Left In Lowell

Tonight there was a hearing held at the Pollard Library, where community input was solicited over a proposed public charter school. I didn’t attend the hearing, as it was held during normal business hours. But, I’m told that supporters offered encouragement, some in person, some by letter.

Those you would know that are supporting this charter school are Joe Mendonca, Tom Wirtenan, Bill Taupier and Steve Pangiatakos. Opposing the proposal, at the event, were Jean Franco & Paul Georges.

I heard there was one particularly cranky man that took the opportunity to rant about greedy Unions, or some nonsense like that. Any microphone will do, eh?

I stated earlier that I’m not supporting this effort. There are plenty of private opportunities to educate your child in Lowell. We sent both our daughters to SJA (K-8), and then to Lowell High. I believe that school choice should be there, but that private schools should not drain public coffers. Thus, we went without some “things,” so our kids could have a solid educational foundation. There was a sting to the tuition. It should be that way.

The criticism of this proposal, backed by SABIS® Educational Systems, Inc., are:
- The educational approach and materials are proprietary, so any ‘lessoned learned’ overcoming challenges unique to Lowell would not be shared with other Lowell public schools.
- The charter school will selectively recruit students, draining talent and public money from LSS.
- That SABIS North America is HQ’d in Minnesota, with a global parent Corp out of Lebanon.
- The current board is comprised, partly, of folks associated to the troubled Lowell Community Charter School.

I used Teh Google and found some things to consider. Please view them below the fold.
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I have more questions than answers. My Socratic muse drives me.

- Are the terms now public? Some of the terms were shared on WCAP. Was that a “breach” or a “Press Release.”

- The SC and UTL leadership have come to terms. Those terms must be disclosed to the membership for an up or down vote. If the rank and file can know the terms, why can’t we? Or, can we?

- If one term is 1.5% pay raise to start “immediately”, if they hit June of 2012 with no long term accord; does the current contract come back or has the SC just handed the membership a floor of 1.5%? I’m going to guess that the deal reached, if accepted by the membership, will exist in perpetuity until a 2012 deal is struck. Or 2013, 2014 …..

- Will the UTL now turn its attention on the City Manager and City Council? Really, how could UTL leadership bind its membership to a long term deal without having the “bookends” set on their health care costs?

- Did the SC miss an opportunity to stake the UTL down on wages, allowing potential health care savings to come back to taxpayers?

- Does the City Council really think they will get to play with savings on the School side, captured by “plan design,” as they see fit? Like give it back to the taxpayers?

The SC is not coached by Bill Belechick. The UTL has a better game plan. I’m not going out on a limb to say this punt was the best play available, for both sides.

Now we turn to Bernie Lynch and the importance of the City Council election.

Update: I’m rescinding my football metaphor and substituting a golf ball. Did the School Committee chip it forward into the rough, the fairway or deeper into the woods? You play the ball where it lays.

Saw this on facebook:

Connie Martin Lowell-Schools
Home from mediation with good news for a change!!! Took a great deal of work from both sides but we did finally reach an agreement. Happy to be moving on to new challenges for the Lowell School Committee.

Update: I received an e-mail from Jackie Doherty at 2:38am. She wrote to thank me for coming to the public hearing, last night. To end on a happier note, she closed with this:

“Also, a quick six hours later we had with an agreement with the UTL …“

Folks, there is plenty of talk out there about expanding the MCAS tests to include more subjects. For sure, a standardized test has its place. We rely on the SAT to help evaluate High School graduates seeking to attend a college or university. However, let’s, as we move forward, be wary of any unintended consequences. I don’t want those test scores tied around teachers necks.

The privatizers are coming.

BOSTON — An advocacy group pressing for a ballot law that would force schools to prioritize teacher effectiveness over seniority in hiring, layoff, and transfer decisions says it has amassed more than 100,000 voter signatures.

The state’s largest teacher’s union is gearing up to fight the proposal in court.

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The Sun has an article about the school committee-teacher contract negotiations. I have a few things to say about it.

First, the reported rejection of the school committee’s offer. Look, I am sympathetic of the fact that the teachers have gone without a cost of living raise (just step increases) for the more than two years there has been no contract. It’s not fair, and it’s frustrating I am sure. Teachers work hard, and should be compensated like professionals. Their job is so important to a strong community.

However, I think asking for too much right now forces the school committee to choose between raises, and JOBS. Chapter 70 money is merely level-funded right now, if even that, and the city can hardly afford to greatly increase their part of the school budget, given the amount of local aid from the state. Medical insurance and other expenses are going up, up, up. This eats into the budget every year. We’re in a serious downtown for heaven’s sake! People are getting laid off right, left, and center in both the private AND the public sector. Why doesn’t this reality sink in? Accept a modest forward-going raise that kicks in over time so the school committee can feel confident they can fund it, or watch colleagues get laid off!!

I am a public and private union sympathizer, but Paul Georges sometimes make it VERY hard for me to sympathize with the teacher’s union and their demands. This isn’t the first time that’s happened. I know his job is to be a hard ass, but enough is enough.

However, that is not the only outrage in that article, and now we come to the real reason for this post. From the article (important part in bold):

As contract negotiations continue behind closed doors between the School Committee and United Teachers of Lowell, one School Committee member tells The Sun that union leaders refused a 3 percent raise offered by the committee this week.

“They are sharks,” said the committee member, who agreed to speak anonymously because negotiations are protected by executive-session privilege. “We have really extended ourselves with the best offer we could make, but it is not enough for them.”

Who the goddamned hell broke executive session rules to comment on the rejection in the first place??

I would like to see that person LOSE the upcoming election. What. An. IDIOT. We NEED to know who that person is.

Of course, the Sun went to Paul Georges for a reaction to the anonymous comment, which included a very incendiary “they are sharks.”

If you thought the negotiations have been grueling, unproductive, and contentious up til now, just wait. Thanks to this stupid farking anonymous School Committee member, the teachers now have an excuse to be even more pissed off. And rightly so. The rules of negotiation were violated by one party. This is not negotiating in good faith. Haven’t we had enough public personnel fights fought in the pages of the Lowell Sun (the former Superintendent) to be smart enough to refrain from this sort of ethical lapse?

My god. If we do not find out what elected moron commented and leaked executive session negotiations, then we need to concentrate on ousting all the incumbents we can and replacing them with all the challengers running. Even though I am a supporter of some of the incumbents.

If I were the rest of the School Committee, I would publicly come out and state they were not the leak, so by process of elimination, we can figure out who was. Sure, there’s a chance someone might lie about it, but if we continue to have elected officials undermining delicate negotiations, I am ready with the pitchfork of my vote to retire them posthaste. And you should be too.

I really loved this post on charter schools (where one progressive, Freddie deBoer, takes down pro-charter progressive Matt Yglesias for his argument that charter schools provide choice for poor people and therefore are good). Bold is mine.

Matt Yglesias pulls out his new hobby horse: rich people have more choices than poor people, charter schools increase choices for poor people (even if they don’t work!), and for this reason we should, I take it, undertake all the union-smashing ideas beloved of the reform movement.

… “rich people have more choices than poor people” is another way of saying “we live under capitalism.” Rich people are always going to have more choices because that’s the point of money. It is indeed the job of government to provide for certain material needs that the poor cannot procure for themselves. And the government should do the best job it possibly can. But government shouldn’t be in the business of artificially providing choice under the bizarre notion that just having choice is a virtue in and of itself, and it really shouldn’t be in the business of providing choices that can’t be proven to work.

Talking about choice as if it is a benefit regardless of the objective reality of whether the choices are beneficial is bizarre. And the idea that tax dollars should pay for that choice, in that absence of evidence as to why, is just a bridge too far. This seems like simple sense to me.

[…]

I’ll ask again, as I asked in the prior post: why does this argument count against public education and not against any other governmental enterprise? Again, rich people have many more choices in transportation than poor people. Should the government fund a system of charter buses that perform about the same service as the regular bus? Where are Yglesias’s posts calling for such a thing? Or perhaps it’s a voucher model he favors. Should we allow any average citizen to withdraw his or her “share” of the public transit budget and use that money to purchase a car? If choice is so compelling, absent of any evidence that the choices being presented actually work, why isn’t Yglesias out beating the bushes for such a policy? Even this is a generous comparison: I’m quite sure that a Toyota can do as good of or better a job than the city bus. The jury is still out on charter schools.

This is the best takedown of the “choice” argument for charter schools I’ve seen.

And there are many studies out there that show that charters don’t perform any better, and may perform worse, than public schools. Draining our public schools of money and students doesn’t help us solve the problems in our public schools, and it appears to put many of our kids on shaky educational ground. As deBoer says, “dividing public funding for schools, even if you preserve per pupil funding, can effectively reduce resources, because education funding is largely based on pooled costs.”

Charters are less accountable, and often exclude underperforming students via selective enrollment, leaving those students behind to disproportionately burden the public schools but with no additional money to address their issues. But beyond that, maybe it’s just not our job as a society to provide everyone with tons of choices. Our job as a society is to set up a system that allows for some minimum sort of level playing field - which we do, by providing a public school system. We shouldn’t take our eyes off of improving our public schools in favor of some false notion that choice has some sort of intrinsic virtue.

[Via dkos.]

The rain didn’t dampen the spirits of Kristin Ross-Sitcawich and her supporters tonight. The lure of Heritage Ice Cream should be duly accounted for. :v)

Kristin covered the tenets of her campaign:
- Data driven strategic planning to include investment of resources back into our classrooms.
- Performance based budgeting to improve transparency and efficiency.
- Expand collaboration with our business community and increase parent participation to provide better support to our students in and out of school.

The points are captured in the brief video:

(Bear with the phone ring intro. Two phones went off as KRS was leading into her remarks. She made the best of it.)

The two points that stuck out for me:
- The performance based budget made the “ask” to taxpayers easier because costs are justified.
- Having the School Superintendant go into the neighborhoods and present the budget. Not only does it justify the cost, but it gives the Supt. a chance to highlight all the good things Lowell’s schools are doing.

Our schools do great things. That is true. The bookkeeping? Not so much.

Kristin is headed in the right direction. She will definately help bring Lowell schools along.

Find out more at www.kristinforlowellkids.com

One of the Sun’s Real Reporters™, Jen Myers, has an interesting piece in the Sun today (the real reason I wanted to peruse the Sun’s horrid front page today, when I wound up distracted by the silly I just posted about below). It begins to paint a very different picture of the very public “battle” between the School Committee and Dr. Chris Scott. In a rather even handed way, it outlines concerns that we all should have when it comes to how our superintendent has been operating.

Given how well I know several of the people involved, I always knew there was more to this story than Campanini wanted to sell us. (I trust that guy about as far as I can throw my Toyota. Or the 15-foot snowbank out in front of my house.)

The two key issues raised by committee members since Scott’s announcement are the use of two literacy consultants at the Murkland School, and the movement of several students out of the Molloy Alternative School program.

At the committee’s Jan. 5 meeting, member Jackie Doherty said she was “blindsided” when she found out that the $1,400-a-day consultants from Teachers for Teachers were being used as part of the underperforming Murkland School’s turnaround plan.

The article mentions that the acceptance of these consultant’s contracts happened in October, and of course this issue has been aired out before, a bit. However:

Doherty and committee member Connie Martin both expressed concern that the consultants were working in the district last fall prior to the School Committee’s vote appropriating funding.

“Working without a contract is illegal,” Martin said. “It is a huge issue.”

Scott’s answer is that they were working at risk, but if Martin is correct, it little matters, and should not have been done. What appears to me is, Scott asked for forgiveness instead of permission, misled (either by accident or deliberately, I couldn’t say) about the rules behind the grants, and what was the School Committee going to do, vote to not give the consultants a contract after they’d been on the job already?

At that meeting, committee member Connie Martin said she felt the $75,000 in grant money could be better spent to hire a full-time staff member, rather than on 48 days of work from the consultants.

48 days compared to a year?? Ug. The fact remains, had there been a proposal ahead of time as to what to do with the grant, the School Committee might have found a way to more efficiently spend that money, including a non-consultant position that could have been for the entire year, instead of using up the grant money on expensive outside consultants. Or they might have gone with Scott’s plan, if it was a good one. But they didn’t get that chance. Since the role of the School Committee is oversight, you have to give them the chance to fill that role. Or else why elect them?

Something new to me, however, is the Molloy School issue (the alternative high school), where there seems to be a dispute about policy changes there that the SC were not made aware of, and that “between June and November, the Molloy’s population fell from 90 students to 55.”

It’s a complicated issue, so (since it’s a Jen Myers article) I recommend you go read more, but it stems from, basically, this:

Former Molloy School guidance counselor Judith Flood said she spoke to several of the Molloy School upperclassmen who were transferred back to LHS and they said they did not want to go.

“They were told there were not going to be any more 11th or 12th graders there anymore,” she said. “Some dropped out because they could not go to a school the size of Lowell High for their own reasons. We have lost a lot of students, we have lost them to the streets.”

There appears to be some students being lost along the way, dropping out because they were shuffled around. That’s concerning, but what’s more concerning is that big policy changes appear to have been made, which at least should have been reported to the SC. Scott claims that there were no big policy changes, but if there weren’t, why did we suddenly see the population of that school reduced so sharply? Again, there was a forgiveness-rather-than-permission atmosphere here, and since the SC has to take the ultimate blame for the dropout rates and for what happens to our students, giving them no chance on oversight when that is their traditional role seems, at best, poor policy.

Then finally, for me, there’s the fact that Scott decided to take her contract dispute to the newspaper where her BFF was sure to give her lots of cover, and to the unions (smacking of the Cox resignation and the city unions). That leaves a very bad taste in my mouth, and it looks like bullying to me. I think this superintendent may just have a bad track record of working within the confines of her job, and if it were one instance, or two, maybe that’s forgivable…but once it becomes a pattern, I have to wonder if she’s the right fit for Lowell after all.

You know what to do today. Go exercise your democratic rights. (Update - find out where you vote and see a ballot preview here!)

Having been so busy lately (teaching, business, etc) I haven’t had much time to post about this election. But suffice to say, I am an enthusiastic NO on all three ballot questions. If any of these pass, we will see a regression in our state, and you will not like the results.

Regarding question one (return of the alcohol exemption) and question three (rollback of the sales tax to 3%), the last thing we need to do in the middle of a time of reduced revenues due to economic woes nationwide is to reduce revenues further by gutting taxes. Yes, math still works the way you were taught in school.

Look, no one loves paying taxes. Everyone would love to have that that $1.25 back on your $20 purchase. However, is that worth seeing more teachers laid off, fewer police, and longer lines at the RMV? We’ve cut the fat, folks, long ago. In fact, Patrick has done a lot to reform the state government - including state transportation department consolidation, which Republican governors have been talking about for years and never accomplished. We’ve started cutting the bone during this recession. Further reducing revenues is suicidal. Forget all the progress we’ve made on jobs, green initiatives, and our kids’ education if we have to cut more essential programs.

With regards to the alcohol tax rollback: don’t listen to the alcohol lobby that you are being “double taxed” on alcohol. What a lot of freaking whining! The excise tax is on volume and is so minuscule, it’s hardly even noticeable - if the excise tax were repealed, prices would hardly change at all. Most other states have a sales tax that applies to alcohol, alongside an excise tax. What the longstanding tax exemption on alcohol was, was a gift and a giveaway. Alcohol is not an essential purchase, so why the hell was it exempt? It should be subject to the same tax that is on all other nonessential goods.

On the sales tax reduction - really, you’re going to save about $3 on a $100 purchase. And remember, sales tax is not applied to most essentials in MA - clothing (unless you buy expensive Gucci) or groceries, for a start. A huge chunk of our discretionary spending budget comes from the sales tax. Is that worth seeing hundreds of teachers laid off? Or unsafe streets? The sales tax cut would be worth a loss of $20 million dollars to Lowell alone, if the cut were applied in full to local aid and Chapter 70 monies from the state. How many city services and school programs do you think $20 million would cut? And since it looks impossible, politically, for Congress to pass another stimulus bill next year, we will be losing the ARRA funding, which has been floating much of our state deficit from reduced tax receipts - our state would be further devastated by the loss of over half the sales tax.

On question 2, the elimination of comprehensive permitting to build affordable housing, also has a regressive result. Of course, many people are frustrated with this law and how it is applied in our communities. However, the repeal of it will have a devastating effect on families who need affordable housing. I don’t have to tell you we have some damned expensive housing costs here in MA. It’s a side effect of our leading-the-nation prosperity. The more people in the middle class and up can afford, the more expensive housing is. The more dense the jobs and opportunity, the more the demand for housing. For those who are in jobs that do not have the same level of opportunity, or for those who are underemployed, disabled, or retired with no savings, the availability of affordable housing is paramount to their survival.

Affecting how difficult is it to build affordable housing in Massachusetts means keeping some families out of the prosperity. That’s not what our state is all about. Maybe the law needs reform (and maybe it doesn’t), but eliminating it is no way to do it. It will only hurt some of our most vulnerable citizens. We’re better than that.

So, I will vote no to all three of the ballot questions. I wish we didn’t have to keep having the same damn debate over revenues and taxes - it’s exhausting to constantly have to defend what is undesirable by any human being. Where’s our ballot question enacting positive initiatives?? But as Governor Patrick has always said, we have to decide what we want government to do, and then decide how to pay for it. Ignoring the reality (and basic math) of the situation to vote for something that feels good now but will hurt us in the long run is just stupid.