Cloaking Inequity

Have you noticed that the same jokers that are telling us our public schools are inadequate are the same jokers that have inadequately funded our schools for decades ($5.4 billion most recently in Texas)? In fact, the cheapistas want to wear the fact that Texas is next to last in school spending as a ribbon […]

Dr. Sonya Horsford, faculty at University of Nevada Las Vegas, and I will lead a peer-reviewed special issue to be published by Urban Education to examine community-based reforms and their implications for educational policy and accountability. Over the past several decades, there have been many, many community-based approaches in education that have shown promise. Recently, […]

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should […]

Our work group has had many questions on how a Community-Based Accountability process would occur on the local level (For CI’s full thread on Community-Based Accountability go here). I noted in a prior post that California had recently developed a Local Control and Accountability plan as part of their school finance reforms. I also noted […]

If you loosely based the generations of accountability in Texas on the testing regime, you could say that with the STAAR, Texas is in the midst of its third generation of accountability (Pre-NCLB TAAS being the first and Post-NCLB TAKS the second). We know that the state currently spends nearly $100 million a year for […]

Policymakers from Texas to California are either taking notice of Community-Based Accountability, and/or they are thinking on the same wavelength. The first positive sign that I posted on around New Years was that the High Performance Coalition of 20 districts in Texas empowered by SB 1557 were seeking to adopt a Community-Based Accountability and Assessment […]

From Edweek Living in Dialogue: In the past, I have shared the ideas of former Nebraska Commissioner of Education Doug Christensen, who speaks of the importance of local initiative, and also Yong Zhao, who has written about what he calls “mass localism.” Now, Julian Vasquez Heilig, along with a long list of co-authors, has offered a comprehensiveframework […]

I have discussed a Community-Based Accountability approach since September 2012 here on Cloaking Inequity. California, land of where the government micromanages everything the land of local control— wait, what?! has announced a form of Community-Based Accountability in trailer legislation and tied it to school finance (Thanks to Kevin Welner for the heads-up). For extensive description […]

How can we banish NCLB’s top-down and narrow paradigm? Here is how you do it… Accountability should foster collective community goals. In education, there are many measures of student success from school entry through graduation and beyond. Here are Community-Based Accountability Executive Summary and Key Features. Please forward and circulate widely. These are living documents and […]

I am giddy!! I had writer’s block all summer. I owed Professor Rich Milner and two co-authors (Dr. Muhummed Khalifa and Dr. Linda Tillman) my portion of a chapter for the upcoming Handbook of Urban Education to be published by Routledge. We were asked to write on a “direction for future work (and needs) in the field of […]

NEPC recently released a report entitled  Democracy Left Behind: How Recent Education Reforms Undermine Local School Governance and Democratic Education.  The press release states: “Local control” has been a bedrock principle of public schooling in America since its earliest days, but a new report concludes the concept “has all but disappeared” in discussions of education policy. […]