- Career and technical education is one of the best weapons in the reformer’s arsenal. It’s a proven gateway to post-secondary credentials and skilled jobs, which can’t be taken for granted when so many of our high school graduates find themselves unprepared for college and career. The Gadfly was apoplectic when Arizona Governor Doug Ducey green-lit $30 million in cuts to the state’s CTE programs last year, reducing their funding by nearly 50 percent. These classes obviously benefit the ninety thousand students they serve annually, but they’re also a boon to the local and regional economies, which profit immensely from a domestic source of coveted technicians and tradesmen. It’s great news for all, therefore, that veto-proof majorities in both houses of Arizona’s state legislature are ready to pass legislation repealing the cuts. If ever there was a case of government electing to be pennywise and pound-foolish, it was this.
- Republicans and teachers’ unions have always been like peas in a pod. We’re not sure where the love affair started, but it was probably when they spent all those decades impugning and seeking to destroy one another. Okay, kidding aside, we’re all aware of the historic tensions existing between unionized teachers and the GOP. That’s why it’s borderline gobstobbing that the National Education Association, America’s single largest labor union, has issued shiny new grades for federal lawmakers—and some of the best grades have gone to Republicans. Fifty-nine congressional elephants earned grades of either A, B, or C, compared to just eighteen in 2009–10. The upward revision is doubtless a product of Republican initiative in writing and helping pass the Every Student Succeeds Act. In reverting so much authority from the federal government back to the states, the bill allows districts, schools, and individual educators (including unionized ones) greater flexibility in the classroom. Now that the two former rivals are best pals, we can’t wait to see them reach concurrence on issues like charter schools, voucher programs, and labor relations.
- Next time you’re looking to enliven your discussion at a dinner party, forget all about religion, politics, and sex and instead bring up the subject of classroom suspensions. Every aspect of school discipline, from its occasionally glaring racial disparities to the growing (but still tiny) number of toddlers getting tossed from kindergarten, is red-hot right now. Thankfully, we have a universally beloved and uncontroversial public figure to elucidate the subject: Eva Moskowitz! At a speech at New York Law School, the Success Academies honcho gave a robust defense of her charters’ unyielding approach to disruptive and unsafe behavior, which has attracted condemnation from more than her usual cast of critics. “The truth of the matter is safety is the number-one reason parents want out of the district schools, and we believe that our first obligation is for the safety of the children,” she said. “There’s no learning that can occur if we aren’t able to guarantee that.” Well, I guess she put that issue to bed.
- Chicago Public Schools is one of the most battered major school districts in the country. Its gaping budgetary hole led policy makers to shutter dozens of schools a few years ago, and continuing cost overruns are now necessitating layoffs as well. Facing a shortfall in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the district has let go of some 227 people. None of the terminated staff were classroom teachers, but losing critical administrative and special education staff is enormously harmful. Meanwhile, with the schools looking to Illinois’s state government to bail it out, Republican state legislators are proposing a wholesale takeover. (Unless they can win over a truly improbable number of Democrats, the plan won’t come close to passage.) Watching families endure this uncertainty is desperately sad, but it’s worth using the terrible scenario as an object lesson: Districts have to take specific steps to secure their own economic viability, or they risk the same future.
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