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Keystone
State Education Coalition
PA
Ed Policy Roundup April 23, 2017:
#HB97:
Written to remove local control over
charter schools and make sure that state control is pro
charter expansion
“A bad bill, written to remove local
control over charter schools, and make sure that state control is pro charter
expansion. It also doesn’t fix the core
funding problem, meaning one family's decision will take resources out of the
classrooms of other kids.” Tweets by Dan
Urevick-Ackelsberg
We will not be publishing the Roundup on
Monday April 24th; we’ll be in Harrisburg asking legislators to
support fair funding and responsible charter school reform. Please call your legislators on Monday and
urge them to work with PSBA/PASA to improve HB97
#HB97:
House vote as soon as Monday; Urge legislators to work with PSBA/PASA to
improve the bill
#HB97 None of Senate
Appropriations Committee Chairman .@SenatorBrowne's
school districts ever authorized a cyber charter. In 2015-16 they had to pay over $19.5 million
in cyber charter tuition. Not one of
Pennsylvania’s 13 cyber charter schools has ever achieved a passing score of 70
on the School Performance Profile. Many
school districts have in-house cyber programs that are able to serve students
at considerable savings over cyber charter costs.
#HB97 None of House
Appropriations Committee Chairman .@RepStanSaylor's
school districts ever authorized a cyber charter. In 2015-16 they had to pay over $3.8 million
in cyber charter tuition.
#HB97 None of
gubernatorial candidate .@SenScottWagner's
school districts ever authorized a cyber charter. In 2015-16 they had to pay over $11.9 million
in cyber charter tuition.
#HB97 None of Senate
Education Committee Minority Chairman @SenatorDinniman's school
districts ever authorized a cyber charter.
In 2015-16 they had to pay over $13.4 million in cyber charter tuition.
#HB97 None of House
Education Committee Chairman Eichelberger's school districts ever authorized a
cyber charter. In 2015-16 they had to
pay over $11.6 million in cyber charter tuition.
#HB97 Neither of House
Speaker .@RepTurzai's school
districts ever authorized a cyber charter.
In 2015-16 they had to pay over $1.8 million in cyber charter tuition.
#HB97 None of Senate
President .@senatorscarnati's
school districts ever authorized a cyber charter. In 2015-16 they had to pay over $9.4 million
in cyber charter tuition.
#HB97 None of Senate
Majority Leader .@JakeCorman's
school districts ever authorized a cyber charter. In 2015-16 they had to pay over $5.1 million
in cyber charter tuition.
Thanks to PCCY for compiling these cyber
tuition figures from data on PDE’s website.
Lancaster Online by ALEX GELI |
Staff Writer April 21, 2017
Pennsylvania lawmakers introduced
legislation this week aimed at reforming the state's 20-year-old charter school
law. Democrats in the state House,
including Lancaster Rep. Mike
Sturla, introduced an eight-bill package in an attempt to improve
accountability, transparency and funding for charter schools. Their proposals come a week after Republican
state Rep. Mike
Reese introduced a charter school reform bill — House
Bill 97 — that some say doesn’t do the necessary reforms justice. His
bill already has been considered twice by the state House. Sturla, who co-sponsored seven of
the Democrats' eight charter school reform bills, said the proposed legislation
“improve(s) the efficiency and accountability for all public schools in the
state of Pennsylvania.” The problem with
charters - “We’ve let the experiment run long enough,” Sturla said, referring
to the two decades-old charter school law.
Signed into law by Republican Gov. Tom Ridge in 1997, the original
legislation was meant to provide school choice for students who didn’t fit into
the traditional public school system. Charter schools were to be, as Sturla put
it, “laboratories of innovation.” That,
some say, hasn’t been the case — hence, the need for reform. “Overall, public school districts are asking
for a level playing field in terms of state mandates and regulations,”
Conestoga Valley superintendent Gerald Huesken said. Charter school overpayments, he said, are his
primary concern.
“If we can run a program for half
of (a charter’s) cost, where is that extra funding going?” he asked.
“Despite their zeal for charter reform
and to, in their opinion, bring more parity between charter and traditional
public schools, the Democrats’ effort to amend the bill was met with mixed
results – only two of the eight proposals in the package gained enough support
to be included in House Bill 97. The
first, a proposal from Rep. Mike Schlossberg (D-Lehigh), would require charter
and cyber-charter schools to note that advertisements and transportation costs
are paid for by taxpayers. “No charter
or cyber-charter school is free; taxpayers pay for these schools, like any
other,” he said of his amendment. “Taxpayers deserve to be given credit for
footing the bill.” The amendment was
incorporated into House Bill 97 by a vote of 186-1.”
HB97: Charter school reform effort gets
restarted in House
City and State By: JASON GOTTESMAN APR 19, 2017 AT 7:34 AMJason Gottesman is the Harrisburg bureau chief for The PLS Reporter, a non-partisan, online news site devoted to covering Pennsylvania government.
Harrisburg – For the last several
sessions, lawmakers in Pennsylvania have tried – and failed – to enact
comprehensive reforms to the commonwealth’s charter school system. This week, that Sisyphean effort was
restarted by the House moving along House Bill 97, vehicle legislation
sponsored by Rep. Mike Reese (R-Westmoreland) that he said was akin to
legislation that nearly got across the finish line last session in the form of
House Bill 530. According to Reese – the
House member whose name has been attached to charter school reform the last two
legislative sessions – the bill is aimed at leveling the playing field between
charter schools (both brick-and-mortar and cyber) and traditional public
schools. “The goal of this legislation
is straightforward: to improve school choice by strengthening the laws under
which charter schools operate while, at the same time, creating immediate
savings to our traditional public schools that pay for our charters and
ultimately creating a level playing field for our traditional public schools
and our charter schools by requiring them to play by the same rules when it
comes to ethics, accountability and transparency,” he told members of the
House Education Committee when the bill advanced from there on Tuesday.
Philly Trib Stacy M. Brown
Tribune Harrisburg Correspondent April 21, 2017
House Democrats on Wednesday
unveiled a package of eight charter school reform bills they said are designed
to treat all Pennsylvania public schools – both traditional and charter – and
their students equally under law. One
introduced by State Rep. James Roebuck, (D- Phila.), House Bill 1199, takes aim
at conflicts of interest in tax-funded payments for charter school leases. “The auditor general’s office has identified
millions of dollars in questionable charter school leases,” Roebuck said in a
news release announcing the legislation. “We need to prevent these conflicts of
interest up front, and we need to recover taxpayers’ money to benefit students
when there has been an inappropriate payment for one of these leases. “Every dollar that goes to an inappropriate
lease is a dollar that doesn’t go to educate our kids,” he added. Ana Meyers, the executive director of the
Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, disputed those who allege
charter schools lease from themselves. “Schools
often need to lease building space and do so through affiliated nonprofit
foundations,” she said. “These arrangements are all approved by the
Pennsylvania Department of Education. These arrangements are unfortunate but
necessary only because of the inequities in all the charter school law which do
not provide for facilities funding.”
HB97: Pa. House tries again on charter
schools
WHYY Newsworks BY KATIE MEYER, WITF APRIL 21, 2017
Pennsylvania's Legislature is
returning to one of its toughest recurring issues — overhauling charter
schools. Among the provisions laid out
in the latest omnibus proposal to get onto the House floor are a standardized
application process for schools seeking charters; more consistent school
performance rubrics; and an extension of the charter review period from five to
10 years. As often happens, traditional
public school and charter school advocates are divided on it. Ana Meyers, executive director
for the state Coalition for Public Charter Schools, said the proposal needs
work. In particular, she opposes a $27 million funding cut for online-only
charters. However, she said she likes most
of it, noting that she backs anything that makes charters more competitive. "Charter schools and cybercharter
schools are run differently than traditional public schools for a reason,"
she said. Steve Robinson, with the
Pennsylvania School Board Association, said he's concerned the reforms give
charters too much of a leg up. "Traditional
public schools are set to a much higher standard than we believe charter
schools are," he said.
EdVotersPA: PA House Poised to Ram Through
Horrible Charter Bill
Education Voters PA Posted
on April 20, 2017 by EDVOPAWe need your help to stop HB 97. The PA House may vote on this deeply flawed charter school legislation next week, as early as Monday, April 24th.
We had hoped that the PA House
would work toward charter reform that would protect taxpayers and students and
improve PA’s system of public education.
Our hopes were misplaced. On Tuesday this week,
members of the House Education Committee passed HB 97 out of committee on
a vote of 17 to 10. Before they voted, lawmakers were assured that
HB 97 was a work in progress and would be amended to address many
significant problems and deficiencies in the bill. That didn’t happen.
During the House
session on Wednesday, Republican leadership and most Republican lawmakers
opposed nearly every substantial amendment that was introduced to fix HB 97.Click HERE to tell your state representative to oppose HB 97. The House will be in session next week and is poised to ram through HB 97 without any further improvements.
·
HB 97 does not address the $100 million profit (and growing)
that charters reap off students with disabilities each year from the broken
special education funding system.
·
HB 97 does nothing to address the continued abysmal academic
performance of the state’s cyber charter schools — none of which have met
the minimum proficiency standard on the state’s school performance profile.
·
HB 97 creates separate performance standards by which to
evaluate charter/cyber charter schools and district schools, making a
comparison of education quality between the two sectors impossible. Cyber charter performance
won’t look as bad if cyber charters are compared only to other charter schools,
many of which are also very low-performing.
·
HB 97 strips local control from school boards. If HB 97 becomes law, local
school boards would be prohibited from requesting any information from charter
applicants beyond the information in a state-created application form; local
school boards would be subjected to the whim of charter operators to amend
their charter; and local school board decisions regarding charter applications
and renewals would be at the mercy of the state’s Charter Appeal Board, which
would be stacked with charter school supporters.
HB 97 improves ethics
and transparency standards for charters and temporarily makes very small
reductions in school district payments to cyber charters. In exchange
for these modest modifications to the current law, legislators are handing
charter lobbyists their wish list with a bow on top. Making charters play by similar
rules as other publicly funded entities should not earn the PA
legislature high praise. These are necessary and important changes to the
PA legislature’s broken law that should have been made years ago.Click HERE to contact your state lawmakers to tell them to oppose HB 97. Please share this action with your networks so that together we can stop HB 97.
“The research by WolfBrown, working with
Johns Hopkins University, showed that participating in the arts help students
develop traits that contribute to later success in life. Younger students
especially showed measurable growth in characteristics like tolerance for other
points of view, an understanding that hard work can develop their knowledge and
abilities, and their motivation to achieve.
The researchers also found that students
who started out highly engaged in school and more emotionally mature retained
these scores if they received arts education. But students who scored as high
in the beginning who did not participate in arts programming showed a
significant decline in their engagement.
Another finding, not surprisingly, is
that students became more interested in the arts once they were exposed to
them.”
Quantifying the benefits of arts education
The notebook by Dale Mezzacappa April
20, 2017 — 2:12pm
We all hear the stories, or have
experiences ourselves or with children: how learning to play an
instrument, or appearing in a play, or creating something beautiful from
scratch, keeps students on the path to graduation and improves their attitude and
well-being. It has long been
understood that the arts are among the "protective factors" that can
shield young people from debilitating effects of trauma. Yet, while arts
are taken for granted as a core part of the curriculum in
well-funded schools, that's not true in districts such as Philadelphia
that are strapped for cash, even though generally they are the ones for which
poverty and trauma wreak their havoc. In those districts, under pressure to
raise test scores, nonmandated and nontested subjects often become
expendable. That is true in
Philadelphia, where art and music teacher positions were slashed in the
depths of the budget crisis and have still not been restored to all schools.
The William Penn
Foundation, which has missions to promote both great learning and creative
communities, commissioned a
study to move beyond the anecdotal and see if and how students
benefited from being involved in some of its grantee arts programs. It
released the results at a conference on Wednesday.
"More than half of the rural school
districts in Pennsylvania are spending less educating their children than their
estimated adequacy target, or the amount expected to ensure that children can
reach the state's rigorous academic standards," the report reads. Even with a new basic education funding formula
intended to level the playing field among all districts, 202 rural districts
are still not receiving their fair share of state funding while 158 spend below
the so-called "adequacy" target, the report shows.”
Lawmakers, Wolf need to make sure rural
students aren't left behind: Editorial
By PennLive Editorial
Board Email the author on April 21, 2017 at 3:14 PM, updated April
21, 2017 at 4:50 PM
When Pennsylvania's policymakers
and elected leaders have their annual debate over public school funding, their
conversations over funding disparities tend to take place in a very binary
context. That disparity debate generally
pits the largest urban school systems - Pittsburgh and Philadelphia - against
every other district in the state, both rural and suburban. But, as a new report makes clear, that's only
half the conversation. According
to new data by the Pennsylvania
Partnerships for Children, a Harrisburg advocacy group, students in the
commonwealth's rural school districts are as at-risk of being left behind as
students in any larger urban district.
“Instead of a rallying cry for property
tax elimination, we suggest a measured consideration of tax reform tied to the
school fair funding formula adopted last year. The formula crafted after a task
force study determines school funding by taking into account things like
poverty, special education population and local tax effort. To be effective, the formula must be applied
to the entire state education revenue stream instead of just 6 percent, as is
the case this year. For tax reform to be
meaningful in Pennsylvania, the system of how monies are allocated must be
reformed as well as the system of taxation.
We are all for property tax reform to change a system that has for too
long been a burden on middle class and fixed income homeowners while
benefitting real-estate wealthy school districts.
But it must be tied to fair funding to
address the long standing inequities.
Just as Pennsylvania taxpayers deserve a
more equitable system of taxation, so do all children in Pennsylvania deserve a
fair chance at a good education.
Fair funding must be part of property
tax reform to meet that most basic right.”
Editorial: Time to get property tax reform
right
Delco Times Editorial POSTED: 04/22/17,
11:21 PM EDT | UPDATED: 2 HRS AGO
To be clear, we support property
tax reform in Pennsylvania as a necessary step to addressing school funding
inequities and an unfair burden on property owners on a fixed income. However, we remain concerned about the
current property tax elimination measure in Harrisburg. The property tax measure
currently proposed is a windfall for business and wealthy school districts and
will end up costing middle-class taxpayers more than they pay now in taxes, an
independent analysis has found. “Far
from providing relief for working families, recent proposals to eliminate
school property taxes in Pennsylvania would increase taxes on the middle class
while sabotaging the chance to adequately fund Pennsylvania schools for
middle-and low-income families,” begins the study, “Who Pays for Property Tax
Elimination?” by the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg. The group which authored the study has been
widely criticized by the Pennsylvania Taxpayers Cyber Coalition as an
organization with ties to the powerful Pennsylvania State Education Association
teachers’ union. Keystone Research Center states on its website that a portion
of its funding comes from organized labor groups, and many of its board members
are affiliated with labor unions across Pennsylvania, including PSEA. owever, that doesn’t change the statistics in
the House Bill 76 proposal which show this version of tax reform does nothing
to address the equally troubling issue of school funding inequity.
“Then there’s the laziness of the bill,
the notion that these senators feel something has to be done to make schools
safer, but rather than find money to improve security features in buildings and
maybe hire more School Resource Officers, let’s just let teachers carry guns.
Looks like you did something without spending a dime. And there is the conflicting messages to
students: Bring a gun to school, you get expelled. See your teacher with a gun?
Heck, feel safer. But the biggest question
about this bill is how it can get any traction in a legislature that refuses to
honestly grapple with big issues in education that have been around for years?”
Our view: More guns won’t fix myriad of education woes
Times
Leader Editorial APRIL 22ND, 2017 - 2:41 PM
For the heck of it, let’s assume
a state law allowing school staff to pack heat is a good idea. Good luck
finding evidence that a plethora of concealed pistols would improve school
safety, but let’s assume the proof exists.
It’s not a hypothetical. The Pennsylvania senate education committee
voted 9-3 to move a bill along, toward a full senate vote. It would make it
legal for school employees properly trained in the use of firearms to be armed
on campus. Even if it is a good idea —
and there are potent arguments it is not — questions abound. For starters, what’s the point? Gov. Tom Wolf
has already said he’s unlikely to sign such a bill, making it almost certainly
an exercise in symbolism without substance. It’s easy to vote for a bill you
know faces a veto, just ask all the U.S. representatives who spent six years
voting some 60 times to repeal, defund or otherwise derail the Affordable Care
Act knowing full well it would be vetoed. When a Republican became president,
they couldn’t muster the votes. Funny
how votes can change when they have real world consequences.
York
Daily Record Opinion by Sen. Mike Regan10:59 a.m. ET April 16, 2017
Sen. Mike Regan is a Republican from Carroll Township.
Last October, a fourth-grade
student in Lycoming County was flown to Geisinger Medical Center after being
struck by a vehicle while walking to school. Later that very same day, a Lackawanna
County teenager was left badly injured following a hit-and-run while riding his
bike home from class. Just three days later, a Northumberland County high
school student was left in critical condition after being struck in an
intersection just minutes from her homeroom.
Buried deep in Gov. Wolf’s 2017-18 budget proposal is a drastic and
shortsighted $50 million cut to pupil transportation subsidies which, if
enacted, could make terrible accidents like these even more prevalent. Citing decreased ridership, low diesel prices
and an increased reliance on school bus contractors, the Wolf administration
recommends this 10 percent funding cut without considering broader economic
consequences, not to mention the imminent threat posed to student safety. Given
the serious implications of such a policy decision, a more thorough examination
is required.
Meadville Tribune By John
Finnerty CNHI News Service Apr 14, 2017
HARRISBURG — A proposal by Gov.
Tom Wolf to cut state funding for school busing costs by almost 9 percent while
changing the formula used to figure out how much they should get has school
officials concerned. School officials
and lawmakers say they’re still in the dark about how the Education Department
would retool the funding formula. House
Republicans included the governor’s proposal to redo the busing aid formula in
their budget, said Stephen Miskin, a spokesman for House Republican leaders.
But at this point, the Wolf administration has not provided legislative leaders
with a description of what the reworked formula would look like, he said. John Callahan, assistant executive director
of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said that just the funding cut
alone is alarming. Most years, the
state’s payments toward busing costs have been “stable and predictable,” he
said. Not this year. Combined with projected increased
costs to school districts to pay their share of pensions, the $50 million
proposed cut in transportation aid would wipe out Wolf's proposed $125 million
boost in funding for basic and special education payments, he said. “In essence, you’re in the
negative,” he said.
Fearful parents demand schools near gas
pipeline release evacuation plans
Inquirer by Kathy Boccella, Staff Writer @Kathy_Boccella | kboccella@phillynews.com Updated: APRIL 23, 2017 — 5:26 AM EDT
Behind closed doors at Rose Tree
Media school headquarters in Delaware County, the “safety summit” brought
together district and township leaders, first responders, officials from Sunoco
Logistics, and even Homeland Security to draw up school evacuation plans in the
event of a catastrophic explosion or leak from the impending Mariner East 2 pipeline. Not in the room — barred from attending,
in fact — were the people whose growing anxiety and anger prompted the
summit: a coalition of more than 2,700 elementary school parents and allies who
fear their children won't be able to get out of harm's way should disaster
strike the pipeline as it carries 275,000 barrels of natural gas liquids daily
through their densely populated suburbs. A tight lid was kept on the late
March confab. In a statement, Rose Tree Media Superintendent James Wigo joined
other attendees in insisting that releasing evacuation details would
“compromise student safety,” for instance in a school shooting. “Think about
the horrors of a potential sniper situation.”
“Critics slam the proposal as an
exaggerated attack on teachers unions spearheaded by conservative lobbyists and
groups such as the Commonwealth Foundation, whose platform includes weakening
public-sector unions.”
Pennsylvania GOP targets teachers paid to do union work
Trib Live NATASHA
LINDSTROM AND JAMIE MARTINES | Saturday, April 22, 2017,
4:14 p.m.
Pennsylvania Republicans are
reigniting a push to outlaw so-called “ghost teachers” — educators who take
extended absences to work full time for their unions while accruing salaries,
seniority and pension credits on the taxpayers' dime. The state Senate is set to take up a bill
that would prohibit school districts from allowing teachers to take time away
from the classroom — in some cases, for a year or more — to work for local or
statewide teachers unions and perform tasks such as handling personnel disputes,
representing colleagues in hearings and coordinating professional development. The biggest sticking point is whether unions
fully reimburse retirement contributions — particularly as districts lament
mounting pension costs and the state grapples with a $50 billion unfunded
pension liability.
Do school reformers spin their wheels?
Inquirer Opinion by Kevin Ferris, Inquirer Columnist kferris@phillynews.com Updated: APRIL 22, 2017 — 8:42
AM EDTRobert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. He serves on the boards of Achievement House Cyber Charter School, in Pennsylvania, and Fayetteville Public Schools in Arkansas.
As the Pennsylvania Department of
Education imposes the Future Readiness Index (FRI) in place of the old School
Performance Profile (SPP), which itself replaced Adequate Yearly Progress
(AYP), one cannot help but recall the French saying plus ça change,
plus c’est la même chose. The more
things change, the more they stay the same could describe the past three
decades of school reform. George Herbert
Walker Bush’s education summit, Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000, George W. Bush’s No
Child Left Behind, and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top have come and gone,
infusing bits of innovation and measurement, but largely leaving traditional
public schools intact. At least in the short term, President Trump’s push to
expand school choice also seems more evolutionary than revolutionary,
notwithstanding the hysterical reactions it evokes.
Why have school reformers (like
me) accomplished so little?
All-Delco Hi-Q: Best & brightest shine
bright in quiz competition
Delco
Times By Colin Ainsworth, cainsworth@delcotimes.com POSTED: 04/22/17, 11:23 PM
When Scott Paper Co. began to
expand its Chester facilities in the 1920s to become the nation’s largest paper
manufacturer, the figure of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller still loomed large
in American industry. While history’s assessment of Rockefeller may fluctuate
over time, his assessment of needing hard work to enjoy the pleasure of success
has held true: “I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to
pleasure.” The top competitors in Delco
Hi-Q, the nation’s oldest academic competition founded by Scott Paper as a
community relations project in 1948, have made the most of their time in high
school and forged promising futures through working hard not only in Hi-Q, but
in the arts, athletics and volunteer roles.
The 2017 All-Delco Hi-Q Team is made up of an outstanding member from
each of the 21 competing teams chosen by their faculty adviser. Today the
competition is sponsored by Franklin Mint Federal Credit Union and the Delaware
County Intermediate Unit, running for 69 continuous years since one of
Chester’s top industrial players began a showcase for the county’s most
industrious students.
What the latest assaults on science
education look like
Washington Post Answer Sheet
Blog By Valerie
Strauss April 22 at 12:49 PM
Each
year, anti-science education legislation is introduced in state legislatures
around the country — and, in a few cases, has been passed. So what is an
anti-science education bill — and how many have been introduced in 2017? There are essentially two different kinds of
anti-science legislation, according to the nonprofit National Center for
Science Education. One involves efforts
to repeal the adoption of state science standards or challenge science
textbooks. There are also bills that attempt to allow science (and other)
teachers to present unscientific criticism of scientific principles as
legitimate — usually aimed at affecting classroom discussion on evolution and
climate change. Since 2014, more than 60
such bills have been filed in state legislatures all over the country; two have
been enacted, in Louisiana in 2008 and in Tennessee in 2012.
[‘But it’s just a theory!’ — How to teach evolution to
a skeptical crowd] These bills are worded as
“academic freedom” bills, but they really are efforts to present foundational
science as controversial. For example, evolution is the animating principle of modern
biology, but these laws attempt to allow creationism and evolution to be
debated in a science classroom as though they had equal scientific basis. There
is no scientific basis to creationist thinking.
Scientists,
Feeling Under Siege, March Against Trump Policies
New
York Times By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR APRIL 22, 2017
WASHINGTON — Thousands of
scientists and their supporters, feeling increasingly threatened by the
policies of President Trump, gathered Saturday in Washington under rainy skies
for what they called the March for Science, abandoning a tradition of keeping
the sciences out of politics and calling on the public to stand up for
scientific enterprise. As the marchers
trekked shoulder-to-shoulder toward the Capitol, the street echoed with their
calls: “Save the E.P.A.” and “Save the N.I.H.” as well as their chants celebrating
science, “Who run the world? Nerds,” and “If you like beer, thank yeast and
scientists!” Some carried signs that showed rising oceans and polar bears in
peril and faces of famous scientists like Mae Jamison, Rosalind Franklin and
Marie Curie, and others touted a checklist of the diseases Americans no longer
get thanks to vaccines.
Although drizzle may have washed
away the words on some signs, they aimed to deliver the message that science
needs the public’s support. “Science is
a very human thing,” said Ashlea Morgan, a doctoral student in neurobiology at
Columbia University. “The march is allowing the public to know that this is
what science is, and it’s letting our legislators know that science is vitally
important.”
Huffington Post by Donald Cohen,
ContributorExecutive Director, In the Public Interest 04/20/2017 01:05 pm ET
Conservatives seem to have a
thing for fast food. The founder of what would eventually become the country’s
largest private prison corporation, CoreCivic (formerly CCA), once declared,
“You just sell [private prisons] like you were selling cars or real estate or
hamburgers.” More recently, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, an
organization founded by Jeb Bush that has lobbied for its corporate funders, including the
world’s largest education corporation, Pearson, wrote that public schools should be thought of as fast
food restaurants. But providing public
goods and services is nothing like selling hamburgers. In a democracy, human
beings should control the public schools, infrastructure, and social services
in their communities. Fast food customers vote individually with their wallets,
which means they really have very little say. Does anyone really want a handful
of corporations, the likes of McDonalds and Burger King, teaching children and
locking people up in prison? This
point is especially true of public education, and is driven home by a report In the Public Interest released last week
authored by Gordon Lafer, an associate professor at the University of Oregon.
Lafer found that taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on
charter school buildings in California, yet the state has little to show for
it.
PSBA Spring Town Hall Meetings coming in May!
Don’t be left in the
dark on legislation that affects your district! Learn the latest from your
legislators at PSBA Spring Town Hall Meetings. Conveniently offered at 10
locations around the state throughout May, this event will provide you with the
opportunity to interact face-to-face with key lawmakers from your area. Enjoy
refreshments, connect with colleagues, and learn what issues impact you and how
you can make a difference. Log in to the Members Area to register today for this FREE event!
- Monday, May 1, 6-8 p.m. — Parkway West
CTC, 7101 Steubenville Pike, Oakdale, PA 15071
- Tuesday, May 2, 7:30-9 a.m. — A W
Beattie Career Center, 9600 Babcock Blvd, Allison Park, PA 15101
- Tuesday, May 2, 6-8 p.m. — Crawford
County CTC, 860 Thurston Road, Meadville, PA 16335
- Wednesday, May 3, 6-8 p.m. — St. Marys
Area School District, 977 S. St Marys Road, Saint Marys, PA 15857
- Thursday, May 4, 6-8 p.m. — Central
Montco Technical High School, 821 Plymouth Road, Plymouth Meeting, PA
19462
- Friday, May 5, 7:30-9 a.m. — Lehigh
Carbon Community College, 4525 Education Park Dr, Schnecksville, PA 18078
- Monday, May 15, 6-8 p.m. — CTC of
Lackawanna Co., 3201 Rockwell Avenue, Scranton, PA 18508
- Tuesday, May 16, 6-8 p.m. — PSBA, 400
Bent Creek Boulevard, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050
- Wednesday, May 17, 6-8 p.m. — Lycoming
CTC, 293 Cemetery Street, Hughesville, PA 17737
- Thursday, May 18, 6-8 p.m. — Chestnut
Ridge SD, 3281 Valley Road, Fishertown, PA 15539
For assistance
with registration, please contact Michelle Kunkel at 717-506-2450 ext. 3365.
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!
Pennsylvania Education Leadership Summit
July 23-25, 2017 Blair County Convention Center - Altoona
A three-day event providing an
excellent opportunity for school district administrative teams and
instructional leaders to learn, share and plan together
co-sponsored by PASA, the
Pennsylvania Principals Association, PASCD and the PA Association for Middle
Level Education
**REGISTRATION IS OPEN**Early
Bird Registration Ends after April 30!
Keynote speakers, high quality
breakout sessions, table talks on hot topics, and district team planning and
job-alike sessions will provide practical ideas that can be immediately
reviewed and discussed at the summit and utilized at the district level.
Keynote Speakers:
Thomas Murray, Director of Innovation for Future Ready Schools, a project of the Alliance for Excellent Education
Kristen Swanson, Director of Learning at Slack and one of the founding members of the Edcamp movement
Thomas Murray, Director of Innovation for Future Ready Schools, a project of the Alliance for Excellent Education
Kristen Swanson, Director of Learning at Slack and one of the founding members of the Edcamp movement
Breakout session strands:
*Strategic/Cultural Leadership
*Systems Leadership
*Leadership for Learning
*Professional and Community Leadership
*Strategic/Cultural Leadership
*Systems Leadership
*Leadership for Learning
*Professional and Community Leadership
CLICK HERE to
access the Summit website for program, hotel and registration information.
Save the Date
2017 PA Principals Association State Conference October 14. 15, 16, 2017
Doubletree
Hotel Cranberry Township, PA
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