Daily postings from the Keystone State Education Coalition now
reach more than 3900 Pennsylvania education policymakers – school directors,
administrators, legislators, legislative and congressional staffers, Governor's
staff, current/former PA Secretaries of Education, Wolf education transition
team members, Superintendents, School Solicitors, PTO/PTA officers, parent
advocates, teacher leaders, business leaders, faith-based organizations, labor
organizations, education professors, members of the press and a broad array of
P-16 regulatory agencies, professional associations and education advocacy
organizations via emails, website, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
These daily emails are archived and searchable at http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.org
Follow us on Twitter at @lfeinberg
Keystone
State Education Coalition
PA
Ed Policy Roundup September 22, 2016
Auditor General DePasquale to release
statewide cyber school audit 1:30 today
Southeastern
PA Regional 2016 Legislative Roundtable: William Tennent High School (Bucks
Co.) SEP 22, 2016 • 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Auditor
General DePasquale slated to be Keynote Speaker
School Leaders from Northampton,
Lehigh, Bucks, Montco, Chesco, Delco and Philadelphia Counties encouraged to
attend.
More info & Registration: https://www.psba.org/event/2016-legislative-roundtable/
What
are Community Schools?
Philly Mayor’s Office of
Education Website
Community schools are public
schools where a full-time coordinator works with the entire school
community—students, parents, teachers, administrators, service providers, and
neighbors—to identify the community’s most pressing needs, such as expanded
medical services, after-school programming, and job training. The coordinator
then works with service providers and City agencies to bring these resources
directly into the school. Community schools become neighborhood centers,
improving access to programs and services for students, families, and
neighbors. Successful community schools
leverage public, private, and philanthropic resources to address challenges
that keep our students from learning. By meeting the needs of the whole child
and the neighborhoods in which they live, community schools better support
students and families, and address non-academic barriers like violence, hunger,
or homelessness, which too often keep students from succeeding in the
classroom.
Department of the Auditor General Sept. 21 press release.
WHAT: Auditor General Eugene DePasquale will release audits of three schools — including a cyber charter school with nearly 10,000 students from 484 school districts — that demonstrate the urgent need to overhaul Pennsylvania's charter school law.
WHEN: 1:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016
WHERE: Capitol Rotunda, Main Capitol, Harrisburg, PA 17120
WHY: The three concurrent audits brought to light more reasons that the state's nearly 20-year-old charter school law needs to be overhauled. The charter school law changes he will outline are in addition to the recommendations to improve accountability, effectiveness, and transparency included in his special report on charter school law reform which is available online.
Governor Wolf Makes Schools That Teach
Stop in Harrisburg
Governor
Wolf’s Blog September 21, 2016
Harrisburg, PA – As part of his
statewide ‘Schools That Teach’ Tour, Governor Tom Wolf visited today with
students and staff at Camp Curtin Academy in Harrisburg. In the 2016-17 budget,
Governor secured $2.6 million in increased classroom funding for the Harrisburg
School District, making for a total increase over $5 million to Harrisburg
schools over his first two budgets. “We
have made great strides over the last two years in restoring the massive hit
schools took due to state budget cuts in 2011, but we still have a lot of work
to do,” Governor Wolf said. “The Harrisburg School District is one of many
across the commonwealth that continues to struggle for adequate funding while
working hard to provide the best possible education to students.” During the visit, the governor was able to
see first-hand some of the district’s academic resources new to the 2016-17
school year, including a newly reopened library and a new SmartLab for STEM
education.
Court eyes school funding
By Stacy M. Brown For
the Pocono Record September 21, 2016
Pennsylvania’s highest court
began considering arguments as to whether an inadequate school funding lawsuit
can go forward. The suit, filed by six
parents and seven school districts from around the state, claims that Gov. Tom
Wolf and Pennsylvania lawmakers have failed as required by the constitution to
properly fund public schools and forcing districts to abide by certain academic
and graduation standards. Gary Summers,
the president of East Stroudsburg Area School District Board of Directors, said
East Stroudsburg and two other districts in Monroe County are adversely
affected by inadequate funding and the formula used to determine how much is
distributed to schools around the state.
“It’s a mixed bag for East Stroudsburg. Yes, we will get an extra and
much appreciated $1 million this year, but we are so far behind that it barely
makes a dent,” Summers said. Much of the
attention has been on the recently approved bi-partisan new funding formula
that was signed in July by Wolf. That
represented a great step forward, but the formula only applied to the
additional amount of the basic education funding for the 2015-16 and 2016-17
school years, Summers said.
Scranton Times Tribune BY SARAH HOFIUS HALL / PUBLISHED: SEPTEMBER 21, 2016
DICKSON CITY — In the corner of a
ballroom, seventh-graders huddled around an infrared camera as they took turns
panning the crowd. Organizers of a new
science, technology, engineering, art and math initiative hope that by the end
of the school year, students will have a clearer vision of their future. More than 800 seventh-graders from the
Scranton and Riverside school districts gathered at Genetti Manor in Dickson
City on Tuesday for the launch of the STEAM program, a project of the Scranton
Area Community Foundation and its Women in Philanthropy program. During the
next two years, the districts will host the Salvadori Center, a New York City
math and science education organization, which will deliver an eight-week
curriculum. Site visits and a mentorship program are also available to
students.
Post Gazette Letter by FRANCO HARRIS, Chair, Board of Directors The Pittsburgh Promise September 22, 2016 12:00 AM
I was encouraged by friend and
former Olympian Bruce Baumgartner in his Sept. 9 Perspectives piece, “The Academic Medal Count,” which equates the success
of elite training of athletes at the youngest possible age to the need for
doing the same with academics for students entering kindergarten. He poses a
truly Olympian idea: Invest more in quality education for students to greatly improve
the chances for their success at the outset of their lives. The Pittsburgh Promise is one of many
programs aimed at improving educational outcomes, closing the achievement gap
and removing cost barriers for young people to succeed. The Promise has seen
firsthand the need to bolster learning and ambition in children as early as
possible. In fact, kindergarten-readiness is a prerequisite to
Promise-readiness in our urban schools. If
our leaders in government and business would adopt such proposals to fund a
game plan to enhance and expand a quality-driven prekindergarten plan for the
children of Western Pennsylvania, educational interventions would conceivably
be less necessary.
Congress to hear arguments on Obama
administration’s proposed education spending rule
Washington Post By Emma Brown September
21 at 10:17 AM
Members
of Congress will have a chance Wednesday morning to hear arguments for and
against the Obama administration’s proposal for how school districts spend
billions of dollars meant to educate poor children, perhaps the most hotly
contested education issue in Washington since Congress passed a federal
education law late last year. The
Education Department and its allies in the civil rights movement say that the
rules will ensure that children in high-poverty schools get the federal aid
they are due, while a wide range of opponents have argued that the
administration has overreached its authority with a proposal that would wreak
havoc on classrooms nationwide. The hearing Wednesday before a
subcommittee of the House Education Committee — “Supplanting the Law and Local
Education Authority Through Regulatory Fiat” — should offer a sense of how
the majority Republican Congress views the administration’s proposal.
Lawmakers Spar Over Federal Overreach,
Equity in House ESSA Funding Hearing
Education Week Politics K12 Blog By Andrew Ujifusa on September 21, 2016 2:16 PM
Washington, D.C. Republican lawmakers and local
K-12 officials sharply criticized a U.S. Department of Education regulatory
proposal they said would improperly meddle in school funding decisions, while
Democratic representatives defended it as promoting greater equity for poor
students, during a House K-12 subcommittee hearing Wednesday. The proposed rules that Secretary of
Education John B. King Jr. released last month concern how schools must show
they are using federal funds to supplement other education funding, and not
using it to fill gaps left by state and local budget decisions. It's a
controversial plan—and one that could end up creating a legal battle between
Congress and the Education Department. Need
a quick refresher on this funding issue? The rules King's department
proposed would allow districts to show federal funds are supplementing their
budgets by using:
The Key Ingredient to Fixing a Failing
School
How one leader took an all-girls
charter from dismal to desirable.
The Atlantic by EMILY
DERUY September 21, 2016
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.—I arranged a
visit to the Chattanooga Girls Leadership
Academy here fully intending to look into the rise of single-sex
public education, particularly schools that focus explicitly on educating girls
of color. In the decade since No Child
Left Behind prompted changes in federal law that ultimately made it easier to
create all-boys and all-girls schools, the number of single-sex public schools
has exploded, many of them aimed at boys and girls of color. (Full disclosure:
I attended an all-girls parochial high school.) CGLA is the first single-gender
public charter school in Tennessee. More than 90 percent of its students are
black or Latino. Nearly all are low income. The school’s brochure says it was
founded “to improve educational opportunities for low-income, underserved girls
in Hamilton County.” So it seemed like a good place to start.
Yet it became obvious minutes
after my visit began that it would be difficult to glean any sort of broadly
applicable insight into the the topic from looking at CGLA. Sure, proponents of
single-sex and charter schools can point to its rising test scores and
college-going rate as “evidence” that their respective causes are a good thing.
And critics can point to research published in Science magazine
that suggests single-sex schools don’t foster better academic outcomes and
accuse charters of pulling resources away from neighborhood schools. (More on
all of that from my fellow Atlantic writer Melinda Anderson here.) But what became abundantly clear is that CGLA
is more an example of how much of an impact school leadership can
have—regardless of school type—than it is of anything else.
Boston
School Committee takes up charter school question
Boston
Globe By James Vaznis GLOBE STAFF SEPTEMBER
21, 2016
The Boston School Committee,
concerned about the financial impact of more charter schools, is poised to join
more than 120 other school committees across the state to oppose a ballot
question that would allow for the proliferation of charter schools. At the committee’s meeting Wednesday night,
chairman Michael O’Neill and vice chairman Hardin Coleman presented a draft
resolution against the ballot question, which stated that state aid to charter
schools “fiscally undermines the ability of the Boston Public Schools to
support the cost of a quality educational program to its students.” The seven-member committee, which is
appointed by Mayor Martin J. Walsh, who opposes the ballot question, is
expected to vote on the resolution at its next meeting on Oct. 5. If approved, the School Committee will be
following in the footsteps of the Boston City Council, which approved a similar
resolution in August. “We don’t want to
demonize charters,” O’Neill said. “There are good charters in the city, but if
we look at the way the ballot question is written — without a funding mechanism
— there is serious impact on the 57,000 students in our care.”
Despite
warnings, College Board redesigned SAT in way that may hurt neediest students
Reuters.com
By Renee Dudley Filed Sept. 21, 2016, 2:32 p.m. GMT
Part Six: Internal documents show
the makers of the new SAT knew the test was overloaded with wordy math problems
– a hurdle that could reinforce race and income disparities. The College Board
went ahead with the exam anyway.
NEW YORK – In the days after
the redesigned SAT college entrance exam was given for the first time in March,
some test-takers headed to the popular website reddit to share a frustration. They had trouble getting through the exam’s
new mathematics sections. “I didn’t have nearly enough time to finish,” wrote a
commenter who goes by MathM. “Other people I asked had similar impressions.” The math itself wasn’t the problem, said
Vicki Wood, who develops courses for PowerScore, a South Carolina-based test
preparation company. The issue was the wordy setups that precede many of the
questions. “The math section is text
heavy,” said Wood, a tutor who took the SAT in May. “And I ran out of time.” The College Board, the maker of the exam, had
reason to expect just such an outcome for many test-takers.
What Clinton and Trump say about school
vouchers, Common Core and free college tuition
PBS
Newshour September 20, 2016 at 6:25 PM EDT
Where do Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump stand on the hot-button issues of education reform in the U.S.?
Lisa Desjardins offers a rundown, and Education Week’s Andrew Ujifusa and Scott
Jaschik of Inside Higher Education join Jeffrey Brown to examine the
candidates’ dramatically different proposals for K-12 and higher education.
Trib Live BY CHRIS
FLEISHER | Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, 2:54 p.m.
Mylan CEO Heather Bresch faced
harsh questions on Capitol Hill over the dramatic price increase for the
drugmaker's life-saving EpiPen device, but she defended the cost as “fair” and
rebuffed lawmakers' demands to cut it. Bresch
was grilled for hours by members of the House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee, who demonstrated bipartisan outrage that the price for the emergency
allergy injection has shot up more than 500 percent since Mylan bought the
rights to EpiPen in 2007. They called the company's actions “disgraceful” and
“sickening” and accused Mylan of putting profits ahead of concern for the lives
of patients. It's disgraceful what's
going on here,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. “But in a way, you've
done us a little bit of a favor by showing us what's wrong with our health care
system. I think it's disgusting.”
Southeastern
PA Regional 2016 Legislative Roundtable: William Tennent High School (Bucks
Co.) SEP 22, 2016 • 7:00
PM - 9:00 PM
PSBA website August 25, 2016
Take a more active role in public
education advocacy by joining our Legislative Roundtable
This is your opportunity for a
seat at the table (literally) with fellow public education advocates to take an
active role in educating each other and policymakers. Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, along with
regional legislators, will be in attendance to work with you to support public
education in Pennsylvania. Use the
form below to send your registration information!
Thursday, September 29, 2016 at 5:30 PM
The Crystal Tea Room, The Wanamaker Building
100 Penn Square East, Philadelphia, PA
Honoring: Pepper Hamilton LLP, Signe Wilkinson, Dr. Monique W. Morris
And presenting the ELC PRO BONO AWARD to Paul Saint-Antoine & Chanda Miller
of Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP
Registration
for the PASA-PSBA School Leadership Conference Oct. 13-15 is now open
The conference
is your opportunity to learn, network and be inspired by peers and
experts.
TO REGISTER: See https://www.psba.org/members-area/store-registration/ (you must be logged in to
the Members Area to register). You can read more on How to Register for
a PSBA Event here. CONFERENCE WEBSITE: For
all other program details, schedules, exhibits, etc., see the conference
website:www.paschoolleaders.org.
The 2016 Arts and Education Symposium will be held on October 27 at the Radisson Hotel Harrisburg Convention Center. Sponsored by the Pennsylvania Arts Education network and EPLC, the Symposium is a Unique Networking and Learning Opportunity for:
·
Arts Educators
·
School Leaders
·
Artists
·
Arts and Culture Community Leaders
·
Arts-related Business Leaders
·
Arts Education Faculty and Administrators in Higher Education
·
Advocates
·
State and Local Policy Leaders
Act 48 Credit is
available.Program and registration information are available here.
PA Principals Association website Tuesday, August 2, 2016 10:43 AM
To receive the Early Bird Discount, you must be registered by August 31, 2016:
Members: $300 Non-Members: $400
Featuring Three National Keynote Speakers: Eric Sheninger, Jill Jackson & Salome Thomas-EL
SAVE THE DATE LWVPA Convention 2017 June
1-4, 2017
Join the
League of Women Voters of PA for our 2017 Biennial Convention at the beautiful
Inn at Pocono Manor!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.