Category: Education

Fed Funded Nonprofit Common Core Push

Fed Funded Nonprofit Leads Common Core Push is courtesy of Joanne Yurchak

By Joy Pullmann

A central defense of the new national education standards, now generating spirited public debates, is that the federal government did not mandate or create them.
“The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics,” the official Common Core website states. In 2009, two nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations called the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), convened government officials and dozens of consultants to write, rewrite, and, in June 2010, finally publish Common Core.

Five months later, 44 states had agreed to trade their K-12 math and English targets and tests for Common Core’s. Those standards are now moving into 87 percent of public school classrooms, and reshaping textbooks and tests for even states and schools that did not elect Common Core. National Common Core tests, funded exclusively by the federal government, come out in 2014-2015.

Taxpayer Dollars Dominate
Previous School Reform News reports have revealed state and federal tax money provide approximately half of CCSSO’s operating funds, and that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation money has been intimately involved in this behind-closed-doors process. NGA receives an even bigger proportion of its operating funds from tax dollars.

According to the latest IRS 990 form for the NGA’s Center for Best Practices , the nonprofit arm of NGA that shares “a common pool of cash and investments ” in 2010 received 80 percent of its $14.8 million annual income from taxpayers. Tax documents also show that back in 2004, the earliest available documents traced, NGA received $31 million from taxpayers. Tax funding has made up most of NGA’s income every year in between.

Approximately half of NGA’s tax-provided revenue comes from the feds, and the other half from membership dues states pay. In its latest financial statement showing $16.9 million in total revenue for 2011-2012, $4.9 million of that came from the feds, $5.5 from states, and another $3 million from corporate sponsors.

SRN contacted NGA for information about its finances and Common Core work. A spokeswoman referred all significant questions to NGA’s communications director, then did not respond to several follow-up requests for that referral.

To Vote or Not to Vote
Despite its heavy tax support, NGA is not required to make meetings, votes, and materials public like government bodies, and it has not done so for its work on Common Core.

NGA is a private trade organization whose actions have no legal binding on states. Governors do vote during NGA’s two annual meetings to express shared priorities, former Virginia Gov. George Allen (R) told School Reform News, but “by the time they vote on a position the [resolutions] get watered down so much any objections are already accommodated. It’s unlike legislatures, with committee hearings and votes.”

Even so, NGA has not released what, if any, resolution 2009’s governors voted on to authorize its subsequent Common Core work. Neither has it released the vote tally.

Not All Governors Involved
Even if governors do vote on vague resolutions that have no legal power, not all attend NGA meetings. The NGA spokeswoman would only say “we consider all governors members of the association,” but five governors have publicly withdrawn membership and refused to pay dues. These are from Florida, Maine, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Texas, and all are Republicans. Only one is from a state that has refused Common Core—those are Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia.

Spokesmen for the abstaining governors all essentially said NGA membership provided too little benefit for the money.

Texas “Gov. [Rick] Perry knows and works with governors all over the nation on a variety of different issues that are important to Texas and our country as a whole,” spokesman Josh Havens said. “We didn’t feel that active membership was a smart use of taxpayer funds.”

Texas governors have not been NGA members since 2003, he said. Before that, the state’s NGA dues ran $125,000 to $150,000 per year. Idaho suspended its membership in 2009 for financial reasons, and it just resumed paying about $40,000 for membership and $30,000 for travel to meetings in 2013, said Jon Hanian, a spokesman for Gov. Butch Otter (R).

“This governor is a strong believer in the Tenth Amendment and state’s rights, and he believes states are the laboratory of the republic,” Hanian said. “He values sharing his experience as well as sharing experience of other governors as he crafts public policy. When there have been attempts to have national policies to the detriment of the 10th amendment, he’s viewed his role as a counterbalance.”

Automatic Membership
When other journalists have asked NGA about governors who want no part in NGA, spokesmen have responded by essentially saying governors cannot choose to leave. When Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) pulled out of NGA in 2012, telling the Bangor Daily News , “I get no value out of those meetings. They are too politically correct and everybody is lovey-dovey and no decisions are ever made,” NGA’s communications director responded by saying all governors are NGA members even if they don’t pay dues.

She declined to say which states pay dues and why the dues vary.

This article is part one of two. Next: How NGA coordinated Common Core and NGA’s progressive roots.

Image by Office of Governor Patrick .

This column was written April 23, 2013. Joy Pullmann (jpullmann@heartland.org) is a research fellow of The Heartland Institute and managing editor of School Reform News, a national monthly publication. In that capacity, she has interviewed and produced podcasts with many of the leading figures in school reform. She previously was the assistant editor for American Magazine at the American Enterprise Institute.

She is also the 2013 recipient of a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education standards.

Ms. Pullmann has been published by the New York Times, Washington Examiner, The Weekly Standard, Washington Times, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Salt Lake Tribune, Ricochet.com, National Review Online, Real Clear Policy, and various other U.S. newspapers and outlets. Pullmann has written a series of Research &Commentary reports on the Parent Trigger, a new school reform idea sweeping the country, and is coauthor with Joseph L. Bast of “Design Guidelines for Parent Triggers” (Heartland Institute, 2012).

She has taught middle and high school students history, literature, and debate, and wrote high school public speaking curriculum. She has traveled nationwide to speak at prominent venues including CPAC, the National Right to Life Convention, and statewide education conferences. She has been a guest on numerous talk shows, including Fox & Friends and the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal.

Public School Funding SOS LOL

By Priya Abraham

The message—really an SOS—about public school funding came from rural Tioga County, but it’s one most Pennsylvanians have grown used to hearing.

“We are in a much, much more difficult situation than we were five or six years ago,” a teacher wrote to the Commonwealth Foundation. “We have had to cut staff, programs and even close schools in our district just to stay afloat.  We have never been able to offer many extras in our curriculum due to the size of our school and minimal tax base, but now we are down to the bare essentials.”

It’s a story playing out for teachers, parents, and students across the state: slashed staff and scaled back arts and language programs. Why? The popular myth advanced by teachers unions is that Gov. Tom Corbett cut $1 billion from public education funding three years ago.

The truth is far less dramatic—and a lot more sobering.

At the governor’s recent state budget address, the spotlight again swung to education spending. The governor has proposed $10.1 billion for public schools, slightly higher than last year, which was then a record high. So what’s all the fuss about cuts?

School districts are indeed feeling real financial stress, but this stems from a lapse of temporary federal stimulus money—not from a governor’s stinginess.

Initially, the stimulus dollars that came to Pennsylvania went to other types of government spending, like welfare. But the influx in funds allowed then-Governor Ed Rendell to spend more on public education.

However, the stimulus was only a temporary boost.  School districts, lawmakers, administrators—everyone in charge knew the money would disappear.  But rather than planning for when funding would reset, many school districts added staff and programs they couldn’t sustain.

The victims are now the students and teachers who are wondering what hit them.

While many educators are reeling, it’s important to look at the real status of education funding in Pennsylvania. Adjusted for inflation, average funding per student—made up of local, state, and federal money—has been around $14,000 since 2008.

Of that money, 58 percent goes to instruction, while 12 percent goes to construction and debt, which is one of the fastest-growing spending categories. In fact, between 1995 and 2012, spending on instruction increased 81 percent, while spending on construction and debt ballooned a whopping 171 percent.

At the same time public school officials complained of dwindling resources, they amassed $3.5 billion in reserve funds across the state’s 500 school districts and charter schools—increasing $300 million in the last year alone.

In addition, the disconnect between public school enrollment and staffing has been worsening. Teachers and staff have certainly seen layoffs in the last three years. But since 2000, schools have added 17,000 staff while the number of students actually fell by 60,000.

Over 15 years, administrators and other professional staff grew 40 percent, and support staff 18 percent, while the number of teachers rose only 14 percent.

In short, public school funding been rising—but it hasn’t always been spent in ways that would best benefit our children. And budgets will be squeezed further by the school employee pension system crisis, which holds nearly $33 billion in debt.

To survive, we must spend more effectively. A good start is reforming the broken student funding formula for school districts, which holds funding steady regardless of enrollment changes. As a consequence, districts with growing student populations often receive too little funding.

Another solution is to allow school districts to pre-pay their future pension obligations using their reserve funds. School boards should also be permitted to opt out of prevailing wage mandates, which artificially inflate their construction costs. And schools must be able to keep their best teachers, regardless of age or experience—a commonsense practice currently prevented by state seniority law.

If we’re to help teachers in Tioga and across Pennsylvania, changing we fund public schools—not just —will be critical.  If not, teachers, students, and taxpayers will be paying far into the future.

Priya Abraham is a senior policy analyst for the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free market think tank.

Visit BillLawrenceDittos.com for Public School Funding SOS LOL
Visit BillLawrenceOnline.com for Public School Funding SOS LOL

 

Firing Teachers, Empowering Parents

To see just how far this nation has fallen consider what happened Feb. 26 at Como Park High School in St. Paul, Minn.

A science experiment set off a fire alarm and the school was evacuated. Fourteen-year-old Kayona Hagan-Tietz was swimming in health class and, unlike her classmates, did not have time to change into dry clothes. She was made to leave the building with just her wet swimsuit and a towel.

It was 5 below zero with a wind chill of 25 below. She stayed wet and near naked in those conditions for 10 minutes, according to the CBS affiliate. Her classmates huddled around her trying to keep her warm. The faculty, like good Germans, feared to throw away the handbook and do the right thing. One eventually did give her a jacket. Finally, permission was obtained for her to sit in a teacher’s car.

Note, after 10 minutes.

How long would you let a near-naked, wet child outside in below zero weather?

To really make you sick go here and read the comments by teachers defending the school’s lack of response.

Parents need the power to fire schools.

Parents need the power to fire teachers.

This nation needs to find its backbone.

We must stop putting people like the Como Park faculty on pedestals and start holding them in contempt

 

Visit BillLawrenceDittos.com for Firing Teachers, Empowering Parents
Visit BillLawrenceOnline.com for Firing Teachers, Empowering Parents

 

 

Common Core Questions

By Joanne Yurchak

Common Core State Standards (recently renamed PA Core Standards) is a costly, untested, educational experiment that was foisted on Pennsylvania’s schools without legislative approval. When full math and language arts implementation began in PA’s public schools in July of 2013, few educators, school administrators, school board members and legislators understood the particulars of this initiative that will fundamentally transform our educational system. Currently, even fewer parents and taxpayers understand the variety of motives for its formulation, its methodologies, its huge unfunded mandates, and its potential harmful effects on Pennsylvania’s educational system and economy.

Listed below are several questions that citizens should pose to their own district’s school board members and school administrators in order to gain a better understanding of the Common Core initiative and parental and student rights with regard to its mandates.

1. There are multiple indications that the federal government will wrest control of our educational system from local school boards and parents via the Common Core initiative.

Question: Is this likely to occur in our school district? If the answer is “No,” can you provide assurances and convincing reasons why this will not happen?

2. Beginning in 2017, the passage of three Keystones — Algebra I, Biology, and Literature – will be a requirement for high school graduation in PA.

Question: What is the estimated cost to our district for the remediation and/or project- based assessments that must be provided to students who are unable to pass these Keystones?

3. Pennsylvania’s regulations describe: (1) an opportunity for students to opt out of the PSSA’s and the Keystones on religious grounds, and (2) the right of a Chief School Administrator to waive the Keystone graduation requirements on a case-by-case basis for “good cause.”

Question: Will our district fully explain the specifics of each of these options to parents?

Question: If the number of students opting out and/or being given waivers is too large in a given school: (1) how will that affect the performance ratings of that school, and (2) how will that school’s compliance with PA’s regulations be evaluated?

4. There are major concerns that the student data collection that is tied to acceptance of federal funding for the Common Core initiative will intrude on students’ privacy rights.

Question: What specific information will be included in a student’s data file? Will data be exclusively academic or will behavioral, familial and/or biometric categories be included?

Question: Will parents be permitted to review what is in their children’s data files? If not, why not? With whom can PA schools legally share information in students’ data files?

5. Over the last several decades, educrats have devised educational experiments such as “Outcome Based Education,” the “New Math,” and the vastly unpopular “No Child Left Behind,” in which our nation’s students have been used as guinea pigs. All of these experiments have proven to be abject failures in improving educational outcomes and each has disrupted learning in a multitude of ways at great expense to the taxpayer.

Question: In light of the failures of the aforementioned experiments, why should we believe the “experts” when they say that Common Core, often described as “No Child Left Behind on Steroids,” will improve the educational performance and learning outcomes of our students?

Citizens must be persistent in obtaining answers from their school districts and must remember that an unasked question won’t be answered. A fully informed public is essential to impede governmental overreach into our educational process and also to understand the toxic consequences of Common Core. The well-being of our most precious possession – our children – is at stake!

For additional information, E-Mail nocommoncoreinpa@yahoo.com.


Editor’s note: Gov. Tom Corbett is on board with Common Core.  Bob Guzzardi, who is challenging him in the May 20 Republican gubernatorial primary is against it.

Colette Moran tweeted the below image of an answer key of her daughter’s Common Core-based third grade work book back in October.

Save Charter Schools

After Barack Obama gave a thousand campaign speeches on Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and the economy, one of his first actions upon taking office as president was to begin gutting a tiny school-choice scholarship program in Washington, D.C. And now newly inaugurated New York mayor Bill de Blasio has, as one of his first agenda items, begun the gutting of the city’s charter schools, which are public schools that operate with some limited measure of independence from the usual education bureaucracies. Like President Obama, Mayor de Blasio is here engaged in plain, naked payback, rewarding the teachers’ unions that funded and manned his campaign by taking hundreds of millions of dollars away from projects they despise. If a private city contractor had bankrolled the mayor’s campaign and been repaid by having him hobble its competition, we’d call it simple corruption. And it is simple corruption, legal though it may be.

Mayor de Blasio intends to redirect money from the city’s charter schools to help pay for expanded pre-kindergarten education, which is to say for a full-employment program for his union supporters. Expanding pre-kindergarten education is a questionable investment: The premier federal pre-kindergarten program, Head Start, has been shown time and time again to provide no lasting results  to its supposed beneficiaries. Robust support for early-childhood education sounds like the sort of thing that should work, but the empirical results are that it does not deliver on its promises.

New York City’s charter schools are consistently flooded with applications from parents desperate to rescue their children from the city’s dysfunctional standard-issue public schools. There are many metrics by which the success of an educational institution can be measured, but if we are guided in some part by the revealed preferences of New York City’s parents, then the evidence is overwhelming that charter schools are a much more attractive choice when the alternative is the product Mayor de Blasio’s union bosses are offering up. Charter-school operators, pointedly seeking to remind the administration that they are, still, operating city public schools, have asked only that their capital and operating funds be proportional to the populations they serve: “A kid is a kid is a kid,” as charter-school executive Eva Moskowitz put it. “We are public charter schools. The operating revenue should be the same. The capital revenue should be the same.”

New York’s charter schools serve a largely minority and low-income population, in a city where the traditional schools barely manage to retain half of the young black men who enter the ninth grade to graduation four years later. Educating the children of New York City entails some serious challenges, and the charter schools have not achieved what anybody would call dramatic success. They simply provide a superior alternative to traditional schools for many families. Results need not be spectacular to be meaningful.

As a report from the Brookings Institution put it:

Two recent rigorous evaluations have found that NYC charter schools are, on average, doing a substantially better job for students than the regular public schools with which they directly compete. For example, student gains in math in charter schools compared to traditional public schools are equivalent to roughly five additional months of schooling in a single school year. Likewise, students attending the small high schools of choice opened by the Bloomberg administration have high school graduation rates that are about 10 percentage points greater than students who wanted to attend these same schools but lost a lottery for admission.
Judging by the application rates, New York City parents love charter schools. The evidence suggests they do a meaningfully if not radically better job than their traditional counterparts. They are seeking only the same resources to which they would be entitled if they were not charter schools, meaning they place no special burden on taxpayers. The only faction opposed to them is the teachers’ unions, which seek to legally eliminate all competition and all alternatives.

Charter schools are a tiny crack in the Berlin Wall of the government-school monopoly, far short of the liberalized approach to education we would prefer. But they are a significant improvement that comes at very little cost, and Mayor de Blasio’s attack on them elevates the interests of his political cronies over those of the city’s children. It is low and it is shameful, and the Panel for Education Policy, which has the opportunity to stop this abuse in March, should see to it that the mayor’s proposal does not stand.

Visit National Review Online for similar stories

Save Charter Schools

Rapist Middle School Teacher Confronted

This dramatic video in which a 28-year-old woman calls and confronts the female teacher who sexually molested while in middle school was placed on YouTube Jan. 17 and has gone viral.

The teacher had been promoted to an assistant principal at Alhambra High School in California. She resigned after being confronted about the allegations made in the video.

The abuse started when the caller was 12. The caller tells the woman she ruined her life.

One kinds of wonders what garbage the teacher was feeding the children she wasn’t molesting about love and sex and boys and religion and politics.

Institutions are necessary but if anything has been learned over the last three decades is that the moment they become beyond reproach is the moment they become magnets for predators.

People must insist on transparency with regard to all institutions and parents must demand in the loudest terms the power to terminate relations with schools and teachers with whom they feel the least bit uncomfortable without incurring cost or hardship.

Vouchers are the perfect solution to the latter.

Rapist Middle School Teacher Confronted

Rapist Middle School Teacher Confronted

 

Education Bills Jan 2014 Before Pa Senate

The Pennsylvania House, last week, sent several education bills to the Senate according to State Rep. Jim Cox (R-129) Education Bills Jan 2014 Before Pa Senate

House Bill 1411, also known as SchoolWATCH, would direct the Pennsylvania Department of Education to create a searchable online database detailing the revenues and expenditures of traditional, charter and cyber school districts across the Commonwealth. The bill follows the model of PennWATCH, which was created to allow Pennsylvania residents to see how tax dollars are being used by state agencies.

House Bill 1741 would require school boards to provide at least 48 hours of public notice prior to voting upon any proposed collective bargaining agreement or employment contract.

House Bill 1738 would create a commission to study basic education funding and develop a formula that takes into account each school district’s market value/personal income aid ratio, equalized millage rate, geographic price differences, enrollment levels, local support and other factors.

House Bill 1816 would allow Pennsylvania’s teachers, guidance counselors and other school administrators to receive necessary continuing education credits if they visit certain manufacturing facilities. These visits would take educators to manufacturers for in-person tours and orientation programs in manufacturing facilities with the goal of ensuring students are more familiar with available opportunities in the modern high-tech manufacturing industry.

House Bill 1878 would create the Pennsylvania Workforce Investment Strategy (Pa WInS) program, which would offer tax credits to businesses to organize and collaborate with each other to address common personnel needs and training shortfalls and then develop employee training programs and implement them with readily-available pre-existing infrastructure.

Education Bills Jan 2014 Before Pa Senate

 

HB 1411 Makes School Funding More Transparent

The Pennsylvania House is  scheduled to vote this week on  House Bill 1411   that would create the SchoolWATCH (Public School Web Accountability and Transparency) Act, according to state Rep. Jim Cox (R-129) HB 1411 Makes School Funding More Transparent

HB 1411 would require the posting of searchable financial information on the web. Does this include teacher salaries? This is what the bill says: The advisory committee may consider including ON THE INTERNET DATABASE INDIVIDUAL salary information for employees who are not administrative staff.

“May consider” is pretty fudgy.

Cox says that the legislation is similar in concept to the bill that created  PennWATCH, which enhanced the accountability of state government by posting state spending, budget and performance information online.

 HB 1411 Makes School Funding More Transparent

New Special Ed Funding Formula Recommended

The Special Education Funding Commission, created by Act 3 of 2013, released its findings after a series of seven public hearings held this summer and fall, says State Rep. Jim Cox (R-129). New Special Ed Funding Formula Recommended

The commission recommends a new funding formula for special education based on three levels of student needs. The formula would be based on factors including small and rural school districts, income/market value and equalized millage rate. Nearly 270,000 children – one out of every seven students – receive special education services in the state’s public schools. Current state funding for special education is slightly less than $1 billion per year, and the “census formula” currently in use pays districts on calculations based on 15 percent of students having mild disabilities and 1 percent having severe disabilities. Since 2008-09, Pennsylvania has not increased special education funding, which effectively ended the use of the formula.

In a similar effort to address basic education funding inequities, the House Education Committee this week approved a bill to create a Basic Education Funding Commission. The proposed group, made up of representatives from the Department of Education, Office of the Budget and the four legislative caucuses, would be tasked with conducting hearings and reviewing the current funding formula and working to create a new model to address current challenges. The commission’s basic education funding recommendation would determine only the distribution of any increase in funding.

 

New Special Ed Funding Formula Recommended

HB 1725 Would Establish CareerBound

HB 1725 Would Establish CareerBoundBills to aid in the cooperation between business and education sectors to help build and improve student skills moved through state House committees last week and are now before the full House says State Rep. Jim Cox (R-129)

House Bill 1725 would establish the CareerBound program, which would join local workforce investment boards, businesses and schools in an effort to develop innovative school-to-work pilot programs. The seven pilot CareerBound programs would be eligible to compete for more than $10 million in funding from a one-time issuance of tax credits for contributing businesses.

House Bill 1878 would create the Pennsylvania Workforce Investment Strategy, or “PA WInS,” which would offer a tax credit as an incentive to businesses to organize and collaborate with each other to address similar personnel and training issues. This would be coordinated through the Department of Labor and Industry.

HB 1725 Would Establish CareerBound