Pupil transportation bill clears Michigan House:
MI Republicans may force local districts to pay for private, parochial and charter school busing
(Posted on the Fix the mitten blog Sept. 24, 2016)
A PUPIL TRANSPORTATION BILL HAS PASSED THE MICHIGAN HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WITH BIPARTISAN SUPPORT, BUT IT’S NOT NECESSARILY WHAT IT PURPORTS TO BE
Nick Krieger (@nckrieger):
With all the recent attention focused on House Bill 4822, the third-grade retention bill, you might have missed the fact that the Michigan House of Representatives passed a pupil transportation bill on Wednesday by a vote of 85-21 (see below).
House Bill 5753, introduced by Rep. Amanda Price (R-Holland), would amend the requirements in §1321 of the Revised School Code governing when a public school district that provides busing for its resident pupils must also provide transportation for nonpublic school pupils. Advocates of the bill claim that it would simply clean up outdated language in the Revised School Code, bringing it in line with current school-funding practices. In particular, they claim that because school districts no longer receive categorical funding to pay for transportation under the State School Aid Act, the language of §1321(b) needs to be deleted.
But the bill is not necessarily what it purports to be.
Section 1321(b) does not specifically mention categorical funding under the State School Aid Act. Instead, it broadly references any state aid that could potentially be used for transportation — including the per-pupil foundation allowance. In short, eliminating the language of §1321(b) would require a school district that offers busing for its resident pupils to provide that same service for nonpublic school pupils regardless of whether the district receives any state funding to pay for it.
What else would House Bill 5753 do? As passed, the bill would not specifically require school districts to pay for and provide transportation for charter school pupils. However, the Michigan House education committee, chaired by Rep. Price, tipped its hand when it referred the bill with substitute H-1 earlier this month (read the Sept. 8 committee minutes here).
Though H-1 was not adopted when the bill reached the House floor, the text of the substitute is telling. Under §1321(c) as presently written, one of the three requirements for providing pupil transportation is…
Follow this link to read the rest of this post: http://www.fixthemitten.com/blog/pupil-transportation-bill-clears-michigan-house
HERE’S AN UPDATE ON THE THIRD-GRADE RETENTION BILL, HB 4822
Parental wishes may well be ignored
(Posted on the Fix the mitten blog Sept. 21, 2016)
Tuesday evening Sept. 20, the House and Senate conferees reached a compromise by a vote of 5-1 (you can read the conference report here). Lawmakers could vote on the conference committee’s recommendations as early as Wednesday.
Most notably, the conference report eliminates language that would have permitted the granting of a good-cause exemption to a third-grade pupil who is not proficient in reading upon the recommendation of his or her principal and reading teacher (other types of good-cause exemptions remain in the bill).
By Nick Krieger (@nckrieger):
Michigan House Bill 4822, the third-grade retention bill, has finally emerged from conference committee. The bill shares many similarities with the controversial Florida third-grade retention law, as well as ALEC model legislation.
Last October, the Michigan House of Representatives passed HB 4822 by a vote of 57-48. The bill was then sent to the Michigan Senate, which made amendments and passed a different version of the bill by a vote of 31-6 in March. The bill was transferred back to the Michigan House, which failed to concur in the Senate substitute. Accordingly, it was sent to conference committee where it has remained since April.
Tuesday evening, the House and Senate conferees reached a compromise by a vote of 5-1 (you can read the conference report here). Lawmakers could vote on the conference committee’s recommendations as early as Wednesday.
Most notably, the conference report eliminates language that would have permitted the granting of a good-cause exemption to a third-grade pupil who is not proficient in reading upon the recommendation of his or her principal and reading teacher (other types of good-cause exemptions remain in the bill). A few other minor changes were made as well.
Overall, the bill remains similar in substance to the original legislation. It would still require:
Follow this link to read the rest of this post: http://www.fixthemitten.com/blog/update-on-third-grade-retention-bill
Common Core, high stakes testing, student & family data collection:
Does Bill Gates now have a plan for colleges too?
Posted by Peter Greene: 24 Sep 2016
Some days I feel kind of Rip Van Winklesque, as if I went to sleep and when I woke up the world had changed. Apparently while I was sleeping, the electorate rose up and elected Bill Gates the Grand Uber Head of Education. “Please,” a bunch of you non-sleeping people said. “Redesign our entire education system. Redefine what it means to be an educated person, and redefine how a person gets an education. Please do that for us, and now that we’ve asked you to do this, please never ask us for any input on the subject ever again.”
And so we got Common Core and high-stakes testing and Big Data Systems and a whole giant network of astro-turf groups pushing these policy ideas and a decade of corporate dismantling of public education, funded in astonishingly substantial ways by Bill and Melinda Gates.
But apparently while I was sleeping, y’all asked him to do something about redesigning colleges, too.
I’m looking at the most current version of Gates’ Postsecondary Success Advocacy Priorities, which is kind of a non-meaning word salad of a title, but I’m thinking what we have here is what The Gates considers the priorities to advocate of in the process of redefining post-secondary success. Yes, I’ve read it so you don’t have to, but if this is the kind of thing you let happen while I’m asleep, we’ve really got to talk.
The Overview
Higher education is the bridge to success. Well, it used to be, but now it’s a narrow twisty high-priced toll bridge, and that’s a problem. Mind you, the cost of that problem is not to the human beings who wanted to cross the bridge:
Rising costs and debt, stubbornly high dropout rates, and persistent attainment gaps threaten higher education’s ability to meet societal and workforce needs. Recent estimates show that the nation will need 11 million more workers with some form of high-quality post-high school education by 2025 than our system is currently on course to produce.
The Gates strategy is…
Follow this link to read the rest of this post: http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-gates-plan-for-college.html
Do school vouchers really raise student achievement?
(Posted from the Journalist’s Resource on Sept.21, 2016)
“Vouchers have been neither the rousing success imagined by proponents nor the abject failure predicted by opponents,” say the authors of the NBER paper, which was led by Dennis Epple of Carnegie Mellon University. The programs show “no consistent, robust pattern.”
Amid such a heated debate, journalists should be mindful of who is presenting voucher research. Studies can be massaged to bolster the claims of one side or the other. Education policy researchers Christopher Lubienski and T. Jameson Brewer of the University of Illinois single out Ed Choice — the advocacy group founded by Milton Friedman — and warn that it over-emphasizes research that is not as strong as it suggests. Some of the findings that Ed Choice presents as bolstering the case for vouchers leave out caveats explicitly flagged by the authors themselves. “Advocacy based on this research is misguided and should be based on potentially stronger claims,” Lubienski and Brewer write in a 2016 study for thePeabody Journal of Education. “[T]he empirical results are relatively modest at best, and sometimes negative, not to mention incoherent and contested.”
Follow this link to read the rest of this post: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/school-vouchers-choice-student-achievement
…until next time, keep reading, sharing, discussing, learning.