Daily postings from the Keystone State
Education Coalition now reach more than 3250 Pennsylvania education
policymakers – school directors, administrators, legislators, legislative and
congressional staffers, Governor's staff, current/former PA Secretaries of
Education, PTO/PTA officers, parent advocates, teacher leaders, 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 and Twitter
These daily emails are archived and
searchable at http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.org
Follow us on Twitter at @lfeinberg
The Keystone State Education Coalition
is pleased to be listed among the friends and allies of The Network for Public Education. Are you a member?
Keystone State Education Coalition
PA Ed Policy Roundup for June 9, 2014:
YouTube Video: The $200 Million/Year PA Charter School
“If not addressed, the pension crisis will have a crippling
effect on the state’s economy and a devastating impact on local school district
budgets. The current system is unsustainable, leaving taxpayers to feel the
brunt of staggering increases unless a workable, long-term solution is
enacted,” is how the PSBA views the issue."
PENSION BOMB: Local
school budgets crippled by problem
Note to Readers: This is
the fifth part of a series on the pension crisis facing Pennsylvanians. The
stories are part of a project being done by The Pottstown Mercury
(www.pottsmerc.com), a sister paper of the Daily Local News.
West Chester Daily Local By Evan Brandt ebrandt@pottsmerc.com
POSTED: 06/07/14
If you think Pennsylvania ’s
pension crisis is just a fight in Harrisburg
between teachers unions and legislators, take a look at your child’s class
size. The yawning pension deficit that
is currently hobbling Pennsylvania’s budget is having a similar trickle-down
effect on local school budgets and is helping drive higher property taxes;
teacher vacancies; higher class sizes and reduced academic programming. As the school boards in Pottsgrove, Daniel
Boone, Pottstown and Phoenixville school districts struggle to make ends meet,
the single most common cause driving higher spending is the sky-rocketing cost
of paying for Pennsylvania’s broken pension system.
“I know that the public really does
not want education funding cut,” Vitali said. “That’s an issue that resonates
with people. ... When you tell people that the choice is between taxing the
drillers and cutting these (education) programs, it’s not a hard choice for people
to make.”
State budget debate set to
begin
By John Kopp, Delaware County Daily
There will be various
numbers tossed around Harrisburg
throughout the next three weeks as lawmakers debate the intricacies of the
state budget. Perhaps none of those
figures will be as critical as the 102 representatives, 26 senators and one
governor needed to approve a new spending plan by the July 1 deadline. That conglomerate of support is necessary in
any budget year. Finding it while staring down a $1.3 billion structural
deficit in a busy election year only adds to the annual difficulty. “I think it’s likely to go right to the
deadline,” said state Sen. Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-9, of Chester .
Each time charter schools skim marginal need special ed students out of
public school districts, they artificially cause the average special ed cost to
spiral higher for the next year's special ed charter school tuition rate.
YouTube Video: The $200 Million/Year PA Charter School
Would the special ed funding bill HB2138/SB1316 be the
"end of charter schools as we know it"? It might be, especially for the operators of
for-profit management companies that contract with charter schools. As best we can tell, instead of special ed
money serving special needs students, it appears that the windfall has funded things
like multi-million dollar CEO compensation, over 19,000 local TV commercials, a
jet and Florida condo, generous political campaign contributions and a 20,000
square foot mansion on the beach in Palm Beach Florida. Here's a three minute youtube video produced
by KEYSEC Co-Chair Mark B. Miller that clearly explains how this happens.
Want more than a three minute video on this
topic? Here's a great piece by long-time
ed writer Dale Mezzacappa for the notebook….
City charters get $100M more
for special ed than they spend; debate rages in Harrisburg
the notebook By Dale
Mezzacappa on June 5, 2014
02:12 PM
Philadelphia charter
schools received more than $175 million last year to educate special education
students, but spent only about $77 million for that purpose, according to aNotebook analysis of state documents. That is a nearly $100 million gap at a
time when city education leaders are considering raising some class sizes to 41
students and laying off 800 more teachers in District-run schools due
to severe funding shortfalls. Payments to charters, which are fixed under
law, make up nearly a third of its $2.4 billion budget.
The issue goes beyond
Philadelphia. Statewide, charters, including cybers, collect about $350
million for special education students, but spend just $156 million on them,
according to calculations from the Pennsylvania Association of School Business
Officials (PASBO). The Notebook used the PASBO
analysis of state data to
calculate the numbers for Philadelphia, which has half the state’s 170
charter schools.
The Keystone State
Editorial: Charter school law in need of repair
Bucks County Intelligencer
When the charter school
law was adopted, multiple benefits were envisioned: to give parents an
alternative to failing public schools, at no additional cost to them; to
provide competition for public schools, thus spurring schools to improve; and
to act as laboratories where, relieved of some state mandates and sparked by
the nimbleness of small scale, new and innovative learning methods would
percolate and migrate to public schools.
But like anything new, the charter school law had kinks in it.
Ironically, what was supposed to help public schools has been hurting them. And
so, state lawmakers are in the throes of fixing the law or, more accurately,
have been presented with the opportunity to fix it. Most hurtful is the funding formula for
special education. The way it works, the districts forward funds for each
special-ed student lost to a charter school. That sum is determined by a state
formula that essentially reflects the average cost of educating a special needs
student. However, the formula does not distinguish between students in need of
low-level services versus those in need of a higher degree of help.
Did you catch our weekend postings?
Pennsylvania
Education Policy Roundup for June 7, 2014:
Parent Trigger Shoots Blanks Again In Philly; Parents
Want Good Neighborhood Public Schools
Use a severance tax to close
budget hole? Maybe, top House Republican says: The Sunday Brunch
By on June 08, 2014 at 9:00 AM
Good Sunday Morning, Fellow
Seekers.
Gov. Tom Corbett says he'd veto one if it ever reached his desk, but that hasn't stopped talk of a severance tax on natural gas drillers from growing from a once-polite whisper to serious chatter.
Gov. Tom Corbett says he'd veto one if it ever reached his desk, but that hasn't stopped talk of a severance tax on natural gas drillers from growing from a once-polite whisper to serious chatter.
Now you can add House Majority Whip Stan Saylor,
R-York, to the chorus
of voices speculating on the possibility of taking the $700 million or so an
extraction would raise and using it to help close a roughly $1.2 billion budget
deficit. "More people are paying
attention to it. We're checking it out," Saylor told The York Daily Record last week.
IS PENNSYLVANIA
Education Voters of Pennsylvania ,
the NAACP and the Keystone State Education Coalition are sponsoring a public
meeting with speakers from the Public Interest Law
Center of Philadelphia
and the Education Law Center
When: Monday June 16th, 6-7 PM
Where: Delaware County Community College Southeast Center
Learn about how a statewide legal strategy could help students
in William Penn, Southeast Delco and
neighboring districts and how you might participate. Legal experts
and attorneys will be present to talk about the law, your children’s rights and
a potential lawsuit against the state of Pennsylvania based
on the state Constitutional requirement to provide an education.
More info: http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.blogspot.com/2014/06/is-pennsylvanias-system-of-school.html
From Bad to Worst
From bad to worse to –
what’s worse than worse? A new report released this week shows that “the
financial condition of school districts across the Commonwealth continues to
deteriorate.” The Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators (PASA) and
the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials (PASBO) surveyed the
state’s 500 school districts and got some chilling results. [PASA-PASBO Budget Report,
6-5-14] With 56% of districts responding, the researchers found
that:
Editorial: Don’t bet on
education funding reform
Delco Times Editorial POSTED: 06/07/14, 8:57 PM EDT
A tall task is looming for Gov. Tom Corbett and the Legislature
as they hunker down in Harrisburg for the annual June drama that results in a
Pennsylvania budget. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
There are no shortage of reasons to doubt that meaningful
change when it comes to education funding and property tax reform – a yoke that
has hung around the neck of Pennsylvania
home owners for decades – is going to happy any time soon. Actually, there are 1.7 billion of them.
That’s the sea of red ink facing Gov. Tom Corbett and the
Legislature as they hunker down in Harrisburg for that annual month-long June
drama that results in a Pennsylvania budget.
In his budget preview address back in February, Corbett –
battling tanking poll numbers and under fire for three years of austere
spending plans, in particular when it comes to education – announced a plan to
pump more money into public education.
BY JENNY DeHUFF, Daily
News Staff Writer dehuffj@phillynews.com, 215-854-5218
POSTED: June 06, 2014
LIKE WACKY Waving
Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tubemen, members of City Council are trying to draw
attention to the fact that the city wants control of its school district back.
Hoping to get that
message across to Harrisburg, Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell introduced
legislation yesterday that calls for abolition of the School Reform Commission,
the state-appointed board that oversees the School District of Philadelphia.
Blackwell says that if
put to Philadelphia voters, a question on the November ballot would garner
overwhelming support and would bolster the more than 38,000 petition signatures
already collected by Council calling for the SRC to be dissolved.
At one city school, no
optimism things will get better
KRISTEN A. GRAHAM, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER LAST UPDATED: Sunday, June 8, 2014, 1:08 AM POSTED: Saturday, June 7, 2014, 8:30 AM
There is no money for
supplies to stock Melissa Holloway's biology lab, so the teacher at Arts
Academy at Benjamin Rush awards extra credit to students who bring in paper
towels. There's no Latin or Advanced
Placement Chemistry at Rush Arts this year, to the disappointment of 180
students who had planned to take those courses.
And if you caught an otherwise excellent student performance in the
school theater, you likely squinted, because the staff couldn't get anyone to
fix the lights. While City Hall and
Harrisburg debate funding for the near-destitute Philadelphia School District,
students and staff are nearing the end of a school year that has been, in the
words of one student, "insane" - and not in a good way.
http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20140608_At_one_city_school__no_optimism_things_will_get_better.html#1oUEHL77EcWG0vX8.99
"Though there's no concrete evidence, some believe the
substitute teacher pool may be shrinking because fewer full-time teaching jobs
have translated into fewer recent college graduates hoping to turn a couple
years of subbing into a job offer. And
certain school districts are capping the hours of the substitutes left in the
pool in an effort to avoid paying for heath care, which eventually will be
required under the Affordable Care Act for employees working an average of 30
hours a week. "Unfortunately, it's
just a series of bad circumstances that is making what's always been somewhat
of a challenge a much more significant challenge," said Jay Himes,
executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Business
Officials, which provides training for district business offices throughout the
state."
Schools grapple with substitute
teacher shortage
Tight job market and
Obamacare fears aggravate a longtime problem.
By Adam Clark,
Of The Morning Call 9:28 p.m. EDT, June 7, 2014
During the middle of a weekday last month, more than 100 Allen
High School students were ushered into the gymnasium. There was no assembly that day or school pep
rally. And this definitely wasn't a game of dodge ball. Many of the students were supposed to be in
class, but 25 teachers called in sick and the school could find only 19
substitutes, according to the district.
The administration's best option was to place the students in a
study hall with four teachers monitoring, district Chief Academic Officer Tina
Belardi said. When the school went into a lockdown drill that day, the scene
became chaotic.
"In PA, we've already seen how this
works with cyber-charters -- just thirty or forty families can decide that an
entire school district will have to make massive cuts. When they jump ship,
they don't just take their own tax dollars with them -- they take the tax
dollars of all their neighbors as well, and those neighbors get no say in the
matter at all. Even electing new school
board members won't make a difference."
School Choice Is UnAmerican
Huffington Post by Peter Greene Teacher,
writer Posted: 06/02/2014 9:10 am EDT
When I was busy listing reasons that conservatives should be opposed to school
choice, I skipped over a biggy. School
choice is taxation without representation.
When some cranky old fart (crankier and older than I am,
anyway) wants to complain about having to pay taxes for schools when his kids
aren't even IN school any more, I have a standard answer. Schools are not a
service for parents. The people who produced the student are not the only
"customers" for the school. The
educated human who emerges from school will become a neighbor, an employee, a
parent, a spouse, a voter, a (one hopes) involved citizen, a person whose job
will contribute in some way to the life of the community. Everybody who will
ever deal with her in any of those capacities shares the benefits of that education.
They are all "customers" of public education. Whether they are
relatives of the educatee or not is hardly the point.
We all have a stake in public education. We all pay taxes to
support public education. And we all get to vote on who will manage the
operation of our schools (well, unless we are in occupied territories like
Philadelphia or Newark).
"While the Gates Foundation created the burst of
momentum behind the Common Core, the Obama administration picked up the cause
and helped push states to act quickly.
There was so much cross-pollination between the foundation
and the administration, it is difficult to determine the degree to which one
may have influenced the other. Several
top players in Obama’s Education Department who shaped the administration’s
policies came either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or
from organizations that received heavy funding from the foundation."
How Bill Gates pulled off the
swift Common Core revolution
Washington Post WRITTEN BY Lyndsey
Layton PUBLISHED: JUNE 7
The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach
to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of
the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support. But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money
— tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could
overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute
national standards.
So they turned to the richest man in the world.
"This is the closest thing to an
educational coup in the history of the United States Kentucky
Did Bill Gates fund an
‘educational coup’?
BY VALERIE STRAUSS June
8 at 11:53 am
My Post colleague Lyndsey Layton has written
an illuminating story about the role Bill Gates and his money played
in the Common Core State Standards initiative and its adoption by 45 states and
the District of Columbia .
In great detail, she explains how on one summer day in 2008, two men —
Gene Wilhoit, then-director of the Council for Chief State School Officers, and
David Coleman, at the time an educational consultant and an “emerging
evangelist for the standards movement” — persuaded Gates to fund the
creation and marketing of what became the Common Core. The article makes a few things clear if they
weren’t before:
Education Votes by Brian Washington 8 Jun 2014
A program that
pro-public education activists have called a throwback to the 1950s–a time when
Alabama tried avoiding integration by directing public school funds to private
schools–has been ruled unconstitutional by a Montgomery County circuit court
judge.
The Alabama
Accountability Act of 2013 targeted students attending public schools that the
state deemed “failing.” Instead of providing real solutions to help all
students gain access to a quality public education, the Accountability Act
starved public schools of critical funding.
The law created a
tax-credit program that used public dollars to reimburse the cost of tuition to
those parents who pulled their children out of public schools and enrolled them
in private or religious schools. Tax credits were also given to companies and
individuals who gave money to certain organizations to fund scholarships for
low-income students to attend private schools.
The program cost taxpayers $40 million during the 2013-14 fiscal year, yet, studies show that voucher and tuition tax-credit schemes don’t result in a better education for students.
The program cost taxpayers $40 million during the 2013-14 fiscal year, yet, studies show that voucher and tuition tax-credit schemes don’t result in a better education for students.
Pre-K for PA
PCCY invites you to get on
the School Spirit Bus to Harrisburg on Tuesday
June 10th for Fair and Full
School
Public Citizens for Children and Youth
On Tuesday June 10th, Public Citizens for Children
and Youth (PCCY) will be going to Harrisburg .
Join committed parents, leaders, and community members from around state to
make it clear to Harrisburg
that PA students need fair and full funding now! We are providing free
transportation to and from Harrisburg
as well as lunch. Please arrive at the United Way Building 1709 Benjamin Franklin Parkway no later
than8:15am. The bus will depart at 8:30am sharp! Reserve your
seat today by emailing us at info@pccy.org or
calling us at 215-563-5848
x11. You can download and share our flyer by clicking here. We hope to see you there!
PA Business-Education Partnership
Featuring:
Welcome By Governor Tom Corbett (invited)
Remarks Acting Secretary of Education Carolyn Dumaresq
(confirmed)
Perceptions & comments of business leaders, educators,
college presidents, and advocacy groups
Full agenda here: http://www.bipac.net/pbc/2014-PA-Education-Summit-Agenda.pdf
Registration: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/pennsylvania-education-summit-tickets-11529363637?aff=eorgf
Come to Harrisburg
Wednesday, June 18, Monday, June 23, and Monday, June 30
Education Voters PA
Governor Corbett’s “election-year” budget is falling apart.
Revenue projections are down and Corbett and state legislators are looking to
make more than $1.2 billion in cuts to his proposed 2014-2015
budget. Lobbyists will be swarming the
Capitol in the month of June and we need to be there, too. Join Pennsylvanians from throughout the commonwealth
as we send a loud and clear message that after three years of balancing the
state budget on the backs of Pennsylvania’s public school children, it is time
for our state government to do what is right and pass a fair budget that will
provide students with the opportunities they need to meet state standards and
be successful after they graduate.
Details: http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/6041/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=7059
Cloaking
Inequity Blog by Julian
Vasquez Heilig May 23, 2014 | | 1
Comment
WE NEED YOUR HELP! Do you believe in public education? Do you
want US policymakers to understand why decision makers in Chile have now
judged vouchers to be problematic after 30 years of universal implementation?
Do you have frequent flier miles you can donate? Sponsor a grad student
today! This summer, I along with eight
UT-Austin graduate students will travel to Santiago, Chile in August 2014 with
Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig to conduct field research that will result in a
policy brief, op-eds and a peer-reviewed academic paper detailing recent changes in
Chile’s market-based education policy proposed this past April by Chile’s
current Education Minister Nicholas Eyzaguirre.
PSBA opens nominations for
the Timothy M. Allwein Advocacy Award
The nomination process is now open for the Timothy M. Allwein Advocacy Award. This award may be presented annually to the individual school director or entire school board to recognize outstanding leadership in legislative advocacy efforts on behalf of public education and students that are consistent with the positions in PSBA’s Legislative Platform. Applications will be accepted until July 16, 2014. The July 16 date was picked in honor of Timothy M. Allwein's birthday. The award will be presented during the PASA-PSBA School Leadership Conference in October. More details and application are available on PSBA's website.
The nomination process is now open for the Timothy M. Allwein Advocacy Award. This award may be presented annually to the individual school director or entire school board to recognize outstanding leadership in legislative advocacy efforts on behalf of public education and students that are consistent with the positions in PSBA’s Legislative Platform. Applications will be accepted until July 16, 2014. The July 16 date was picked in honor of Timothy M. Allwein's birthday. The award will be presented during the PASA-PSBA School Leadership Conference in October. More details and application are available on PSBA's website.
Education
Policy and Leadership Center
Click
here to read more about EPLC’s Education Policy Fellowship Program, including:
2014-15 Schedule 2014-15 Application Past Speakers Program Alumni And More
Information
2014 PA Gubernatorial Candidate Plans for Education
and Arts/Culture in PA
Education Policy and Leadership Center
Below is an alphabetical list of the 2014
Gubernatorial Candidates and links to information about their plans, if
elected, for education and arts/culture in Pennsylvania. This list will be updated, as more
information becomes available.
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