Good News For October

In a battle of hearts and minds between the lobbyists of reformers and the advocates for making young black lives truly matter, the NCAAP just resolved to call for the end of Charter Schools…   The significance being: that the truth is growing daily inside people’s brains that the only reason to have two separate and unequal school systems (one for the affluent and another for the poor), is to segregate.

There is absolutely and unequivocally no other reason.

More here……

“This Definition, For Example, No Longer Requires States To Use ESEA Standardized Test Scores To Measure Student Growth In Any Grade Or Subject, And Does Not Require The Use Of Definitions Of Terms Used For Race To The Top.”

Final Rules on Teacher Preparation — page 91-92;  US Department of Education.

Fed’s New Rules Will Force Revisit To SB 51: Sokola’s Death Star

As the Rogue Ones all gather their forces to defeat the dark monstrosity being built on the edge of their star system, they got a much needed assist from the Feds coming to their rescue.

It was anticipated that teacher colleges would need to provide proof of their graduates’ classroom skills in helping advance student learning, under proposed rules issued Nov. 25 by the U.S. Department of Education…

Programs that failed to do so could eventually be blocked from offering financial aid to would-be K-12 teachers in the form of federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education, or TEACH, grants, according to the long-delayed proposal.  The rules are the Obama administration’s attempt to toughen what have long been considered ineffectual requirements left over from “No Child Left Behind”, for teacher-preparation programs in Title II of the Higher Education Act…

The U.S. Department of Education yesterday released its long-awaited final rules on teacher preparation.

Under the rules, states will be required each year to rate all of its traditional, alternative and distance prep programs as either effective, at-risk, or low-performing….

The annual ratings will be based on several metrics, such as a) the number of graduates who get jobs in high-needs schools, b) how long these graduates stay in the teaching profession, and c) how effective they are as teachers, judging from classroom observations as well as their students’ academic performance...

This is in direct opposition to the thrust of Dave Sokola’s educational policies which have had the direct consequence of destroying public education, thereby elevating and illuminating Charter Schools as the more desirable.  His policies preclude running off teachers, they preclude closing schools, and they preclude holding public schools to low ratings while providing Charter Schools with high ones… 

As of today, the thrust of all those policies now take us in the wrong direction to get Title I funding.

• Instead of running teachers out of high needs schools, we need to get them to stay in high needs schools.
• Instead of helping the state achieve it’s educational goals, TFA (Teachers For America) now hinders the state from achieving its goals.
• Instead of making life hell on teachers in high needs schools, the state needs to all it can to maintain, grow, and prosper all those teachers in high needs schools. Every teacher in a high needs school  who quits, now endangers the income the state receives from the Federal Government. Free money that would need to be made up, if it were ever lost.

In a major change from the proposed rules—which were subject to heavy criticism from the field—student learning will not have to be based on test scores or the proxy of teacher evaluations based on student test gains; rather, states will have the flexibility to use other measures deemed “relevant to student outcomes” and determine how various components of their systems are weighted…

 

This is the exact passage which will require the tweaking of SB51 or now it would just be reworking Title 14, Chapter 12…Subchapter VIII – Educator Preparation Programs.…

e) Educator preparation programs shall collaborate with the Department to collect and report data on the performance and effectiveness of program graduates. At a minimum, such data shall measure performance and effectiveness of program graduates by student achievement. The effectiveness of each graduate shall be reported for a period of 5 years following graduation for each graduate who is employed as an educator in the State. Data shall be reported on an annual basis. The Department shall make such data available to the public.

(f) The Department shall promulgate rules and regulations governing educator preparation programs pursuant to this subchapter in collaboration with Delaware educators.

And here is the proper tweaking necessary to put Delaware’s Empire of Education, back under Inter-Galactic Law….. 🙂

e) Educator preparation programs shall collaborate with the Department to collect and report data on the performance and effectiveness of program graduates. At a minimum, s Such data measures performance and the effectiveness of educator preparation program graduates by student achievement. The effectiveness of each graduate shall be reported for a period of 5 years following graduation for each graduate who is employed as an educator in the State. Data shall be reported on an annual basis. The Department shall make such data available to the public. State mandated student test scores which have been proven to be ineffective determiners of teacher effectiveness, cannot be part of the evaluation process.

(f) The Department with the approval of the General Assembly, shall promulgate rules and regulations governing educator preparation programs pursuant to this subchapter in collaboration with Delaware educators.

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I look forward to these being put on the table in the first days of the new legislature…

For the timeline is thus… Under the rules, states must establish their reporting systems in the 2016-2017 school year, and can use the following school year to test out their systems. All reporting systems must be in effect by 2018-2019 school year.

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In another change from the draft rules, states will no longer be required to ensure that programs only accept top-performing students, as long as all students are held to a high bar by the program’s end. The aim here is to ensure that prep programs can recruit diverse candidates into the teaching profession.

Requiring another change in Sokola’s SB51 which is now

Title 14  Chapter 12…

Subchapter VIII.  Education Preparation Programs

• (b) Each educator preparation program approved by the Department shall establish rigorous entry requirements as prerequisites for admission into the program. At a minimum, each program shall require applicants to:

  (1) Have a grade point average of at least a 3.0 on a 4.0 scale or a grade point average in the top fiftieth percentile for coursework completed during the most recent 2 years of the applicant’s general education, whether secondary or post-secondary; or

  (2) (1) Demonstrate mastery of general knowledge, including the ability to read, write, and compute, by achieving a minimum score on a standardized test normed to the general college-bound population, such as Praxis, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), or American College Test (ACT), as approved by the Department.

  Each educator preparation program may waive these admissions requirements for up to 10 20%of the students admitted. Programs shall implement strategies to ensure that students admitted under such a waiver receive assistance to demonstrate competencies to successfully meet requirements for program completion.

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  Never underestimate the power …of the Force…..

 

Newark Charter School Puts Self Preservation of Administrator Over Right And Wrong.

Parents. Students.

Get back!… Opt out of taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment until that teacher is reinstated… If not reinstated.. don’t take the test…

A) The test is stupid.  (literally)

B) The test has no bearing on your abilities.  Schools look at GPA’s.

C) The test is one thing you control that Meece doesn’t… You choose not to take the test, he is the laughing stock of the entire Charter Network..

D)  The peace of mind that comes after you’ve opted out is incredible, probably one of the nicest feelings you will ever feel…  it’s like being on a white sandy beach, with aqua waves periodically pounding the surf, a cold drink in your hand, a breeze across your well oiled skin, feeling neither too hot or too cold… just right…  Oh, and did I mention the palm trees over you to shade you from the excessive sun?  This vision is almost as great as the feeling you get when opting out of the Smarter Balanced….. It’s literally amazing…

E)  If you Opt Out and change your mind (like when they reinstate your teacher whom who love and adore and who will do more than Meece ever could to help you succeed in college) they are so desperate to have you take the test, they will probably give you bonuses of over thousands of dollars each (j/k but they will certainly let you in with complete forgiveness)…

Opt out of the test this week, and see, see just how much power you have in your hands … Opt out of the Smarter Balanced…

The Charter School Movement Has Failed. Time To Bury It.

Remember the bally-hoo over Obamacare?  It has performed better than have Charter Schools.

Remember the bru-ha-ha twixted up over Benghazi?  Even that has weathered better than have Charter Schools…

Remember the IRS scandals over investigating the Tea Party?  Those were nothing compared to the malfeasance being reported daily in Charter Schools across America.

Remember the Maine?  No, …no one was alive then who is alive today….

But despite the last exception, Charter Schools have performed worse than anything in American History… Even the futures on American Indians performed better across time.

A quick review of the record shows that Charter Schools underperform their public counterparts.  Charters under-educate their students.  Teachers have better knowledge and credentials at public schools.  Cost per student is cheaper at public schools.

The only valid reason for continuing Charter Schools is to allow whites to go to school where Blacks can’t get in.

Other than that, there is no viable reason for maintaining a failing program that sucks valuable resources away from the viable solution solving the problem….

It is time to end Charters… period….   “White purity” is not a good enough reason to keep them going…..

They Were Right Back Then; They Are Wrong Now. The Reality Of What They Warned Us Against, Is Taking Place Right Before Our Very Eyes…….

Title 14:*509 The 509 Blues…..

Charter schools shall be eligible for public funds under procedures established by this section….

The Department of Education (not the district) shall annually calculate the local cost per student expended by each school district for each type of student for the year immediately preceding based on the formula set forth in subsection (e) of this section…

subsection (e)

Local cost per student as used in this section shall be calculated as follows:

Total Local Operating Expenditure in Preceding Fiscal Year’s Total Division I Units, minus Spec School Units Number of Pupils per Unit

Where:

Total Local Operating Sum of all expenditures (Expenditure in from local sources) minus (Preceding FY local expenditures for tuition) minus (local expenditures for debt service) minus (local expenditures for Minor Capital Improvement) minus (local cafeteria expenditures) minus (any other local expenditures deemed by the Secretary of Education to be inappropriate for inclusion for the purpose of this chapter).

Breaking it down,  the Total Local Operating Cost, is the sum of all a district’s expenditures

minus its expenditures for tuition (meaning students who left the district and took their money with them)… Obviously these could not be counted towards the cost of those students remaining….

minus any expenditures for debt… No one accounts for debt as a cost of doing business.  I don’t care if you are a restaurant, a movie theater, or Chemoirs.  Debt cost is added after all expenses of doing business have been calculated.  Then with those profits, you pay off debt.   Debt cost can have nothing to do with per student cost otherwise taking on debt suddenly makes it look like you are spending wildly on each student.

minus Minor Capital Improvements … Fixing a roof or installing a new air conditioner cannot be directly related to the cost per student.  Imagine if it were, how student costs would rapidly fluctuate yearly and between districts or even in the same fiscal year… Older districts would be stuck with unbearably high costs, newer districts enjoying much lower.

minus Local Cafeteria expenditures….

minus any other expenditure deemed by the Secretary to be inappropriate for inclusion…

So if any wrongdoing has occurred, it is directly attributable to the Secretary of Education…   He is in charge of determining each district’s cost per student, and IF there are any other expenditures which need excluded from the cost per student, he makes the decision…

So are we going to lynch Mark Murphy now?  You’re a little late…

Now that you too have seen the law, this statement Earl Jaques included in his mysterious email which tags a line of Sokola’s, is odd.

“The Christina District increased that line from under $700 thousand to about $9.2 million since 2011, and has not asked the Secretary for approval of the increased exemptions. “ —Sokola

Seeing how only the Secretary can make any adjustment to the formula and how only the Secretary can determine the cost per student, it is difficult to think Dave Sokola knows what he is talking about….  How could they increase that line when only the Secretary handles “that line”?

Rather odd from someone who wrote the legislation.

If Christina were holding back money, it would be at the behest of a former Secretary of Education’s decision, not the Christina School Board themselves…

So any attempt to blame Christina District is not going anywhere.  They are blameless. Don’t take my word for it. Read Title 14: *(509)…. Perhaps Sokola and Meece should take time to commiserate together and spend their time singing the …. “509 Blues”…. (in Title 14, that is)…

Is Dave Sokola Delaware’s Darrell Issa?

Darrell Issa is known for not giving a damn about truth, his constituents, or his honor. He is responsible for 40’s of millions spent on witch hunts to find dirt on Hillary Clinton.  (How is that working out for you, bro?)  He is the richest elected official in Washington, all of his money from Viper Car Alarm…. (DE, do, DE, do, whooop, whooop,).. As a kid, he was also arrested for car theft….

Dave Sokola, whose district contains some of the best of Christina School District’s public schools has been gutting those schools to finance Newark Charter School.  This charter school  was “that same one” which was forced to abandon its “white only” admissions policy and use a fixed lottery instead. Still, people they don’t like, don’t get in the lottery.

Hence the correlation mentioned in the title… One sells out the ethics of our national government; the other sells out our ethics of our little children…

Recently a charter heist of $3 million dollars concocted in the middle of the night, was sprung on Christina.  Legislative authorities were alerted in time to stop it, thank goodness. But Dave Sokola hotly defended the stealing of the money in a letter to a Charter School constituent….

One can dance around whether Sokola is culpable or not.  He was not involved in the decision, that was the Delaware Department of Education and if he’d remained silent, no one would have known.  However his outburst was published and is now public knowledge.

Christina educates 15,000 students every day.  Newark Charter only 2000.  But Sokola wanted to take $3 million away from those 15,000 and give it to only those 2000, who btw, are from wealthy parents, almost all white.  This same school was caught this summer fudging its books, forcing the collection of “dues” from parents for field trips, and then charging the state for those same field trips and pocketing the money…

Yep, those are Dave Sokola’s friends.   Are you now seeing the connection?  Both Issa and Sokola are about the fleecing… Taking from the public and putting into the hands of the elite, their “friends”….

Good news is that he is up for election against a good candidate. We can bump him out and have a public school champion working hard to keep Greater Newark’s money in our schools instead of always trying to find another owner for it…….

Charter Harm Broken Down Statewide

Out of Delaware’s total 136,027 students, 11,865 go to charter schools, 124,162 continue in public education… (8.72%) (btw Red Clay’s charters not included since Red Clay is the authorizer)

That little 9% siphons a money better spent in public schools. Costs in 2016.

ACADEMIA ANTONIA ALONSO 1,232 Payments $3,524,608.63

ACADEMY OF DOVER CHARTER SCHL 1,374 Payments $3,628,701.16

CAMPUS COMMUNITY SCHOOL 2,425 Payments $4,558,838.47

DE COLLEGE PREPARATORY ACADEMY 1,364 Payments $2,351,143.15

DELAWARE DESIGN-LAB HS 1,282 Payments $2,410,480.42

EARLY COLLEGE HIGH SCHOOL 1,144 Payments $2,757,920.69

EAST SIDE CHARTER SCHOOL 3,060 Payments $7,426,823.05

FAMILY FOUNDATIONS ACADEMY 2,613 Payments $8,846,337.76

FIRST STATE MONTESSORI ACADEMY 1,388 Payments $3,794,639.93

FREIRE CHARTER SCHOOL 1,354 Payments $2,958,912.10

GATEWAY LAB SCHOOL 1,749 Payments $4,556,773.53

GREAT OAKS CHARTER SCHOOL 751 Payments $3,229,356.48

KUUMBA ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL 1,995 Payments $8,058,005.38

LAS AMERICAS ASPIRA 3,549 Payments $7,931,013.77

MAPLETON CHARTER SCHOOL AT WHI 2 Payments $1,736.86

MAURICE J. MOYER ACADEMY 50 Payments $112,524.40

MOT CHARTER SCHOOL 4,510 Payments $11,355,105.68

NEWARK CHARTER SCHOOL 3,958 Payments $26,599,416.25

ODYSSEY CHARTER 3,161 Payments $13,048,335.82

POSITIVE OUTCOMES CHARTER SCHL 1,746 Payments $3,118,502.54

PRESTIGE ACADEMY 1,427 Payments $3,687,431.41

PROVIDENCE CREEK ACAD CHTR SCH 3,351 Payments $7,414,681.73

REACH ACADEMY FOR GIRLS 37 Payments $233,814.90

SUSSEX ACADEMY OF ARTS SCIENCE 2,336 Payments $6,422,637.21

THE DELAWARE MET 870 Payments $2,100,835.55

THOMAS A EDISON CHARTER SCHOOL 2,790 Payments $9,237,268.52

All told, roughly $149,365,845.39 was spent on non-Red Clay Charters… which taught only 11,865 students. On gross cost, that amounts to $12,588 a student…. Without charters and all else being equal, that same money when spread across the balance of those left in public schools, is a lost benefit of $1202 or rounded down, $1200 loss per student remaining in public schools… (Total benefit to a class of 20 would be $24,000).

So in a future court case by the ACLU over the unconstitutionality of charter schools in Delaware, when asked to prove harm backing their claim, here it is… Charter Schools take $1200 away from each student remaining in public schools…

Now some people think that since money follows a child that those schools with fewer students need less. Unfortunately no. The costs to those schools losing students to charters remain the same. Utility costs don’t change because you have fewer students; teaching costs don’t change because you have fewer students. Maintenance costs don’t change because you have fewer students. In fact, no costs get eliminated because you have fewer students. What does happen is all those fixed costs go up as a percentage of total revenue coming in. So there is less discretionary income available for students… You have to cut things like football, sports, music, arts, and all those things that are more important than books in any school.

Likewise, the charters on a shoe string budget are also running at levels of no frills with none of the above. A whole generation loses big time.

And for what gain? Only one of those schools met proficiency levels… Roughly 2000 students…

WE are going through all this pain of hurting 134,000 students just to hit our goals for 2200.

This is why, Charter Schools need to be eliminated from Delaware. Or with enough political will, they can still be allowed to stay, but only if they are fully funded by line items in the state budget, and public schools return to being fully funded by their localities.

The problem is not so much with the harm Charters do to their own students… It is what they do to everyone else…. And upon surveying the damage done so far, it is past time everyone not hired or associated with the CHARTER SCHOOLS NETWORK, stands up and says… NO MORE……

Time To KILL Delaware’s Charters

That’s a broad brush… but you can’t really pick and choose when you start a debate.. Those delineations with exceptions can come later… There are still possible solutions allowing us to save Charters as a program, and yes, they will cost more… But it’s just money assessed and spent; it’s not the ruin of people’s lives which is the unseen cost of allowing Delaware’s Charter to continue……

Charter School proponents insist they have the freedom and right to tap into the public schools financial stream… In a way they are not unlike those who discovered cheap desert land bordering the Colorado River, bought it for a song, then diverted the river water to irrigate crops where none had ever been before….

In the original small amounts there was nothing wrong with it… There was plenty to be shared. But as more and more start tapping the mighty Colorado, it becomes less mighty.. in fact, it dries up hundreds of miles before reaching it’s outlet, denying all those downstream the water they once had…

This is what Charters do to public schools. Their only rational for it is this: we know those in power and so they let us do it…

Charter schools do not teach better than public schools. They do not perform better than public schools. They seem to be worse than public schools.

No, it is only power and their fleecing of it, which allows them to exist at all. If you were a legislator and got treated royally by rich charter supporters, maybe have a BBQ, some expensive liquor, hobnob with celebrities a little, there would be a good tendency to give back something in return to people who “gave” to you…

Thus Delaware through Dave Sokola, got charter schools. They were almost died out a year ago, because as mentioned above, they don’t work at teaching our children what they need to know. But then, the potential for huge charter firms to enter Delaware, firms which educate for profit, opened new opportunities to get wealthy off the backs of children. Suddenly existing charter supporters, those enriching themselves off the public stream, had large financial backing to be able to corral our legislators as well as the support of a think tank to invent face-saving platitudes about being pro charter. The big firms see the potential to buy out the little and use their river access to flood vast levels of the interior, but also shriveling the river to almost nothing….

So now, not later, is the time to KILL charters.

They have zero redeeming value.

Furthermore they continue Afro-American and Hispanic segregation in public schools. The NAACP’s proposed moratorium, cites increased segregation, high rates of suspensions and expulsions for black students, fiscal mismanagement, and poor oversight in charter schools as reasons to hit pause on the sector’s growth…..

Just as we made fundamental changes to our public educational system to allow charters in the first place (they were illegal originally); we can also make fundamental changes to disallow charters in second place. All it takes is the stroke of a pen…

The sooner that is done, then more financial waters flow through our public schools and since those educate the gross majority of our kids, it is there we can best impact the betterment of our national education…..