Edhivemn.com
June 18, 2018
This year ONE non-White majority charter school supported by funders in this database exceeded the state average in test score proficiency. But that one school is suspect because of wildly fluctuating test scores. Overall these schools are highly segregated and many have had very low test scores for many years.
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Badass Teachers Association
January 27, 2018
Nancy Bailey
Public schools need a continuum of services for children experiencing emotional/behavioral problems. They also need a whole curriculum that includes classes that are therapeutic, like art, music, and drama. These classes can help students find their niche and keep them from academically falling behind.
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Journal Journal of Education Policy
February 7, 2017
Elisabeth E. Lefebvre & Matthew A. M. Thomas
This paper critically examines the relationship between these entities through the lens of TFA corps members placed in charter schools, and explores two types of schools described by interviewees, namely, shit shows,’ and like-minded schools.’
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Have You Heard blog
May 3, 2017
Jennifer Berkshire
One of the consequences of making education so central to social policy has been that we’ve ended up taking the pressure off of the state for the kinds of policies that would be more effective at addressing poverty and economic inequality. Instead we’re asking education to do things it can’t possibly do. The result has been increasing support for the kinds of market-oriented policies that make inequality worse.
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Washington Post
April 27, 2017
Emma Brown and Mandy McLaren
Students in the nation’s only federally funded school voucher initiative performed worse on standardized tests within a year after entering D.C. private schools than peers who did not participate, according to a new federal analysis that comes as President Trump is seeking to pour billions of dollars into expanding the private school scholarships nationwide.
The study, released Thursday by the Education Department’s research division, follows several other recent studies of state-funded vouchers in Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio that suggested negative effects on student achievement. Critics are seizing on this data as they try to counter Trump’s push to direct public dollars to private schools.
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Alternet
April 29, 2017
Steven Rosenfeld
As the Trump administration plans to redirect taxpayer billions to privatize K-12 education, a scholarly article by some of the nation’s leading investigators of charter school rip-offs has highlighted how their business model is prone to fiscal self-dealing.
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MinnPost
April 27, 2017
Erin Hinrichs
Today, however, STRIDE is facing closure. While school leaders say they embraced the school’s newfound diversity, they struggled to adapt to the academic needs of their changing student population. The school went from being in the top 15 percent of all Title 1 schools in the state, in terms of students’ academic performance, to being in the bottom quarter of Title 1 schools.
Also see:
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Crooks & Liars
April 24, 2017
Jenn Budd
The Walton family now owns only 50% of Walmart stores. Sadly, that means they only make billions upon billions having lost the last chunk of billions. But never fear, for they have invested wisely. So much so that they have been able to give over $1.3 billion, by their own estimates, to K-12 education during the last two decades through their Walton Family Fund.
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The News & Observer (Raleigh)
April 24, 2017
Lynn Bonner
Students could gain admission to charter schools based on where their parents work or where they live under legislation that would make significant changes in the ways the schools fill their classrooms.
The state House is considering a collection of bills that would change who can start a charter and how quickly the schools can grow. Corporations would be able to reserve spaces in schools for their employees’ children...
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Alternet
April 22, 2017
Leonie Haimson / Network for Public Education
Though much has been written about President Trump’s proposed budget cuts, little has been said about how his largest proposed cut to public schools, the total elimination of $2.4 billion in Title IIA funds, would likely increase class size across the nation.
Most schools have already have seen sharp increases in class size since the great recession.
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Vice.com
April 11, 2017
Allison McCann
By and large, schools with large concentrations of poor or minority children (often the same children, since race and poverty are highly correlated in the U.S.) perform worse. “At scale, we have rarely been able to consistently produce high-quality schools in situations in which all of the kids are poor and minority, " said Rucker C. Johnson, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Star Tribune
March 22, 2017
Beatrice Dupuy
Four plaintiffs filed an appeal Thursday in their fight to challenge Minnesota's teacher tenure laws. A judge rejected their suit in October but the parents are back to assert that state laws are protecting ineffective teachers and violating students' rights by keeping low-income and minority students from attaining a quality education.
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Star Tribune
March 12, 2017
Beena Raghavendran
A lawsuit claiming the state is shirking its responsibility to educate poor and minority students was thrown out after a Monday ruling from the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
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Bright Light Small City
March 11, 2017
Sarah Lahm
As testing season begins in full force across Minnesota, publicly available data from the state Department of Education indicates a striking trend: the number of high school juniors refusing to sit for the state and federally mandated MCA tests is growing
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Institute for New Economic Thinkng
February 28, 2017
Alex Molnar
Nowhere is the toxic effect of privatization on America’s public wellbeing more evident than in the sphere of education. Today, politicians in thrall to neoliberal ideology seek to subordinate the democratic mission of public education to a theory of market-driven economic development and social organization. The phantasmagorical belief in neutral “scientific " expertise as the primary basis for policymaking has, therefore, profoundly antihuman as well as antidemocratic implications.
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Bright Light Small City
March 14, 2016
Sarah Lahm
Amid all of this revamping, the Minneapolis Public Schools continues to fall further into the hands of MN Comeback.
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