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Keystone State Education Coalition
PA Ed Policy Roundup for May 26, 2015:
Sign up to support fair funding
May 28, 2015 7:00 PM Jefferson Educational Society 3207 State St. Erie , PA 16508
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Campaign for Fair
Education Funding website
Our goal is to
ensure that every student has access to a quality education no matter where
they live. To make that happen, we need to fundamentally change how public
schools are funded. The current system is not fair to students or taxpayers and
our campaign partners – more than 50 organizations from across Pennsylvania - agree
that it has to be changed now. Student performance is stagnating. School
districts are in crisis. Lawmakers have the ability to change this formula but
they need to hear from you. You
can make a difference »
DId you catch our holiday
weekend postings?
PA Ed Policy Roundup for May 23, 2015: Put down that
crappy beach novel; today's Roundup is hot…..
Editorial: Time growing
short for fixing state pension crisis
The ticking time
bomb tucked inside the Pennsylvania
budget has not detonated – yet.
But that does not
mean the crisis circling the state’s two major public employee pension plans is
going away, or that it is not having a huge effect on people’s lives. Just ask the people who used to drive school
buses for the Springfield
School District Philadelphia , the financially ailing school
system is considering outsourcing health services, which could lead to a
showdown with unionized school nurses. Across
the region school boards are singing the same, sad song. Every cost – every
body - is being scrutinized. That means fewer teacher aides, more outsourcing
of services, a loss of familiar faces such as those who man cafeterias and
front offices. Much of it is fueled by
two major factors – skyrocketing costs associated with health care and pension
costs.
High-profile votes, fights
preview Wolf’s challenges in June
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)
- June is crunch time in the state Capitol and the challenges in front of Gov.
Tom Wolf are becoming clearer in the Democrat’s first go-round with budget
negotiations. For Wolf, who took
office in January, it will be perhaps the biggest test yet of his mettle, and
an important sign of how successful he will be the rest of his term in
persuading the state Legislature’s huge Republican majorities to support his
priorities. The last few days provided something
of a preview of the battles awaiting Wolf’s administration and how it might
handle them. It ruffled Republican
feathers in the Capitol this past week with a bare-fisted attack on the Senate
Republicans’ top priority: a bill to scale back pension benefits for future and
current public school and state government employees.
"Last
year, close to $1.3 billion left traditional public schools to go to charters,
and that's tax dollars," said Steve Robinson, senior director of
communications for the school boards association, "and taxpayers have
every right to know how that money is being spent."
School board group seeks charters' data
School board group seeks charters' data
KATHY
BOCCELLA, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER LAST
UPDATED:May 23, 2015, 1:08 AM
For the group
representing Pennsylvania school board members, when it comes to the state's
billion-dollar charter-school industry, there's no such thing as too much
information. But frivolous is
the word charter-school operators are using to describe the blizzard of
Right-to-Know requests submitted by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. They were lodged with about 180 publicly
funded charters in every corner of the state, seeking data on how those schools
spend millions of dollars on such items as salaries, consultants, rent, ad
campaigns, and a long list of other expenditures.
As of this morning zero
responses have been recorded on this website from the 177 charter schools
listed...
Charter Schools: Tracking
PSBA's May 15th Right-to-Know Requests
PSBA filed a Right-to-Know
request with Pennsylvania charter
and cyber charter schools on May 15, 2015. PSBA is tracking the response from
each charter in the table below and updating it on a weekly basis. According to
Right-to-Know Law, public entities have five days from receipt of an open
records request by the agency’s open records officer to either 1) provide the
requested records (indicated by a green check); 2) deny the request and give
reasons for the denial (indicated by a red X); or 3) invoke a 30-day extension
for specific legal reasons (indicated by an (E)).
Philly's SRC approves
another KIPP charter school
WHYY Newsworks BY KEVIN MCCORRY MAY 25, 2015
It's kind of like
when a teacher allows you to correct your test and resubmit it for a grade.
There was fervent
public debate about the possibility of the Philadelphia School Reform
Commission approving a slate of new charter schools in February. In the end, five of 39 applicants got the
go-ahead, with some tightened restrictions.
ast week, the SRC greenlit another charter last week to little fanfare. KIPP's bid to open a new K-4 charter school
in West Philadelphia was flatly denied in
February – with Farah Jimenez abstaining and the remainder of the commissioners
voting for denial. Instead of fighting
the rejection at the state charter appeals board, KIPP just addressed the red
flags and kicked a revised application back to the SRC.
Philly school officials
make their money pitch to City Council this week
WHYY Newsworks BY KEVIN MCCORRY MAY 25, 2015
The School District of Philadelphia
"There's a lot of work
to do, which is why it's disappointing that despite all the talk about schools
leading up to last week's city election, little was being done to help them.
City Council members criticized Mayor Nutter's proposed property-tax increase
for schools but dared not take up the issue in the midst of their campaigns. As
a result, Council's public hearing on the district's budget was put off until
today. The School Reform Commission is required to adopt a budget by Sunday."
Talk doesn't fund schools
Talk doesn't fund schools
INQUIRER EDITORIAL BOARD POSTED: Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 1:07 AM
It would be a shame
if the gains Philadelphia
has made in lowering its dropout rate and increasing the number of students who
graduate from high school were dealt a setback by inadequate school funding. A report released last week showed that since
2006, the share of ninth graders graduating from Philadelphia high schools in four years has
risen from 52 percent to 65 percent. Meanwhile, the dropout rate fell from 29
percent for the 2003-04 freshman class to 25 percent for the 2008-09 freshmen.
Well-schooled in the ways
of Phila., SRC chair is still learning
KRISTEN A.
GRAHAM, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER POSTED: Tuesday,
May 26, 2015, 1:07 AM
What Marjorie Neff
envisioned for her life after retiring in June was travel and undivided time
with family, sprinkled with regular stints volunteering at her neighborhood
school.
What the former
Philadelphia principal got was quite different - one of the toughest positions
in the city, unpaid at that, with political stakes so high the future of
200,000 children depends in part on how well she does her job. When she told one of her sons over the winter
she was about to become chair of the School Reform Commission, he was a little
wistful: Why couldn't Neff be more like his girlfriend's mother? "She went on a trip to Thailand and
took up poetry," Neff said, laughing. "But I grew up in this system,
and my children went through it. I'm not leaving this city. God willing, I'm
going to have grandchildren and they'll go to public school."
Districts tighten social media contacts among teachers,
students
By Mary Niederberger
/ Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette May 26, 2015 12:00 AM
A rash of local
teachers charged with having sexual relationships with students raises the
question of whether there is an increase in the number of sexual predators
among teachers or simply heightened awareness and increased reporting. Although the answer may not be clear, one
thing is certain: All of the teachers were charged after social media or text
messages with their alleged victims were exposed. The electronic messages, including cell phone
texts and messages on Facebook and Twitter, left a digital trail for
investigators to follow, making it easy to identify victims and present the
suspected teachers with specific evidence of wrongdoing. That leaves school
officials tasked with trying to figure out how to embrace the seemingly
limitless educational advantages of the Internet and social media tools, but
preventing them from being used to initiate and foster covert, inappropriate
relationships among staff and students.
Philipsburg-Osceola
celebrates ranking of high school among state’s best
Centre Daily Times BY BRITNEY MILAZZO bmilazzo@centredaily.comMay
25, 2015
It’s something
that Philipsburg-Osceola
Area Senior High School has never seen.
This year, the
school was ranked 67th best high school in the state by U.S. News & World Report. “This is the first
time P-O has been ranked,” said Principal Robin Stewart. “I congratulate P-O
high school teachers for their dedication to improving educational outcomes for
our students.” The list was
released May 12, ranking the top 77 schools in Pennsylvania . Stewart attributes the accolade to the need
to improve. “(It’s) never being
satisfied that you do something that you’ve never done before, (and) always
striving to be better and moving the educational system to be better,” she
said. “Recognizing the achievements of teachers and students leads to being
able to challenge all members of our educational community to continue to
strive for greater success.”
Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2015/05/25/4764868_philipsburg-osceola-celebrates.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy
"Another cost that
weighs heavily on the budget, said board member Ron Williams, is the $6.1
million the district will pay into the state pension system, known as PSERS,
which stands for the Public School Employees Retirement System. Next year that cost will represent more than
10 percent of Pottstown ’s total expenditures."
By Evan Brandt, The Mercury POSTED: 05/24/15, 9:12 AM EDT | UPDATED: 2 HRS AGO
http://www.pottsmerc.com/general-news/20150524/pottstown-moves-forward-with-57-million-no-tax-budget
Editorial: Conestoga
Valley School District board needs to understand reality of Sunshine Act
THE ISSUE: Conestoga
Valley School
District
Rule No. 1. You can
discuss individual employees in executive sessions — i.e., in the dark, out of
public hearing — but not if the individual employee asks for the matter to be
discussed at an open meeting.
Rule No. 2. This
means you need to give that employee notice, so he or she can request an open
discussion.
Rule No. 3. You
definitely cannot decide in executive session to simply do away with a whole
swath of personnel.
CV Superintendent
Gerald Huesken says the school board’s "executive session deliberations
concerned specifically-known custodial, cafeteria and classroom aide
employees,” and the board considered “the specific circumstance of individual
employees.” These discussions, he says,
“were not about broad theoretical groups of employees.” Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel at
Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, says that’s a “very broad interpretation of
the personnel executive session — too broad in my opinion.” She adds: “Even if the personnel executive
session did apply, the school still failed to allow the ‘specifically-known
custodial, cafeteria and classroom aide employees’ to request the discussion
happen at an open meeting, which is required by the Sunshine
Act.” That law is intended to ensure
that public officials conduct the public’s business in public. And a policy that outsources a whole class of
employees is most decidedly the public’s business.
As the last day of
school approaches, studying spelling is the last thing on most kids' minds. But
not for the 285 contestants in this week's Scripps National Spelling Bee. Will Yaeger will represent Lancaster County
in the 88th annual contest, which kicks off Tuesday in National
Harbor , Maryland , about nine miles
south of Washington . The thirteen-year-old said on Friday that
he'd been practicing spelling on a special Scripps site for an hour each night
in recent weeks.
Blogger note: Are tax credit programs the
new WAMs in Pennsylvania
In Pennsylvania
NYT Editorial: A Costly Tax Break for Nonpublic
Schools
New York Times By THE EDITORIAL BOARD MAY 22, 2015
Gov. Andrew Cuomo
can talk passionately about improving New
York ’s “failing public schools,” but when he made
that point at churches and a yeshiva last Sunday it was, at best, disingenuous.
He was there to sell his bill that would help private and parochial schools, by
offering big tax credits to their donors. This energetic effort for an expensive and possibly unconstitutional bill that
Mr. Cuomo has named the Parental Choice in Education Act could cost the state
more than $150 million a year. That money should be used to help almost 2.7
million public school students in the state, not given to wealthy donors
subsidizing mainly private or religious schools. Elizabeth Lynam, a
budget expert for New York ’s
Citizens Budget Commission, called the bill “an extremely lucrative benefit
likely to serve the state’s wealthiest taxpayers.” Many of the people who would
get the credit already support their favorite private or parochial schools, she
said. A tax credit to encourage them isn’t needed.
"Careful studies of the
implementation of NCLB have shown that it has done what less bullish observers
might have predicted from the outset. It has increased the focus on the
education of poor and minority students, but it has not provided schools with
needed tools to create higher quality schooling for these students."
Education reformers have
it all wrong: Accountability from above never works, great teaching always does
Common Core or No Child Left Behind --
reformers always try to manage change from above. It fails & hurts our kids
Salon.com by JAL MEHTA SUNDAY, MAY 24,
2015 02:59 PM EDT
In late 2001, three
months after the September 11 attacks, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)
passed both House and Senate with strong bipartisan majorities and was signed
by a Republican president. Promising to use the power of the state to ensure
that all children were proficient in reading and math by 2014, proponents
heralded the act as the greatest piece of federal education legislation since
the creation of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. By
requiring the states to set high standards, pairing them with assessments that
measured whether students were achieving those standards, and holding schools
accountable if students failed to do so, NCLB, in the eyes of its sponsors,
would close achievement gaps and make America ’s schools the envy of the
world. A decade later, the bloom is off
the rose. While almost everyone today continues to share the aim of leaving no
child behind, the act itself has come in for criticism from many quarters, to
the point that Bush’s former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings declared
that NCLB is now a “toxic brand” in American politics.
Pollster Terry Madonna Joins the Next #FairFundingPA
chat on Twitter
Terry Madonna will
join the next monthly Twitter chat with Pennsylvania’s major education
leadership organizations on Tuesday, May 26 at 8 p.m. Madonna
is Professor of Public Affairs and Director of the Center for Politics and
Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College. He is also the Director of the
Franklin and Marshall
College Poll.
Topics will include,
but not be limited to: Property tax reform, Governor Wolf’s budget proposal,
and of course the need for a fair, predictable basic education funding formula.
Use hashtag #FairFundingPA to participate and follow the
conversation.
On the last Tuesday
of each month at 8 p.m., the following organizations go to Twitter to discuss
timely topics, ask questions and listen to the public’s responses:
- The
- The
- The
- The
- The
Join the
conversation. Share your ideas, lurk, learn and let us know what you think
about the state’s support for public schools. It’s a simple, free and
fast-paced way to communicate and share information. If you’ve never tweeted
before, here are directions and a few tips:
NAACP PA STATE CONFERENCE YOUTH & COLLEGE
DIVISION:
Saturday, May 30, 2015 9:00 am
St. Bernard Hall, Friendship Circle Senior
Center
East Campus of Mercy Fitzgerald
Hospital
Please RSVP to
panaacpyc@gmail.com by May 25
May 28, 2015 7:00 PM Jefferson Educational
Society 3207 State St.
Erie , PA 16508
Panelists
Conneaut School
District
Mr. Jarrin
Sperry, Superintendent, Ms. Jody Sperry, Board President
Corry School
District
Mr. William Nichols,
Superintendent
Fort LeBoeuf
School District
Mr. Richard Emerick,
Assistant Superintendent
Girard School
District
Dr. James Tracy,
Superintendent
Harbor Creek
School District
Ms. Christine
Mitchell, Board President
Millcreek School
District
Mr. William Hall,
Superintendent Mr. Aaron O'Toole, Director of Finance and Accounting
Keynote Speaker
Mr. Jay Himes,
Executive Director, Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials
PILCOP: Adequately and
Fairly Funding Pennsylvania Schools: What are the Needs and Where Does the
Money Come From? (Live Webinar)
June 8, 2015, 12:00 — 2:00 P.M.
June 8, 2015, 12:00 — 2:00 P.M.
Staff attorney
Michael Churchill will speak about what schools need and where the money comes
from in this Pennsylvania Bar Institute (PBI) webinar on June
8. Click here to register.
Governor Wolf has
proposed $500 million in new funding for public schools starting this July. He
has proposed as shale extraction tax and increases in personal income and sales
taxes to pay for this. This Philadelphia
Bar Association Education Law Section and PBI are hosting a webinar that will
focus on how much public schools need and differing proposals on how state
funds should be distributed this year and in the future. Other focuses will
include the current local tax burdens for public schools and issues concerning
how the state should raise revenues to pay for these programs. The program will also provide information
about the components of a good funding formula and look at the work of the
Basic Education Funding Commission and the state-wide Campaign for Fair
Education Funding, of which we are a leading member.
