Education: State of Emergency- Mobilize!

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Free Fall- Educational opportunities in California

Summary from the new report of UCLA Accord Center:
California Educational Opportunity Report.

Core Findings from our Surveys and Interviews:

• California high schools are providing less time and attention and fewer quality programs. As a consequence, student

engagement, achievement, and progress to graduation and college are suffering;

• School reform has all but sputtered to a halt due to staff cutbacks and the elimination of time for professional development;

• Even as high schools across the state are impacted by declining budgets, inequality is growing across and within schools;

• California’s high schools face growing demands from families experiencing economic crisis; these demands point to the interrelationship

of California’s education and social welfare budgets.

Rogers, J., Bertrand, M., Freelon, R., Fanelli, S. (2011). Free Fall: Educational Opportunities in 2011.

Los Angeles: UCLA IDEA, UC /ACCORD.

To access this report online, please visit http://www.edopp.org

Save Our Schools March

by Lisa Schiff
 

Exon Mobil, $156 million. Bank of America, $1.9 billion. General Electric, $4.1 billion. Chevron, $19 million. These highly profitable companies, and many others like them, received these extraordinarily large amounts of money back as tax refunds. Yes that’s right, Republican lawmakers at the state and federal levels are trying to convince the American public that we need to decimate critical services like Medicare and public education so that we can hand over our money to these companies.

In the most intense ideological battle since Newt Gingrich was in office, Republicans at state and federal levels are holding fast to plans to extend tax breaks and implement drastic cuts to a variety of social services, including education. In California, the health care community, K-12 public schools and public institutions of higher education are steeling themselves for unknown levels of losses.

But for public school supporters the challenge is doubly difficult. Not only do we need to fight more forcefully than ever for the minimal, insufficient funding that schools currently receive, we must also fight for a totally revamped approach to education. Education activists across the nation have made the painful realization that President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are no friends to the project of providing a quality education to all children. If anything, the programs and proposals of this administration have set schools back even further than under the Bush regime. Certainly they have only reinforced the approaches established by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and their destructiveness has been extended through the outrageous Race To The Top (RTTT) competition, that attempts to pass for policy.

We have no choice but to face facts--public education is under attack from all sectors of elected leadership, regardless of party. There is no one now to turn to other than ourselves, which may in fact be the best position to be in.

Asking to be invited to the conversation about improving our schools for all kids has only resulted in a controlled pacification of parents, a grinding down of educators, and more sophisticated means of covering up where are schools are failing our students.

Parents and educators across the country now understand that asking for permission is just not getting us where we need to go. With that new understanding has come new types of action, including a tremendous effort this summer for the Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action in Washington D.C. July 28-July 31, 2011.

The Save Our Schools March has endorsers that include parents and educator from across the country who have been deeply involved in challenging test-driven, corporatization of our schools and who are committed to seeing rigorous, engaging, well-rounded, education provided to all children. The guiding principles of the event capture the goals and dreams so many of us have been arguing for these past years:

“For the future of our children, we demand:

Equitable funding for all public school communities

• Equitable funding across all public schools and school systems

• Full public funding of family and community support services

• Full funding for 21st century school and neighborhood libraries

• End to economically and racially re-segregated schools

End high stakes testing used for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluation

• Use multiple and varied assessments to evaluate students, teachers, and schools

• End pay per test performance for teachers and administrators

• End to public school closures based upon test performance

Teacher, family and community leadership in forming public education policies

• Educator and civic community leadership in drafting new ESEA legislation

• Federal support for local school programs free of punitive and competitive funding

• End political and corporate control of curriculum, instruction and assessment decisions for teachers and administrators

Curriculum developed for and by local school communities

• Support teacher and student access to a wide-range of instructional programs and technologies

• Well-rounded education that develops every student’s intellectual, creative, and physical potential

• Opportunities for multicultural/multilingual curriculum for all students

• Small class sizes that foster caring, democratic learning communities”

This may be the moment we’ve been working towards, when enough of us, from enough communities throughout the country have reached the same level of frustration, fueled by the knowledge of what is both possible and necessary for the education of our kids. We’re the only ones we can count on to make it happen.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA.

reprinted with permission from Beyond the Chron

How Public School Budget Cuts Herald the End of Equality in the U.S.

How Public School Budget Cuts Herald the End of Equality in the United States

By Mark Naison

Throughout the United States, the nation’s public school system is being savaged by budget cuts that will make a mockery of federal legislation designed to reduce the achievement gap between children in low-income and high-income districts. 

In Detroit, the school district has been told by the state to close half of its schools to close a $347 million deficit, leading to high school classes that could contain as many as sixty students.  Providence, RI just handed out pink slips to its nearly 2,000 teachers to reduce its deficit (although, in an astonishing feat of creative accounting, most—but not all—of the teachers are expected to be rehired); and Austin, TX may do the same in a response to a ten percent reduction in state funding.  And in thousands of school districts throughout the country, teachers are being fired, sports and arts programs are being shut down, AP classes are being cancelled, and class size is going through the roof while state and local governments radically cut education funding to balance their budgets.

Make no mistake about it, these budget cuts will have a disproportionate effect in the poorest school districts, where parents depend on schools to impart skills which, because of educational background or language issues, they often lack.  You cut arts and science programs in a upper-middle-class school district, parents will compensate by finding private tutors or funding additional classes through the PTA.  In poor neighborhoods, once such programs are gone, they are gone for good.   You can squeeze the teachers in poor districts all you want to produce magical results on test days; as opportunities to give students individual attention and special training in arts and science disappear, the test score gap will grow wider, the dropout rate will increase, and college admission from such districts will plummet.

What makes this a bitter pill to swallow that the dream these budget cuts will destroy was one nurtured by a Republican president, George W. Bush.  Never mind that the dream was based on false data from the Houston school district; never mind that it was used by politicians, business leaders and the media to divert attention from confronting sources of inequality outside the school system.  It is still held that every child in America has the right to a great education and an opportunity to attend college if they take advantage of that opportunity.

Now that very dream is in tatters, not just because of the decision elected officials made to cut public school budgets, but because of the decision they didn’t make:  to TAX THE RICH.  Make no mistake about it, in every state where these budget cuts are being made the vast majority could have been avoided if taxes were raised on the wealthiest five percent of the population, a group which controls nearly 40 percent of national income!  Yet in state after state throughout this country, as well as in Congress, such taxes were declared “off limits” by politicians of both parties.

Let us be very blunt about the consequences of this choice.  In the midst of the worst economic crisis in modern U.S. history, our political leadership has decided to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice while tragically weakening the one avenue our society has identified for reducing inequality in the nation—our public schools.

Not only is it profoundly immoral to impose hardship on  the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society, targeting schools for such huge cuts does violence to the very ideal of equality of opportunity which once used to unite liberals and conservatives.

If the only schools that can function well are in communities where parents have the resources to compensate for the budget cuts, then we are basically creating a social order where children will remain in the social position of their parents into the next generation, and where poor and working-class children are doomed by inferior training to be a servant class for the rich, if they are lucky enough to find jobs at all.

I don’t know about you, but this sounds more like the ancien régime in France or pre-revolutionary Russia than the country which Abraham Lincoln once praised “for lifting artificial burdens off the shoulders of men.”

The American Dream is dying before our eyes.

Will we have the courage to rescue it?

Republished with permission from the History News Network.

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham's Urban Studies Program. He is the author of three books and over 100 articles on African-American History, urban history, and the history of sports. His most recent book, White Boy: A Memoir, was published in the spring of 2002

California Budget crisis grows

States’ Budget Woes Go Deep Below the Surface

New Brookings report shows seeds of deficit troubles were planted years ago, and problems may be larger than they appear

Washington, D.C. — As state governors and lawmakers begin work on their daunting budget challenges in the aftermath of the Great Recession, new research from the Brookings Institution’s Mountain West project and the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University shows this situation actually has been building for several years, and may be worse that it first appears.

The new paper by the two research organizations, Structurally Unbalanced: Cyclical and Structural Deficits in California and the Intermountain West, looks at four states—Arizona, California, Colorado, and Nevada—and shows how these problems may go far beyond shorter- term revenue declines associated with the economic slowdown. Solving states’ budget challenges may be more difficult than is generally thought as they can involve massive, entrenched imbalances than will not disappear with economic recovery.

These four states have been among the hardest-hit by the Recession, and several are contending with deep, chronic imbalances that should serve as a caution to other states.

“The budgetary condition of many states is, if anything, worse than is recognized,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow and the policy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. “The gravity of states’ short-term and especially longer-term deficits underscores that this is a time when state policymakers must break their bad habits and turn to more responsible budget planning practices that looks in a balanced way at the long-term fit of revenues to spending.”

Matthew Murray, the report’s lead author and a professor of economics at the University of Tennessee notes, “The ongoing deficit problems confronting these states have compelled the states to resort to an unattractive mix of tax increases, spending cuts and one-time fixes to bring budgets into alignment.

How to fix education and schools

How to "fix things fast" in education: Support libraries and librarians
Sent to TIME Magazine, Dec 14, 2010

TIME's report that the US "lags behind" countries like Finland and South Korea" 
on the PISA reading test ("In school, China on the rise," Dec 20), and TIME's 
positive evaluation of the film Waiting for Superman (The Best Movies of 2010, 
Dec. 20), leads to the conclusion that there is something seriously wrong with 
American education and that "we have to fix things fast." A closer look at the 
data shows that what is wrong is our unacceptably high rate of child poverty.

Poverty had a huge impact on American PISA reading test scores. American 
students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch 
averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any of the 34 member countries 
of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).  Those in 
schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch 
averaged 527. Among the OECD countries, only Korea and Finland did better.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in 
poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries. 

Our overall scores are less impressive because we have one of the highest rates 
of child poverty among all the countries tested. According to a 2005 UNICEF 
report, the US has a child poverty rate of over 21.9%; in contrast, the rate in 
high-scoring Finland is only 2.8%. 



Among other things, high poverty means less access to books at school, at home 
and in the community. Less access to books means less reading, and less reading 
means lower performance on tests such as the PISA.  


What all this means is that our first priority should be to protect children 
against the effects of poverty, including making sure all children have access 
to reading material. And the obvious way to do this is to support school and 
public libraries and school librarians. 


The PISA report confirms this: Reading fiction for enjoyment and on-line reading 
were associated with higher PISA reading scores across all countries tested.

Stephen Krashen