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AROUND THE WEB | pages 1Edhivemn.com Charter schools in Minnesota started or supported by the fundersSorted by size of largest school demographicThis year ONE non-White majority charter school supported by funders in this database exceeded the state average in test score proficiency. But that one school is suspect because of wildly fluctuating test scores. Overall these schools are highly segregated and many have had very low test scores for many years. [ link ] Read the story >
Hechinger Report Nearly 750 charter schools are whiter than the nearby district schoolsLoose laws let scores of charters create policies that favor white studentsAccording to Joe Nathan, this isn't segregation because parents are "choosing" to segregate. [ link ] Read the story >
Badass Teachers Association The Sad Impact of Corporate School Reform on Students with Emotional/Behavioral DisabilitiesPublic schools need a continuum of services for children experiencing emotional/behavioral problems. They also need a whole curriculum that includes classes that are therapeutic, like art, music, and drama. These classes can help students find their niche and keep them from academically falling behind. [ link ] Read the story >
Journal Journal of Education Policy ‘Shit shows’ or ‘like-minded schools’: charter schools and the neoliberal logic of Teach For AmericaThis paper critically examines the relationship between these entities through the lens of TFA corps members placed in charter schools, and explores two types of schools described by interviewees, namely, ‘shit shows,’ and ‘like-minded schools.’ [ link ] Read the story >
Bright Lights Small City Minneapolis Public Schools Stands By Administrator with Side School Choice Consulting BusinessIn 2017, according to Minneapolis Public Schools staff, the district’s General Counsel, Amy Moore, investigated whether or not district administrator Bryan Fleming’s consulting business constituted a conflict of interest, per MPS policy 3000. The conclusion reached was that Fleming was not in violation of the district policy. [ link ] Read the story >
Bright Lights Small City Minneapolis Public Schools Administrator Runs a Side School Choice Consulting BusinessWhen it comes to declining student enrollment for the Minneapolis Public Schools, it looks like the fox may be guarding the hen house.It turns out that Bryan Fleming, who has served as Director of Enrollment Management for the Minneapolis schools since 2016, runs a side consulting business that offers “School-placement Advising for families and family law practitioners.” [ link ] Read the story >
Have You Heard blog Education Can’t Fix Poverty. So Why Keep Insisting that It Can?Education is not the best anti-poverty program, argues historian Harvey Kantor, and it’s long past time we acknowledged that…One of the consequences of making education so central to social policy has been that we’ve ended up taking the pressure off of the state for the kinds of policies that would be more effective at addressing poverty and economic inequality. Instead we’re asking education to do things it can’t possibly do. The result has been increasing support for the kinds of market-oriented policies that make inequality worse. [ link ] Read the story >
Washington Post Nation’s only federally funded voucher program has negative effect on student achievement, study findsStudents in the nation’s only federally funded school voucher initiative performed worse on standardized tests within a year after entering D.C. private schools than peers who did not participate, according to a new federal analysis that comes as President Trump is seeking to pour billions of dollars into expanding the private school scholarships nationwide. [ link ] Read the story >
Newsday Common Core math test boycotted by 79,780 Long Island studentsNearly 80,000 public school students in 100 districts across Long Island refused Tuesday to take the state mathematics exam given in grades three through eight, in a fifth straight year of boycotts driven by opposition to the Common Core tests, according to a Newsday survey. [ link ] Read the story >
Alternet 5 Times Charter School Founders Used Shady Real Estate Deals to Shamelessly Enrich ThemselvesA trio of academics compare the tactics to Wall Street's raiders.As the Trump administration plans to redirect taxpayer billions to privatize K-12 education, a scholarly article by some of the nation’s leading investigators of charter school rip-offs has highlighted how their business model is prone to fiscal self-dealing. [ link ] Read the story >
MinnPost STRIDE Academy was once one of the top performing charters in Minnesota. Now it’s getting shut downToday, however, STRIDE is facing closure. While school leaders say they embraced the school’s newfound diversity, they struggled to adapt to the academic needs of their changing student population. The school went from being in the top 15 percent of all Title 1 schools in the state, in terms of students’ academic performance, to being in the bottom quarter of Title 1 schools. Also see: [ link ] Read the story >
The News & Observer (Raleigh) Should charter school enrollment be a corporate employee perk?Students could gain admission to charter schools based on where their parents work or where they live under legislation that would make significant changes in the ways the schools fill their classrooms. [ link ] Read the story >
Crooks & Liars Race To The Bottom: The Department Of Walmart EducationThe Walmartification of EducationThe Walton family now owns only 50% of Walmart stores. Sadly, that means they only make billions upon billions having lost the last chunk of billions. But never fear, for they have invested wisely. So much so that they have been able to give over $1.3 billion, by their own estimates, to K-12 education during the last two decades through their Walton Family Fund. [ link ] Read the story >
Alternet Trump's Education Budget Will Undermine Teaching and SchoolsBefore Trump, class sizes were already growing.Though much has been written about President Trump’s proposed budget cuts, little has been said about how his largest proposed cut to public schools, the total elimination of $2.4 billion in Title IIA funds, would likely increase class size across the nation. [ link ] Read the story >
Star Tribune Enrollment slide to continue in St. Paul, consultant saysA former state demographer is offering little hope of a turnaround in the enrollment decline that has put the St. Paul Public Schools in budget-cutting mode for the past two years. [ link ] Read the story >
Vice.com When school choice means choosing segregationBy and large, schools with large concentrations of poor or minority children (often the same children, since race and poverty are highly correlated in the U.S.) perform worse. “At scale, we have rarely been able to consistently produce high-quality schools in situations in which all of the kids are poor and minority,” said Rucker C. Johnson, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley. [ link ] Read the story >
Star Tribune Plaintiffs file appeal disputing Minnesota's teacher tenure lawsFour plaintiffs filed an appeal Thursday in their fight to challenge Minnesota's teacher tenure laws. A judge rejected their suit in October but the parents are back to assert that state laws are protecting ineffective teachers and violating students' rights by keeping low-income and minority students from attaining a quality education. [ link ] Read the story >
Star Tribune Minnesota Court of Appeals throws out school desegregation suitParents claimed state did little to address disparities in schools.A lawsuit claiming the state is shirking its responsibility to educate poor and minority students was thrown out after a Monday ruling from the Minnesota Court of Appeals. [ link ] Read the story >
Bright Light Small City Opt Out Numbers in Minnesota High Schools SkyrocketAs testing season begins in full force across Minnesota, publicly available data from the state Department of Education indicates a striking trend: the number of high school juniors refusing to sit for the state and federally mandated MCA tests is growing [ link ] Read the story >
Institute for New Economic Thinkng Dismantling Public Education: Turning Ideology into GoldPolicies based on faith in the “market” as a principle of social organization have wrought havoc with a founding principle of American democracyNowhere is the toxic effect of privatization on America’s public wellbeing more evident than in the sphere of education. Today, politicians in thrall to neoliberal ideology seek to subordinate the democratic mission of public education to a theory of market-driven economic development and social organization. The phantasmagorical belief in neutral “scientific” expertise as the primary basis for policymaking has, therefore, profoundly antihuman as well as antidemocratic implications. [ link ] Read the story >
Bright Light Small City MN Comeback: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing for the Minneapolis Schools?Amid all of this revamping, the Minneapolis Public Schools continues to fall further into the hands of MN Comeback. Also see: [ link ] Read the story >
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