By JASON MOON • 6 HOURS AGO Superintendents, school board members, teachers, and parents held a press conference Thursday morning to voice their concerns about a bill that would create “education freedom savings accounts.” The bill, known as Senate Bill 193, would allow parents to use public money to educate their kids outside of public schools, including…
Category: Charter School
In Arizona, teachers can now be hired with absolutely no training in how to teach
By Valerie Strauss May 14, 2017 New legislation signed into law in Arizona by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey (R) will allow teachers to be hired with no formal teaching training, as long as they have five years of experience in fields “relevant” to the subject they are teaching. What’s “relevant” isn’t clear. The Arizona law…
Trump and DeVos Continue to Undermine Public Education with Their Proposed Fiscal Year 2019 Budget
By Stephenie Johnson, Neil Campbell, and Scott Sargrad Posted on February 12, 2018, 2:50 pm Today, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos released their proposed budget for the 2019 fiscal year. The Trump administration’s budget proposal for this year makes strikingly similar drastic cuts to the administration’s fiscal year 2018 proposal, which represented the most devastating funding cuts to…
What Would it Cost to Get All Students to Average? {#iBelieve}
By The Hechinger Report, Contributor March 26, 2018, at 11:30 a.m. Most low-income schools don’t receive enough money to help kids hit average math and reading scores, a new study shows. HOW MUCH DOES IT COST to educate a child? It often feels like policymakers pick numbers out of a hat. Utah spends less than $7,000 a year on…
The Myth of Public School Failure {#iBelieve}
The Myth of Public School Failure RICHARD ROTHSTEIN SPRING 1993 Public schools are actually performing remarkably well. What they need is not radical reform but more support. There’s a conventional wisdom about public schools: Graduates don’t have the skills needed for a technologically advanced economy. We’ve doubled funds for public education since the mid-1960s, but…
Alabama education chief calls out schools for not preparing graduates
By Trisha Powell Crain Updated Mar 26, 1:11 PM; Posted Mar 26, 1:11 PM tcrain@al.com Alabama interim state superintendent Dr. Ed Richardson has called out more than 150 schools for not preparing their high school graduates to either go to college or begin a successful path to a career. In a strongly-worded memo to superintendents statewide last week, Richardson wrote, “This is…
Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) {#iBelieve}
A New Education Law The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was signed by President Obama on December 10, 2015, and represents good news for our nation’s schools. This bipartisan measure reauthorizes the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the nation’s national education law and longstanding commitment to equal opportunity for all students. The new…
Court case could ‘financially cripple’ California unions
BY ADAM ASHTON February 26, 2018 12:01 AM Thirteen years ago, California’s teacher union went toe-to-toe with the state’s movie star governor and crushed him at the ballot box, funding almost half of the $121 million campaign that swamped his proposals to revamp tenure and restrict government spending. The rejection of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2005 initiatives…
The Demographics of Alabama’s “Failing Schools!” (2013)- {#iBelieve}
Challen Stephens | cstephens@al.com June 18, 2013 at 2:05 PM The state of Alabama unveiled its list of so-called failing schools today, labeling in bold red letters 74 attendance zones throughout inner cities and rural counties.All are high-poverty schools. And nearly all are predominantly black. For those 74 schools, the list promises immediate consequences, as those…
Alabama Will Get A New List of “Failing” Schools This Fall (2013)
August 11, 2013 Challen Stephens | cstephens@al.com Alabama will be facing a new list of “failing” schools before the year is out, as the test scores from last spring are due to be released some time this fall. The new round of test data will cause the state to recalculate the scores that led…
Standing Strong for Public Education! 