of
those submitted expressed support for high-stakes testing or for the policies
of No Child Left Behind or the Race to the Top.
It was easy for me to
ask readers to write letters. Once they began to arrive, I would have been lost
without the providential intervention of Anthony Cody, who offered to collect
them, bring them together in one place, have them printed, and ship them to the
White House. Robert Valiant offered to create a file for the letters.
In short, dear friends,
collating and compiling your letters into a single volume would not have been
possible without the kindness of strangers. The volume was created by a new
community–a community of cyber-friends–and it now exists as a document.
All of the letters that
arrived by the end of the day on October 17 are now a pdf file of 430 pages.
They may be found here.
A Binder Full of Bad Ideas
Earlier this year at a roundtable discussion in Colorado
But teachers, like many other Americans, have
questions about Romney's policies and proposals. They worry about their impact
on the education that kids receive, because he advocates slashing education
funding and privatizing public education.
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