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Keystone
State Education Coalition
What Tax Overhaul
Could Mean For Students & Schools
The legal strategy to get states to provide adequate education funding has changed -- and it's working in schools' favor.
Governing BY LIZ FARMER | DECEMBER 6, 2017
This fall, schools and other education advocates won a victory in Pennsylvania when the state Supreme Court reinstated a lawsuit claiming that the state's school funding formula doesn't meet schools' basic needs. The case, William Penn School District v. Pennsylvania Department of Education, is just one of many in recent years that highlight a fundamental shift in legal strategy for education funding lawsuits. Instead of arguing that funding levels are too low, plaintiffs have started focusing on state-mandated standards for public schools, such as test scores and college-readiness. In other words, they argue, implementing these new requirements while receiving the same or less per-pupil funding from the state amounts to an unfunded mandate violating the state's constitutional promise to fund education. "They'll mandate until the cows come home," says David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center. "But what they don't do in so many places, is really sit down and think about if this is the performance we want, what are the resources that need to be in schools to give them a chance to achieve those standards, what's the cost and how do we build our financing formula around that?"
The approach is working.
http://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-winning-shift-school-funding-court-battles.html
What A Tax Overhaul Could Mean For Students And Schools
NPR Heard on Morning Edition ANYA KAMENETZ CORY TURNER Dec. 7, 20174:28 AM
The House and Senate are working to reconcile their versions of a tax plan — but one thing is for certain: Big changes are ahead for the nation's schools and colleges. Let's start with K-12. There, Republicans from both sides of Congress generally agree on two big changes.
Saving for private school - Taxpayers can currently save money for college through a 529 plan, where earnings grow tax-free. Many states also offer deductions for contributions. In the proposals, Republicans want to let taxpayers use 529s to pay for K-12 tuition at private and religious schools, too. Families can already do that with a different plan — Coverdell Education Savings Accounts — but these have low contribution limits and aren't open to high-income Americans. The move to expand the 529 would dramatically increase who could use these plans and the money they could save. "I think the only taxpayers who will be in a position to benefit from the 529 change are very rich people," says Nora Gordon, an economist and associate professor at Georgetown University. She says using these accounts to save for elementary or high school won't help much unless you can afford to set aside a lot of money early on. No wonder, when the Government Accountability Office studied 529s and Coverdells a few years ago, it found "families with these accounts had about 25 times the median financial assets" of those who didn't use them and "about three times the median income." While the proposed expansion of 529 plans would largely help affluent parents who use private schools, Republicans are proposing another change that could hurt funding for the nation's public schools.
Making sure children have health insurance doesn’t seem to be a priority for Congress or President Trump.
by The Inquirer Editorial Board Updated: DECEMBER 7, 2017 — 10:43 AM EST
Pennsylvania should be proud to have originated the idea behind the nation’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, which today provides coverage to 9 million low-income children and pregnant women. But like so many other good ideas and programs, CHIP is drowning in the fetid river of Washington politics. State Rep. Allen Kukovich (D., Westmoreland) in the 1980s came up with the idea of a health insurance program for families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. But years passed before he and State Sen. Allyson Schwartz (D., Phila.) were successful in passing legislation to create Pennsylvania’s CHIP, which was signed into law by Gov. Robert P. Casey in 1992. Pennsylvania CHIP celebrated its 25th birthday on Dec. 2. But now CHIP here and in other states is on the verge of death because the national program created in 1997 to provide matching funds hasn’t been reauthorized by Congress. Several states’ CHIP programs will run out of money within weeks unless Congress acts, and most will be broke by March.
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/editorials/chip-childrens-health-insurance-program-pennsylvania-20171207.html
Editorial: Congress has imperative to fund CHIP
Daily Local Editorial POSTED: 12/05/17, 8:58 PM EST
That massive tax reform plan is not the only fiscal nightmare that is rattling around the nation’s Capitol. There is another problem that has now been festering for more than two months, one that affects some of the most needy among us – children. Thousands of children across the region are in danger of losing their health insurance. And yes, this one is connected at the hip with the blind zeal of some in Washington to do away with the signature legislation of the Obama Administration. While doing everything in their power to gut and eventually do away with the program known as Obamacare, our elected officials also have managed to allow funding for a crucial children’s health program to lapse. CHIP, which stands for Children’s Health Insurance Program, provides essential health benefits for thousands of families. It started more than 20 years ago, but its funding has not been in place since Sept. 30. Now several states, including Pennsylvania, are scrambling for cash to prop up the program.
http://www.dailylocal.com/opinion/20171205/editorial-congress-has-imperative-to-fund-chip
In Pa. gerrymander case, experts can't defend the indefensible | Opinion
Inquirer by Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Philly.com Updated: DECEMBER 7, 2017 11:19 AM
Pennsylvania is no stranger to partisan gerrymandering disputes. In a blockbuster 2004 case, the Supreme Court declined to strike down the congressional map then in effect. The court didn’t quite hold that the map was lawful; rather, it couldn’t think of a workable standard for evaluating the map’s validity. Another gerrymandering suit is now making its way through the Pennsylvania courts, with a decision expected by the end of the year. But unlike its predecessor, this suit is based on a manageable test as well as a mountain of damning evidence. Perhaps for this reason, it has thoroughly flummoxed the state’s lawyers and experts. What’s changed since 2004? In recent years, political scientists have developed powerful new tools for evaluating district maps. These tools indicate how skewed a map is in a party’s favor, how likely this skew is to persist in the future, and whether the skew has a legitimate explanation (like a state’s political geography). In the Wisconsin case now pending before the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs used these tools to craft a simple test for gerrymandering:
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/in-pa-gerrymander-case-experts-cant-defend-the-indefensible-20171207.html
By Lindsay Lazarski, WHYY December 7, 2017
The federal trial
over Pennsylvania’s congressional district map wrapped up in a Philadelphia
courtroom on Thursday with a string of stirring closing arguments before a
three-judge panel. During four days of deliberations, a group of
more than 20 Pennsylvania voters challenged the way Republican lawmakers drew
the state’s congressional districts in 2011, asserting a gerrymandering scheme
that violates the U.S. Constitution. If the voters are successful, they could
trigger a new congressional map impacting the 2018 midterm elections when all
18 of Pennsylvania’s seats in the U.S. House of Representative could be
contested
Editorial: Scaling back standardized testing is a good
thing for Pennsylvania's students
Lancaster Online by The LNP Editorial Board December
8, 2017
THE
ISSUE - Gov. Tom Wolf announced changes Wednesday to Pennsylvania’s standardized school testing
regimen. Starting next school year, the Pennsylvania System of School
Assessment tests will be condensed from three weeks to two weeks and shifted to
later in the school year. “The new schedule builds on changes taking effect
this school year to remove two sections of the PSSA — one in math and one in
English language arts — and reduce questions in the science assessment, which
is enabling the Department of Education to condense and move the testing window
to later in the year,” a department press release explained. This school year,
the number of test days has been reduced by two. States were given the
flexibility to restructure their testing regimens by the Every Student Succeeds
Act, which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act and took effect in July.
It appears that time and sanity will be restored to the school
schedule, and that’s a good thing. There’s no need to throw out those No. 2 pencils,
however, because standardized testing will remain a part of Pennsylvania
education. That is also a good thing. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with
standardized testing. We need tools to measure academic performance. But over
the years, it became a beast that threatened to swallow our education system —
and any creativity within it — whole. It failed to recognize the nuances
at work in the classroom — the students from economically disadvantaged homes,
who fared worse on standardized tests than their middle-class counterparts; the
students with learning disabilities who could shine, with individualized
instruction, in their classwork, but who performed poorly on these tests.
Pittsburgh-area
schools are looking to do more to prevent student suicide
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by ELIZABETH BEHRMAN Lbehrman@post-gazette.com 4:57 PM
DEC 7, 2017
The North Allegheny School District has spent weeks
studying the issue of student stress and sleep, gearing up to consider changes
to the school day schedule and the way grades are calculated. Among the reasons
the district is considering such things, the superintendent said, is because
North Allegheny doesn’t want to end up like the schools in Palo Alto,
Calif. Like North Allegheny, that Silicon Valley district is high-performing
with high-achieving students, Superintendent
Robert Scherrer said. And in 2015, the California schools were the site of a
number of youth suicides, brought on in part, experts said, by issues like
anxiety and depression as well as academic stress and parental pressure.
Coding:
The new literacy?
The city is launching a campaign to bring
computer science to all students.
The notebook by Dale Mezzacappa December 7, 2017 —
5:37pm
Kahleel Odom, an 8th grader at Ethel Allen
Elementary School in North Philadelphia, had one goal in mind: escaping the
zombies. He peered at his Chromebook. The maneuver required several steps,
so he could move his Minecraft avatar block by block. But he couldn't just
operate a joystick; he had to type in what to do next. He was coding.
Kahleel, a friendly 13-year-old, tried to explain: "I had to
make sure the iron golem got the zombie so the zombies didn't get
me." He was among a roomful of students at Ethel Allen participating
Wednesday morning in an international hour
of code event. They worked while getting coaching from
people such as Matt Stem, the state's deputy secretary of education, and
Nefertiti Stanford, a customer engineer at IBM and a champion mentor
with Philly
CoderDojo, which works with students mostly after school. The
event was part of the District's participation in Computer Science
Education Week.
Audit:
Mismanagement at Parking Authority cheated Philly District out of nearly $80
million
PPA spent money on pay raises and comp time,
while school budgets were slashed.
The notebook by Greg Windle December 7, 2017 —
5:34pm
The state’s auditor general, Eugene DePasquale,
said Thursday that mismanagement and corruption at the Philadelphia
Parking Authority had cheated the School District out of nearly $78 million
over the last five years. The auditor general examined the employment and
financial practices at the Parking Authority during the tenure of
now-ousted executive director Vincent Fenerty. DePasquale called the time
period a “reign of terror,” when Fenerty sexually harassed multiple female
employees while enriching himself and other executives. DePasquale said he
found evidence that Fenerty misled City Council when he testified in 2014
that the School District would receive an additional $7.5 million as the result
of a parking-rate increase — money that never materialized. “The whole reason
why the state took [the Parking Authority] over in the first place was to help
the kids in the city of Philadelphia,” DePasquale said. “My audit shows that
the School District of Philadelphia potentially missed out, from mismanagement
at the Parking Authority, on approximately $77.9 million over the past five
years alone.”
Editorial:
Children, families in Chester Upland still being cheated
Delco Times POSTED: 12/07/17, 9:00 PM
EST | UPDATED: 22 SECS AGO
Stop us if you’ve heard this before. Chester Upland
School District is a mess.
Actually, the word used by Auditor General Eugene
DePasquale was “chaos.”
DePasquale was in town Wednesday to release the
results of the latest state audit of Chester Upland’s books. Or at least that
was his hope. It didn’t turn out that way.
That’s because DePasquale said things are so bad in
Chester Upland that officials were not even able to supply the necessary
paperwork his office needed to do the audit. “Total administrative chaos,” is
how the auditor general put it. DePasquale, who has now been in charge of
reviewing the books for public agencies in the state for almost five years,
says that has never happened before. The Democrat stopped in our office in
Swarthmore Wednesday morning to discuss his dealings with the district. He
noted it’s “very rare” to run into this kind of difficulty and lack of
cooperation. At one point he referred to the district as the Titanic. “It is
rather rare to find a school district in such disarray that we are unable to
complete an audit and leaves doubts about whether the district’s students are
getting the education they deserve and need,” DePasquale said in a statement.
York Dispatch by Liz Evans Scolforo,
505-5429/@LizScolforoYD Published 7:49 p.m. ET Dec. 7, 2017 | Updated 8:16
p.m. ET Dec. 7, 2017
Former York Suburban School District superintendent
Shelly Merkle has waived her right to a preliminary hearing on charges she
vandalized two of her former assistant's vehicles in one day on
school property. Michele A. Merkle, 54, of the 1900 block of Vicki Drive in
Spring Garden Township, is now facing trial on two counts of second-degree
misdemeanor criminal mischief. She waived the hearing Thursday, Dec. 7, in the
office of District Judge Scott Laird. Laird, whose office is in York
Township, told The York Dispatch he was asked to handle the case by
York County President Judge Joseph Adams after Spring Garden-area District
Judge Jennifer Clancy — who previously served as a York Suburban school board
member — recused herself.
Betsy
DeVos Releases Q&A Explaining Landmark Special Education Ruling
Education Week Politics K12 Blog By Alyson
Klein on December 7, 2017 11:25 AM
School districts wondering about the legal
implications of a major special education court case are getting some help from
the U.S. Department of Education. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has
released a question-and-answer document explaining the ruling in Endrew
F. vs. Douglas County. The ruling, which came down in
March, determined
that districts have the obligation to provide students in special education
with something beyond a minimal quality or "de minimis" education. "The Supreme
Court sent a strong and unanimous message: all children must be given an
opportunity to make real progress in their learning environment - they cannot
simply be passed along from year to year without meaningful improvement,"
said DeVos. "For too long, too many students offered [individualized
education programs] were denied that chance. I firmly believe all children,
especially those with disabilities, must be provided the support needed to
empower them to grow and achieve ambitious goals." Christina Samuels
will have a more thorough explanation at On Special Education. But for
now, here's
the document.
The
Charter-School Crusader
The combative Eva Moskowitz has created the
nation’s most impressive school system—and made lots of enemies in the process.
The Atlantic by ELIZABETH
GREEN JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 ISSUE
In the spring of 2007, I moved to New York City
to cover what I was sure was the most important story in the country. One of
those annoying people who had settled on a career before I knew how to drive, I
was a young and enthusiastic reporter on the education beat. In New York, I
could cover the biggest education revolution ever attempted: a total overhaul
of the way public schools worked, in the country’s largest school system. The
drivers of this transformation were the city’s billionaire mayor, Michael
Bloomberg, and his handpicked schools chancellor, Joel Klein, a prosecutor who
had previously taken on Microsoft and had now set his sights on toppling his
hometown’s education status quo. “BloomKlein,” as their enemies called them,
radiated a crusading moral confidence. Both liked to say that their work, begun
in 2003, was the next phase of the civil-rights movement. And they wielded
unprecedented authority to actually follow through on their enlightened mission
to tackle inequities and eradicate dysfunction; in 2002, state lawmakers had
dissolved New York City’s elected school board and handed total control to the
mayor. Supporters and opponents alike shared the BloomKlein conviction that
their “disruptions” would soon spread to cities all across the country.
Register
for New School Director Training in December and January
PSBA Website October 2017
You’ve started a challenging and
exciting new role as a school director. Let us help you narrow the learning
curve! PSBA’s New School Director Training provides school directors with
foundational knowledge about their role, responsibilities and ethical
obligations. At this live workshop, participants will learn about key laws,
policies, and processes that guide school board governance and leadership, and
develop skills for becoming strong advocates in their community. Get the tools
you need from experts during this visually engaging and interactive event.
Choose from any of these 11
locations and dates (note: all sessions are held 8 a.m.-4 p.m., unless
specified otherwise.):
·
Dec. 8, Bedford CTC
·
Dec. 8, Montoursville Area High School
·
Dec. 9, Upper St. Clair High School
·
Dec. 9, West Side CTC
·
Dec. 15, Crawford County CTC
·
Dec. 15, Upper Merion MS (8:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m)
·
Dec. 16, PSBA Mechanicsburg
·
Dec. 16, Seneca Highlands IU 9
·
Jan. 6, Haverford Middle School
·
Jan. 13, A W Beattie Career Center
·
Jan. 13, Parkland HS
Fees: Complimentary to All-Access
members or $170 per person for standard membership. All registrations will be
billed to the listed district, IU or CTC. To request billing to
an individual, please contact Michelle Kunkel at michelle.kunkel@psba.org. Registration also includes a
box lunch on site and printed resources.
NSBA 2018
Advocacy Institute February 4 - 6, 2018 Marriott Marquis, Washington D.C.
Register Now
Come a day early and attend the Equity
Symposium!
Join hundreds of public education advocates
on Capitol Hill and help shape the decisions made in Washington D.C. that
directly impact our students. At the 2018 Advocacy Institute, you’ll gain
insight into the most critical issues affecting public education, sharpen your
advocacy skills, and prepare for effective meetings with your representatives. Whether
you are an expert advocator or a novice, attend and experience inspirational
keynote speakers and education sessions featuring policymakers, legal experts
and policy influencers. All designed to help you advocate for your students and
communities.
Registration is now open for the 2018 PASA Education Congress! State College, PA, March 19-20, 2018
Don't miss this marquee event for Pennsylvania school leaders at the Nittany Lion Inn, State College, PA, March 19-20, 2018.
Learn more by visiting http://www.pasa-net.org/2018edcongress
Any comments contained herein are my comments, alone, and
do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any other person or organization
that I may be affiliated with.
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