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Keystone State Education Coalition
PA Ed Policy Roundup for
December 29, 2014:
AP: Gap between rich, poor
schools in PA doubled in 4 years
Keep Up with the
Campaign for Fair Education Funding
The Campaign for Fair Education Funding
is sending out regular email notices about the activities of the Campaign and
ways for supporters to get involved and connect with this growing
movement. Please sign-up here to receive
those updates, and encourage others - parents, teachers, students, civic
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In light of Friday's decision to grant the state receivership
of the York City School District
"On behalf of the students, parents, graduates, and
property owners of the School District for the City of York who do not want to
be forced into a Charter School, on behalf of those who do not want public
funds to be used to profit private companies, and on behalf of those who want a
voice in who educates their children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, York
NAACP expresses dissatisfaction with the decision to grant Receivership and to
appoint David Meckley the Receiver.
York NAACP has already filed an appeal of the Court's decision
to deny its Petition to Intervene. Contrary to prior reports, it was not the
appeal that was rejected by the Commonwealth
Court , it was the "emergency request to stay
proceedings pending the appeal" that was denied. As such, we will continue
with the appeal now that a final decision has been made.
Locals react to judge
granting state takeover of York
City
York Daily Record By
Angie Mason amason@ydr.com @angiemason1 on Twitter 12/27/2014 02:21:12 PM
State groups, legislators, students and others have weighted in
since York
County Judge Stephen Linebaugh granted the state education department's
petition for a receiver in York City School District on Friday. The judge's decision names David Meckley as
receiver, giving him all of the school board's powers except for taxing. His
job is to implement the district's financial recovery plan. That plan calls for
converting district schools into charter schools, run by an outside operator,
if internal reform isn't working. Meckley
said Friday that the plan still has two tracks and he'd be talking to all
district stakeholders. But in November, he'd directed the board to approve an
agreement to turn district schools into charters run by Charter Schools USA
Here's a look at what people were saying after the judge's
decision:
"I do not want to be involved in a
for-profit charter. I don't think that they're in it for the students. I think
they're in it for the money, and I don't want to be a part of that." She is not alone.
York City
By ERIN JAMES 505-5439/@ydcity POSTED: 12/28/2014
09:55:38 PM EST
The York
City School
District
"I will be looking for a new job," Hoover said Sunday.
"I do not want to be involved in a for-profit charter. I don't think that
they're in it for the students. I think they're in it for the money, and I
don't want to be a part of that." She
is not alone. A York County judge's ruling Friday paves the way for a state
appointee to follow through with his plan, unveiled in November, to convert the
district to charter schools operated by a for-profit company called Charter
Schools USA.
An appeal by district attorneys, also filed Friday, could slow
that process. But for district employees and teachers like Kimberly Bolt, the
clock is ticking louder and louder.
http://www.yorkdispatch.com/breaking/ci_27220100/york-city-teachers-stressed-over-charter-conversion
Did you catch our weekend postings?
Coverage and reactions to state takeover of York City
PA Ed Policy Roundup Dec 27: Grinch steals Democracy
in York PA
Unchartered
Territory: Charter conversion in York City and New
Orleans
Research for Action by Mark
Duffy and John Sludden December 18, 2014
In less than a week, York County
Judge Linebaugh will issue his ruling on whether the Department of
Education-appointed receiver for the York
City School
District Pennsylvania
The receiver’s plan for York New Orleans
"Choice? There will be no “choice” for
the families of York
City Florida York
City
Diane Ravitch's Blog By dianeravitch December 27, 2014 //
Last Friday, a judge cleared
the way to put the York City schools into receivership, meaning under
state control. The Pennsylvania Department of Education previously announced
its intention to hand over the entire school district to the for-profit charter
chain Charter Schools of America .
Be it noted that today’s education “reformers” don’t much care
for democracy. They would rather turn public schools over to a for-profit
corporation that siphons off 20% in management fees and pays itself outlandish
rental fees rather than trust parents and local citizens to do what’s best for
their children.
Gap between rich, poor
schools doubled in 4 years
Luzerne County Citizen's Voice By MARC LEVY, Associated Press Dec. 28, 2014 8:57 AM ET
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The gap between what wealthy districts and poor districts spend to educate children has widened dramatically in the four years since GOP Gov. Tom Corbett took office, amid deep budget-balancing cuts in state aid under Republican-controlled Harrisburg and long-delayed pension obligation payments coming due. Gaps that existed when Corbett took office have now more than doubled, according to an Associated Press analysis of state data on spending, income and attendance. The growing disparity that Corbett's successor, Democrat Tom Wolf, will inherit has helpedPennsylvania earn the label in one study as
being among the worst states in educational disparity. The perception of a damaged educational
system under Corbett helped drive his loss in the Nov. 4 election, as Corbett
defended his stance on education funding by saying it is more important how
money is spent rather than how much is spent.
Luzerne County Citizen's Voice By MARC LEVY, Associated Press Dec. 28, 2014 8:57 AM ET
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The gap between what wealthy districts and poor districts spend to educate children has widened dramatically in the four years since GOP Gov. Tom Corbett took office, amid deep budget-balancing cuts in state aid under Republican-controlled Harrisburg and long-delayed pension obligation payments coming due. Gaps that existed when Corbett took office have now more than doubled, according to an Associated Press analysis of state data on spending, income and attendance. The growing disparity that Corbett's successor, Democrat Tom Wolf, will inherit has helped
How PA public school district
spending has changed
A look at how Pennsylvania
public school spending is changing, overall and by district income levels, over
the last four years. The figures are based on an Associated Press analysis of
state Department of Education data on Pennsylvania 's
500 school districts.
Wolf's education transition
team has Philly connections
WHYY Newsworks BY KEVIN
MCCORRY DECEMBER 28, 2014
With inauguration day less than a month away, Pennsylvania
Gov.-elect Tom Wolf has been busy coming up to speed on a host of the
commonwealth's most pressing issues.
After a running a campaign centered on increasing education
equity, Wolf has appointed an education transition team with half of its
membership connected to Philadelphia .
GOP draws lines as Wolf
focuses on huge deficit
Philly.com by MARC LEVY, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Saturday, December 27, 2014, 3:09 PM
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - With Democratic Gov.-elect Tom Wolf
touring Pennsylvania to drum out his message about state government's massive
structural deficit, the leaders of the big Republican legislative majorities
are sending their own message to him: Me first.
So far, Republican leaders say their ideas must come first
before they will consider any tax increase, including on natural gas drilling.
However, they are staking out positions that Wolf opposed during his campaign
and that stalled under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett amid solid opposition by
Democratic lawmakers.
Gov. Wolf and legislators,
take heed; there's popular support for strong action on many fronts: Editorial
Penn Live By PennLive Editorial
Board on December 26, 2014 at 1:21 PM, updated December 26, 2014
at 3:14 PM
For Pennsylvania ,
2014 was the year a lot of things didn't happen, despite widespread popular
support for change. Legislators remain
free to accept unlimited amounts of gifts from lobbyists and special interests.
Despite taped evidence of Philadelphia
colleagues taking cash from a lobbyist, legislators didn't even pass a law
banning cash "gifts" once and for all.
Pennsylvanians who are gay won the right to get married, but in
most parts of the state, they can be fired from their jobs or evicted from
their homes just for being gay.
Pensions for state workers and teachers are still dangerously
underfunded, despite painfully large and growing make-up contributions that
drain money from current services and fuel resentment from taxpayers. Many Pennsylvania
schools have to jam students into bigger classes and scale back non-core
courses that help give students a well-rounded education. State money for
schools is still skewed by ad hoc political deals that favor some places,
rather than following a rational formula that applies evenhandedly across the
state.
Editorial: Gov.-elect Wolf
must articulate a positive vision for Pennsylvania
The Issue: Tom Wolf will be sworn in as Pennsylvania ’s 47th governor on Jan. 20. He
was elected by a wide margin in November, even as
Republicans won big, increasing their party’s majorities in both houses of
Pennsylvania’s General Assembly, winning control of the U.S. Senate, and
picking up governorships in other states.
Gov.-elect Wolf beat Gov. Tom Corbett in a landslide after coasting
through the Democratic primary. He won
so easily by coming out early in the campaign with positive TV ads that
introduced him to the state’s voters as a likable, pragmatic, can-do leader.
And his decisive victory gave him a mandate to reform education, bring some fairness to
the tax system, and impose a severance tax on Marcellus Shale drilling.
Troubled Philly
Palmer charter school says it's closing
JEREMY ROEBUCK, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER Saturday,
December 27, 2014, 11:28 PM
A cash-strapped charter school
with two Philadelphia School
District of Philadelphia Walter
D. Palmer
Leadership Learning
Partners Charter
School
Phila. schools to immediately
take students from closing Palmer charter elementary
ERIN ARVEDLUND, INQUIRER
STAFF WRITER LAST UPDATED: Monday, December 29, 2014, 1:08 AM
POSTED: Sunday, December 28, 2014, 7:02 PM
The Philadelphia
School District
"We are working on finalizing a transition plan for Palmer
students. What that means basically is to get access to their records. It's
very important. We have already had this issue where the parents have had
trouble getting records when the Palmer high school closed."
Can positive student-teacher
relations improve math scores?
By Eleanor Chute / Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette December 29, 2014 12:00 AM
If a teacher goes to a student’s basketball game, will that
help the student do better in math?
It might. With a
National Science Foundation grant, Pittsburgh Public Schools has embarked on an
effort to develop positive student-teacher relationships to help every student
learn math. The goal is to reduce the gap in student achievement, sometimes
called the racial achievement gap or the opportunity gap. The project is called DEbT-M, which
stands for Designing for Equity by Thinking in and about Mathematics. It
is funded by a nearly $8 million, five-year NSF grant. The project lead is the
nonprofit Education Development Center ,
based in Waltham , Mass. University of Pittsburgh
and Carnegie Mellon University Duquesne University
"At least part of one of those goals
will be met within the first month of 2015, Heimel said. Austin
Area School
Superintendent Jerry Sasala will speak about the inequities before the Pennsylvania
Tax fairness coalition sets
tough goals for 2015
Bradford Era By ALEX DAVIS Era Reporter a.davis@bradfordera.com Sunday,
December 28, 2014 8:42 pm
Area leaders plan to continue into the new year their mission
of getting money filtered back to rural areas that have significant amounts of
state-owned land and oil, gas and timber industries.
The effort has been ongoing for several months, and now the
State Land Tax Fairness Coalition has set strategies for 2015. In the end, the
group wants two new laws: one that includes an increase in-lieu-of-taxes
payments to school districts, counties and municipalities for state-owned
lands, and the other for state-collected revenue from future gas and oil leases
and timber sales on state-owned land to be shared with school districts,
counties and municipalities.
“Political insiders describe this mission as an uphill battle,
especially in an era when the state’s revenue projections have come up short by
upwards of $2 billion in the current fiscal year,” said Potter County Commissioner
Paul Heimel, who is one of the leaders of the State Land Tax Fairness
Coalition. “They say that any new legislation that requires additional state
expenditures will have to clear some very high hurdles.” But, individuals who serve on the State Land
Tax Fairness Coalition aren’t giving up.
Heimel laid out a six-point strategic plan at the most-recent meeting of
the Potter County Board of Commissioners. That includes introducing new
legislation; preparing professional maps, charts and other data to show the
impact of high proportions of tax-exempt property on local tax bases;
scheduling one-on-one meetings with individual senators and representatives to
discuss the mission; and giving testimony before state committees.
Mark Gleason Turns 'Dump the
Losers' Into a Pseudoscience
Defend Public Education Blog By Ken Derstine December 16, 2014
Mark Gleason, the Executive Director of the Philadelphia
School Partnership, made national headlines in the spring of 2014 when, while
participating on an education panel, he described the portfolio method of
school reform of his organization as being based on a “dump the losers”
philosophy. (See A
Glimpse Behind the Curtain | Defend Public Education ) He wasn’t
talking about a factory making consumer products; he was talking about public
schools that are charged with educating the next generation. In a new document released by the Philadelphia School Advocacy
Partners, the new lobbying arm of the PSP set up by Mark Gleason and PSP,
they double-down on “dump the losers”. Their first document One
City, Two Systems of Schools gives the appearance of a scientifically
researched document which justifies this “dump the losers” philosophy as the
solution to the problems that plague Philadelphia ’s
public schools.
This ten-page document is released just as the School Reform
Commission, the entity set up after the state takeover of the School District
in 2001, is holding hearings on forty applications for new chartersin Philadelphia . Today, Philadelphia has 89
charters with 67,000 students. PSP is campaigning to have many of the
District’s 214 public schools turned into charters.
NYT Opinion: Rage Against the
Common Core
New York Times Sunday Review Opinion By DAVID L. KIRP DEC.
27, 2014
STARTING in the mid-1990s, education advocates began making
a simple argument: National education standards will level the playing
field, assuring that all high school graduates are prepared for first-year
college classes or rigorous career training.
While there are reasons to doubt that claim — it’s hard to see how Utah,
which spends less than one-third as much per student as New York, can offer a
comparable education — the movement took off in 2008, when the nation’s
governors and education commissioners drove a huge effort to devise
“world-class standards,” now known as the Common Core. Although the Obama administration didn’t
craft the standards, it weighed in heavily, using some of the $4.35 billion
from the Race to the Top program to encourage states to adopt not only the
Common Core (in itself, a good thing) but also frequent, high-stakes testing
(which is deeply unpopular). The mishandled rollout turned a conversation about
pedagogy into an ideological and partisan debate over high-stakes testing. The
misconception that standards and testing are identical has become widespread. At least four states that adopted the Common
Core have opted out. Republican governors who initially backed the standards
condemn them as “shameless government overreach.”
"That omission puts Duncan
pretty much in line with the majority of education insiders surveyed by
Whiteboard Advisors, a government-relations organization in Washington
Arne Duncan's Edu-Predictions
for 2015
Education Week By Alyson Klein on December
24, 2014 10:32 AM
We've got just a few more days before it's time to put on the
New Year's Eve dancing shoes and break open the champagne. So what's U.S.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan predicting for next year?
·
More than 60,000 additional children will enroll
in high-quality early learning. (I think he's hoping for good results from the
administration's new Preschool
Development Grant program and other initiatives.)
·
Six hundred new commitments by colleges,
organizations, and companies will help thousands more students prepare for and
graduate from college. (Sounds like he's putting a lot of stock in the White
House's recent
higher education summit.)
·
Ten million more students will have high-speed
Internet access (That would mean a great success for the Obama
administration's E-rate
initiative.)
·
America 's
high school graduation rate will set a record—again. (Graduation rates were,
indeed, at an all-time
high this year, but it's noteworthy that big achievement gaps remain.
What's more, the metric in question has only been required since 2008, and only
uniformly used since 2012. Plus, grad rates went from 79 percent to 80 percent,
hardly a dramatic jump. Still, a record's a record.)
Not on Duncan 's
list? A reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, a top priority for
both U.S. Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the House education
committee, and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the incoming chairman of the Senate
education panel.
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.
PSBA Master School Board
Director Recognition: Applications begin in January
PSBA website December 23, 2014
The Master School Board Director (MSBD) Recognition is for
individuals who have demonstrated significant contributions as members of their
governance teams. It is one way PSBA salutes your hard work and exceptional
dedication to ethics and standards, student success and achievement,
professional development, community engagement, communications, stewardship of
resources, and advocacy for public education.
School directors who are consistently dedicated to the aforementioned
characteristics should apply or be encouraged to apply by fellow school
directors. The MSBD Recognition demonstrates your commitment to excellence and
serves to encourage best practices by all school directors.
The application will be posted Jan. 15, 2015,
with a deadline to apply of June 30. Recipients will be notified by the MSBD
Recognition Committee by Aug. 31 and will be honored at the PASA-PSBA School
Leadership Conference in October.
If you are interested in learning more about the MSBD Recognition,
contact Janel Biery,
conference/events coordinator, at (800) 932-0588, ext. 3332.
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