Category Archives: Activism

CUEE Campaign Disclosure Report Completed

Received yesterday.
From: Sam Allen
Date: November 6, 2011 5:26:15 PM EST
Subject: CUEE Campaign Disclosure Report Completed

Friends,
Attached is a copy of the CUEE Disclosure Report. How many children could this have help!!!!! How many teachers and support staff could we have saved? Are we in still in a recession?

Thanks,
Sam Allen
—
Samuel Allen, Superintendent Emeritus

Double Lowndes County Commission tonight: Work 4:30 PM Regular 5:30 PM

Alcohol, rezoning, hospital, debt, and an election! Because Tuesday is Election Day, the Lowndes County Commission changed its regular meeting to Monday. Work sessions are usually Monday in the morning; today the Work Session is at 4:30 PM, just before the Regular Session at 5:30 PM. It’s a busy agenda, including two alcohol licenses, two rezonings, and an appointment to the Hospital Authority of Valdosta and Lowndes County (VLCHA); that’s the body that authorized South Georgia Medical Center (SGMC) buying Smith Northview Hospital, after which SGMC got the County Commission to have we the taxpayers guarantee $100 million in bonds for expansion. Hm, and “SGMC Revenue Certificates” is on this agenda, too.

Here’s the agenda:

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2011, 4:30 p.m.
REGULAR SESSION, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2011, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor
Continue reading →

We don’t need consolidation to change anything that needs to be changed —Barbara Stratton

Received today on Tracking can help all distributions of students —new research” of the blog “On the LAKE Front. -jsq
I’m definitely against consolidation, but I don’t like tracking either. When I was self employed breeding & training race horses in the 80’s I worked part time as a substitute teacher. The county system used a form of tracking that grouped students into slow, medium & fast learners. My children were in the top group so it worked well for them. However, I did not like the system because I observed a lot of students who lost the desire to try because they were classified in the slow learner group.

I finished the last month for one 7th grade class & had to sit in on the end of year decisions to pass or fail. One student was

Continue reading →

Tracking can help all distributions of students —new research

It turns out tracking students can help all students if done properly. CUEE’s invited speaker Terry Jenkins co-authored a paper back in 1997 about Detracking Troup County: Providing an Exemplary Curriculum for All Students. He appeared to be saying de-tracking was an advantge of school consolidation. Back then tracking was apparently considered a bad thing. Recent research shows that actually tracking students can help all levels of students. So yet another supposed reason or benefit of consolidation turns out not to be true.

Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer wrote for American Economic Review, 101(5): 1739–74, DOI:10.1257/aer.101.5.1739, Peer Effects, Teacher Incentives, and the Impact of Tracking: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Kenya

To the extent that students benefit from high-achieving peers, tracking will help strong students and hurt weak ones. However, all students may benefit if tracking allows teachers to better tailor their instruction level. Lower-achieving pupils are particularly likely to benefit from tracking when teachers have incentives to teach to the top of the distribution. We propose a simple model nesting these effects and test its implications in a randomized tracking experiment conducted with 121 primary schools in Kenya. While the direct effect of high-achieving peers is positive, tracking benefited lower-achieving pupils indirectly by allowing teachers to teach to their level. (JEL I21, J45, O15)
The first sentence is the standard “diversity” argument that CUEE keeps making. The authors state it so as to poing out that their study finds that it’s far from the whole story.

I find this part especially interesting: Continue reading →

The Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs in public safety net use by low-paid employees

Interesting study from California whose results probably also apply to Georgia, showing that Wal-Mart pays about a third less than other retail companies, so little that Wal-Mart employees tend to use food stamps and public medical assistance and housing to stay afloat, which thus “creates a hidden cost to the state’s taxpayers.”

Arindrajit Dube and Ken Jacobs wrote for UC Berkeley Labor Center, August 2004, Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs: Use of Safety Net Programs by Wal-Mart Workers in California. According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center:

This widely publicized report finds Wal-Mart’s wage and health benefits packages for its California workers to be below average as compared to the overall retail sector in California. The authors also find a greater reliance upon public assistance programs among Wal-Mart workers as compared to other California retail workers. Finally, the authors estimate the additional costs to taxpayers of “Wal-Martization”—the adoption of Wal-Mart’s wage and health benefits standards by retailers throughout California.
Here is an extract from the study: Continue reading →

How about as a first step the Chamber pledge… —Jim Parker

Received today on Why the Chamber Supports Unification. -jsq
So true, John. There was no meat in the whole letter. The last line sums it up, “We BELIEVE…” yada, yada, yada. Faith based thinking might fly in religious institutions, but in the education of our children, we have a pretty good handle on what is needed. Deferring to those trained and with years of experience in the education of our children, who have brought countless facts to the discussion, none of which the Chamber can or has bothered to refute, I will go along with both Boards of Education and vote NO to consolidation.

I did note that Mr Gooding offered to “combine our resources and our efforts and work together as a community to transform two average school systems…” Since he used the first person plural “our,”

Continue reading →

Jobs, Title VI, and education —George Boston Rhynes @ VBOE 25 October 2011

George Rhynes tied together parents, jobs, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and local education at the VBOE 25 October 2011 open forum. His question:
If we are concerned about our children really getting an education, better be concerned about equal employment and getting federal funds, so these parents get their equal share of the jobs, in the community…. I’m talking about the qualified parents that apply for jobs in this area and some of you know they don’t get them.
[applause]

Here’s Part 1 of 2: Continue reading →

Schools serving children in poverty well —Karen Noll

Received yesterday. -jsq
From: Karen Noll
To: chamber@valdostachamber.com
Cc: [many other people]

Dear Mr. Gooding and Chamber of Commerce,

In response to your most recent correspondence, I dare say many ask why the Chamber has such a single focus on an unproven plan with little or no supporting data. Yet again your answers to the many questions about the reasons that the Chamber is acting in this manner are insufficient and demonstrate quite clearly that you are steadfastly working to undermine the very community you claim to support.

Maybe it is my academic background, but I will use data to support my assertions and hopefully rectify some of the misinformation that has been so disruptive to this community, a discussion of a very important issue: the education of our children.

According to the Chamber’s own study, education ranked

12th out of 16 factors in importance to businesses coming to our community. The Chamber’s own survey revealed that a low crime rate and the business friendliness of the local agencies were most important to businesses in 2009.

Our community sadly hosts a large population of children living in poverty, and education is the best avenue to future success. For this reason, I am very pleased to report that our economically disadvantaged students in Valdosta City Schools met or exceeded the expected CRCT scores for the district last year. This is no small feat and we have some very dedicated educators to thank for this achievement.

Furthermore, research shows that “larger district size has been shown to be negatively associated with the achievement of impoverished students” ( Howley, C. 1996). This means that the fantastic achievements of our most disadvantaged students will be reversed in a larger district and all of the hard work of VCS educators will be lost in order to create, as you claim, “one great public school system”.

Two years ago the city school district asked Chamber members to provide input on their Strategic Improvement Plan through an online survey. Only 5.2% of responses came from Chamber members. Valdosta City Schools encouraged input from all stakeholders, yet these Chamber members in large part did not respond. Now the Chamber claims to have THE solution for the schools they had no time for when asked for feedback.

Research consistently shows that bigger does not mean better in education. So, ‘combining our resources’ does not bring more money, better educational outcomes, or cost savings. According to the Lowndes County Board of Education consolidation would put a number of teachers out of work. That would mean fewer customers in local businesses and less tax revenue. In other words, school consolidation would negatively impact our local economy and its businesses.

The Chamber is acting irresponsibly toward this community and the children served by the Valdosta City Schools. I am again appalled by the callousness of this organization, the petty name calling and repeated misinformation. It is crystal clear that CUEE and the Chamber are not interested in what is best for our children.

As a positive and strong community we will rise above the bad apple that misbehaves and move forward because it is the right thing to do, and we will continue to model appropriate behavior to our children. At the same time, we as a community must remember the lesson we have learned today: ‘greed can blind’. We are called to reach out to and to help those in need. We will continue to work together as a community and work toward the brightest future for our children.

Thank you, Mr. Gooding, for reminding us again of the path we are called to take.

Vote No for our children!!

My best wishes to you,
Karen Noll

Why the Chamber Supports Unification —Tom Gooding, Chairman, VLCoC

My opinion is appended. -jsq
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 11:17:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tom Gooding <chamber@valdostachamber.com>
Subject: Why the Chamber Supports Unification

Dear Chamber Members:

Some ask why the Chamber supports school system unification, instead of focusing on poverty. The answer is very simple: The Chamber’s mission is to build a strong and healthy community, resulting in job opportunities for our citizens, which addresses poverty. Improving public education is the single most important thing we can do to build a strong community, grow jobs, and reduce poverty.

Valdosta’s business community consistently ranks

Continue reading →

After the VLCIA meeting: brain storming sessions —Dr. Noll

Dr. Noll sent this postscript to What can we do as a community to better cooperate? -jsq
I was approached after the meeting and informed that the Industrial Authority intends to invite communal leaders like myself to brain storming sessions in the future, although I do not know yet the design for such a forum, nor have I received any invitations as of today. Still, if there is one thing that has again become clear in the context of the consolidation issue, our community desperately needs structures that a) allow for more transparency and b) forums in which we can take advantage of the creative energy that exist in our community, INSTEAD of trying to shut people out, to hide information from them, or to push through divisive agendas.

It is my hope that the leaders of the Industrial Authority, as well as the City Council, the Lowndes County Commission, and the Chamber of Commerce for that matter, understand the opportunity we have: to turn a weakness (as exposed by the way we handled biomass, and are currently handling the consolidation issue) into a strength … via communication and cooperation … as is appropriate for a true community.

-Michael.