Georgia Governor's Opportunity School District

Georgia's Governor Nathan Deal  proposed creation of an Opportunity School District (OSD) in early 2015. The OSD would authorize the state to control "chronically failing public schools and rescue children languishing in them" according to press releases. In a March 2015 Frequently Asked Questions, the Governor's Office stated this about the structure of the school district:

The OSD is an organizational unit of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (GOSA),established and administered by the superintendent of the Opportunity School District (OSD) for the purpose of providing oversight and operation of failing schools assigned to the OSD.

The Governor shall appoint a superintendent of the OSD, to be confirmed by the Senate. TheOSD superintendent shall be a direct report to the Governor.

These schools subject to potential control by the OSD include many Atlanta Public Schools, DeKalb County Schools (metro Atlanta), Fulton County Schools (metro Atlanta), Bibb County Schools (Macon, GA), Chatham County Schools (Savannah, GA), Dougherty Country Schools (Albany, GA), Muscogee County Schools (Columbus, GA), and Richmond County Schools (Augusta), including several others. In an interactive map, see the potentially impacted schools across the state of Georgia here: http://www.ajc.com/map-ga-schools-failing/  

To read more about the criteria that would trigger inclusion in the OSD, see the FAQs.

Job Opportunities for Progressive (NEW) Charter School In Jackson, MS

Friends and educators of the world, a close friend and founder of the school is calling for resumes and cover letters for teaching positions at Midtown Public Charter School (one of the first charter schools in Mississippi history) in Jackson, Mississippi for August 2015.

In the folder linked below there are three documents:

1. Teacher Position Announcement (Provides Position Details)

2. About Midtown Public (Provides a School Overview )
3. Midtown Public School Design (Provides Insights Into School Building Design)3. Midtown Public School Design (Provides Insights Into School Building Design)

Teaching certification is not required in Mississippi, so take a look and apply if you might be interested in making a big impact with an awesome team!

Here's the link of the file: http://bit.ly/1AG6svW

To get an application, Call Dr. Kristi Hendrix at 601-354-5373.

States with Most K-12 Black Student Graduates

National Center for Education Statistics new study shows that my home state, Georgia, is not among the top states with the most K-12 student graduates who are African-American/Black. Unfortunately, this is no shocker to me, but I do hope for the days where Georgia can proudly make this this. Here are those states that are above the national average of African-American/Black graduates.

National average: 69% graduation rate for African-American/Black students compared to 73% for Hispanic students, 86% for white students, and 88% for Asian students.

In reverse order, according to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

10. South Carolina and Arizona (71%)

9. Vermont and Maine (72%)

8. Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts and Missouri (73%)

7. Iowa, Delaware, Nebraska, West Virginia (74%)

6. Kansas, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia (75%)

5. North Dakota, New Hampshire, Hawaii (76%)

4. Maryland (77%)

3. Arkansas (78%)

2. Montana and Tennessee (79%)

1. Texas (84%)

See 2011-2012 data from Governing.com.

U.S. Department of Education orders districts to fix funding disparities

In an official "Dear Colleague Letter" released this week, the U.S. Department of Education basically instructed school districts to have similar academic course offerings for its students, regardless of race, color, origin, etc. The Letter is issued by the Office of Civil Rights, which enforces Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin, in programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance).

Chronic and widespread racial disparities in access to rigorous courses, academic programs, and extracurricular activities; stable workforces of effective teachers, leaders, and support staff; safe and appropriate school buildings and facilities; and modern technology and high-quality instructional materials further hinder the education of
students of color today. (Page 2).  

 As concrete examples, the letter cites:

But schools serving more students of color are less likely to offer advanced courses and gifted and talented programs than schools serving mostly white populations, and students of color are less likely than their white peers to be enrolled in those courses and programs within schools that have those offerings. For example, almost one in five black high school students attend a high school that does not offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses, a higher proportion than any other racial group. Students with limited-English-proficiency (English language learners) are also underrepresented in AP courses according to data from the 2011-12 school year. In that year, English language learners represented five percent of high school students, but only two percent of the students enrolled in an AP course.11 Similarly, of the high schools serving the most black and Latino students in the 2011-12 school year, only 74 percent offered Algebra II and only 66 percent offered chemistry. Comparable high-level opportunities were provided much more often in schools serving the fewest black and Latino students, where 83 percent offered Algebra II courses and 78 percent offered chemistry. (Page 3.)

On the facilities of schools:

The physical spaces where our children are educated are also important resources that influence the learning and development of all students, yet many of our Nation’s schools have fallen into disrepair. Too often, school districts with higher enrollments of students of color invest thousands of dollars less per student in their facilities than those districts with predominantly white enrollments. (Page 4.)

On teacher pay within the same school district:

. . . [D]isparities may be indicative of broader discriminatory policies or practices that, even if facially neutral, disadvantage students of color. For example, teachers in high schools serving the highest percentage of black and Latino students during the 2011-12 school year were paid on average $1,913 less per year than their colleagues in other schools within the same district that serve the lowest percentage of black and Latino students. (Page 5.)

The Letter also recognizes that snap-shot data may not tell the whole story.

The provision of equal opportunities may require more or less funding depending on the location of the school, the condition of existing facilities, and the particular needs of students such as English language learners and students with disabilities. For example, older facilities generally require more money for annual maintenance than do newer facilities. Similarly, greater annual per-pupil library expenditures for one school may reflect an effort to correct years of underfunding of a library collection. Funding disparities that benefit students of a particular race, color, or national origin may also permissibly occur when districts are attempting to remedy past discrimination. (Page 10.)

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I encourage you to read more to find your own gems.

-e

Judge Profits from Jail Sentences

The School-to-Prison Pipeline is real.  Education policy spaces are full of statistics, anecdotes, narratives, and campaigns to inform and correct for what happens to many, many students and youth, particularly our black and brown babies.

Well, here is a REAL account (so it seems) of a JUDGE that has allegedly been sentencing adolescents and teenagers to JAIL and PROFITING FROM IT.

It's sickening.  Deeply sickening.

Judge to serve 28 years after making $2 million for sending black children to jail

2:15 PM EDT

7/30/2013 by Amir Shaw   http://rollingout.com/criminal-behavior/judge-must-serve-28-years-after-making-2-million-for-sending-children-to-jail/

"Judge Mark A. Ciavarella, 63, serves as an example of why the private prison industry can do more harm than good. Ciavarella worked alongside owners of private juvenile facilities to ensure that the prison remained occupied. The more prisoners equated to more profits for the owners of the prison"

(Read more directly from the article.) 

When you got prosecutors spewing prejudices...

A Texas prosecutor stood before a jury and asked them to make logical connections based on prejudices of what African-Americans and Hispanic people would do with a bag of money.

Have no idea where I was when this story first broke, but I'm reading about it now and it sickens me on sooo many levels.  Usually, I just list the link and ask readers to explore, but because of the gross miscarriage of power that has been entrusted in a prosecutor (presumably a representative of the people to seek justice), here's the text of the story.

I would make my own comments, but Justice Sotomayor has made the points that I feel in a way that is much more thoughtful that I would probably put together.  I've highlighted her comments in purple.

More after the break...

If you received a grant for in-school clinic services, what would YOU use it for?

The assumption for this response is that a grant recipient (from the Johnson Foundation) would be able to create a full service healthcare wing of the middle or high school that would be staffed with at least two nurses each of the 5 school days a week.  Given this assumption, here is the plan for specific healthcare services.

More after the break...

Closing the School-to-Prison Pipeline [Conference]

Blogging from Harvard Law School Advocate 4 Education’s 1^st Conference on the School-to-Prison Pipeline

March 8, 2012

                The purpose of the conference is to generate multi-disciplinary dialogue about the challenges and foster solutions to the school-to-prison pipeline.  There’s a call for people to work on specific areas of the pipeline, but a greater call for people to see how these pieces fit together.  The speakers are both legal and non-legal, non-profits, juvenile justice officials.  The audience includes service-providers, policy advocates, lawyers, teachers, and students.  Most dynamic, the closing session will be a dialogue from each of the panels applied to a vignette in hopes to find creative ways to approach the particular case.

Panel 1: Education—How do educational institutions add to the problem and how can they solve it?

Moderator:  Susan Cole:  HLS Director of Ed Law Clinic of Trauma and Law clinic

Dr. Laura McNeal, Charles Hamilton Houston Institute

• ·         Research projects are underway that look at some of the causes of disparate impact that policies have (like “zero-tolerance”).  Also developing research tools that will quantify unconscious/implicit bias in order to push public policy change.

Alana Greer, Advancement Project

• ·         Work with community groups and national organizations to get their voices heard at the policy table.  See various takes on what the exact issues are.  Works in LA (truancy tickets for walking to class late or criminal record), Philadelphia (transfers to alternative disciplinary schools, zero-tolerance, out-of-school suspensions).  There’s a background principle being applied that students are different than they were and are more violent and need a police state.  One of the goals is getting administrators’ discretion back so that boyscouts stop getting disciplined for having sporks and students with scissors from gift-wrapping stop getting put in alternative schools.

Daniel Losen, UCLA Civil Rights Project, Director of Center for Civil Rights Remedies

• ·         Focus on school discipline problem—the number of children getting kicked out of school for discipline issues.  For successful remedies have to get to school resources, implicit bias, effective preschool because expulsion is the outcome of these things.  Has promoted a borrowing a disparate impact analysis from administrative law—requiring that a method of administration that has an adverse impact on protected groups (even though it’s facially neutral) can still violate Title XI.  The structure of that disparate impact analysis includes (1) adverse impact on protected group, and either (2) the practice is educationally unsound or (3) less discrimination option exist.  Discipline isn’t just about safety, it’s about students getting time back in school.

Dr. Tim Lisante, New York City Department of Education

• ·         Spent time in Rikers Island in NYC (where there are many jails) teaching and being a principal with students who were sent to the center from their home school.  At this stage, being in the center is pre-adjudication for the students until they have been through their court process.  Now he’s a bureaucrat (J) and a parent of three sons in NYC.  Works on home-school re-entry to transfer students back into their schools once finished in the court systems. (NYC has over 500 high schools).

In the child welfare space, none of us chose this.

None of us chose this for our lives.  As mothers, we don’t choose dysfunction over healthy family units and as children we don’t choose to be orphaned over being nurtured.  None of us look down the barrel and say “Sign me up for the hard life!”  But, it’s true—our choices have consequences and those kinetics run deep and long. When we take toxins into our pregnant bodies we seep destruction into our children.  When we run away from the institutions that simulate normalcy, we claim our autonomy and our vulnerability.  And when we open ourselves up to revolving door of caretakers, we become the bests and worse parts of humanity. What separates those that plead for adoption now and removal yesterday versus those that urge family preservation first and resources soon is not a game of who to blame. But rather, both recognize that none of us chose this for our lives, yet all of us must take care to fix it. Using the babies in the river parable, we are just torn as to whether to concentrate on scooping up the babies we see floating downstream or trekking upstream to search for the baby thrower.  As and much as I would like to strap on my backpack and charge after the evildoer throwing away lives, I cannot contemplate passing by the lives in front of our needing solutions now.

What is the comparability loophole?

ESEA Reauthorization is the coming attraction in Congress this fall.  If she were selling tickets, people would be lining up around the block just to see if she will make an appearance.  Some are betting that she will.  Most are skeptical -- at best -- if she will even be permitted to take the stage.  Back in 2007, when she was supposed to star in the blockbuster hit of "Changing No Child Left Behind," she was no where to be found.  Well, correction, she started to get off the ground, maybe even made it to the dressing room to get revised, but never fully showed herself as a finished product.  And now that she has this unrealiable track record, many in Congress (namely House Republicans) insist that they will put together their own show -- in smaller magnitude -- that will carry the same punch.

One of the many, many [read numerous] proposals on what should be included when (if) ESEA reauthorization happens this fall is to fix the "comparability loophole."  The comparability loophole describes the way federal money is delivered to schools serving large amounts (or percentages) of low-income families' children.  Boiled down, this means that in order to get federal funds, a school district must (among other fiscal requirements) spend as much of their own monies (state and local) on schools with high concentrations of low-income students as it does on schools within the same districts that have low concentrations of low-income students.  This is known as the "comparability" fiscal requirement.  It stems from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Title I provision.  (ESEA is the base bill that has been reauthorized several times, most recently known as No Child Left Behind.)

More after the break...

H.R. 2445 is some pretty scary stuff

H.R. 2445 would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to provide States and local educational agencies with maximum flexibility in using Federal funds provided under such Act.

But "flexibility" in these ways is more of a reverse Robin Hood blindside.  Title I monies are at stake.

Two Thoughts Emerge In My Mind—On “Bad” Schools & “Race” [Reading Response]

Thought #1: What makes a “bad” school? The general answer might include schools with poor student test scores, school violence, dilapidated buildings and grounds, old textbooks, and unhealthy lunch programs. The unsaid, less politically correct answer is schools with lots of black and brown faces (obviously not because they are black and brown faces—though some of the theorists from last week might propose that it is because of those identities--but because, as this week’s readings amplify, segregated schools (bad) and high concentrations of students on free lunch (bad) are more likely to be the experiences of black and brown faces than white faces). Traits of “good schools” consist of the opposite features (perhaps explaining the teacher transfer trend in Georgia from Orfield and Lee, p. 17). And for the most part, our general solution has been to use money to transform the former into the latter. Yet, I find myself asking the same question asked by others: does one overcome the bad schools of the impoverished simply by having more money? I cautiously assert that the answer is “no” (though I make a sharp distinction between poverty being an aggregate condition that needs a large-scale remedy and “poor” as an individual status that might in fact benefit from a wealth transfer). So, I am left to choose amongst other model solutions to meet the challenge… but I am just not sure the importation of one particular model is the way to go.

Thought #2: In this week’s Washington Post, the conversation arose again about the inability of using race as a factor for diversifying schools as a result of Parents Involved v. Seattle School District (2007) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/19/AR2010091904973.html?sub=AR). It seems this article and this week’s readings illustrate the core connections between the identities of the education have-nots and the resources of the education haves, and how our decentralized system needs but struggles to disperse identities and resources within its populations. But this effort at social engineering is a huge undertaking. Perhaps I am simplistic—but I drink of the water that says the teacher-leader and student-parent relationships are the key levers for change. Systems have an obligation to diversify student experiences, but if we are to advance student outcomes, the solution requires far more teacher and administrator self-awareness and vulnerability that I think most are ready for.