In The News
(Associated Press) - Educators fear that a new measure that will slash $4 billion in funding to Texas public schools over the next two years will permanently handicap them because it removes any long-term obligation for the state to maintain a minimum support level.
Normally, a school's funding level is determined by a formula based on enrollment, but for the first time since World War II the Legislature has reduced per-student funding, a trend that could continue under the new school finance law.
Education advocates argue lawmakers could fund everything else before appropriating education money, potentially leaving schools with a smaller chunk of state money each year.
Members of Young Voices Rhode Island recently conducted an analysis of the state’s education system and developed vision for education reform for the state. Their vision does not lay blame on any one group, but instead looks at the whole education system, suggesting ways to improve the performance of districts, principals, teachers, and students. The students met with Governor Chafee on May 12, 2011 to present their plan, and will be following up with his policy team.
Love them or hate them, the proposals collectively known as “school reform” are mostly top-down policies: divert public money to quasi-private charter schools, pit states against one another in a race for federal education dollars, offer rewards when test scores go up, fire the teachers or close the schools when they don’t.
Public school teachers and their unions are under a sustained assault that is still unfolding. In 2010 Michelle Rhee, former Washington, DC, schools chancellor, announced the creation of a multimillion-dollar lobbying organization for the explicit purpose of undermining teachers unions.
Today the NAACP released Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate, a stunning look at the human and economic impact of our country's overfunding of prisons and underfunding of education.
With state budgets buckling, American teachers are facing the erosion of tenure protection, employee benefits, and other job protections that they fought for and won years ago.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rightly argued that painful spending cuts will be needed to close New York’s projected $10 billion deficit. The hard truth is that it is impossible to cut spending deeply without cutting the state’s huge outlays for education and health care. That means that New York’s most vulnerable citizens — schoolchildren, the elderly, the poor, the sick — will feel a disproportionate amount of the pain.
After a 30-minute press conference in which eight Senate Democrats (and Billy Easton of the NYSUT-backed Alliance for Quality Education) made the case to extend an income tax surcharge on the top three-percent of earners, Easton and Sen. Jose Peralta said they were open to raising the tax floor about $200,000.
A message for Gov. Cuomo rang through the halls of the state Capitol on Wednesday. Parents, students and teachers are not happy with proposed cuts to education in New York State.
SYRACUSE -- Education advocates boarded a bus to Albany Wednesday morning to join hundreds of other New Yorkers for Education Lobby Day.
