State Lawmakers Pass Sweeping Education Reform

State lawmakers passed sweeping education reforms in a race to get hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money. 400-million dollars are up for grabs under President Barack Obama's ‘Race to the Top Competition.' Fewer than half the states are likely to win the money. State lawmakers said this legislation should give Michigan a better chance.

Lawmakers are calling this the biggest education reform in 20 years. They passed five bills to make up this race to the top package. The changes would make it easier to remove poor performing teachers and create a merit-based pay system to reward good performance. The bills also allow for some thirty additional charter schools. The measure also increased the dropout age from 16 to 18. Of course lawmakers hope all of these are things help qualify Michigan for the federal money....

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Florida's Fort Pierce charter school closing?

By James Kirley

ST. LUCIE COUNTY — An injunction that would have kept students in classes and public money flowing to a 14-month-old charter high school has been denied by a circuit court judge, leaving a state hearing as the school’s last chance to survive.

On Friday, Circuit Judge William Roby dismissed a complaint and request for an injunction by The Charter School of Fort Pierce.

Roby said the charter school had failed to show that irreparable harm will result without an injunction.

“On the other hand, after extensive review, it appears that the school board, which is responsible for all public schools and public school students in St. Lucie County, found that deficiencies at the school pose an immediate threat to the educational welfare of students attending the school,” Roby wrote.

The St. Lucie County School Board voted unanimously Nov. 10 to close the school after district officials and a third-party audit indicated the publicly funded, privately run charter school was operating in the red. The charter school filed for an injunction Nov. 19.

Like all public schools, the charter school got state funding based on student enrollment. But it never achieved the enrollment envisioned in its business plan.

The charter school posted the school district’s only “F” when school grades based on results of the 2009 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test results were released last spring. Charter school officials said their first-ever grade was because many of their students had struggled and performed poorly in traditional public schools in prior years...

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Performance pay works in the Prince George's schools

By William R. Hite Jr. and Donald J. Briscoe

Performance pay is supposed to be the third rail of education reform. But in Prince George's County, we have shown that it doesn't have to be.

Two years ago, we agreed to reward teachers and principals who elevate student achievement in high-need schools. Our program shows that the government can be a catalyst for school reform and that the Obama administration's plans to dramatically expand incentive programs are essential to changing school systems that currently fail, or cannot afford, to reward effective teaching.

It also shows what administrators and teachers can accomplish when we work together. During the 2006-07 school year, Prince George's schools and the unions joined hands to create and implement the district's first pay-for-performance program, supported by a five-year, $17 million grant from the federal government's Teacher Incentive Fund. TIF helps states and school districts develop innovative systems to reward teachers and principals who boost student achievement in high-need schools.

Yes, we had our disagreements as we worked out how to supplement the existing compensation system, which is based largely on seniority and qualifications, not performance. But thanks to the involvement of teachers and administrators selected by the unions, we were able to create a voluntary program that provides up to $10,000 in bonuses for effective teachers in high-need schools and as much as $12,000 for administrators who work to turn around struggling schools. Two committees that included teachers and administrators designed both the cash-incentive structure and the program's professional development system, which helps teachers improve classroom instruction and assists teachers and administrators in earning their bonuses...

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Is Arne Duncan giving up on education reform?

By David Ellison- Oakland Tribune

TO CHARTER OR not to charter? That is the question.

Hamlet pondered whether to battle "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" or to just give up. My fear is that, in pushing for more charter schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has given up.

Charters never really became laboratories for innovation.

They simply adopted the "new ideas" all public schools would if they had the freedom and the funds: longer school days and years, smaller schools and class sizes, careful selection of motivated, gifted teachers, strict accountability for both students and their parents, site-based management. "...

Charters have such freedom. But their claims to operate with less state funds than most public schools are spurious.

For one, charters usually receive substantial outside support. Even more significant, since salaries account for more than 90 percent of most schools' budgets, charters typically employ younger, far-less expensive faculty, and turn them over after only four years, thus keeping expenses artificially low.

In other words, charters attract our best new teachers but quickly burn them out.

This is reform?

True reform would address the real and enduring problems plaguing public education, such as the fact that the teaching profession generally attracts our least qualified college graduates; that the worst of them too often staff inner-city schools; that schools stand more segregated by race and class than ever; that they follow the same factory model as a century ago.

Many (certainly not all) charters — such as Summit Preparatory High School, which I featured in my last column — offer at least a few of our inner-city children a way out of an obviously broken and shamelessly unjust system of public schools...

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Why Michelle Rhee Has to Play Tough

By Richard Whitmire

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The forces lined up against D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee -- angry teachers, grumpy D.C. Council members, the nation's top teachers' union leader quarterbacking the opposition -- are essentially asking one question: Why can't you behave more like that nice Arne Duncan?

Indeed, with his aw-shucks humility and his anecdotes about playing b-ball with the president, Duncan has undeniable charm. That charm was honed in Chicago, where he never played in-your-face politics and never publicly suggested there was widespread incompetence among the teaching force, qualities that contributed to President Obama's tapping him to be U.S. secretary of education.

By contrast, Rhee appeared on the cover of Time wielding a broom to symbolically sweep incompetence out of her public schools. Yikes.

But there's a reason Rhee plays hardball: She has no choice...

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New York Mayor Wants More Charter Schools

More charter schools may be coming to the city under a plan proposed Wednesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Speaking at a 10th anniversary celebration of charter schools at the Sisulu-Walker Charter school in Harlem, the mayor said if reelected, he would fight to abolish the cap put on charter schools by Albany.

Bloomberg's plan would double the amount of charter schools in the city to 200. He is proposing that by 2013, almost 10 percent, or 100,000 public school seats will be charter.

"Charter schools like Sisulu have succeeded because they empower teachers and principals to set high expectations," said Bloomberg. "They encourage innovation in the classroom. They create competition among schools for students. But most importantly, they give parents more options in deciding what's best for their children."

In addition, he pledged to raise $100 million in private funds for charter school facilities...

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Will Longer Schoold Days Work?

By Jason Campbell

President Obama thinks that keeping kids in their seats might just be the education reform this country needs.

But at least one Manteca teacher isn’t quite sure that his kids could stand to stay in their seats any longer than they already do.

With that the Commander-in-Chief believes that students today spend too little time in the classroom. Coming this week, those involved in education at the local level who have had to deal with the crippling economic blow that is still digging into coffers, aren’t quite sure that the concept of longer school days and shorter vacations – while maybe a good theoretical idea – is currently feasible.

“We need to prepare our students to be able to compete in a global economy, and that’s just the reality of education in America today,” said Manteca Educators Association President Ken Johnson. “I think that the idea sounds good theoretically, but practically something like that is going to take some serious money and that’s something we just don’t have right now.”

“On the surface it sounds like a good idea, but in reality I’m not so sure that it could immediately work. It might be good rhetoric...

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