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Keystone State Education Coalition
PA Ed Policy Roundup for
December 19, 2014:
The ABC's of Basic Education
Funding in Pennsylvania
Overview of 50 States'
Funding Formulas
By Mike Griffith, Education Commission
of the States
Presented to PA Basic Education Funding
Commission October 2014
The ABC's of Basic Education
Funding in Pennsylvania
The Campaign for Fair Education Funding December 18, 2014 Video
Runtime 3:31
The Pennsylvania
PASBO answers the
question: What is Basic Education Funding?
Charter Schools USA expands
on plans for York City
A representative of Charter Schools
USA said the for-profit
company will be "dedicated to improving the education of York City
students" if given the opportunity to operate the York City School District Charter Schools
USA
Parents, teachers, students and school officials are
overwhelmingly opposed to that idea — which would be the first
public-to-charter conversion in Pennsylvania and among the first in the
country.
The York
City
The board did not discuss the decision before or after the
vote.
After the meeting, board President Margie Orr said the board's
decision was "possibly" influenced by a desire to reach an agreement
more consistent with the district's financial recovery plan.
The lack of a new teachers' contract has been a big source of
contention among district and state officials since the early days of the
district's two-year financial recovery process.
"The biggest cost increases in the
five-year plan are charter and pension expenditures. Next year alone, the
district expects it will have to spend $32 million more in pension costs and
$42 million in charter costs. Stanski
would not say whether the district is planning for new charters - 40 new charter-school
applications have been received. He said the district was planning to lose
5,000 more students to charters over the next five years, though."
No-frills spending plan
adopted for Phila. schools
KRISTEN A. GRAHAM, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER LAST UPDATED: Friday, December 19,
2014, 1:08 AM POSTED: Thursday, December 18, 2014, 9:55 PM
Even in a best-case scenario, the Philadelphia School
District
SRC adopts 5-year financial
plan
SOLOMON LEACH, DAILY
NEWS STAFF WRITER LEACHS@PHILLYNEWS.COM,
215-854-5903 POSTED: Friday, December 19, 2014, 12:16 AM
THE SCHOOL REFORM Commission last night adopted a five-year
financial plan that maintains the status quo, but signaled its intention to
push a more-ambitious agenda that would require significant investments from
the city and state. The adopted plan
shows a projected $30 million budget gap for the fiscal year that starts July
1, compared to a $216 million anticipated shortfall last year. The spending
plan reflects a continued rise in pension costs and charter-school payments,
but also assumes that health-care benefits imposed on the teachers' union will
be upheld - something that Commonwealth
Court has yet to decide. "While on paper [the gap] looks smaller,
it's smaller because we've had to make decisions that impact the lives of
children in our city," Chief Financial Officer Matt Stanski told
reporters. In contrast, the district's
"transformational" five-year plan would require an extra $309 million
next year, which would be directed to schools for additional classroom and
after-school resources, Stanski said.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20141219_SRC_adopts_5-year_financial_plan.html#OeM7SKqZDd6OaLyq.99
District: We need $309M more
next year to provide effective education
Five-year financial plan to be presented to the SRC
tonight says just to keep inadequate current conditions, $30 million is needed.
the notebook By Dale
Mezzacappa on Dec 18, 2014 02:30 PM UPDATED 7:50
Tonight Superintendent William Hite presented two
five-year financial plans to the School Reform Commission. One is called "Inadequate Status
Quo" and reflects the "grim reality" of current conditions in
schools. The other, called
"Transformation," asks for enough resources to "provide all ...
students with the kind of educational opportunities that will enable them to
fulfill their promise." Both plans
require more money -- $30 million to maintain what exists now, and 10 times as
much -- $309 million -- to give students what District leaders think they need
next year.
Philly Wakisha Charter school
shutting for good earlier than planned
WHYY Newsworks BY LAURA
BENSHOFF DECEMBER 18, 2014
North Philadelphia's Wakisha charter school is closing its
doors this Friday, only the second charter school in Philadelphia history to do so in the middle
of a school year. Wakisha was supposed to close on December 23rd, but last week
the school's administration stopped classes and moved up the last day to
December 19th. In a letter from school administrators first reported by
the Philadelphia Inquirer's Martha Woodall, the school
citied dwindling teacher and student numbers as the reason for closing their
doors even sooner than initially announced. The letter maintained there were
only "three administrators, and 10 classroom teachers and support
staff" as of last week. According to the Philadelphia School
District
Putting a number on forgone Pa.
WHYY Newsworks BY MARY
WILSON DECEMBER 19, 2014
A report by
Pennsylvania 's
auditor general finds that some counties are losing hundreds of millions of
dollars from organizations defined as charities and are therefore exempt from
property taxes. The study cherry-picks
10 counties -- including Bucks and Montgomery
--and tallies up how much money they lost in 2014 because of the nonprofit
entities within their borders that don't pay property taxes. It also discloses
what those counties' hospitals and medical facilities would have to pay in
property taxes if not for the exemption.
Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said he knows some of these
organizations make voluntary payments to local governments instead of property
taxes, but those payments aren't standardized.
Cuomo
Signals Changes for Education Next Year
New York Times By KATE TAYLOR DEC. 18, 2014
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signaled
on Thursday that he intended to push next year for sweeping changes to the
state’s education system, with goals that include making it easier to fire
low-performing teachers and increasing the number of charter schools. In a letter to the state’s departing
education commissioner, John B. King Jr., and the chancellor of the Board of
Regents, Merryl H. Tisch, Mr. Cuomo’s director of state operations, Jim
Malatras, asserted that the performance of the state’s students on a variety of
measures, like graduation rates and test scores, was “unacceptable.” He also
enumerated pointed questions about subjects like teacher evaluations and
tenure. The first question on the list,
for instance, asked, “How is the current teacher evaluation system credible
when only 1
percent of teachers are rated ineffective?”
The Problem Isn't Getting Rid
of Teachers, It's Keeping Them
Forbes by Nick Morrison December 3, 2014
Judging by the tenor of the education debate in recent weeks,
it would be easy to assume that the biggest challenge facing school leaders is
how to get rid of bad teachers. But any problems caused by teacher tenure pale
in comparison with the difficulty in getting teachers to stay.
I wrote earlier this week about how a belief in removing poor
teachers as a way to improve schools was misplaced. My post was
a response to the debate prompted by an article in
Time magazine about tech entrepreneurs who want to make it easier to fire bad
teachers.
While it may excite conservative commentators, this proposal is
doomed to fail, not least because firing teachers requires finding
replacements, and there is no guarantee they will be any better, if they exist
at all. But there is another side to
this debate, and that is the difficulty of keeping teachers in the classroom.
Not just good teachers, but any teachers.
Turning around schools with
low achievement rates never seems to work
One of the goals U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan set when
he launched the $3.5 billion School Improvement Grant (SIG) program in
2009 was to turn 1,000 schools around annually for five years. “We could really
move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of
underserved children,” he said. I like
Duncan and much of what he and the Obama administration have done for schools,
but that goal is a harmful fantasy.
The overlooked truths about fixing schools
are vividly revealed in an Education Writers Association research
brief, “What
Studies Say About School Turnarounds,” by Andrew Brownstein,
a freelance journalist who reports on federal education policy.
(Turnaround schools are those whose low achievement rates have been
significantly improved by a change in operations.) Brownstein said “successful turnarounds are
extremely rare.” Veterans ofeducation reform efforts “might be forgiven
for thinking of turnarounds as the unicorns of federal education policy,” he
said.
January 23rd–25th, 2015 at The Science Leadership
Academy , Philadelphia
EduCon is both a conversation and a conference.
It is an innovation conference where we can come together, both
in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will
be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the
big dreams.
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