"Education reformers have a name for the resistance: the education 'Blob.' The Blob includes the teachers unions, but also janitors and principals unions, school boards, PTA bureaucrats, local politicians and so on." (John Stossel, The Blob That Ate Children.) In Kansas, we're seeing the Blob at full activation, vigorously protecting its interests. The source of the Blob's consternation is a bill in the Kansas Legislature that would add charter schools and tax credit scholarships to the educational landscape in Kansas. (Kansas does have charter schools at present, but the law is so stacked in favor of the Blob's interests that…
Following is news coverage and reaction to the Kansas school finance lawsuit Luke Gannon, et al v. State of Kansas. Press release from Kansas Supreme Court The court declared certain school funding laws fail to provide equity in public education as required by the Kansas Constitution and returned the case to Shawnee County District Court to enforce the court's holdings. The court further ordered the three-judge panel that presided over the trial of the case to reconsider whether school funding laws provide adequacy in public education -- as also required by the constitution. ... The court set a July 1,…
No matter which side wins the Kansas school finance lawsuit, we already know who loses: Kansas schoolchildren. The last time schools won a suit, the state lowered its standards for schools. Talking about school spending is easy, even though most Kansas public school spending advocates refuse to acknowledge the totality of spending. (Or if they acknowledge the total level, they may make excuses for the spending not being effective.) Advocating for more spending is easy. It's easy because the Kansas Constitution says the state must spend on schools. Parents want more spending, and so do teachers, public employee unions, and…
In this episode of WichitaLiberty.TV: There are efforts to have the Kansas Legislature expand the open records law to include the spending records of several taxpayer-funded agencies, but the City of Wichita wants to keep the records secret. Then, did you know the Kansas teachers union has a media response team? Finally, Arthur Brooks makes the moral case for free enterprise. Episode 32, broadcast February 23, 2014. View below, or click here to view at YouTube.
Letters to the editor in your hometown newspaper may have the air of being written by a concerned parent of Kansas schoolchildren, but they might not be what they seem. It's fashionable for school advocacy groups to bash their critics as mere lackeys of a top-down driven power structure. It is the advocates for school spending -- teachers, parents, children, school principals -- that are the true grassroots, they say. So it might be surprising to learn that Kansas' largest teachers union has a plan and mechanism for distributing its message. It's called the KNEA Media Response Team, and it…
When comparing Kansas school test scores to those of other states, it's important to consider disaggregated data. Otherwise we may -- figuratively speaking -- let the forest obscure the trees. Kansas school leaders are proud of Kansas schools, partly because of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as "The Nation's Report Card." Kansas ranks pretty high among the states on this test. It's important, however, to examine the results from a few different angles to make sure we understand the entire situation. An illustrative video is available here, or at the end of this article. Data…
From Kansas Policy Institute. KNEA: supporting institutions at children’s expense By Dave Trabert The Kansas National Education Association’s slogan is “Making public schools great for every child.” It may be a coincidence that their slogan seems to emphasize institutions over students, but many of their actions quite deliberately put institutional interests first. My belief has nothing to do with individual teachers. Kansas is blessed with thousands of dedicated teachers who get up every morning thinking of ways to help students and they deserve citizens’ gratitude and support for everything they do. My comments are not directed at teachers, but at…
At a time when Kansas was spending more on schools due to an order from the Kansas Supreme Court, the state lowered its already low standards for schools. This is the conclusion of the National Center for Education Statistics, based on the most recent version of Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP Scales. NCES is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations, and is located within the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences. The mapping project establishes a relationship between the tests each state…
Rejection of Kansas National Education Association (KNEA) by teachers in a small Kansas school district could start a trend. From Heritage Foundation's The Foundry. By James Sherk and Michael Cirrotti. Teachers in Deerfield, Kansas, just did something unusual -- they voted to decertify their union. The Kansas National Education Association (KNEA) no longer represents them. Teachers disliking their union representation do not make news, but teachers actually leaving their union do: The law makes it very difficult for teachers to remove unwanted unions. Unlike most public officials, unions do not stand for re-election, so their members cannot regularly hold them…
Critics of public schools usually explain that they're not faulting individual teachers. Instead, they target their criticism at the teachers union, bureaucratic school administration, or "the system" in general. So when we observe the actions of teachers, we're correct to wonder if they're acting as citizens, or as teachers representing their school districts, or as union members, or in some other role. This issue is important when we take notice of the actions of teachers at a recent meeting of the South-Central Kansas Legislative Delegation in Wichita. Here's a message tweeted during that meeting from Judy Loganbill, a Wichita school…
