California Budget Crisis- Sources of revenue

It is clear that the California budget is in crisis and we can not simply cut our way out of the crisis.  Budget cuts and lay offs make the recession worse.

School funding reveals the nature of crisis.  In the last two years the k-12 budget “solutions” have cut 4.6 billion dollars from the schools. We have larger classes and fewer teachers.  School reform has stopped- except for the politicians hot air.  School funding makes up a total of 30% of the state budget.  Any crisis in the state budget and any cuts in the state budget will make school budgets worse.

California will need to raise taxes to fund the schools and to repair the social safety net.  Anti tax radicals and Republicans  oppose any tax increases.   The state ‘solutions’ of the last three years depended upon receiving federal stimulus money.  The stimulus monies are almost finished and with the Republican winning control  of Congress there will probably not be more funds.

The world wide economic crisis was created by  U.S. finance capital and banking, mostly on Wall Street ,ie. Chase Banks, Bank of America, AIG, and others.   Finance capital produced a $ 2 trillion bailout of the financial industry, the doubling of U.S. unemployment rate and the loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs.  More than 15   million people are out of work.  At the national level almost all of the projected deficit through 2020 will be the result of three factors: the Great recession, the tax cuts of the early 2000s under George W. Bush, and the hundreds of billions of dollars of war spending.

The economic stalemate in California has produced school funding cuts far beyond reasonable levels.  At present,  the state ranks 47^th among all states in its per-pupil spending, spending $2,856 less per pupil than the national average.

  In California we need to spend more state money to improve schools, to develop roads and infrastructure, and to create jobs.  Those who are well educated are more employed and paying taxes while those with less education, those who leave school, are in a prolonged economic crisis.  It is well documented that our schools and our universities are in a finance crisis.  We need to be preparing young people for new jobs and to create new industries.  The success of students in higher education will significantly determine California’s future competitiveness and prosperity.   Improving education, including both k-12 and higher education, makes California more likely to attract investment and the creation of new jobs and new industries.

Why Civil Rights Groups oppose the Obama Education Agenda

Two weeks ago in a dispute over California legislation, Sacramento Bee writers claimed that the defeat of SB 1285     was a defeat for "civil rights" groups.  I questioned, who were these so called "civil rights" groups.  Here is what major civil rights groups are saying about education.

Dear Deborah,

In late July, the nation's leading civil rights organizations issued a withering critique of the Obama administration's education policies. Did you see it? It would be understandable if most people never even heard about it because of the circumstances under which it was released. The statement was issued by the NAACP, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the National Urban League, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the National Coalition for Educating Black Children, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Schott Foundation for Public Education. The press briefing was canceled at the last minute, when the leaders were invited to meet with Secretary Arne Duncan at the very hour they had scheduled their press briefing.

The statement—titled "Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn"—got little media coverage, but its detractors got plenty. Columnist Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post castigated the civil rights groups for daring to challenge President Obama, as did an editorial in The Wall Street Journal titled "Civil rights groups choose the teachers unions over black kids."  A hedge-fund manager associated with the pro-charter group "Democrats for Education Reform" called the civil rights leaders "gutless weasels" and accused them of putting the interests of the teachers' unions over the future of minority children.

Fraud passed off as school reform - Kohn

What Passes for School Reform: "Value-Added" Teacher Evaluation and Other Absurdities - Alfie Kohn 

The less people know about teaching and learning, the more sympathetic they're likely to be to the kind of "school reform" that's all the rage these days. Look, they say, some teachers (and schools) are lousy, aren't they? And we want kids to receive a better education -- including poor kids, who typically get the short end of the stick, right? So let's rock the boat a little! Clean out the dead wood, close down the places that don't work, slap public ratings on these suckers just like restaurants that have to display the results of their health inspections.

On my sunnier days, I manage to look past the ugliness of the L.A. Times's unconscionable public shaming of teachers who haven't "added value" to their students, the sheer stupidity and arrogance of Newsweek's cover story on the topic last spring, the fact that the editorials and columns about education in every major newspaper in the U.S. seem to have been written by the same person, all reflecting an uncritical acceptance of the Bush-Obama-Gates version of school reform.

I try to put it all down to mere ignorance and tamp down darker suspicions about what's going on. If I squeeze my eyes tightly, I can almost see how a reasonable person, someone who doesn't want to widen the real gap between the haves and have-nots (which is what tends to happen when attention is focused on the gap in test scores), might look at what's going on and think that it sounds like common sense.

Area schools await U.S. Aid. Outrage or incompetence?

The morning Bee has a frustrating report by Diane Lambert on B1 which says that  some area school districts are considering using their portion of the schools stimulus funds next year ( not this one) for a variety of  dubious purposes.  This manipulation reduces teachers in the classrooms.

http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/ca/edjobsfund.asp

Lets review.  What got this law passed?   The economic collapse on Wall Street had decimated our schools. We activists convinced Congress that we need teachers in the classrooms.  And, putting teachers back to work would stimulate (grow) the economic recovery.

Now, according to this article several local districts, including Natomas Unified, don’t know how they will spend the money, when they will spend it,  and for what.  This manipulation and profit taking reduces teachers in the classroom –remember we needed them, and  removes the stimulus effect of the appropriation.

I am appalled at the bone headedness of these officials. One result will be there will be no future appropriations for this purpose- that is the local officials are creating a fraud on Congress.  The stimulus package was not a birthday gift to be spent however they chose.   It is not a deposit in their piggy bank. It was an investment with particular goals – more teachers and public stimulus.

Any school board member who votes for these diversions should be voted out of office.   As the President said in his news conference, “this country is really hurting and we don’t have time anymore to play games.” Here are the present allocations;

Testing more while failing at school reform

There are schools that work well, and schools that work poorly.  The schools that work well almost always are in middle class neighborhoods, and the schools that work poorly are in poor neighborhoods.  When these students are brought together in comprehensive high schools- the lower class kids do poorly and the middle class kids do well.

There are skilled teachers, unskilled teachers, and poor teachers. The most recent evidence on Teach for America shows no particular merit in their approaches. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/teach-for-america

Research does not support the use of test scores, including value added testing as a reliable source of evaluation  http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/6276/. (See prior blog on this.) The New York Times has an article today by Sam Dillon that describes the controversy well http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/education/01teacher.html?_r=1&hpw

The essence of the argument around value added testing  as promoted in the Los Angeles Times series is that poor teachers should be eliminated.  One assumption is that individual teachers can change the school trajectory of kids.  While good teachers are important, the Broader, Bolder Approach work demonstrates that  communities need to improve the educational environment, not just hire and fire new teachers. http://www.boldapproach.org/

Crooks, fools, charlatans, carpetbaggers, and school reform

Inexperienced Companies Chase U.S. School Funds

By SAM DILLON

With the Obama administration pouring billions into its nationwide campaign to overhaul failing schools, dozens of companies with little or no experience are portraying themselves as school turnaround experts as they compete for the money.

A husband-and-wife team that has specialized in teaching communication skills but never led a single school overhaul is seeking contracts in Ohio and Virginia. A corporation that has run into trouble with parents or authorities in several states in its charter school management business has now opened a school turnaround subsidiary. Other companies seeking federal money include offshoots of textbook conglomerates and classroom technology vendors.

Many of the new companies seem unprepared for the challenge of making over a public school, yet neither federal nor many state governments are organized to offer effective oversight, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group in Washington. “Many of these companies clearly just smell the money,” Mr. Jennings said.

Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor who has formed his own consulting company, said he was astonished to see so many untested groups peddling school improvement strategies.“This is like the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers and charlatans,” Dr. Crew said.

_Note. Rudy Crew was once the Superintendent in Sacramento.

The Obama administration has dramatically increased federal financing for school turnarounds, to $3.5 billion this year, about 28 times as much as in 2007. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is pushing to overhaul 5,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools in the next few years.