Education

A new investigative report from the Detroit Free Press reveals a problem in Michigan found in many other states: Charter schools with little oversight and nearly no regulation underperforming to the detriment of students. The report’s findings led the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA), a lobby group focusing on the for-profit education industry, to wage an all-out PR campaign to minimize the positive impact of this solid journalistic effort.

The local charter school cheerleaders may try to deny the obvious, but the evidence is quite clear: the three charter schools in Hoboken, New Jersey, do not serve nearly as many students in economic disadvantage as the public schools. It's pointless to argue otherwise because the evidence is quite clear and incontrovertible. But that hasn't stopped the local charter boosters from engaging in all sorts of mental gymnastics in an attempt to rationalize this segregation.

The Freep has a story about how the state of Michigan opened up the floodgates for charter schools, refused to properly oversee them, and instead created an environment in which money flows from tax coffers into private pockets with very little accountability. Unfortunately, Michigan is not an anomaly.

Even the alchemists responsible for concocting the horrific education policies designed to turn teaching and learning into a test score have been shaken hard enough to awaken from the nightmare scenario of fast-tracking high-stakes Common Core testing across the nation.

A pro-business Los Angeles judge ruled Tuesday that California's allowance of teacher tenure was in fact unconstitutional. This unprecedented ruling comes after fierce lobbying and lawsuits brought by the corporate-funded Students Matter (euphemism!). The group has plans to expand nationally.

Minnesota Senator Al Franken had a few choice words to say to his colleagues about their refusal to expand refinancing to student loans. "This makes just no sense," he said. "This is a commonsense bill – it would help more than 550,000 Minnesotans who have student debt."

In their continuing fight for post-Act 10 rights, Madison Teachers Inc. has ratified a contract with the Madison Metropolitan School board for 2015-2016. Both the board and the teachers wanted to get the deal in place before the State Supreme Court rules on the union’s complaint over local bargaining rights. The contract will give the teachers a 0.25 percent raise.

The Pennsylvania budget will contain a moratorium on construction spending by school districts for the third straight year, meaning schools in need of repair will have to find solutions without state aid. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s construction cuts began in 2012, when he cut funding to new applications, thus stalling 354 projects in various stages of construction and capital across the Commonwealth. The state’s Department of Education has estimated that it would take at least $1.6 billion to reimburse all projects.

What if a surgeon’s medical license could be taken away based on an error-prone statistical formula that ranked his abilities on a scale of 1 to 5, based on the success (or failure) of a small number of the operations he performed? Or imagine if a lawyer could lose her membership to the bar because a statistical estimate of her success predicted that she would lose the majority of her cases next year.

Even after adjusting for inflation, the average 2014 college graduate has twice as much debt as their 1994 counterparts. Just 20 years. This year's newest members of the work force (or slaves to more debt in grad school) wrestled the title of "Most Indebted Class in U.S. History" from last year's reigning champs. Yay school!