Here in Baltimore we here lots of ONE BALTIMORE-----in a city steeped in the history of EMPIRE-BUILDING OVERSEAS these several decades. Johns Hopkins is global because of this----
Educating broadly would have citizens reading these several decades about US corporations moving overseas, what they built, and how they operated. If we knew that we knew during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA the global Wall Street 1% and their 2% were bringing those structures back to the US.
What is different between China's history and American history? Great global merchants and old wealth came from thousands of years of trade between an Asia---a Europe---a Middle Far-East. These are where the global 1% and their 2% live. They see the North American and African continent as COLONIAL----no intentions of keeping a national sovereignty. This is why we are already seeing EXITS-----breaking down of US into independent Foreign Economic Zones. China has not joined the ONE WORLD CREW----as other BRIC nations because they see keeping that national sovereignty. Again, CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA represent that OLD EUROPEAN WEALTH---the people colonizing America---they do not want or need a US sovereignty.
'I.The Basis for One China, de Facto and de Jure
The One-China Principle has been evolved in the course of the Chinese people's just struggle to safeguard China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and its basis, both de facto and de jure, is unshakable'.
So what does all this have to do with US public schools and education for WE THE PEOPLE as citizens? If global Wall Street is allowed this march to ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE under global neo-liberal COMMON CORE corporate education we will not remain citizens and we will not be able to access REAL information. The DARK AGES were about just that -----the 99% of people lived as serfs being kept from accessing worldly information. US black citizens tied to slavery know that was used for centuries to keep them enslaved.
IT IS CRITICAL TO OUR STATUS OF CITIZENS---NOT SLAVES----TO KEEP OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION STRONG AND TO KEEP INFORMATION IN OUR CLASSROOMS OPEN AND BROAD.
THE HISTORY OF US PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN STRONG STEM CURRICULA-----WHY ARE GLOBAL 1% MAKING THIS EXCLUSIVE NOW?
They are hyping STEM to cover the fact that they are killing our humanities and liberal arts curricula no matter how many times global Wall Street pols say they are not.
WHAT IS STEM EDUCATION
WHAT IS STEM EDUCATION
By bdavis Posted:December 9, 2012
What is STEM
The simplest definition is what it stands for, which is science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. There are many organizations that are dedicated to this topic and they define this with their own objectives. The ultimate goal of STEM education is to encourage students to take an interest in STEM subjects at an early age. This should be beneficial to them when they enter the jobs market, and in turn it should benefit the greater economy. It is a simple definition with a straight forward goal.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has compiled a list of STEM designated degrees. This list is intended for foreign students who are studying in the U.S. on a valid student visa so they may qualify for certain optional training programs. But this is also a good reference for American students, and it show that STEM can be integrated into a variety of interests.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are an important part of education in a competitive global marketplace. In 2009, the United States educational system received some sobering news. The Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) ranked 15-year-old U.S. high-school students 18th in mathematics and 13th in science. These results were based on data from 34 participating nations. Some of the nations with higher student scores included much smaller and far less wealthy nations like Estonia, Slovenia and Finland. It was apparent that the U.S. educational system needed significant improvement in these areas if the students who would be the workforce of tomorrow were to have a competitive edge in a globalized, high-tech marketplace.
National and state educational policymakers renewed efforts begun in 2006 to improve the overall mathematics, science and technology literacy of U.S. students. These efforts became known as the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM, initiative.
Although many of the nation's public schools had already begun a greater focus on mathematics and science as part of their core curricula, new academies as well as existing educational institutions took the focus one step further. Applying for, and receiving, government and private business grants set up for STEM education initiatives, these schools aggressively promoted the concept with the express goal of graduating students competent in a variety of STEM subjects.
Schools pursuing these goals explored a variety of approaches such as smaller class sizes of 10 to 12 students with a one-to-one student/computer ratio, inquiry-based teaching methodologies and an active partnership with technology businesses that provide real-world applications for STEM subjects. Other schools made electronic textbooks, Skype and video-conferencing an integral part of the educational experience. In the state of Washington, for example, private funding supports special scholarships for students who score particularly well in these subjects on state or college entrance exams. Scholarship recipients agree to further pursue these subjects in college and work in Washington's STEM-related industries for a specified period of time after graduation.
Whatever innovative approaches were put into place, the STEM educational blueprint was paramount: integrating technology into the daily educational experience, specially trained teachers who knew how to best present these subjects, inquiry-based interactive teaching methodologies and, of course, a robust curriculum with adequate knowledge assessment practices.
Because of the government and business funding initiatives, becoming a STEM-designated school can mean access to significant financial resources. However, the specific criteria for becoming a designated school vary by state. There is the basic educational blueprint to which all designated schools must adhere, but each state has its own approach how to best follow that blueprint. As previously stated, many new academies and specialized schools have been launched that are essentially STEM schools. However, existing schools are also adjusting their curricula and teaching methodologies to win this designation.
Even though the initiative has solid support at the state and national level, not everyone is totally on-board with the extreme focus on STEM subjects. Some of these critics feel that elected officials and their business leader allies are trying to use the STEM education process to bolster the U.S. economy. There is no doubt that the jobs of tomorrow will mainly require high-skilled, technologically advanced workers. However, the education system may result in more qualified workers than there are jobs for them to fill.
Despite the critics, it is unlikely that state and national policymakers will rein in efforts to promote the curricula in as many schools as possible. State, national and private funding dollars are increasingly earmarked for this initiative, and there is a great deal of hope that the collective investment of these entities will result in superior mathematics and science literacy in U.S. students.
PISA evaluations take place every three years, which means that the 2012 data is being assessed for a 2013 release. Proponents and investors supporting STEM education will be looking closely at that data to see if the education policy changes and investment strategies have had the desired effect. If they have, then one can expect to see an even greater emphasis on STEM education in U.S. schools.
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We are hearing from all US labor and justice citizens that we KNOW US grads in STEM are being left unemployed or under-employed not in their fields while the global labor pool are taking those jobs in US city Foreign Economic Zones. This is happening because growing immigrant and foreign density in these US city Foreign Economic Zone creates a population not having rights---not having a connection to American and US history, quality of life, understanding of Democratic Republic and citizens with rights under a US Constitution.
We saw above a STEM national charter chain all sold in our US cities as what poor communities need to attain good jobs---even as we watch grads left behind.
When we listen to these global Wall Street player pols ---CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA----they are actively working to grow ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE using these STEM directives.
Our US public schools have always had strong STEM----along with strong liberal arts and humanities and the drop in student achievement came from a Clinton defunding and dismantling our public K-university---the same Clinton neo-liberals passing policy to defund and dismantle our strong public schools and STEM classes these few decades are now the ones saying we must have global corporate schools focused only on STEM.
'The U.S. Census Bureau reported today that 74 percent of those who have a bachelor's degree in science, technology, engineering and math — commonly referred to as STEM — are not employed in STEM occupations. In addition, men continue to be overrepresented in STEM, especially in computer and engineering occupations. About 86 percent of engineers and 74 percent of computer professionals are men'.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2014 Census Bureau Reports Majority of STEM College Graduates Do Not Work in STEM Occupations
July 10, 2014
Release Number: CB14-130
The U.S. Census Bureau reported today that 74 percent of those who have a bachelor's degree in science, technology, engineering and math — commonly referred to as STEM — are not employed in STEM occupations. In addition, men continue to be overrepresented in STEM, especially in computer and engineering occupations. About 86 percent of engineers and 74 percent of computer professionals are men.
"STEM graduates have relatively low unemployment, however these graduates are not necessarily employed in STEM occupations," said Liana Christin Landivar, a sociologist in the Census Bureau's Industry and Occupation Statistics Branch.
According to new statistics from the 2012 American Community Survey, engineering and computer, math and statistics majors had the largest share of graduates going into a STEM field with about half employed in a STEM occupation. Science majors had fewer of their graduates employed in STEM. About 26 percent of physical science majors; 15 percent of biological, environmental and agricultural sciences majors; 10 percent of psychology majors; and 7 percent of social science majors were employed in STEM.
Approximately 14 percent of engineers were women, where they were most underrepresented of all the STEM fields. Representation of women was higher among mathematicians and statisticians (45 percent), life scientists (47 percent) and social scientists (63 percent). The rates of mathematicians and statisticians, and life scientists are not statistically different from each other.
Highlights
The tables released today highlight statistics on field of degree, occupation, unemployment and median earnings for college graduates by sex, race and Hispanic origin. In addition, the tables include state level STEM occupation information.
Below details a few highlights from the tables:
Interactive Graphic
In addition to new tables released today on field of degree and occupation, the Census Bureau released a new interactive graphic to explore the relationship between college majors and occupations. The graphic shows the relationship between STEM college majors and STEM employment. In addition, the graphic highlights STEM and non-STEM field of degree and employment by sex, race and Hispanic origin.
About the American Community Survey
The American Community Survey provides a wide range of important statistics about all communities in the country. The American Community Survey gives communities the current information they need to plan investments and services. Retailers, homebuilders, police departments, and town and city planners are among the many private- and public-sector decision makers who count on these annual results.
Ever since Thomas Jefferson directed the first census in 1790, the census has collected detailed characteristics about our nation's people. Questions about jobs and the economy were added 20 years later under James Madison, who said such information would allow Congress to "adapt the public measures to the particular circumstances of the community," and over the decades allow America "an opportunity of marking the progress of the society."
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MIKULSKI IS OF COURSE TOP GLOBAL JOHNS HOPKINS GLOBAL LABOR POOL POLICY.
'As Erin Neill, of Senator Mikulski’s staff, pointed out, no one in the immigration debate speaks effectively for US-born STEM workers. The IT world’s libertarian ethos, the relative poverty among young scientists and their unemployed and underemployed peers, and a fear of antagonizing present or potential employers all hamper efforts to organize these workers'.
Left social Democrats are being made to appear anti-immigrant labor when we fight these US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zone policies bringing more and more and more foreign immigrant labor pool from working class jobs to now professional class. As this article shows we have plenty of new immigrant citizens highly qualified shouting as loudly against these high-skilled immigrant labor policies CLINTON AND OBAMA sell as PRO-IMMIGRANT. The Democratic base of labor and justice has KNOWN THIS WAS HOGWASH----global Wall Street is simply exploiting these workers with every intention of bringing what these immigrants are earning down to third world levels as soon as density is built in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones---like Baltimore.
So, all our Baltimore 'public' schools turned corporate charter are hyping the need for all students to be tied to STEM at the same time building structures that will make it impossible for US students graduating in STEM to attain jobs here in the US.
IT IS DELIBERATE FOLKS ---GET RID OF GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS AND TO DO THAT WE MUST FIX ELECTION RIGGING AND FRAUD.
CLINTON/OBAMA are made to look so into protecting immigrant and foreign workers when they are far-right global Wall Street exploiting these global labor pool ------while killing WE THE PEOPLE BLACK, BROWN, AND WHITE CITIZENS.
African engineers being brought to Baltimore to take any global corporate campus and global factory job that may be created will be fleeced and exploited----while, if these African professional stayed in their home nations growing local small businesses for their people----they would grow wealth for all African citizens.
It doesn’t add up
A science writer questions the conventional wisdom of US-born STEM workersBy Beryl Lieff BenderlyMay / June 2013
Homegrown President Obama, seen here visiting at technical college in North Carolina, supports bringing more foreign STEM workers to the US, despite high unemployment among US workers. (Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images)
In late February, Christine Miller and Sona Shah went to the Capitol Hill office of Miller’s senator, Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, to talk about immigration reform and the job market for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers. Miller, an American-born MIT grad with a PhD in biochemistry, had 20 years of research experience when Johns Hopkins University laid her off in 2009 because of funding cuts. Shah, an Indian-born US citizen with degrees in physics and engineering, had been laid off earlier by a computer company that was simultaneously hiring foreign workers on temporary visas. Proposals to increase admission of foreign stem workers to the US, Miller and Shah told Erin Neill, a member of Mikulski’s staff, would worsen the already glutted stem labor market.
According to Miller, Neill told them this is not the argument “she normally encounters on this issue.” The conventional wisdom is that tech companies and universities can’t find enough homegrown scientists to hire, so they need to import them from China and India. Neill suggested to Miller and Shah that “we would have more impact if we represented a large, organized group.”
Miller and Shah are, in fact, part of a large group. Figures from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform.
The two main STEM-related proposals currently part of that debate in Congress would increase the number of temporary high-skill worker visas (also called guestworker visas), and give green cards to every foreign graduate of an American college with a master’s or PhD in a STEM field. Media coverage of these proposals has generally hewed, uncritically, to the unfounded notion that America isn’t producing enough native talent in the science and engineering fields to satisfy the demands of businesses and universities—and that foreign-born workers tend to be more entrepreneurial and innovative than their American-born counterparts. Allowing more stem immigrants, the story goes, is key to adding jobs to the beleaguered US economy.
It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.
High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. Politicians, advocates, and articles and op-eds published by media outlets—including The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, Slate, and others—invoke such foreign-born entrepreneurs as Google’s Sergey Brin or Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, as if arrival from abroad (Brin and Yang came to the US as children) explains the success of the companies they founded . . . with partners who are US natives. Journalists endorse studies that trumpet the job-creating skills of these entrepreneurs from abroad, while ignoring the weaknesses that other scholars find in the research.
Meanwhile, The National Science Board’s biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators, consistently finds that the US produces several times the number of STEM graduates than can get jobs in their fields. Recent reports from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, and the American Chemical Society warn that overproduction of STEM PhDs is damaging America’s ability to recruit native-born talent, and advise universities to limit the number of doctorates they produce, especially in the severely glutted life sciences. In June 2012, for instance, the American Chemical Society’s annual survey found record unemployment among its members, with only 38 percent of new PhDs, 50 percent of new master’s graduates, and 33 percent of new bachelor’s graduates in fulltime jobs. Overall, STEM unemployment in the US is more than twice its pre-recession level, according to congressional testimony by Ron Hira, a science-labor-force expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
And yet, a bill introduced in Congress last year that would have heeded the NIH recommendation by limiting visas for biomedical scientists was attacked in a Forbes article that suggested it could delay progress on the search for a cure for cancer by keeping out able researchers.
* * *Foreign-born scientists and engineers have, of course, contributed significantly to American society as innovators and entrepreneurs—and the nation’s immigration policy certainly needs repair. But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them.
Temporary visas allow employers to pay skilled workers below-market wages, and these visas are valid only for specific jobs. Workers are unable to take another job, making them akin to indentured servants. Universities also use temporary visas to recruit international graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, mainly from China, to do the gruntwork for professors’ grants. “When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.
Research by Hira, Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, Richard Freeman of Harvard, and numerous others has shown how temporary visas have allowed employers to flood STEM labor markets and hold down the cost of tech workers and scientists doing grant-supported university research. Wages in the IT industry rose rapidly throughout the 1990s, but have been essentially flat or declining in the past decade, which coincides with the rising number of guestworkers on temporary visas.
In his new book, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Peter Cappelli, a human-resources specialist at the Wharton School, concludes that companies’ reported hiring difficulties don’t arise from a shortage of qualified workers, but from rigid recruitment practices that use narrow categories and definitions and don’t take advantage of the applicants’ full range of abilities. Companies so routinely evade protections in the visa system designed to prevent displacement of American citizens that immigration lawyers have produced videos about how it is done. For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.
The temporary-visa system also facilitates the offshoring of STEM work, particularly in the IT field, to low-wage countries. Outsourcing companies use the temporary visas to bring workers to the US to learn the jobs that the client company is planning to move to temp workers’ home country. The 10 firms with the largest number of H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill workers, are all in the business of shipping work overseas, and former Indian commerce minister Kamil Nath famously labeled the H-1B “the outsourcing visa.”
These practices have helped to reduce incomes and career prospects in STEM fields drastically enough to produce what UC Davis’s Norman Matloff calls “an internal brain drain” of talented Americans to other, more promising career opportunities such as Wall Street, healthcare, or patent law.
The proposal before Congress to automatically grant green cards to all STEM students with graduate degrees—regardless of field, origin, or quality—would exacerbate the problem of already overcrowded markets, according to new research by Hal Salzman of Rutgers University, Daniel Keuhn of American University, and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University. It also would benefit universities facing tough financial times by dramatically increasing the allure of American graduate schools, and thus the income potential to universities. And, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said at a 2011 hearing, it would “further erode the opportunities of American students. Universities would in essence become visa mills.”
Academic departments generally determine how many graduate students they admit, or postdocs they hire, based on the teaching and research workforce they need, not on the career opportunities awaiting young scientists. Unlike companies, universities have access to unlimited temporary-worker visas. This allows universities to hire skilled lab workers and pay them very low, “trainee” wages. Postdocs are an especially good deal for professors running labs because they don’t require tuition, which must be paid out of the professors’ grants, notes Paula Stephan, a labor economist at Georgia State University, in her book How Economics Shapes Science.
* * *Immigrants constitute the nation’s “only shot at getting a growing economy,” because they “start more jobs than natives,” declared New York Times columnist David Brooks on Meet the Press in February. “Every additional 100 foreign-born workers in science and technology fields is associated with 262 additional jobs for US natives,” he had written in the Times, adding that “a quarter of new high-tech companies with more than $1 million in sales were also founded by the foreign-born.”
These claims, cited by Brooks and many others, arise from a body of research that has been the subject of scholarly dispute—though you’d never know it from the media coverage of this issue. The overwhelming majority of coverage presents the conclusions reached in studies like the one conducted by Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, who publishes widely in popular media and speaks frequently on immigration issues. About a quarter of the 2,054 engineering and technology companies that responded to Wadhwa’s telephone survey said they had a “key founder”—defined as a chief technology officer or a CEO—who was foreign-born. Extrapolating from that figure, the study credits immigrant-founded companies with employing 450,000 people nationally in 2005.
But a nationwide survey by political scientist David Hart and economist Zoltan Acs of George Mason University reached a different conclusion. In a 2011 piece in Economic Development Quarterly, Hart and Acs note that between 40 and 75 percent of new jobs are created by no more than 10 percent of new businesses—the so-called high-impact firms that have rapidly expanding sales and employment. In their survey of high-impact technology firms, only 16 percent had at least one foreign-born founder, and immigrants constituted about 13 percent of total founders—a figure close to the immigrant share of the general population. But the more fundamental problem with Wadhwa’s study, Hart and Acs suggest, is that it does not report the total number of founders at a given company, making conclusions about immigrants’ overall contribution impossible to quantify.
Evaluating the issues of statistics and sample selection that divide the academic researchers is beyond the purview of most general media, but informing readers that reputable researchers reached different conclusions is not. Though real, the immigrant role in high-tech entrepreneurship could be considerably less dramatic than many writers claim.
Research on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in 1999 by AnnaLee Saxenian, for example, found that 36 percent of high-tech companies owned by Chinese immigrants were doing nothing more groundbreaking than putting together computers for sale from components.
* * *As Erin Neill, of Senator Mikulski’s staff, pointed out, no one in the immigration debate speaks effectively for US-born STEM workers. The IT world’s libertarian ethos, the relative poverty among young scientists and their unemployed and underemployed peers, and a fear of antagonizing present or potential employers all hamper efforts to organize these workers. National scientific associations and advocacy groups sponsored by industry and universities, meanwhile, represent the interests of those who benefit from the system—tenured faculty, university administrators, and company executives, including those at companies whose donations support scholarly conferences and other association activities. These organizations and their lobbyists frame their policy arguments with feel-good abstractions about the inherent value of science and research and innovation, suggesting they are a panacea for America’s economic ills.
Which brings us to the story of Xianmin Shane Zhang, a software engineer in Minnesota. According to his LinkedIn page, Zhang earned his BS in engineering in his native China, one MS in physics at Southern Illinois University, and another in computer science at the University of Houston. His profile next lists a series of IT jobs at US companies. In 2005, 43-year-old Zhang was one of a group of workers over 40 who sued their former employer, Best Buy, for age discrimination, when the company laid them off after outsourcing their jobs. The suit ended in an undisclosed settlement.
After being laid off by Best Buy, Zhang eventually fulfilled the rosy forecast of those advocating increased STEM-worker immigration by becoming an entrepreneur, though hardly following the innovation and jobs-for-Americans script. His Z&Z Information Services in St. Paul helps US companies outsource their IT and programming needs to China. “Giving green cards to foreign students can lead to offshoring as well,” notes Norman Matloff, who uncovered this tale. That’s because young scientists and engineers from abroad get older, and wind up facing the same age discrimination and glutted market as their native-born colleagues. Why isn’t that reported, too?
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We spoke yesterday of how Baltimore City controlled by Wall Street Baltimore Development and global Johns Hopkins is simply MOVING FORWARD in building independent CORPORATE CHARTER SCHOOL BOARDS while Baltimore and Maryland citizens are being told by their pols public school boards are being protected and attempts at elected school boards is being pushed when NONE OF THAT IS TRUE.
Take the information above about how this STEM emphasis is NOT HELPING US STUDENTS ------with the super-sized building of a global corporate STEM neo-liberal PRE-K- CAREER COLLEGE structure and we see the DEATH of public education in America.
Whether Republican county or Democratic county----all citizens are fighting as CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA WALL STREET PLAYERS in our Maryland Assembly and county city councils are simply pushing these ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE ONE GLOBAL EDUCATION forward.
ALL OF THESE POLS AND THE BALTIMORE SUN AND NATIONAL MEDIA REPORTERS KNOW THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE SCHOOL BOARD MODELS ARE BEING PUSHED AS THEY ALL PRETEND TO BE LISTENING TO CITIZENS--
'The remarks, made during a public hearing on the potential for an elected or hybrid board — in which some members are elected and others are appointed — hinted at the possibility that a new approach to the decades-long debate over school board selection might gain traction next legislative session'.
Meanwhile in our US cities like Baltimore----Wall Street Baltimore Development Corporation 'labor and justice' organizations are hard at work selling to our low-income communities these education policies will help these citizens with stronger schools and jobs. EVERYONE IS BEING LIED TO----CHEATED----HAVING OUR FUTURES STOLEN-----
Anne Arundel lawmakers keep open mind on elected school board
By Amanda Yeager / Staff
Amanda YeagerContact Reporterayeager@capgaznews.com
Lawmakers' recent remarks suggest a new approach to the debate over school board selection might soon gain traAnne Arundel County lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle expressed openness Tuesday to changing the selection process for the county's Board of Education so that at least some of its members are elected.
The remarks, made during a public hearing on the potential for an elected or hybrid board — in which some members are elected and others are appointed — hinted at the possibility that a new approach to the decades-long debate over school board selection might gain traction next legislative session.
"It is time again for us to consider different options and whether another process would better serve Anne Arundel County," said Del. Pam Beidle, D-Linthicum, who chairs the delegation's education subcommittee.
Exactly what that new process might be remains unclear. While several public officials expressed support for a hybrid board, important details — such as how many members would be elected, who would make appointments and how to keep politics from encroaching on school board decisions — still need to be ironed out.
Currently, eight members of the county's Board of Education are appointed to five-year terms by the governor. The board also includes a student member, who serves a one-year term.
Del. Sid Saab, a Crownsville Republican who has submitted bills proposing a hybrid school board in the past two General Assembly sessions, said he plans to take up the cause again when a new session starts in January.
School board reviews capital budget "I'm optimistic we can finally move forward," he said.
The hearing comes after months of political jousting over the makeup of a group that interviews and recommends school board candidates to the governor.
The 11-member commission, which is composed of five gubernatorial appointees, one county executive appointee and representatives from local education interest groups, was created by compromise legislation about a decade ago during former Gov. Martin O'Malley's term.
Glen Burnie High School junior Carolyn Williams, 17, won the election to be the student member nominee, to be appointed by Governor Larry Hogan, for the Anne Arundel County School Board, during a meeting of the Chesapeake Regional Association of Student Councils at South River High School Friday.
Last fall, Gov. Larry Hogan replaced O'Malley's Democratic appointees on the commission with Republicans. In February, his decision to appoint new school board members Terry Gilleland and Maria Sasso — marking the first time in decades the school board did not have an African American member among its ranks — sparked an outcry and a push to ensure greater diversity on the board.
This spring, General Assembly Democrats passed a law, over Hogan's veto, seeking to remove the governor's five appointments to the 11-member School Board Nominating Commission and replace them with new members from groups representing parents and minority communities. Democrats said the new representatives would broaden perspectives on the board, while Republicans argued they would expand Democrats' influence.
The measure was promptly challenged in Circuit Court by sitting Hogan appointees, who argue that only the governor has the power to ask them to leave. Circuit Court Judge William C. Mulford agreed, but Attorney General Brian Frosh has appealed his decision on behalf of the General Assembly. The Court of Appeals is expected to take up the case in November.
A separate lawsuit, in which commission members who represent the teachers union and other local groups are attempting to block earlier-than-usual appointments for two school board seats that don't come open until July 1, 2017, is also awaiting a final verdict.
The nominating commission, chaired by Hogan appointee Jamie Falcon, has submitted six recommendations to the governor for those seats. Hogan has yet to respond.
The school board selection process has been a perennial concern of Anne Arundel County Republicans, many of whom have long supported a fully elected board or a hybrid of elected and appointed members.
But they've been unable to get legislation changing the process off the ground in recent years. Last session, Saab withdrew his bill proposing a hybrid school board after encountering opposition.
County Executive Steve Schuh, a former state delegate, and Del. Tony McConkey, R-Severna Park, sponsored similar bills in 2013 and 2014. Neither made it to the floor for a vote.
Schuh said this week he supports a hybrid school board but not a fully elected one. Most important, he said, is that the board encompasses members from all across the county and with a variety of political leanings.
"We need to make sure we have all perspectives on the board," he said.
Amalie Brandenburg, Schuh's education liaison, told delegation members that the county executive favors a system of five elected representatives — one from each of the county's legislative districts — as well as three county executive-appointed members and one student representative.
Councilman Chris Trumbauer, D-Annapolis, said he would like for the council to have a say in appointments, as well, although he didn't go so far as to recommend the council select its own appointee.
"For me to consider the process of the seven of us putting forth one name makes my head hurt, and I think that would not be the most productive process," he said, but "speaking for myself ... we'd like to have some role in the conversation."
School board vice president Julie Hummer said the board has not taken an official position on whether the selection process should change.
But she said board members should strive to consider the entire county's interests, and not just those of one community: "An effective board member understands that although they live in and represent a certain part of the county, our mission is to work together for all students, not just those from our individual community."
Sen. Bryan Simonaire, a Pasadena Republican who has been a longtime supporter of an elected school board, said he often hears from constituents who want more power over their school board members.
"They just don't feel there's any accountability to the people," he said.
Simonaire said he wanted to create a "direct link" between voters and the school board, while trying to "get rid of partisanship" as much as possible.
House Minority Leader Nic Kipke, R-Pasadena, said the presence of some degree of politics in school board business is inevitable.
"This is why I prefer to allow the citizens of our county to make that selection through direct elections like the vast majority of boards in Maryland and around the country," he said in a statement.
Out of Maryland's 24 school districts, 17 are elected, five are hybrid bodies and two — Anne Arundel and Wicomico County — are fully appointed. This November, Wicomico County voters will decide via referendum whether they want to change their school board selection process.
Not everyone was convinced changing to an elected school board would be in the best interest of students and teachers.
Jacob Baumgart, first vice president of the Chesapeake Regional Association of Student Councils, said the student group's position "is one of irritated ambivalence." He noted that many recent school board decisions, including this fiscal year's budget vote and decisions on the hiring of a superintendent, earlier school start times and assessment strategies, have been made without partisan bickering.
"Leaders are supposed to be responsible for the entire community but we find that quite often they're only accountable to their own partisan electorate," he said.
Annapolis and Anne Arundel County Chamber of Commerce President Bob Burdon said the chamber opposes a change and sees nothing wrong with the current system.
"For two decades, the Chamber of Commerce has advocated that an elected school board only makes sense if the Board of Education is given fiscal and budgetary autonomy along with revenue-raising authority," said Burdon, who also serves on the school board nominating commission but did not speak on its behalf. "Absent that, an elected school board does nothing more than expose our children's education to partisan politics which has been very divisive in the past few years, as we've seen."
This story has been updated to correct the name of the Circuit Court judge who ruled on the lawsuit against removal of Hogan's appointees to the School Board Nominating Commission. Judge William C. Mulford heard the case.
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Here we see again----THAT APPOINTED COMMISSION this time on school board appointments. Whether global 1% Wall Street corporate neo-liberal O'MALLEY-----or global 1% Wall Street corporate Bush neo-con HOGAN_---these appointments to our school boards especially in Baltimore City are CORPORATE APPOINTEES. THEY ARE NOT THE AVERAGE CITIZEN OR EDUCATION ACTIVIST----these appointments are almost always someone from those global NGO corporate education non-profits moving global ONE WORLD ONE EDUCATION forward.
'Last fall, Gov. Larry Hogan replaced O'Malley's Democratic appointees on the commission with Republicans'.
The problem for Maryland and Baltimore citizens is our AFT------our public school teacher's unions are growing a majority of education privatization members-----
All states across the nation controlled by CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA POLS----will have education policies PRETENDING to listen to WE THE PEOPLE----with no intentions of doing so. The gimmick of hybrid public school boards is THE MAJORITY of votes comes from the corporate appointed members. So, here we have a student no doubt wanting to be that community education activist-----but her voice is one vote on a school board with a majority that will vote for corporate education. This policy is just like the policy of telling voters to vote for the LEAST WORST OF CANDIDATES. Here global pols are telling us----look, we are giving WE THE PEOPLE a voice on a stacked deck of appointed committees.
MARYLAND ASSOCIATION OF BOARDS OF EDUCATION
2012 Legislative Positions
ELECTED AND APPOINTED
BOARDS OF EDUCATION
BACKGROUND
Of Maryland’s 24 local boards of education, eighteen are locally elected; four are appointed at least in
part by the Governor, and the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners is appointed jointly by the
Governor and Mayor; two appointed boards are transitioning to hybrid boards comprised of both
appointed and elected members; and members of one appointed board must be retained through an
election following their appointment.
The following eighteen boards are elected:
Allegany County
Calvert County
Carroll County
Cecil County
Charles County
Dorchester County
Frederick County
Garrett County
Howard County
Kent County
Montgomery County
Prince George’s County
Queen Anne’s County
St. Mary’s County
Somerset County
Talbot County
Washington County
Worcester County
The following four boards are appointed:
Anne Arundel County
1
Baltimore City
2
Baltimore County
Wicomico County
The following two boards are hybrid boards comprised of both elected and appointed members:
Caroline County
3
Harford County
4
1
The Anne Arundel County Board of Education members are
subject to a “retention” election in the election year
following their appointment or reappointment.
2
The Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners is appointed by the Governor and the Mayor of Baltimore jointly from nominations submitted by the State Board of Education.
3
The Caroline County Board of Education transition to a boar
d comprised of appointed and elected members, beginning
in 2011, was approved by local referendum
in 2010 (as provided for in SB 964, 2009).
4
The Harford County Board of Education is transitioning beginning in 2010 to a board comprised of appointed and elected members (SB629/HB 639, 2009).
________________________________________________
While US citizens are fighting these fights------global Wall Street pols are advancing global ONE WORLD ONE EDUCATION policies as fast as they can go. THESE ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD ISSUES ARE NOT THE REAL ISSUE---THEY ARE BUILDING PLATFORMS FOR CORPORATE CHARTER SCHOOL BOARDS WITH THESE CHARTER CHAINS IN BALTIMORE.
Glen Burnie student chosen as member of Board of Education
Glen Burnie High School junior Carolyn Williams, 17, won the election to be the student member nominee, to be appointed by Governor Larry Hogan, for the Anne Arundel County School Board, during a meeting of the Chesapeake Regional Association of Student Councils at South River High School Friday.
'after the board voted to continue its partnership with the Education Achievement Authority, the controversial state-run district which has taken over fifteen Detroit public schools since its inception in 2012'.
We have Republicans Rick Snyder and this Larry Hogan pushing as hard as they can to create an EDUCATION AUTHORITY taking all voice of citizens in education policy while in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones---like Detroit and Baltimore---we have global Wall Street pols posing Democrats pushing these same policies.
With board appointments, Hogan can shape education policy early in his term
Due to a quirk in state law, Gov. Larry Hogan is making a slew of new appointments to state and local school boards this year, giving him the opportunity to steer the state's education policy toward a more conservative view.
(Tom Brenner, Baltimore Sun)
Liz BowieContact ReporterThe Baltimore Sun
With numerous board appointments, Gov. Hogan can shape education policy early in his term
Due to a quirk in state law, Gov. Larry Hogan is making a slew of new appointments to state and local school boards this year, giving him the opportunity to steer the state's education policy toward a more conservative view.
Some of the appointees already named reflect Hogan's concerns about the Common Core standards and his desire to expand charter schools. And more are coming: of the 22 school board appointments Hogan can make in Central Maryland this year, only 15 have been filled so far.
"It is a lot of educational policy in the governor's hands," said Henry Smith, an assistant professor of education policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. "It is an opportunity for him to reach beyond politics and appoint people who have some different approaches to education than we have seen to date."
The appointments come at a crucial time. Contracts for the state and Baltimore County superintendents are up for renewal, and there is growing concern over a new teacher evaluation system and the amount of testing required of students. The state school board, which in Maryland has broad power to set education policy, will determine whether schools continue on their course.
Unlike other states, Maryland has adopted most of the recent policy changes, including the Common Core, teacher evaluations and new assessments, without a significant backlash. But those on the far right and on the far left have criticized such changes, for different reasons.
The quirk that gave Hogan so many school board appointments resulted from the rescheduling of Maryland primaries.
When primaries were moved from September to June, the appointment process that had been in place for years was disrupted. Because the state constitution says a lame-duck governor cannot make appointments after the primary, and because most school board terms end June 30, Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, was prevented from making appointments for positions that turned over last summer. Some school board members whose terms had expired stayed for an additional year; in other cases, positions were left vacant.
Hogan names three to Harford School Board As a result, Hogan, a Republican, will fill two years' worth of vacancies in his first six months in office: those that turn over this July and those from last July. In most cases, the appointees will serve four- or five-year terms, although in Baltimore County some terms will be cut short in 2018 when the county transitions to a partly elected board.
Hogan said after a recent news conference that he did not use the state board appointments to advance his agenda on creating more charter schools or slowing the Common Core. For city and county board appointments — which have included Democrats and Republicans — he said he is relying primarily on recommendations from the local level.
In a statement, the governor's office added that Hogan "is committed to selecting individuals who will represent the best interest of their respective counties and will apply these very high standards to his remaining appointees." Hogan, who has been keeping a limited schedule while undergoing cancer treatment, declined to be interviewed to discuss the issue further.
Increasingly, board members in large counties are taking on what is essentially a volunteer, part-time job that requires them to oversee complex budgets of more than $1 billion, or as much as half a county's entire spending. Board members must vote on contracts ranging from purchasing textbooks to building schools; they also hire and can fire the superintendent.
Hogan's appointees could have immediate impact. State schools Superintendent Lillian Lowery and Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance have contracts that expire in a year, and decisions on whether they will be offered new four-year deals will be made in the next six months.
Hogan's appointees to the 12-member state school board include well-known education experts familiar with policies they will be asked to weigh in on, including conservatives Chester E. Finn Jr. and Andy Smarick, who have researched and written extensively about education.
Finn is a former president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington conservative think tank, where he worked for 17 years. Smarick is a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit education research and consulting firm. Smarick was formerly the New Jersey deputy commissioner of education and a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education during Republican President George W. Bush's administration.
Finn and Smarick, who support the Common Core and are strong advocates for charter schools, declined to discuss their appointments.
Hogan has also appointed Michele Jenkins Guyton, who lives in northern Baltimore County and has children with disabilities, to the state board. She could not be reached for comment.
"I am very encouraged by how knowledgeable and accomplished some of them are," said Jason Botel, executive director of MarylandCan, an education advocacy group. "Chester Finn and Andy Smarick are two leading national experts on education policy and practice. While I may not agree with them on every issue, having their experience and expertise on our state school board is an enormous value-add for our state's children."
The state and local appointments so far have not shown much racial diversity, even though white children are a minority in public schools in the state and in Baltimore County. For example, Finn and Smarick, who are white, replaced two African-American women appointed by O'Malley. In Baltimore County, one of the six appointees is African-American: Romaine Williams, who is being reappointed to the board.
"Going forward I would encourage the governor and his staff to play close attention to the diversity in Baltimore County," said Don Mohler, chief of staff for County Executive Kevin Kamenetz, a Democrat. Mohler added, "It is clear in the appointments that the county executive did not have involvement in the selection process."
In Baltimore County, Hogan's appointments to the 12-member board range from Democrats who have run for government office to conservative voices, including Republican Ann Miller, who will take her seat later in the year.
Current board member George Moniodis said the board needs consistency amid such large turnover. The governor's office mistakenly thought that his term expired July 1 and named Miller to replace him. However, Moniodis' term does not expire until December and he will serve until then.
The members' lack of experience could make their jobs more difficult, Moniodis said. "We could help them in the transition to become active participants of the board. If I had gone out, it would have been six [new members including a student member]. In business it doesn't happen like that," he said.
Miller, who is opposed to both the Common Core and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers tests, has been critical of the school system in her columns for an online publication, Examiner.com.
Last school year, she tried to have her daughter, a student at Hereford High School, opt out of state testing, which the state has advised school systems not to allow.
"Either [Baltimore County Public Schools] must acknowledge a parent's right to refuse the tests and provide written policy on those procedures, or they must stand in defiance of federal statute and deny parental rights to govern their children's education," Miller wrote in a column. "We will not continue to be misled, uninformed, intimidated, and subject to arbitrary and fluid decisions made on the fly and written on a napkin."
In an interview, she said she supports more local control of schools, wants a greater role for parents and wants the school system to be more transparent.
"We have lost a lot of teachers. They are the front line and we need to listen to them and respond," said Miller, who also has a child who is home-schooled and another who attends a private Christian school.
Hogan's new appointments include more people who have children in the systems they are representing. In Baltimore County, for instance, only one school board member in the past several years has had children in the public schools. Two of the five new appointments are parents of current students.
Besides Miller, Hogan appointed Republican Kathleen Causey, also the parent of a Hereford High student and a leader of Hereford Works, a group that fought Dance's change in high school schedules a year ago. Members petitioned legislative leaders and turned up by the hundreds at school board meetings, but eventually lost the attempt to keep their schedule.
In Baltimore County, Hogan also appointed June Eaton, a retired Catholic school social studies and language arts teacher from Dundalk; Nick Stewart, an Arbutus lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for state delegate as a Democrat; and Stephen Verch, who ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for a seat on the County Council.
Republican Del. Robert Long said in a statement that he recommended Eaton, whose children attended Catholic schools, because she has the "breadth of experience needed to confront the challenges of education in a constantly involving economy. She will bring a perspective that will ensure we prepare our young people for a prosperous career and successful post-secondary education."
Eaton is not a registered voter, so she has no party affiliation. Asked if she had any public school issues that needed to be addressed, she said, "I really haven't given it much thought. This is all new to me."
The nature of Baltimore County's school board will change in a few years. After some parent advocates complained that the board had ignored their concerns, they lobbied for a hybrid board, with some elected and some appointed members. The legislature passed the measure, which takes effect in 2018.
Harford County's board is already a hybrid of elected and appointed members. Hogan has appointed Laura S. Runyeon, a paralegal for Miles and Stockbridge who has been active with the PTA, and Alfred L. Williamson, a retired Social Security Administration senior manager. Hogan reappointed Joseph Arthur Hau, who is vice president and chief financial officer of Chesapeake Environmental Management Inc. and has served on the board since 2011.
Ryan Burbey, president of the Harford County Education Association, said he doesn't know the new members well but is looking forward to working with them.
In Anne Arundel County, Hogan will name five of the board's nine members this year, but will have less power in the choices because he must choose from a list created by a nominating commission.
Hogan has appointed three people to open seats and has two more to announce. The appointments are Tom Frank of Crofton, retired founder and head of a biomedical engineering company; Julie Hummer of Laurel, a former teacher and active PTA member who has three children in the school system; and Allison Pickard of Millersville, a parent and PTA president whose career has included working on elderly housing issues.
The three new appointees to the Baltimore City school board, who are chosen jointly by the governor and mayor, have not yet been announced. Howard and Carroll counties have elected school boards.
________________________________________________
THIS EDUCATION ACHIEVEMENT AUTHORITY IS THE SAME AS A CORPORATE SCHOOL BOARD WITH POWERS TO VOCATIONALLY TRACK AND ASSIGN STUDENTS TO CORPORATE CAMPUS SCHOOLS......IT IS THAT ONE WORLD ONE EDUCATION GLOBAL NEO-LIBERAL STRUCTURE----and yes, Detroit was brought down into bankruptcy to install this CORPORATE SCHOOL COMMITTEE---------
Again, all these education policies appear to hit our US city low-income black and brown citizens hardest but the goal is to expand these corporate school boards and authorities statewide.
Education Achievement Authority
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Education Achievement Authority Interlocal agreement school district overview
Formed July 1, 2011
Type board
Minister responsible
Roy Roberts, EAA Executive Committee Chair[1]
Interlocal agreement school district executive
Veronica Conforme, chancellor
Parent interlocal agreement school district Eastern Michigan University
Detroit Public Schools
Child interlocal agreement school district
Education Achievement System
Key document
EMU-Detroit Public Schools Agreement
The Education Achievement Authority (EAA or Authority) is the governing body of the Education Achievement System (EAS or System), a Michigan statewide school system for failing schools.
The office of the State Superintendent or an Emergency Manager of a school district may transfer a failing school from its district into the System that is not under an approved redesign plan'.[2]
It is ironic that Wall Street's MEDIA -MADE Black Lives Matter leader DeRay McKesson has a job as HUMAN CAPITAL manager moving these global corporate education structures forward here in Baltimore. The opposite of BLACK LIVES MATTER.. Baltimore is staged to be pushed into bankruptcy to install this same Detroit EDUCATION ACHIEVEMENT AUTHORITY-----once our public school board.
This Education Achievement Authority is simply yet another QUASI-GOVERNMENTAL agency handed to corporate committees to decide all that is education from where funding goes ----to what it goes-----what policies are advanced with funding---and where students will attend schools. IT IS THAT ONE WORLD GLOBAL CORPORATE EDUCATION STRUCTURE. Michigan is being led down this path by a global Wall Street pol pretending to be a conservative Republican ---there is nothing conservative or republican in giving total control of our K-12 to appointed quasi-governmental organizations. Baltimore is staged to do the same in this coming economic crash and city bankruptcy.
Michigan Education Achievement Authority Special School District A Lightning Rod For Controversy
12/12/2012 07:30 pm ET | Updated Feb 11, 2013
Jaclyn Zubrzycki Education Week, Bethesda, Md.
As Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority nears the end of its first fully operational semester, a battle rages over its present and its future.
The statewide school system, which took charge of 15 schools in Detroit this fall, has been the subject of disputes in recent weeks about governance, educational models, and equity in a city notoriously plagued by financial issues, depopulation, racial tensions, poverty—and low student achievement.
Michigan is among a number of states, including Tennessee and Louisiana, that have formed state-level authorities to manage their most troubled schools. The progress of those ventures is being closely watched by policymakers nationwide.
The controversy in Michigan came to a head late last month, in the wake of a Detroit school board vote that questioned the status of the city school system’s state-appointed emergency financial manager, Roy Roberts. The city school board unanimously voted to withdraw from the statewide authority.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in the state House and Senate, in an effort to protect the authority, are pushing bills that would set it into state law during the current Republican-led session. The bill’s authors and other proponents of codifying the authority say the newly created district, which serves about 11,000 Detroit students, could potentially improve the academic achievement of the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools across the entire state.
Letter to Washington
The Detroit board’s vote is unlikely to represent the end of the education authority, mostly because the statewide entity currently operates through a contractual agreement, signed by Mr. Roberts, between the 50,000-student city school system and Eastern Michigan State University, that Mr. Roberts, who remains the emergency financial manager, is unlikely to dissolve.
But the authority remains the focus of contention. A group of parents, university professors, and advocates for the Detroit public schools wrote a letter last month to
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama listing concerns with the educational program, accountability, and governance of the authority, which was recently named a finalist in the federal Race to the Top district competition.
Some opponents have gone further in their critiques: The president of the Detroit school board, LaMar Lemmon, and community activist Helen Moore said in interviews with Education Week that the authority was a racially motivated attempt to dismantle Detroit’s public school system.
The educational authority is so new that there aren’t yet data to indicate whether it is more or less successful than the traditional system. Steven Wasko, a spokesman for the Detroit public schools, said that the lack of information argues against dismantling the authority.
“Given that the schools have been assigned to that reform district for just a little over three months, on what basis can it be concluded that it has not worked?” he said.
But advocates like Ms. Moore say the authority’s beginner status argues against extending it through proposed legislation.
Fraught History
The Detroit school system was first taken over by the state in 1999, returned to local control in 2005, and handed to a state-appointed emergency financial manager in 2009. The lack of local control over the school system has long been a bone of contention.
State Rep. Lisa Posthumus Lyons, the chairwoman of the house education committee and a sponsor of House Bill 6004, which would confirm the authority as “part of this state’s system of public schools,” said that while she believed in locally controlled schools, state legislators had a responsibility to address the problem of low-performing schools.
She said the bill had been modified to reflect some concerns. For instance, students in the authority were initially not required to take the same state tests as students in other schools, but now are. Another revision would allow schools to eventually leave the authority.
But the most recent version of the bill would still grant the authority the power to create new charter schools and authorizers, and would require the regular Detroit school system to lease or sell buildings to the authority.
The authority’s learning model and its use of a computer program called Buzz have also come into question. The program in Detroit is similar to an effort that authority Chancellor John Covington installed while he was the superintendent of the 17,000-student Kansas City, Mo., school system, which abandoned the model soon after Mr. Covington left in 2011.
But Detroit teacher Brooke Harris, testifying before state legislators, said the program was “not innovative, and not student-centered.”
In an interview, Mr. Covington said that the online program “does not drive the curriculum of the authority of Michigan,” which he described as a blended learning program.
Differing Perspectives
Anecdotal evidence on the new instructional program is also mixed. K.C. Wilbourn, who is in her fourth year as the principal at Detroit’s Denby High School, said that when she first learned that Denby would become part of the authority she was “devastated.” But Ms. Wilbourn said working with Mr. Covington has been a pleasant surprise. “I can share thoughts without consequences, and that to me is priceless,” she said.
This year, 75 percent of the staff is new, and 25 percent were provided by Teach For America, the nonprofit group that places teachers in high-need schools.
“It’s been good for the children because it’s been good for its leader,” Ms. Wilbourn said.
Meanwhile, at Mumford High School, also within the authority, Ms. Harris said her school had struggled this year with logistical problems. Her classes had as many as 45 students, and two classes only recently gained access to Buzz after being delayed by technical issues. Rescheduling this month brought Ms. Harris’s class sizes down to 33.
The Urban League’s Mr. Anderson said “we’re interested in what’s happening to improve education in the state, but the jury’s still out on whether the [authority is] the best way or not.” ___
___________________________________________
Here we have a Republican Governor Larry Hogan elected by Republican voters knowing where all these corporate charter and RAce to the Top policies are going and they do not like it. So, being a Bush global Wall Street neo-cons with every intention to MOVE FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GLOBAL EDUCATION ----Hogan pretends to appoint people who will protect community charters and end corporate COMMON CORE AND RACE TO THE TOP----all while installing in BAltimore City the very corporate charter school board and Baltimore City School Superintendent THAT WILL MAKE BLOOMBERG AND WALL STREET PROUD.
We have Republicans Rick Snyder and this Larry Hogan pushing as hard as they can to create an EDUCATION AUTHORITY taking all voice of citizens in education policy while in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones---like Detroit and Baltimore---we have global Wall Street pols posing Democrats pushing these same policies.
MARYLAND ASSOCIATION OF BOARDS OF EDUCATION
2012 Legislative Positions
ELECTED AND APPOINTED
BOARDS OF EDUCATION
BACKGROUND
Of Maryland’s 24 local boards of education, eighteen are locally elected; four are appointed at least in
part by the Governor, and the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners is appointed jointly by the
Governor and Mayor; two appointed boards are transitioning to hybrid boards comprised of both
appointed and elected members; and members of one appointed board must be retained through an
election following their appointment.
The following eighteen boards are elected:
Allegany County
Calvert County
Carroll County
Cecil County
Charles County
Dorchester County
Frederick County
Garrett County
Howard County
Kent County
Montgomery County
Prince George’s County
Queen Anne’s County
St. Mary’s County
Somerset County
Talbot County
Washington County
Worcester County
The following four boards are appointed:
Anne Arundel County
1
Baltimore City
2
Baltimore County
Wicomico County
The following two boards are hybrid boards comprised of both elected and appointed members:
Caroline County
3
Harford County
4
1
The Anne Arundel County Board of Education members are
subject to a “retention” election in the election year
following their appointment or reappointment.
2
The Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners is appointed by the Governor and the Mayor of Baltimore jointly from nominations submitted by the State Board of Education.
3
The Caroline County Board of Education transition to a boar
d comprised of appointed and elected members, beginning
in 2011, was approved by local referendum
in 2010 (as provided for in SB 964, 2009).
4
The Harford County Board of Education is transitioning beginning in 2010 to a board comprised of appointed and elected members (SB629/HB 639, 2009).
Educating broadly would have citizens reading these several decades about US corporations moving overseas, what they built, and how they operated. If we knew that we knew during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA the global Wall Street 1% and their 2% were bringing those structures back to the US.
What is different between China's history and American history? Great global merchants and old wealth came from thousands of years of trade between an Asia---a Europe---a Middle Far-East. These are where the global 1% and their 2% live. They see the North American and African continent as COLONIAL----no intentions of keeping a national sovereignty. This is why we are already seeing EXITS-----breaking down of US into independent Foreign Economic Zones. China has not joined the ONE WORLD CREW----as other BRIC nations because they see keeping that national sovereignty. Again, CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA represent that OLD EUROPEAN WEALTH---the people colonizing America---they do not want or need a US sovereignty.
'I.The Basis for One China, de Facto and de Jure
The One-China Principle has been evolved in the course of the Chinese people's just struggle to safeguard China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and its basis, both de facto and de jure, is unshakable'.
So what does all this have to do with US public schools and education for WE THE PEOPLE as citizens? If global Wall Street is allowed this march to ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE under global neo-liberal COMMON CORE corporate education we will not remain citizens and we will not be able to access REAL information. The DARK AGES were about just that -----the 99% of people lived as serfs being kept from accessing worldly information. US black citizens tied to slavery know that was used for centuries to keep them enslaved.
IT IS CRITICAL TO OUR STATUS OF CITIZENS---NOT SLAVES----TO KEEP OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION STRONG AND TO KEEP INFORMATION IN OUR CLASSROOMS OPEN AND BROAD.
THE HISTORY OF US PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN STRONG STEM CURRICULA-----WHY ARE GLOBAL 1% MAKING THIS EXCLUSIVE NOW?
They are hyping STEM to cover the fact that they are killing our humanities and liberal arts curricula no matter how many times global Wall Street pols say they are not.
WHAT IS STEM EDUCATION
WHAT IS STEM EDUCATION
By bdavis Posted:December 9, 2012
What is STEM
The simplest definition is what it stands for, which is science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. There are many organizations that are dedicated to this topic and they define this with their own objectives. The ultimate goal of STEM education is to encourage students to take an interest in STEM subjects at an early age. This should be beneficial to them when they enter the jobs market, and in turn it should benefit the greater economy. It is a simple definition with a straight forward goal.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has compiled a list of STEM designated degrees. This list is intended for foreign students who are studying in the U.S. on a valid student visa so they may qualify for certain optional training programs. But this is also a good reference for American students, and it show that STEM can be integrated into a variety of interests.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are an important part of education in a competitive global marketplace. In 2009, the United States educational system received some sobering news. The Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) ranked 15-year-old U.S. high-school students 18th in mathematics and 13th in science. These results were based on data from 34 participating nations. Some of the nations with higher student scores included much smaller and far less wealthy nations like Estonia, Slovenia and Finland. It was apparent that the U.S. educational system needed significant improvement in these areas if the students who would be the workforce of tomorrow were to have a competitive edge in a globalized, high-tech marketplace.
National and state educational policymakers renewed efforts begun in 2006 to improve the overall mathematics, science and technology literacy of U.S. students. These efforts became known as the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM, initiative.
Although many of the nation's public schools had already begun a greater focus on mathematics and science as part of their core curricula, new academies as well as existing educational institutions took the focus one step further. Applying for, and receiving, government and private business grants set up for STEM education initiatives, these schools aggressively promoted the concept with the express goal of graduating students competent in a variety of STEM subjects.
Schools pursuing these goals explored a variety of approaches such as smaller class sizes of 10 to 12 students with a one-to-one student/computer ratio, inquiry-based teaching methodologies and an active partnership with technology businesses that provide real-world applications for STEM subjects. Other schools made electronic textbooks, Skype and video-conferencing an integral part of the educational experience. In the state of Washington, for example, private funding supports special scholarships for students who score particularly well in these subjects on state or college entrance exams. Scholarship recipients agree to further pursue these subjects in college and work in Washington's STEM-related industries for a specified period of time after graduation.
Whatever innovative approaches were put into place, the STEM educational blueprint was paramount: integrating technology into the daily educational experience, specially trained teachers who knew how to best present these subjects, inquiry-based interactive teaching methodologies and, of course, a robust curriculum with adequate knowledge assessment practices.
Because of the government and business funding initiatives, becoming a STEM-designated school can mean access to significant financial resources. However, the specific criteria for becoming a designated school vary by state. There is the basic educational blueprint to which all designated schools must adhere, but each state has its own approach how to best follow that blueprint. As previously stated, many new academies and specialized schools have been launched that are essentially STEM schools. However, existing schools are also adjusting their curricula and teaching methodologies to win this designation.
Even though the initiative has solid support at the state and national level, not everyone is totally on-board with the extreme focus on STEM subjects. Some of these critics feel that elected officials and their business leader allies are trying to use the STEM education process to bolster the U.S. economy. There is no doubt that the jobs of tomorrow will mainly require high-skilled, technologically advanced workers. However, the education system may result in more qualified workers than there are jobs for them to fill.
Despite the critics, it is unlikely that state and national policymakers will rein in efforts to promote the curricula in as many schools as possible. State, national and private funding dollars are increasingly earmarked for this initiative, and there is a great deal of hope that the collective investment of these entities will result in superior mathematics and science literacy in U.S. students.
PISA evaluations take place every three years, which means that the 2012 data is being assessed for a 2013 release. Proponents and investors supporting STEM education will be looking closely at that data to see if the education policy changes and investment strategies have had the desired effect. If they have, then one can expect to see an even greater emphasis on STEM education in U.S. schools.
____________________________________
We are hearing from all US labor and justice citizens that we KNOW US grads in STEM are being left unemployed or under-employed not in their fields while the global labor pool are taking those jobs in US city Foreign Economic Zones. This is happening because growing immigrant and foreign density in these US city Foreign Economic Zone creates a population not having rights---not having a connection to American and US history, quality of life, understanding of Democratic Republic and citizens with rights under a US Constitution.
We saw above a STEM national charter chain all sold in our US cities as what poor communities need to attain good jobs---even as we watch grads left behind.
When we listen to these global Wall Street player pols ---CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA----they are actively working to grow ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE using these STEM directives.
Our US public schools have always had strong STEM----along with strong liberal arts and humanities and the drop in student achievement came from a Clinton defunding and dismantling our public K-university---the same Clinton neo-liberals passing policy to defund and dismantle our strong public schools and STEM classes these few decades are now the ones saying we must have global corporate schools focused only on STEM.
'The U.S. Census Bureau reported today that 74 percent of those who have a bachelor's degree in science, technology, engineering and math — commonly referred to as STEM — are not employed in STEM occupations. In addition, men continue to be overrepresented in STEM, especially in computer and engineering occupations. About 86 percent of engineers and 74 percent of computer professionals are men'.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2014 Census Bureau Reports Majority of STEM College Graduates Do Not Work in STEM Occupations
July 10, 2014
Release Number: CB14-130
The U.S. Census Bureau reported today that 74 percent of those who have a bachelor's degree in science, technology, engineering and math — commonly referred to as STEM — are not employed in STEM occupations. In addition, men continue to be overrepresented in STEM, especially in computer and engineering occupations. About 86 percent of engineers and 74 percent of computer professionals are men.
"STEM graduates have relatively low unemployment, however these graduates are not necessarily employed in STEM occupations," said Liana Christin Landivar, a sociologist in the Census Bureau's Industry and Occupation Statistics Branch.
According to new statistics from the 2012 American Community Survey, engineering and computer, math and statistics majors had the largest share of graduates going into a STEM field with about half employed in a STEM occupation. Science majors had fewer of their graduates employed in STEM. About 26 percent of physical science majors; 15 percent of biological, environmental and agricultural sciences majors; 10 percent of psychology majors; and 7 percent of social science majors were employed in STEM.
Approximately 14 percent of engineers were women, where they were most underrepresented of all the STEM fields. Representation of women was higher among mathematicians and statisticians (45 percent), life scientists (47 percent) and social scientists (63 percent). The rates of mathematicians and statisticians, and life scientists are not statistically different from each other.
Highlights
The tables released today highlight statistics on field of degree, occupation, unemployment and median earnings for college graduates by sex, race and Hispanic origin. In addition, the tables include state level STEM occupation information.
Below details a few highlights from the tables:
- At 9.1 million, the college major with the most graduates was business, while multidisciplinary studies was the major with the smallest number of graduates at 275,000.
- Engineering was the major with the highest earnings ($92,900), while the major with the lowest earnings was visual and performing arts ($50,700).
- In 2012, 3.6 percent of all college graduates between the ages of 25 and 64 were unemployed. A larger percentage of men than women were unemployed: 3.7 percent and 3.5 percent, respectively.
- Non-STEM management occupations employed the most male college graduates (3.8 million), while education occupations employed the most female college graduates (4.3 million).
- States with the largest percentage of STEM workers: Maryland (18.8 percent), Washington (18.3 percent) and Virginia (16.5 percent). The rates of workers in Maryland and Washington are not statistically different from each other.
Interactive Graphic
In addition to new tables released today on field of degree and occupation, the Census Bureau released a new interactive graphic to explore the relationship between college majors and occupations. The graphic shows the relationship between STEM college majors and STEM employment. In addition, the graphic highlights STEM and non-STEM field of degree and employment by sex, race and Hispanic origin.
About the American Community Survey
The American Community Survey provides a wide range of important statistics about all communities in the country. The American Community Survey gives communities the current information they need to plan investments and services. Retailers, homebuilders, police departments, and town and city planners are among the many private- and public-sector decision makers who count on these annual results.
Ever since Thomas Jefferson directed the first census in 1790, the census has collected detailed characteristics about our nation's people. Questions about jobs and the economy were added 20 years later under James Madison, who said such information would allow Congress to "adapt the public measures to the particular circumstances of the community," and over the decades allow America "an opportunity of marking the progress of the society."
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MIKULSKI IS OF COURSE TOP GLOBAL JOHNS HOPKINS GLOBAL LABOR POOL POLICY.
'As Erin Neill, of Senator Mikulski’s staff, pointed out, no one in the immigration debate speaks effectively for US-born STEM workers. The IT world’s libertarian ethos, the relative poverty among young scientists and their unemployed and underemployed peers, and a fear of antagonizing present or potential employers all hamper efforts to organize these workers'.
Left social Democrats are being made to appear anti-immigrant labor when we fight these US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zone policies bringing more and more and more foreign immigrant labor pool from working class jobs to now professional class. As this article shows we have plenty of new immigrant citizens highly qualified shouting as loudly against these high-skilled immigrant labor policies CLINTON AND OBAMA sell as PRO-IMMIGRANT. The Democratic base of labor and justice has KNOWN THIS WAS HOGWASH----global Wall Street is simply exploiting these workers with every intention of bringing what these immigrants are earning down to third world levels as soon as density is built in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones---like Baltimore.
So, all our Baltimore 'public' schools turned corporate charter are hyping the need for all students to be tied to STEM at the same time building structures that will make it impossible for US students graduating in STEM to attain jobs here in the US.
IT IS DELIBERATE FOLKS ---GET RID OF GLOBAL WALL STREET POLS AND TO DO THAT WE MUST FIX ELECTION RIGGING AND FRAUD.
CLINTON/OBAMA are made to look so into protecting immigrant and foreign workers when they are far-right global Wall Street exploiting these global labor pool ------while killing WE THE PEOPLE BLACK, BROWN, AND WHITE CITIZENS.
African engineers being brought to Baltimore to take any global corporate campus and global factory job that may be created will be fleeced and exploited----while, if these African professional stayed in their home nations growing local small businesses for their people----they would grow wealth for all African citizens.
It doesn’t add up
A science writer questions the conventional wisdom of US-born STEM workersBy Beryl Lieff BenderlyMay / June 2013
Homegrown President Obama, seen here visiting at technical college in North Carolina, supports bringing more foreign STEM workers to the US, despite high unemployment among US workers. (Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images)
In late February, Christine Miller and Sona Shah went to the Capitol Hill office of Miller’s senator, Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, to talk about immigration reform and the job market for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers. Miller, an American-born MIT grad with a PhD in biochemistry, had 20 years of research experience when Johns Hopkins University laid her off in 2009 because of funding cuts. Shah, an Indian-born US citizen with degrees in physics and engineering, had been laid off earlier by a computer company that was simultaneously hiring foreign workers on temporary visas. Proposals to increase admission of foreign stem workers to the US, Miller and Shah told Erin Neill, a member of Mikulski’s staff, would worsen the already glutted stem labor market.
According to Miller, Neill told them this is not the argument “she normally encounters on this issue.” The conventional wisdom is that tech companies and universities can’t find enough homegrown scientists to hire, so they need to import them from China and India. Neill suggested to Miller and Shah that “we would have more impact if we represented a large, organized group.”
Miller and Shah are, in fact, part of a large group. Figures from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform.
The two main STEM-related proposals currently part of that debate in Congress would increase the number of temporary high-skill worker visas (also called guestworker visas), and give green cards to every foreign graduate of an American college with a master’s or PhD in a STEM field. Media coverage of these proposals has generally hewed, uncritically, to the unfounded notion that America isn’t producing enough native talent in the science and engineering fields to satisfy the demands of businesses and universities—and that foreign-born workers tend to be more entrepreneurial and innovative than their American-born counterparts. Allowing more stem immigrants, the story goes, is key to adding jobs to the beleaguered US economy.
It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.
High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. Politicians, advocates, and articles and op-eds published by media outlets—including The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, Slate, and others—invoke such foreign-born entrepreneurs as Google’s Sergey Brin or Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, as if arrival from abroad (Brin and Yang came to the US as children) explains the success of the companies they founded . . . with partners who are US natives. Journalists endorse studies that trumpet the job-creating skills of these entrepreneurs from abroad, while ignoring the weaknesses that other scholars find in the research.
Meanwhile, The National Science Board’s biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators, consistently finds that the US produces several times the number of STEM graduates than can get jobs in their fields. Recent reports from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, and the American Chemical Society warn that overproduction of STEM PhDs is damaging America’s ability to recruit native-born talent, and advise universities to limit the number of doctorates they produce, especially in the severely glutted life sciences. In June 2012, for instance, the American Chemical Society’s annual survey found record unemployment among its members, with only 38 percent of new PhDs, 50 percent of new master’s graduates, and 33 percent of new bachelor’s graduates in fulltime jobs. Overall, STEM unemployment in the US is more than twice its pre-recession level, according to congressional testimony by Ron Hira, a science-labor-force expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
And yet, a bill introduced in Congress last year that would have heeded the NIH recommendation by limiting visas for biomedical scientists was attacked in a Forbes article that suggested it could delay progress on the search for a cure for cancer by keeping out able researchers.
* * *Foreign-born scientists and engineers have, of course, contributed significantly to American society as innovators and entrepreneurs—and the nation’s immigration policy certainly needs repair. But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them.
Temporary visas allow employers to pay skilled workers below-market wages, and these visas are valid only for specific jobs. Workers are unable to take another job, making them akin to indentured servants. Universities also use temporary visas to recruit international graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, mainly from China, to do the gruntwork for professors’ grants. “When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.
Research by Hira, Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, Richard Freeman of Harvard, and numerous others has shown how temporary visas have allowed employers to flood STEM labor markets and hold down the cost of tech workers and scientists doing grant-supported university research. Wages in the IT industry rose rapidly throughout the 1990s, but have been essentially flat or declining in the past decade, which coincides with the rising number of guestworkers on temporary visas.
In his new book, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Peter Cappelli, a human-resources specialist at the Wharton School, concludes that companies’ reported hiring difficulties don’t arise from a shortage of qualified workers, but from rigid recruitment practices that use narrow categories and definitions and don’t take advantage of the applicants’ full range of abilities. Companies so routinely evade protections in the visa system designed to prevent displacement of American citizens that immigration lawyers have produced videos about how it is done. For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.
The temporary-visa system also facilitates the offshoring of STEM work, particularly in the IT field, to low-wage countries. Outsourcing companies use the temporary visas to bring workers to the US to learn the jobs that the client company is planning to move to temp workers’ home country. The 10 firms with the largest number of H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill workers, are all in the business of shipping work overseas, and former Indian commerce minister Kamil Nath famously labeled the H-1B “the outsourcing visa.”
These practices have helped to reduce incomes and career prospects in STEM fields drastically enough to produce what UC Davis’s Norman Matloff calls “an internal brain drain” of talented Americans to other, more promising career opportunities such as Wall Street, healthcare, or patent law.
The proposal before Congress to automatically grant green cards to all STEM students with graduate degrees—regardless of field, origin, or quality—would exacerbate the problem of already overcrowded markets, according to new research by Hal Salzman of Rutgers University, Daniel Keuhn of American University, and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University. It also would benefit universities facing tough financial times by dramatically increasing the allure of American graduate schools, and thus the income potential to universities. And, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said at a 2011 hearing, it would “further erode the opportunities of American students. Universities would in essence become visa mills.”
Academic departments generally determine how many graduate students they admit, or postdocs they hire, based on the teaching and research workforce they need, not on the career opportunities awaiting young scientists. Unlike companies, universities have access to unlimited temporary-worker visas. This allows universities to hire skilled lab workers and pay them very low, “trainee” wages. Postdocs are an especially good deal for professors running labs because they don’t require tuition, which must be paid out of the professors’ grants, notes Paula Stephan, a labor economist at Georgia State University, in her book How Economics Shapes Science.
* * *Immigrants constitute the nation’s “only shot at getting a growing economy,” because they “start more jobs than natives,” declared New York Times columnist David Brooks on Meet the Press in February. “Every additional 100 foreign-born workers in science and technology fields is associated with 262 additional jobs for US natives,” he had written in the Times, adding that “a quarter of new high-tech companies with more than $1 million in sales were also founded by the foreign-born.”
These claims, cited by Brooks and many others, arise from a body of research that has been the subject of scholarly dispute—though you’d never know it from the media coverage of this issue. The overwhelming majority of coverage presents the conclusions reached in studies like the one conducted by Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, who publishes widely in popular media and speaks frequently on immigration issues. About a quarter of the 2,054 engineering and technology companies that responded to Wadhwa’s telephone survey said they had a “key founder”—defined as a chief technology officer or a CEO—who was foreign-born. Extrapolating from that figure, the study credits immigrant-founded companies with employing 450,000 people nationally in 2005.
But a nationwide survey by political scientist David Hart and economist Zoltan Acs of George Mason University reached a different conclusion. In a 2011 piece in Economic Development Quarterly, Hart and Acs note that between 40 and 75 percent of new jobs are created by no more than 10 percent of new businesses—the so-called high-impact firms that have rapidly expanding sales and employment. In their survey of high-impact technology firms, only 16 percent had at least one foreign-born founder, and immigrants constituted about 13 percent of total founders—a figure close to the immigrant share of the general population. But the more fundamental problem with Wadhwa’s study, Hart and Acs suggest, is that it does not report the total number of founders at a given company, making conclusions about immigrants’ overall contribution impossible to quantify.
Evaluating the issues of statistics and sample selection that divide the academic researchers is beyond the purview of most general media, but informing readers that reputable researchers reached different conclusions is not. Though real, the immigrant role in high-tech entrepreneurship could be considerably less dramatic than many writers claim.
Research on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in 1999 by AnnaLee Saxenian, for example, found that 36 percent of high-tech companies owned by Chinese immigrants were doing nothing more groundbreaking than putting together computers for sale from components.
* * *As Erin Neill, of Senator Mikulski’s staff, pointed out, no one in the immigration debate speaks effectively for US-born STEM workers. The IT world’s libertarian ethos, the relative poverty among young scientists and their unemployed and underemployed peers, and a fear of antagonizing present or potential employers all hamper efforts to organize these workers. National scientific associations and advocacy groups sponsored by industry and universities, meanwhile, represent the interests of those who benefit from the system—tenured faculty, university administrators, and company executives, including those at companies whose donations support scholarly conferences and other association activities. These organizations and their lobbyists frame their policy arguments with feel-good abstractions about the inherent value of science and research and innovation, suggesting they are a panacea for America’s economic ills.
Which brings us to the story of Xianmin Shane Zhang, a software engineer in Minnesota. According to his LinkedIn page, Zhang earned his BS in engineering in his native China, one MS in physics at Southern Illinois University, and another in computer science at the University of Houston. His profile next lists a series of IT jobs at US companies. In 2005, 43-year-old Zhang was one of a group of workers over 40 who sued their former employer, Best Buy, for age discrimination, when the company laid them off after outsourcing their jobs. The suit ended in an undisclosed settlement.
After being laid off by Best Buy, Zhang eventually fulfilled the rosy forecast of those advocating increased STEM-worker immigration by becoming an entrepreneur, though hardly following the innovation and jobs-for-Americans script. His Z&Z Information Services in St. Paul helps US companies outsource their IT and programming needs to China. “Giving green cards to foreign students can lead to offshoring as well,” notes Norman Matloff, who uncovered this tale. That’s because young scientists and engineers from abroad get older, and wind up facing the same age discrimination and glutted market as their native-born colleagues. Why isn’t that reported, too?
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We spoke yesterday of how Baltimore City controlled by Wall Street Baltimore Development and global Johns Hopkins is simply MOVING FORWARD in building independent CORPORATE CHARTER SCHOOL BOARDS while Baltimore and Maryland citizens are being told by their pols public school boards are being protected and attempts at elected school boards is being pushed when NONE OF THAT IS TRUE.
Take the information above about how this STEM emphasis is NOT HELPING US STUDENTS ------with the super-sized building of a global corporate STEM neo-liberal PRE-K- CAREER COLLEGE structure and we see the DEATH of public education in America.
Whether Republican county or Democratic county----all citizens are fighting as CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA WALL STREET PLAYERS in our Maryland Assembly and county city councils are simply pushing these ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE ONE GLOBAL EDUCATION forward.
ALL OF THESE POLS AND THE BALTIMORE SUN AND NATIONAL MEDIA REPORTERS KNOW THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE SCHOOL BOARD MODELS ARE BEING PUSHED AS THEY ALL PRETEND TO BE LISTENING TO CITIZENS--
'The remarks, made during a public hearing on the potential for an elected or hybrid board — in which some members are elected and others are appointed — hinted at the possibility that a new approach to the decades-long debate over school board selection might gain traction next legislative session'.
Meanwhile in our US cities like Baltimore----Wall Street Baltimore Development Corporation 'labor and justice' organizations are hard at work selling to our low-income communities these education policies will help these citizens with stronger schools and jobs. EVERYONE IS BEING LIED TO----CHEATED----HAVING OUR FUTURES STOLEN-----
Anne Arundel lawmakers keep open mind on elected school board
By Amanda Yeager / Staff
Amanda YeagerContact Reporterayeager@capgaznews.com
Lawmakers' recent remarks suggest a new approach to the debate over school board selection might soon gain traAnne Arundel County lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle expressed openness Tuesday to changing the selection process for the county's Board of Education so that at least some of its members are elected.
The remarks, made during a public hearing on the potential for an elected or hybrid board — in which some members are elected and others are appointed — hinted at the possibility that a new approach to the decades-long debate over school board selection might gain traction next legislative session.
"It is time again for us to consider different options and whether another process would better serve Anne Arundel County," said Del. Pam Beidle, D-Linthicum, who chairs the delegation's education subcommittee.
Exactly what that new process might be remains unclear. While several public officials expressed support for a hybrid board, important details — such as how many members would be elected, who would make appointments and how to keep politics from encroaching on school board decisions — still need to be ironed out.
Currently, eight members of the county's Board of Education are appointed to five-year terms by the governor. The board also includes a student member, who serves a one-year term.
Del. Sid Saab, a Crownsville Republican who has submitted bills proposing a hybrid school board in the past two General Assembly sessions, said he plans to take up the cause again when a new session starts in January.
School board reviews capital budget "I'm optimistic we can finally move forward," he said.
The hearing comes after months of political jousting over the makeup of a group that interviews and recommends school board candidates to the governor.
The 11-member commission, which is composed of five gubernatorial appointees, one county executive appointee and representatives from local education interest groups, was created by compromise legislation about a decade ago during former Gov. Martin O'Malley's term.
Glen Burnie High School junior Carolyn Williams, 17, won the election to be the student member nominee, to be appointed by Governor Larry Hogan, for the Anne Arundel County School Board, during a meeting of the Chesapeake Regional Association of Student Councils at South River High School Friday.
Last fall, Gov. Larry Hogan replaced O'Malley's Democratic appointees on the commission with Republicans. In February, his decision to appoint new school board members Terry Gilleland and Maria Sasso — marking the first time in decades the school board did not have an African American member among its ranks — sparked an outcry and a push to ensure greater diversity on the board.
This spring, General Assembly Democrats passed a law, over Hogan's veto, seeking to remove the governor's five appointments to the 11-member School Board Nominating Commission and replace them with new members from groups representing parents and minority communities. Democrats said the new representatives would broaden perspectives on the board, while Republicans argued they would expand Democrats' influence.
The measure was promptly challenged in Circuit Court by sitting Hogan appointees, who argue that only the governor has the power to ask them to leave. Circuit Court Judge William C. Mulford agreed, but Attorney General Brian Frosh has appealed his decision on behalf of the General Assembly. The Court of Appeals is expected to take up the case in November.
A separate lawsuit, in which commission members who represent the teachers union and other local groups are attempting to block earlier-than-usual appointments for two school board seats that don't come open until July 1, 2017, is also awaiting a final verdict.
The nominating commission, chaired by Hogan appointee Jamie Falcon, has submitted six recommendations to the governor for those seats. Hogan has yet to respond.
The school board selection process has been a perennial concern of Anne Arundel County Republicans, many of whom have long supported a fully elected board or a hybrid of elected and appointed members.
But they've been unable to get legislation changing the process off the ground in recent years. Last session, Saab withdrew his bill proposing a hybrid school board after encountering opposition.
County Executive Steve Schuh, a former state delegate, and Del. Tony McConkey, R-Severna Park, sponsored similar bills in 2013 and 2014. Neither made it to the floor for a vote.
Schuh said this week he supports a hybrid school board but not a fully elected one. Most important, he said, is that the board encompasses members from all across the county and with a variety of political leanings.
"We need to make sure we have all perspectives on the board," he said.
Amalie Brandenburg, Schuh's education liaison, told delegation members that the county executive favors a system of five elected representatives — one from each of the county's legislative districts — as well as three county executive-appointed members and one student representative.
Councilman Chris Trumbauer, D-Annapolis, said he would like for the council to have a say in appointments, as well, although he didn't go so far as to recommend the council select its own appointee.
"For me to consider the process of the seven of us putting forth one name makes my head hurt, and I think that would not be the most productive process," he said, but "speaking for myself ... we'd like to have some role in the conversation."
School board vice president Julie Hummer said the board has not taken an official position on whether the selection process should change.
But she said board members should strive to consider the entire county's interests, and not just those of one community: "An effective board member understands that although they live in and represent a certain part of the county, our mission is to work together for all students, not just those from our individual community."
Sen. Bryan Simonaire, a Pasadena Republican who has been a longtime supporter of an elected school board, said he often hears from constituents who want more power over their school board members.
"They just don't feel there's any accountability to the people," he said.
Simonaire said he wanted to create a "direct link" between voters and the school board, while trying to "get rid of partisanship" as much as possible.
House Minority Leader Nic Kipke, R-Pasadena, said the presence of some degree of politics in school board business is inevitable.
"This is why I prefer to allow the citizens of our county to make that selection through direct elections like the vast majority of boards in Maryland and around the country," he said in a statement.
Out of Maryland's 24 school districts, 17 are elected, five are hybrid bodies and two — Anne Arundel and Wicomico County — are fully appointed. This November, Wicomico County voters will decide via referendum whether they want to change their school board selection process.
Not everyone was convinced changing to an elected school board would be in the best interest of students and teachers.
Jacob Baumgart, first vice president of the Chesapeake Regional Association of Student Councils, said the student group's position "is one of irritated ambivalence." He noted that many recent school board decisions, including this fiscal year's budget vote and decisions on the hiring of a superintendent, earlier school start times and assessment strategies, have been made without partisan bickering.
"Leaders are supposed to be responsible for the entire community but we find that quite often they're only accountable to their own partisan electorate," he said.
Annapolis and Anne Arundel County Chamber of Commerce President Bob Burdon said the chamber opposes a change and sees nothing wrong with the current system.
"For two decades, the Chamber of Commerce has advocated that an elected school board only makes sense if the Board of Education is given fiscal and budgetary autonomy along with revenue-raising authority," said Burdon, who also serves on the school board nominating commission but did not speak on its behalf. "Absent that, an elected school board does nothing more than expose our children's education to partisan politics which has been very divisive in the past few years, as we've seen."
This story has been updated to correct the name of the Circuit Court judge who ruled on the lawsuit against removal of Hogan's appointees to the School Board Nominating Commission. Judge William C. Mulford heard the case.
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Here we see again----THAT APPOINTED COMMISSION this time on school board appointments. Whether global 1% Wall Street corporate neo-liberal O'MALLEY-----or global 1% Wall Street corporate Bush neo-con HOGAN_---these appointments to our school boards especially in Baltimore City are CORPORATE APPOINTEES. THEY ARE NOT THE AVERAGE CITIZEN OR EDUCATION ACTIVIST----these appointments are almost always someone from those global NGO corporate education non-profits moving global ONE WORLD ONE EDUCATION forward.
'Last fall, Gov. Larry Hogan replaced O'Malley's Democratic appointees on the commission with Republicans'.
The problem for Maryland and Baltimore citizens is our AFT------our public school teacher's unions are growing a majority of education privatization members-----
All states across the nation controlled by CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA POLS----will have education policies PRETENDING to listen to WE THE PEOPLE----with no intentions of doing so. The gimmick of hybrid public school boards is THE MAJORITY of votes comes from the corporate appointed members. So, here we have a student no doubt wanting to be that community education activist-----but her voice is one vote on a school board with a majority that will vote for corporate education. This policy is just like the policy of telling voters to vote for the LEAST WORST OF CANDIDATES. Here global pols are telling us----look, we are giving WE THE PEOPLE a voice on a stacked deck of appointed committees.
MARYLAND ASSOCIATION OF BOARDS OF EDUCATION
2012 Legislative Positions
ELECTED AND APPOINTED
BOARDS OF EDUCATION
BACKGROUND
Of Maryland’s 24 local boards of education, eighteen are locally elected; four are appointed at least in
part by the Governor, and the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners is appointed jointly by the
Governor and Mayor; two appointed boards are transitioning to hybrid boards comprised of both
appointed and elected members; and members of one appointed board must be retained through an
election following their appointment.
The following eighteen boards are elected:
Allegany County
Calvert County
Carroll County
Cecil County
Charles County
Dorchester County
Frederick County
Garrett County
Howard County
Kent County
Montgomery County
Prince George’s County
Queen Anne’s County
St. Mary’s County
Somerset County
Talbot County
Washington County
Worcester County
The following four boards are appointed:
Anne Arundel County
1
Baltimore City
2
Baltimore County
Wicomico County
The following two boards are hybrid boards comprised of both elected and appointed members:
Caroline County
3
Harford County
4
1
The Anne Arundel County Board of Education members are
subject to a “retention” election in the election year
following their appointment or reappointment.
2
The Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners is appointed by the Governor and the Mayor of Baltimore jointly from nominations submitted by the State Board of Education.
3
The Caroline County Board of Education transition to a boar
d comprised of appointed and elected members, beginning
in 2011, was approved by local referendum
in 2010 (as provided for in SB 964, 2009).
4
The Harford County Board of Education is transitioning beginning in 2010 to a board comprised of appointed and elected members (SB629/HB 639, 2009).
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While US citizens are fighting these fights------global Wall Street pols are advancing global ONE WORLD ONE EDUCATION policies as fast as they can go. THESE ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD ISSUES ARE NOT THE REAL ISSUE---THEY ARE BUILDING PLATFORMS FOR CORPORATE CHARTER SCHOOL BOARDS WITH THESE CHARTER CHAINS IN BALTIMORE.
Glen Burnie student chosen as member of Board of Education
Glen Burnie High School junior Carolyn Williams, 17, won the election to be the student member nominee, to be appointed by Governor Larry Hogan, for the Anne Arundel County School Board, during a meeting of the Chesapeake Regional Association of Student Councils at South River High School Friday.
'after the board voted to continue its partnership with the Education Achievement Authority, the controversial state-run district which has taken over fifteen Detroit public schools since its inception in 2012'.
We have Republicans Rick Snyder and this Larry Hogan pushing as hard as they can to create an EDUCATION AUTHORITY taking all voice of citizens in education policy while in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones---like Detroit and Baltimore---we have global Wall Street pols posing Democrats pushing these same policies.
With board appointments, Hogan can shape education policy early in his term
Due to a quirk in state law, Gov. Larry Hogan is making a slew of new appointments to state and local school boards this year, giving him the opportunity to steer the state's education policy toward a more conservative view.
(Tom Brenner, Baltimore Sun)
Liz BowieContact ReporterThe Baltimore Sun
With numerous board appointments, Gov. Hogan can shape education policy early in his term
Due to a quirk in state law, Gov. Larry Hogan is making a slew of new appointments to state and local school boards this year, giving him the opportunity to steer the state's education policy toward a more conservative view.
Some of the appointees already named reflect Hogan's concerns about the Common Core standards and his desire to expand charter schools. And more are coming: of the 22 school board appointments Hogan can make in Central Maryland this year, only 15 have been filled so far.
"It is a lot of educational policy in the governor's hands," said Henry Smith, an assistant professor of education policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. "It is an opportunity for him to reach beyond politics and appoint people who have some different approaches to education than we have seen to date."
The appointments come at a crucial time. Contracts for the state and Baltimore County superintendents are up for renewal, and there is growing concern over a new teacher evaluation system and the amount of testing required of students. The state school board, which in Maryland has broad power to set education policy, will determine whether schools continue on their course.
Unlike other states, Maryland has adopted most of the recent policy changes, including the Common Core, teacher evaluations and new assessments, without a significant backlash. But those on the far right and on the far left have criticized such changes, for different reasons.
The quirk that gave Hogan so many school board appointments resulted from the rescheduling of Maryland primaries.
When primaries were moved from September to June, the appointment process that had been in place for years was disrupted. Because the state constitution says a lame-duck governor cannot make appointments after the primary, and because most school board terms end June 30, Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, was prevented from making appointments for positions that turned over last summer. Some school board members whose terms had expired stayed for an additional year; in other cases, positions were left vacant.
Hogan names three to Harford School Board As a result, Hogan, a Republican, will fill two years' worth of vacancies in his first six months in office: those that turn over this July and those from last July. In most cases, the appointees will serve four- or five-year terms, although in Baltimore County some terms will be cut short in 2018 when the county transitions to a partly elected board.
Hogan said after a recent news conference that he did not use the state board appointments to advance his agenda on creating more charter schools or slowing the Common Core. For city and county board appointments — which have included Democrats and Republicans — he said he is relying primarily on recommendations from the local level.
In a statement, the governor's office added that Hogan "is committed to selecting individuals who will represent the best interest of their respective counties and will apply these very high standards to his remaining appointees." Hogan, who has been keeping a limited schedule while undergoing cancer treatment, declined to be interviewed to discuss the issue further.
Increasingly, board members in large counties are taking on what is essentially a volunteer, part-time job that requires them to oversee complex budgets of more than $1 billion, or as much as half a county's entire spending. Board members must vote on contracts ranging from purchasing textbooks to building schools; they also hire and can fire the superintendent.
Hogan's appointees could have immediate impact. State schools Superintendent Lillian Lowery and Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance have contracts that expire in a year, and decisions on whether they will be offered new four-year deals will be made in the next six months.
Hogan's appointees to the 12-member state school board include well-known education experts familiar with policies they will be asked to weigh in on, including conservatives Chester E. Finn Jr. and Andy Smarick, who have researched and written extensively about education.
Finn is a former president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington conservative think tank, where he worked for 17 years. Smarick is a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit education research and consulting firm. Smarick was formerly the New Jersey deputy commissioner of education and a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education during Republican President George W. Bush's administration.
Finn and Smarick, who support the Common Core and are strong advocates for charter schools, declined to discuss their appointments.
Hogan has also appointed Michele Jenkins Guyton, who lives in northern Baltimore County and has children with disabilities, to the state board. She could not be reached for comment.
"I am very encouraged by how knowledgeable and accomplished some of them are," said Jason Botel, executive director of MarylandCan, an education advocacy group. "Chester Finn and Andy Smarick are two leading national experts on education policy and practice. While I may not agree with them on every issue, having their experience and expertise on our state school board is an enormous value-add for our state's children."
The state and local appointments so far have not shown much racial diversity, even though white children are a minority in public schools in the state and in Baltimore County. For example, Finn and Smarick, who are white, replaced two African-American women appointed by O'Malley. In Baltimore County, one of the six appointees is African-American: Romaine Williams, who is being reappointed to the board.
"Going forward I would encourage the governor and his staff to play close attention to the diversity in Baltimore County," said Don Mohler, chief of staff for County Executive Kevin Kamenetz, a Democrat. Mohler added, "It is clear in the appointments that the county executive did not have involvement in the selection process."
In Baltimore County, Hogan's appointments to the 12-member board range from Democrats who have run for government office to conservative voices, including Republican Ann Miller, who will take her seat later in the year.
Current board member George Moniodis said the board needs consistency amid such large turnover. The governor's office mistakenly thought that his term expired July 1 and named Miller to replace him. However, Moniodis' term does not expire until December and he will serve until then.
The members' lack of experience could make their jobs more difficult, Moniodis said. "We could help them in the transition to become active participants of the board. If I had gone out, it would have been six [new members including a student member]. In business it doesn't happen like that," he said.
Miller, who is opposed to both the Common Core and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers tests, has been critical of the school system in her columns for an online publication, Examiner.com.
Last school year, she tried to have her daughter, a student at Hereford High School, opt out of state testing, which the state has advised school systems not to allow.
"Either [Baltimore County Public Schools] must acknowledge a parent's right to refuse the tests and provide written policy on those procedures, or they must stand in defiance of federal statute and deny parental rights to govern their children's education," Miller wrote in a column. "We will not continue to be misled, uninformed, intimidated, and subject to arbitrary and fluid decisions made on the fly and written on a napkin."
In an interview, she said she supports more local control of schools, wants a greater role for parents and wants the school system to be more transparent.
"We have lost a lot of teachers. They are the front line and we need to listen to them and respond," said Miller, who also has a child who is home-schooled and another who attends a private Christian school.
Hogan's new appointments include more people who have children in the systems they are representing. In Baltimore County, for instance, only one school board member in the past several years has had children in the public schools. Two of the five new appointments are parents of current students.
Besides Miller, Hogan appointed Republican Kathleen Causey, also the parent of a Hereford High student and a leader of Hereford Works, a group that fought Dance's change in high school schedules a year ago. Members petitioned legislative leaders and turned up by the hundreds at school board meetings, but eventually lost the attempt to keep their schedule.
In Baltimore County, Hogan also appointed June Eaton, a retired Catholic school social studies and language arts teacher from Dundalk; Nick Stewart, an Arbutus lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for state delegate as a Democrat; and Stephen Verch, who ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for a seat on the County Council.
Republican Del. Robert Long said in a statement that he recommended Eaton, whose children attended Catholic schools, because she has the "breadth of experience needed to confront the challenges of education in a constantly involving economy. She will bring a perspective that will ensure we prepare our young people for a prosperous career and successful post-secondary education."
Eaton is not a registered voter, so she has no party affiliation. Asked if she had any public school issues that needed to be addressed, she said, "I really haven't given it much thought. This is all new to me."
The nature of Baltimore County's school board will change in a few years. After some parent advocates complained that the board had ignored their concerns, they lobbied for a hybrid board, with some elected and some appointed members. The legislature passed the measure, which takes effect in 2018.
Harford County's board is already a hybrid of elected and appointed members. Hogan has appointed Laura S. Runyeon, a paralegal for Miles and Stockbridge who has been active with the PTA, and Alfred L. Williamson, a retired Social Security Administration senior manager. Hogan reappointed Joseph Arthur Hau, who is vice president and chief financial officer of Chesapeake Environmental Management Inc. and has served on the board since 2011.
Ryan Burbey, president of the Harford County Education Association, said he doesn't know the new members well but is looking forward to working with them.
In Anne Arundel County, Hogan will name five of the board's nine members this year, but will have less power in the choices because he must choose from a list created by a nominating commission.
Hogan has appointed three people to open seats and has two more to announce. The appointments are Tom Frank of Crofton, retired founder and head of a biomedical engineering company; Julie Hummer of Laurel, a former teacher and active PTA member who has three children in the school system; and Allison Pickard of Millersville, a parent and PTA president whose career has included working on elderly housing issues.
The three new appointees to the Baltimore City school board, who are chosen jointly by the governor and mayor, have not yet been announced. Howard and Carroll counties have elected school boards.
________________________________________________
THIS EDUCATION ACHIEVEMENT AUTHORITY IS THE SAME AS A CORPORATE SCHOOL BOARD WITH POWERS TO VOCATIONALLY TRACK AND ASSIGN STUDENTS TO CORPORATE CAMPUS SCHOOLS......IT IS THAT ONE WORLD ONE EDUCATION GLOBAL NEO-LIBERAL STRUCTURE----and yes, Detroit was brought down into bankruptcy to install this CORPORATE SCHOOL COMMITTEE---------
Again, all these education policies appear to hit our US city low-income black and brown citizens hardest but the goal is to expand these corporate school boards and authorities statewide.
Education Achievement Authority
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Education Achievement Authority Interlocal agreement school district overview
Formed July 1, 2011
Type board
Minister responsible
Roy Roberts, EAA Executive Committee Chair[1]
Interlocal agreement school district executive
Veronica Conforme, chancellor
Parent interlocal agreement school district Eastern Michigan University
Detroit Public Schools
Child interlocal agreement school district
Education Achievement System
Key document
EMU-Detroit Public Schools Agreement
The Education Achievement Authority (EAA or Authority) is the governing body of the Education Achievement System (EAS or System), a Michigan statewide school system for failing schools.
The office of the State Superintendent or an Emergency Manager of a school district may transfer a failing school from its district into the System that is not under an approved redesign plan'.[2]
It is ironic that Wall Street's MEDIA -MADE Black Lives Matter leader DeRay McKesson has a job as HUMAN CAPITAL manager moving these global corporate education structures forward here in Baltimore. The opposite of BLACK LIVES MATTER.. Baltimore is staged to be pushed into bankruptcy to install this same Detroit EDUCATION ACHIEVEMENT AUTHORITY-----once our public school board.
This Education Achievement Authority is simply yet another QUASI-GOVERNMENTAL agency handed to corporate committees to decide all that is education from where funding goes ----to what it goes-----what policies are advanced with funding---and where students will attend schools. IT IS THAT ONE WORLD GLOBAL CORPORATE EDUCATION STRUCTURE. Michigan is being led down this path by a global Wall Street pol pretending to be a conservative Republican ---there is nothing conservative or republican in giving total control of our K-12 to appointed quasi-governmental organizations. Baltimore is staged to do the same in this coming economic crash and city bankruptcy.
Michigan Education Achievement Authority Special School District A Lightning Rod For Controversy
12/12/2012 07:30 pm ET | Updated Feb 11, 2013
Jaclyn Zubrzycki Education Week, Bethesda, Md.
As Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority nears the end of its first fully operational semester, a battle rages over its present and its future.
The statewide school system, which took charge of 15 schools in Detroit this fall, has been the subject of disputes in recent weeks about governance, educational models, and equity in a city notoriously plagued by financial issues, depopulation, racial tensions, poverty—and low student achievement.
Michigan is among a number of states, including Tennessee and Louisiana, that have formed state-level authorities to manage their most troubled schools. The progress of those ventures is being closely watched by policymakers nationwide.
The controversy in Michigan came to a head late last month, in the wake of a Detroit school board vote that questioned the status of the city school system’s state-appointed emergency financial manager, Roy Roberts. The city school board unanimously voted to withdraw from the statewide authority.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in the state House and Senate, in an effort to protect the authority, are pushing bills that would set it into state law during the current Republican-led session. The bill’s authors and other proponents of codifying the authority say the newly created district, which serves about 11,000 Detroit students, could potentially improve the academic achievement of the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools across the entire state.
Letter to Washington
The Detroit board’s vote is unlikely to represent the end of the education authority, mostly because the statewide entity currently operates through a contractual agreement, signed by Mr. Roberts, between the 50,000-student city school system and Eastern Michigan State University, that Mr. Roberts, who remains the emergency financial manager, is unlikely to dissolve.
But the authority remains the focus of contention. A group of parents, university professors, and advocates for the Detroit public schools wrote a letter last month to
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama listing concerns with the educational program, accountability, and governance of the authority, which was recently named a finalist in the federal Race to the Top district competition.
Some opponents have gone further in their critiques: The president of the Detroit school board, LaMar Lemmon, and community activist Helen Moore said in interviews with Education Week that the authority was a racially motivated attempt to dismantle Detroit’s public school system.
The educational authority is so new that there aren’t yet data to indicate whether it is more or less successful than the traditional system. Steven Wasko, a spokesman for the Detroit public schools, said that the lack of information argues against dismantling the authority.
“Given that the schools have been assigned to that reform district for just a little over three months, on what basis can it be concluded that it has not worked?” he said.
But advocates like Ms. Moore say the authority’s beginner status argues against extending it through proposed legislation.
Fraught History
The Detroit school system was first taken over by the state in 1999, returned to local control in 2005, and handed to a state-appointed emergency financial manager in 2009. The lack of local control over the school system has long been a bone of contention.
State Rep. Lisa Posthumus Lyons, the chairwoman of the house education committee and a sponsor of House Bill 6004, which would confirm the authority as “part of this state’s system of public schools,” said that while she believed in locally controlled schools, state legislators had a responsibility to address the problem of low-performing schools.
She said the bill had been modified to reflect some concerns. For instance, students in the authority were initially not required to take the same state tests as students in other schools, but now are. Another revision would allow schools to eventually leave the authority.
But the most recent version of the bill would still grant the authority the power to create new charter schools and authorizers, and would require the regular Detroit school system to lease or sell buildings to the authority.
The authority’s learning model and its use of a computer program called Buzz have also come into question. The program in Detroit is similar to an effort that authority Chancellor John Covington installed while he was the superintendent of the 17,000-student Kansas City, Mo., school system, which abandoned the model soon after Mr. Covington left in 2011.
But Detroit teacher Brooke Harris, testifying before state legislators, said the program was “not innovative, and not student-centered.”
In an interview, Mr. Covington said that the online program “does not drive the curriculum of the authority of Michigan,” which he described as a blended learning program.
Differing Perspectives
Anecdotal evidence on the new instructional program is also mixed. K.C. Wilbourn, who is in her fourth year as the principal at Detroit’s Denby High School, said that when she first learned that Denby would become part of the authority she was “devastated.” But Ms. Wilbourn said working with Mr. Covington has been a pleasant surprise. “I can share thoughts without consequences, and that to me is priceless,” she said.
This year, 75 percent of the staff is new, and 25 percent were provided by Teach For America, the nonprofit group that places teachers in high-need schools.
“It’s been good for the children because it’s been good for its leader,” Ms. Wilbourn said.
Meanwhile, at Mumford High School, also within the authority, Ms. Harris said her school had struggled this year with logistical problems. Her classes had as many as 45 students, and two classes only recently gained access to Buzz after being delayed by technical issues. Rescheduling this month brought Ms. Harris’s class sizes down to 33.
The Urban League’s Mr. Anderson said “we’re interested in what’s happening to improve education in the state, but the jury’s still out on whether the [authority is] the best way or not.” ___
___________________________________________
Here we have a Republican Governor Larry Hogan elected by Republican voters knowing where all these corporate charter and RAce to the Top policies are going and they do not like it. So, being a Bush global Wall Street neo-cons with every intention to MOVE FORWARD ONE WORLD ONE GLOBAL EDUCATION ----Hogan pretends to appoint people who will protect community charters and end corporate COMMON CORE AND RACE TO THE TOP----all while installing in BAltimore City the very corporate charter school board and Baltimore City School Superintendent THAT WILL MAKE BLOOMBERG AND WALL STREET PROUD.
We have Republicans Rick Snyder and this Larry Hogan pushing as hard as they can to create an EDUCATION AUTHORITY taking all voice of citizens in education policy while in US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones---like Detroit and Baltimore---we have global Wall Street pols posing Democrats pushing these same policies.
MARYLAND ASSOCIATION OF BOARDS OF EDUCATION
2012 Legislative Positions
ELECTED AND APPOINTED
BOARDS OF EDUCATION
BACKGROUND
Of Maryland’s 24 local boards of education, eighteen are locally elected; four are appointed at least in
part by the Governor, and the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners is appointed jointly by the
Governor and Mayor; two appointed boards are transitioning to hybrid boards comprised of both
appointed and elected members; and members of one appointed board must be retained through an
election following their appointment.
The following eighteen boards are elected:
Allegany County
Calvert County
Carroll County
Cecil County
Charles County
Dorchester County
Frederick County
Garrett County
Howard County
Kent County
Montgomery County
Prince George’s County
Queen Anne’s County
St. Mary’s County
Somerset County
Talbot County
Washington County
Worcester County
The following four boards are appointed:
Anne Arundel County
1
Baltimore City
2
Baltimore County
Wicomico County
The following two boards are hybrid boards comprised of both elected and appointed members:
Caroline County
3
Harford County
4
1
The Anne Arundel County Board of Education members are
subject to a “retention” election in the election year
following their appointment or reappointment.
2
The Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners is appointed by the Governor and the Mayor of Baltimore jointly from nominations submitted by the State Board of Education.
3
The Caroline County Board of Education transition to a boar
d comprised of appointed and elected members, beginning
in 2011, was approved by local referendum
in 2010 (as provided for in SB 964, 2009).
4
The Harford County Board of Education is transitioning beginning in 2010 to a board comprised of appointed and elected members (SB629/HB 639, 2009).
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