Those who obstruct choice are more interested in protecting their special interests than in protecting the interests of all children to access a quality education
Ruthven Haneef Auguste
Earlier this week I was in Trenton with other public charter school parents to meet with legislators, advocate for the opportunity to choose a school that best fits the needs of our children, and commit to a year of action supporting education equality for all. Whether you’re a charter, district, or private school parent, we can all agree we want the best for our kids no matter where you choose to send them to school.
The opposition to school choice has regularly used certain words for parents in New Jersey’s worst-performing school districts when they have the audacity to choose to send their kids to public charter schools — “pawn” and “parasite” come to mind. However, in no area of life is less choice good, and it is upsetting that these adults, many who presumably have children of their own, seem determined to take away opportunity and choice from parents like me. I don’t presume to think I have enough information to form an opinion of how schools should be run in their towns and would guess things are vastly different in Newark where I work and live. We have amazing schools, terrible schools, and everything in the middle, which is why I wanted to be able to make the choice of where my children go to school.
By Adam Clark | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on March 06, 2017 at 11:40 AM
TRENTON — The Christie administration last week announced its decisions on more than two dozen applications to expand, renew or open new charter schools.
While four schools were ordered to close at the end of this school year, the state approved more than 6,000 new charter school seats through the expansion of existing schools, a significant increase in school choice.
The state Department of Education also gave 21 schools a five-year renewal of their charter. Here’s the rundown of the decisions:
Calling education the “civil rights issue of our time,” President Donald Trump used his address before Congress last week to highlight one of his top issues – school choice.
Echoing a campaign promise, Trump vowed to push for students in poor school districts to be able to use public funds to attend a charter, private or religious school.
“I am calling upon members of both parties to pass an education bill that funds school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African-American and Latino children,” Trump said. “These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school that is right for them.”
Trump did not say what form his school choice program would take. But he did give a few hints of what a federal push for school choice might look like in New Jersey and around the country.
I’m headed to Trenton this morning because I need legislators to know what my grandsons’ public charter school means to them.
I’m raising two African American boys in Newark and we all know in this country what can happen to African American men, especially if they drop out of school.
Uncommon Schools’ North Star Academy is providing my grandchildren with an education like nothing that I experienced for myself or for my own children.
When I hear my elected representatives speaking negatively about charter schools, I want to ask them if they have ever visited North Star Academy. If they did, they would quickly see how well it is serving my grandchildren and the other kids who attend.
There are too many lawmakers who have never stepped foot in North Star Academy, or a school like it. They have never come for morning circle. They have not met with our wonderful teachers. They have not seen how well our children are doing in class.
By Adam Clark | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on February 24, 2017 at 12:33 PM
TRENTON — Supporters of New Jersey’s charter schools are planning a major lobbying effort in the state capital next week as controversy and criticism surrounding the schools continues to mount.
A group of nearly 200 charter school supporters, mostly parents, will gather at the state house to deliver the message that charter schools are changing lives, adding value to children’s education and creating opportunities for students, according to the New Jersey Charter Schools Association.
“I wanted something better for my children and couldn’t afford to move or pay for private school,” said Haneef Auguste, whose four children attend KIPP New Jersey Schools in Newark. “No one should stand in the way of any child’s chance at a better life, especially when the circumstances in some of our communities are so dire.”
Mayor Fulop addressed the Senate Select Committee on School Funding Fairness
By Alyana Alfaro • 02/22/17 4:01pm
NEWARK – Advocates of changing New Jersey’s school funding formula often cite the booming Hudson County municipality of Jersey City as a school district they feel receives outsized state funding due to old school funding policies that do not take into account the economic growth of the past few years.
Fulop said he does not feel Jersey City should be penalized for funding schools according to current regulations. Alyana Alfaro for Observer
However, according to Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, such arguments only take into account the affluent waterfront section of the city and ignore primarily minority portions of the Jersey City that are significantly less well off. On Wednesday, Fulop addressed the Senate Select Committee on School Funding Fairness with concerns about the dangers of reducing school funding.
American school kids became more stupid under the Obama administration, according to rankings released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
They recently released the results of a worldwide exam administered every three years to 15-year-olds in 72 countries. The exam monitors reading, math and science knowledge.
Based on their findings, the United States saw an 11-point drop in math scores and nearly flat levels for reading and science.
The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, fell below the OECD average – and failed to crack the top ten in all three categories.
In other words, thanks to the Obama administration’s education policies, kids in the Slovac Republic are more proficient in multiplication.
Get past all the noise, and the opposition to Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s pick for the Education Department, is all about the teachers unions — which consider it their right to have a friendly face running federal policy even in Republican administrations.
Yes, two Senate Republicans have come out against DeVos — the only two who routinely get A’s on the National Education Association’s “report card” because they vote the union line. Efforts to find another GOP vote against her will almost surely fail, because the other 50 Republicans aren’t in unions’ pocket, and Vice President Mike Pence can deliver a 51st vote if needed.
Superintendent no longer willing to wait for Legislature to fix the problem, says ‘We are going to become the aggressor on this issue’
Kingsway superintendent James Lavender and other school officials announce their legal challenge to New Jersey’s school-aid formula.
School officials in communities all over New Jersey have complained for years about state education-funding inequities, and now lawmakers are holding a series of hearings on the issue — giving clear indications that they plan to address the school-aid problems in the next state budget.
But that new spending plan won’t go into effect until July, and officials representing the Kingsway Regional School District in South Jersey say they can no longer wait on the State House to fix a system that is shorting their students more than $11 million in state aid this year.
Instead, Kingsway regional superintendent James Lavender said district attorneys will be filing a legal brief this week with the state Supreme Court as they attempt to join a new phase of school-aid litigation that Gov. Chris Christie has been seeking to initiate since last year. But unlike Christie, who wants a complete overhaul of the state school-aid law that was enacted in 2008, the Kingsway district is instead pushing only for the invalidation of a “hold harmless” provision that for years has allowed some districts to avoid losing school aid even as others, including Kingsway, have been shortchanged.
School Choice — Who Opposes It and Why?
1)The leaders of teachers unions(NJEA), though not all of the teachers themselves, see school choice as a threat to their “virtual monopoly on education.”
2)Other critics of school choice think that it violates the First Amendment’s clause separating church and state, because some religious schools can end up receiving taxpayer funds.
5 Myths About School Choice
To help you better understand the ongoing debate, we want to dispel some common myths about school choice. But first:
What is school choice?
School choice isn’t just about charter schools. It refers broadly to a range of options and policies which provide alternatives to public school, including but not limited to publicly funded charter schools, magnet schools, school vouchers, and tax credits.
The goal of school choice is to improve student outcomes by giving parents a wider range of educational options and find what works best for their children.
Myth #1: School choice promotes inequality.
Opponents of school choice believe that increasing choices will benefits mostly middle and upper class families, leaving low-income students stuck in failing public schools with dwindling resources. They believe parents, if given a choice, won’t want to send their kids to school with minority or low-income students, and that increased choice will lead to increased segregations.
Fact: Public schools are already segregated; charter schools see increased diversity.
Under the current public school system, the school you go to is determined by where you live. What happens under this system is that higher-income households move to communities with other high-income families and better schools, while low-income families who can’t afford to move are stuck with the local public school. The segregation of race and income in public schools is a direct result of this self-segregation in housing.
School choice programs can create more diverse schools by overcoming this location-based segregation. Indeed, research shows that school choice programs create to more integrated, less segregated schools.
Myth #2: School choice harms public schools.
Opponents worry that school choice programs will harm public schools by diverting away much-needed funds, and forcing public schools to compete with other alternatives.
Fact: Losing students can help public schools, and so can competition.
There are several assumptions in this argument: 1. That losing students will cost public schools money, 2. That losing money will lead to a decline in school quality, and 3. That competition is harmful to public schools.
First, while public schools may lose money when students leave, the money lost may be less than the cost of educating the student, leaving more resources to educate the remaining students.
Second, more money doesn’t always lead to better outcomes. For many schools, budget concerns are less about how much money they have, and more about how that money is spent.
Finally, research shows that competition improves performance in public schools. When public schools are forced to compete, they have to show improvement in order to keep students and resources. When there are no alternatives to public schools, there is no incentive to prioritize student-focused improvements.
Myth #3: School choice is bad for teachers.
Opponents of school choice argue that holding teachers accountable by measuring their students’ performance on standardized tests punishes teachers and does nothing to improve the quality. They also argue that more charter schools, whose teachers are often non-unionized, harm the teachers unions, and by extension teachers.
Fact: School choice is good for teachers.
While it might be unfair to punish teachers for poor test scores when outside factors like poverty and lack of funding affect student performance, it is also unfair to students to keep poor-quality teachers employed.
It can be very hard to fire bad teachers in public schools. When budget cuts require layoffs, tenure rules can protect older, less competent teachers, while newer, more competent teachers are let go. Increased school choice means more options, not just for students, but also for teachers.
Myth 4: it doesn’t empower parents.
While the goal of school choice is to provide families with more educational options, opponents argue that through school choice, parents actually have less power to control their children’s education. Without parent-teacher associations at charter or private schools, parents would have less direct influence over school policy. Meanwhile, opponents express concern that parents aren’t equipped to consider all the different educational choices available and determine what’s best for their children.
Fact: Parents get to choose what’s best for their children.
In a public school system, parents might be able to influence some policies at their child’s public school—but if they can’t, or that school doesn’t have the resources their child needs, they have no other options.
Parents know their children’s education needs best, and school choice empowers parents to pick the option that’s best for their them. Indeed, when asked, most Americans favor some form of school choice.
Myth #5: School choice doesn’t work.
Opponents argue that charter and privates schools perform no better than public schools. This myth often refers back to Myth #2, saying that if charter and private school don’t perform better than public schools, then they shouldn’t be allowed to divert resources from them.
Fact: School choice improves outcomes across the board.
School choice improves educational outcomes for those in choice programs, but it also improves educational outcomes of the public schools which compete with alternative educational choices.
Ridgewood NJ, According to Sterling Lloyd, assistant director at the Education Week Research Center and coauthor of the Quality Counts report, the grading framework rewards states with a “well-rounded approach to education.” Broadly speaking, in states at the top end of the ranking, parents have the resources to support their children’s learning in well-funded schools; students report high academic achievement in the classroom; and graduates are able to pursue careers in an economy where opportunities are available to them.
The Education Week Research Center rated New Jersey Schools second best in the USA:
2. New Jersey
> Overall grade: B
> Per pupil spending: $15,946 (6th highest)
> High school graduation rate: 89.7% (2nd highest)
> Pct. 3 & 4 yr. olds enrolled in preschool: 63.7% (2nd highest)
Only three states report a higher median annual household income than New Jersey’s $72,222. Partially because of its strong tax base, New Jersey invests heavily in its public school system. The Garden State spends the equivalent of 4.8% of its taxable resources on its schools, second in the country only to Vermont. Each year, nearly $16,000 per student are spent on New Jersey schools — more than all but five other states.
While the connection between school spending and educational outcomes is complex, in New Jersey, high spending accompanies strong academic performance. The state has some of the largest shares both of math and english-proficient eighth graders, and about 38% of 11th and 12th grade advanced placement test scores in New Jersey are 3 or better — high enough to qualify for college credits — the sixth largest share of all states.
by DAVID HARSANYI January 20, 2017 12:00 AM @DAVIDHARSANYI
Betsy DeVos wants better education for minority and low-income kids. There’s something perverse about an ideology that views the disposing of an unborn child in the third trimester of pregnancy as an indisputable right but the desire of parents to choose a school for their kids as zealotry. Watching President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, answer an array of frivolous questions this week was just another reminder of how irrational liberalism has become.
Democrats often tell us that racism is one of the most pressing problems in America. And yet, few things have hurt African Americans more over the past 40 years than inner-city public-school systems. If President Obama is correct and educational attainment is the key to breaking out of a lower economic stratum, then no institution is driving inequality quite as effectively as public schools.
Actually, teachers’ unions are the only organizations in America that openly support segregated schools. In districts across the country — even ones in cities with some form of limited movement for kids — poor parents, typically those who are black or Hispanic, are forced to enroll their kids in underperforming schools when there are good ones nearby, sometimes just blocks away.
Democrats Sweeney and Prieto will pursue individual approaches to funding reform
Get ready to hear a lot more about school funding in New Jersey.
This week will start what could amount to nine separate public hearings in the next month about the state of school funding for New Jersey’s public schools, all driven by the somewhat fractured Democratic leadership of the Legislature.
The first is scheduled for today before the Joint Committee for the Public Schools, a hearing that has long been on the docket.
The next day will be the initial hearing before the Assembly’s education committee at 10 a.m. on Wednesday in the State House. Another is planned before a new Senate select committee next week, on January 27, at Kingsway Regional High School in Woolwich at 11 a.m. The next three have yet to be scheduled.
And this is all before Gov. Chris Christie unveils his state budget for fiscal 2017, in which a third of state spending will be aid to schools. It’s anyone’s guess as to what he will put forward.
Christie has been pushing to scuttle the state’s current formula-driven funding plan, instead providing the same amount of state aid per pupil for every district, no matter the need.
Ridgewood NJ, so who’s Afraid of Betsy DeVos? “Mrs. Devos’s Most Important Qualification is that She Has the Courage of Her Convictions”, in an editorial the Wall Street Journal attempts to answer the critics and make the case to provide poor children with better educational opportunities. We know the unions don’t like it and neither do Democrat, lawmakers looking to stifle their constituents keeping them fat, dumb and happy. Who’s Afraid of Betsy DeVos?
The Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal Opinion
January 14th, 2017 Click Here to Read
Democrats are searching for a cabinet nominee to defeat, and it’s telling that progressive enemy number one is Betsy DeVos. Donald Trump’s choice to run the Education Department has committed the unpardonable sin of devoting much of her fortune to helping poor kids escape failing public schools.
Mrs. DeVos’s most important qualification is that she has the courage of her convictions.
The DeVoses have donated tens of millions of dollars to charity including a children’s hospital in Michigan and an international art competition in Grand Rapids. They’ve also given to Christian organizations, which the left cites as evidence of concealed bigotry. Yet education has been their main philanthropic cause.
During the 1990s, they patronized a private-school scholarship fund for low-income families and championed Michigan’s first charter school law. In 2000 they helped bankroll a voucher initiative, which was defeated by a union blitz. The DeVoses then turned to expanding charters, which have become Exhibit A in the progressive campaign against her.
Two studies from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (2013, 2015) found that students attending Michigan charters gained on average an additional two months of learning every year over their traditional school counterparts. Charter school students in Detroit gained three months.
The real reason unions fear Mrs. DeVos is that she’s a rare reformer who has defeated them politically. Prior to being tapped by Mr. Trump, she chaired the American Federation for Children (AFC), which has helped elect hundreds of legislators across the country who support private school choice.
AFC has built a broad coalition that includes black and Latino Democrats, undercutting the union conceit that vouchers are a GOP plot to destroy public schools. In 2000 four states had private-school choice programs with 29,000 kids. Today, 25 states have vouchers, tax-credit scholarships or education-savings accounts benefitting more than 400,000 students.
You know progressives have lost their moral bearings when they save their most ferocious assault for a woman who wants to provide poor children with the education they need to succeed in America.
Chad Livengood , Jonathan Oosting and Michael Gerstein , The Detroit News11:39 a.m. EST November 25, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump’s planned nomination of west Michigan philanthropist Betsy DeVos for education secretary has ignited a debate about how the country delivers a high-quality education for every child.
DeVos, 58, supports increasing school choices, which she has called an attempt to “empower” parents to find good schools for their children, whether they be traditional public schools, alternative public academies known as charters, virtual schools or private and religious institutions.
“Betsy DeVos is a brilliant and passionate education advocate,” Trump said Wednesday in a statement. “Under her leadership, we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families.”
