Monday, October 08, 2007

DC idiots still shovelling in more money



D.C. public schools would receive $81 million in additional revenue to fund a sweeping restructuring of the central office and help cover a projected budget shortfall, under a plan announced yesterday by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. Fenty (D) and School Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee characterized the funding proposal as a one-time cost that would allow them to streamline the system, improve programs, including food service, and maintain surplus school building space.

The additional spending comes in concert with a proposal Rhee is drafting that would ask the D.C. Council to suspend the city's personnel law so that she could terminate staff members. The chancellor said yesterday that she intends to cut about 200 of the central office's 914 positions and would use some of the additional dollars to offer severance packages to employees. She declined to elaborate.

The money for Fenty's plan would come primarily from a pot of $100 million in unexpected tax revenue identified last month by Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi, the mayor said. At the time, Gandhi said the windfall came from continued growth in the city's residential and commercial property markets, and Fenty quickly pledged to use much of the tax money for schools.

The plan marks a sharp shift for Fenty. When he campaigned for mayor last year, Fenty said repeatedly that the school system did not need more money. In the spring, he took direct control of the struggling 50,000-student school system and set its budget for fiscal 2008 at about $800 million in local funds, approximately the same level as last year. "We still believe the current budget is what is needed for the day-to-day operations," Fenty said at a news conference on the steps of the John A. Wilson Building. "But there are issues, including layoffs and other emergencies, that need to be taken care of right away."

The funding plan requires approval from the D.C. Council, and Fenty appeared to have support of a solid majority of the 13-member body. Seven members stood with him at the news conference and two others sent letters of support. "I have confidence the mayor and chancellor will use this money wisely," said Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), chairman of the Committee on Finance and Revenue. Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) did not attend the news conference, but Fenty said he had been briefed. Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) sent Fenty a letter chastising him for announcing the plan publicly before fully briefing him. "This is disrespectful and politically damaging," Barry wrote.

Mary Levy, a longtime D.C. schools advocate for the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, had said that Fenty would probably find he needs to spend more before being able to fix systemic problems in areas such as human resources and financial systems. Yesterday, she said she wanted to know more details about how the new money will be spent. "I'm waiting for more precision," Levy said.

More here





Australian Leftist leader to raise the bar for schools

He sounds good but the teachers' unions will nobble him

KEVIN Rudd has attacked the nation's schools as unacceptably patchy in quality, expressing sympathy for parents struggling to find schools that provide a decent education. And the Labor leader has promised to impose on schools a level of rigour not yet seen in Australia by linking funding to improved standards rather than handing state governments or private schools "a blank cheque".

In an interview with The Weekend Australian yesterday, Mr Rudd also called for four-year fixed electoral terms "entrenched in stone" and said John Howard had created a whole new class of "forgotten people" marooned by his rejection of traditional liberalism. He also posed his alternative to Mr Howard's vision statement, delivered in the 1996 election campaign, that if elected, he wanted Australians to feel "relaxed and comfortable". Mr Rudd said he wanted Australians to be "confident in their kids' future, confident in Australia's future".

Mr Rudd made the comments in Sydney after a hectic week of campaigning on public hospital standards and amid increasing tension over when the Prime Minister will name a date for the federal election. Asked whether parents could be confident that any government school would provide an adequate education, Mr Rudd said one of the education system's worst problems was its variability. He said he felt sympathy for parents who faced a "vexed choice" on schooling, admitting he had seen excellence in public and private schools as well as inadequacy. "What you'll find us doing increasingly is lifting the bar nationally on performance measures for schools," he said. "When we talk about a new national curriculum, let me tellyou, its core hallmark when it comes to English, maths, science, history, languages, will be absolute rigour."

In an indication that the Opposition Leader is likely to take on the powerful teachers' unions if he wins office, Mr Rudd said Labor would negotiate a national curriculum with states and tie funding increases to improvements in educational outcomes. "We are doing kids an absolute disservice by a lack of rigour in schools' curricula, an absolute disservice by not testing them forrigour all the way through," he said. "And we are doing an absolute disservice to our kids if we don'thave intervention strategies properly resourced to deal with literacy and numeracy non-performance." A Labor government would deliver to the education system "a rigour that I don't believe any federal government has embraced before".

While he agreed he had no magic wand, Mr Rudd said a carrot-and-stick approach would deliver change, with schools measured against tough standards that would be regularly lifted. "Unless school performance continues to improve against robust measures of learning outcomes for kids, whether it's in trades or it's in academic subjects or their primary school equivalents, then we are not in the business of signing blank cheques," he said.

Mr Rudd is a product of the Queensland state school system and sent his three children to state primary schools and private secondary schools. Having ruled out a return to Labor's 2004 election policy, which included funding cuts affecting a "hit list" of exclusive private schools, Mr Rudd said his ambition was for the standard of Australian public and private schools to be the best in the world.....

Mr Rudd said he wanted Australians to feel proud of their country and confident it had the the best-educated and most highly skilled workforce in the Western world. He said he wanted "a country which celebrates enterprise, initiative and success, but which doesn't throw the fair go out the back door".

He said Mr Howard had spent his 11 years in office trying to shift the national character towards one opposed to concern for others and accused him of attempting to "terminate the fair go with extreme prejudice". ....

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