Hillary Clinton's Evolving Position on Public Charter Schools....

Her husband supported charter schools, as did her former boss and current president Barack Obama.  Hillary used to support them as well, until left winger Bernie Sanders started surging in the polls, forcing Clinton to move to the left in order to appease the special interests on the hard left....


From Politico:

"Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded less like a decades-long supporter of charter schools over the weekend and more like a teachers union president when she argued that most of these schools “don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.”

Her comments in South Carolina came straight from charter school critics’ playbook and distanced her from the legacies of her husband, former President Bill Clinton — credited with creating a federal stream of money to launch charters around the country —"

Read     Hillary Clinton Rebukes Charter Schools

The Education Success Story Nobody Wants to Talk About

New Orleans post Katrina has been up and down.  New Levies were built to replace the ones that failed. The former Mayor went to prison for corruption. The Saints won a Super Bowl.  The city lost 200,000 in population.  Through all of this-- The school system was deplorable, even before the storm.

But for the decade since Katrina, New Orleans has formed a network of charter schools that have showed an amazing level of progress; this is not the sort of success that establishment types will celebrate, though.  So the article that came out this weekend celebrating the successes of New Orleans charter schools will not receive much notice, sadly.  It will be ignored, and if brought up, the person mentioning this success will be castigated by the establishment types, and the results will be questioned in not outright rebuked.

But Statistics and numbers don't lie....

From  Urban Education Reform:  New Orleans Proves Charter Schools Can Work:

"In a short period of time, urban charters have yielded impressive, even astonishing, success at closing the academic achievement gap between the poorest children and more privileged ones. The management of charter schools varies widely, but in urban centers, where education reformers have concentrated most of their energy, their performance has been especially strong.  A major study earlier this year by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes carefully comparing equivalent student populations found that urban charters on the whole produce an extra 40 days (eight weeks)of classroom learning in math and 28 days of extra classroom learning in reading per student per year.. New Orleans provided the largest-scale experiment in charter education in the United States--a complete overhaul, undertaken all at once. The results have vindicated the strategy. As the authors concluded, "We are not aware of any other districts that have made such large improvements in such a short time.. New Orleans is the breakthrough social equity liberals have been waiting for. "We tried to make urban districts better for 50 years. We tried more funding, more accountability, more pipelines of talent, more [professional development], more training, more certification rules, and on and on and on. After all of that time, and all of those cities, we still don't have a single high-performing urban district in America. Not one," Andy Smarick, an education-policy analyst, told me. "But the very first time we try an all-charter system, the first time ever, we get dramatically better results in only a decade." And some liberals, like the Obama administration, have encouraged and praised its success."

How Several Public Schools in Escambia County are Denied Proceeds from Local Option Sales Taxes

At next month's discussion workshop I will be bringing an issue of inequity I feel needs to be addressed:  We only allocate proceeds form the county-wide half-cent sales tax referendum to "some" public schools.

That's right I said it.  There are a handful of public schools in Escambia County that are excluded from receiving any of the proceeds the voter approved measure provides.

But I believe we should be allocating money from this referendum to ALL public schools--just as the voters believed we would.

To complicate things and make matters worse---, the directors/principals of these schools are told "The School Board does not want nor do they allow you to get any of these monies for facilities."

This school board member (granted I'm only one of five) wants to share this resource with all public schools for the benefit of all public school students.

Each year, this 1/2 cent  tax generates between $20-$23 Million for schools.  We utilize the money to build schools and to renovate and construct educational facilities infrastructure  throughout our district.

Yet some public schools, already receiving less than their full share of operational revenues to start with, are denied ANY of this money.

Politicians/Bureaucrats have looked me in the eye and said "We don't have enough to share, we have too many needs in Our schools, and we can't spare them ANY!"

I've heard this rationalization frequently "Those schools get some money that the legislature didn't give us!"  Okay, so that is a valid point but that situation has been remedied and even if it wasn't, two wrongs don not make a right.  Every kindergartner knows that axiom of truth.

Students that attend these schools deserve for their fair share of the tax proceeds to be allocated to their schools.  These  are public school students.  These are public schools. This is what the citizens voted for.

Parents of these students pay tax, pay this 1/2 cent sales tax, yet none of their students' schools receive one thin dime of this revenue to enhance the learning environments of theses schools.

We are going to discuss this at an upcoming workshop because what we are doing is not right.

These are public schools.  Charter schools are public schools and the students that attend charter schools are public school students and should not be the victims of financial deprivation/discrimination.

We can and should allocate the proportional share to ALL public schools---just like the flashy campaign literature promised when we successfully lobbied the electorate to vote for the continuation of this tax.

Let's not turn back the clock like it is 1950---let's not financially leave SOME public school students on the back of the bus.