Recently in Schools.K-12 Category

Source: Lee Fang, Republic Report, May 14th 2012

On Saturday, Republic Report's Zaid Jilani reported that the National Association of Charter School Authorizers was one of the many covert members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the controversial front group that helps lobbyists ghostwrite state law. As Jilani noted, NACSA is funded in large part by taxpayer dollars...NACSA worked closely with ALEC to promote charter schools. As we've reported, ALEC legislation allows for-profit charter school companies to siphon tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. In many cases, the ALEC-authored legislation provides for unproven online school companies to administer the charter schools.

Source: Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Chicago Tribune, May 16, 2012

Chicago Public Schools plans to create 60 more charter schools over five years, which would increase the share of privately run charters to about a quarter of all schools in the district.

The plan for charter growth, part of a larger proposal for 100 new schools over the same five years, is laid out in an application seeking $20 million for charter schools from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Right now the district's 675 schools include 110 charters, which get tax dollars but are privately controlled. Private organizations also operate an additional 27 schools, 19 of which are managed by the Academy for Urban School Leadership.

Source: Ty Tagami, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 11, 2012

Facing a budget crunch, Atlanta Public Schools wants to replace about half its custodial staff with contract workers. Staffers were told of the plans this week. "We were informed that our facilities department had to be downsized by 100 employees," said Dorothy White, a custodian at APS for 28 years....School system spokesman Keith Bromery placed the number of job cuts closer to 75 of the 150 custodians on staff....Bromery said Superintendent Erroll Davis wants to keep custodial staffers only at elementary schools, and only during the day. Contractors will clean overnight at all schools and during the day at middle schools and high schools, he said....

Source: Zack McMillin, Memphis Commercial-Appeal, May 6, 2012

Those opposed to the creation of municipal school districts in Shelby County believe significant legal barriers remain even after the state legislature's passage of a bill last week designed to allow as many as six municipalities to hold referendums for new school systems....
Related:
Shelby County, Tenn., municipalities seeking their own school systems may face challenges
Source: American School & University, May 4, 2012

Source: Kurt Madden, Lansing State Journal, May 10, 2012

Dean Transportation will bus all East Lansing students beginning this fall, becoming the first suburban school district in Ingham County to use the company to transport all of its students. According to Kellie Dean, owner and manager of the 1,100-employee Lansing company, 10 school districts and two intermediate school districts have signed up with the company in the last two years to provide busing....Superintendent David Chapin said the move is expected to save about $120,000 a year in each of the next five years, with a spike of $400,000 in the first year because the district will sell its 12 buses to Dean Transportation.

Source: Zak Koeske, Fair Lawn Patch, May 9, 2012

The Board of Education will vote next Thursday on a revised cuts plan that aims to fill a $450,000 hole in the school district's budget that was introduced last month when the board voted to retain 13 in-house custodians who were set to be replaced by contractors. The new plan would save the jobs of some, but not all of the custodians who had originally been on the district's chopping block. Superintendent Bruce Watson said all eight night custodian positions at the high school would still be privatized if the new proposal were to pass. The move would result in six layoffs, since one of those positions is already vacant and another is a retirement that wouldn't be filled.

Source: Jake Remaly, Madison Patch, May 9, 2012

Related:
- Custodian Outsourcing Talks Continue / Information submitted by four custodial services companies to be evaluated by committee.
Source: Jake Remaly, Madison Patch, April 4, 2012
- District Considers Outsourcing Custodial Services
Source: Jake Remaly, Madison Patch, March 28, 2012

Madison school administrators received information from four companies last week about custodial services for the district, a topic that will be discussed further by the Board of Education and with members of the union that represents the 19 custodians who work for Madison schools, Superintendent Dr. Michael Rossi said....Rossi said the union has made what the district would normally consider excellent offers under normal bargaining circumstances, but the district still needs to weigh the union's offers against proposals from companies.

Source: Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, Antitrust Division, Press Release, 12-557, April 30, 2012

In order to resolve antitrust concerns, National Express Corporation and Petermann Partners Inc. will divest several school bus contracts and associated assets in the states of Washington and Texas in order to proceed with their proposed merger, the Department of Justice announced today. National Express and Petermann contract with school districts throughout the United States to provide school bus services.

The parties have agreed to sell eight school bus transportation contracts in the states of Texas and Washington to Student Transportation of America Inc. (STA). The divested assets include transportation contracts in the school districts of Battle Ground and Hockinson in Washington and the school districts of Bastrop, Boyd, Eagle Mountain-Saginaw, Leander, Manor and Terrell, as well as Dallas-based KIPP Truth Academy, in Texas....The school boards and entities whose contracts are being divested are in the process of approving the transfer of the contracts.

Source: Joshua D. Angrist, Parag A. Pathak, Christopher R. Walters, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), IZA Discussion Paper Series, IZA DP No. 6525, April 2012

Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. Using the largest available sample of lotteried applicants to charter schools, we explore student-level and school-level explanations for this difference in Massachusetts. In an econometric framework that isolates sources of charter effect heterogeneity, we show that urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond that of urban public school students, while non-urban charters reduce achievement from a higher baseline. Student demographics explain some of these gains since urban charters are most effective for non-whites and low-baseline achievers. At the same time, non-urban charter schools are uniformly ineffective. Our estimates also reveal important school-level heterogeneity within the urban charter sample. A non-lottery analysis suggests that urban charters with binding, well-documented admissions lotteries generate larger score gains than under-subscribed urban charter schools with poor lottery record. Finally, we link charter impacts to school characteristics such as peer composition, length of school day, and school philosophy. The relative effectiveness of urban lottery-sample charters is accounted for by these schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to urban education.

Source: Tom Philpott, Mother Jones, May 4, 2012

... The city of Chicago, steered for years by privatization-happy Democrats Richard Daley and now Rahm Emanuel, has been heading down a similar path. Of the 11 new schools the city has built under a $1 billion program since 2006, 9 have no kitchen facilities and serve food based on what the Unite Here union, which organizes Chicago's cafeteria workers, calls the "frozen food model." But the workers fought back--and the famously contentious Mayor Emanuel and his education team blinked. In their contract negotiations with the city, the workers won a five-year moratorium on building any new kitchenless schools or converting old ones over to the heat-and-serve model. .... "We did petitions to parents, we did house visits and phone banks to our coworkers, we did our 'Let's Cook!' rally. And I think it was successful.