Franklin Schargel’s Blog

Money ALONE Cannot Buy School Improvement

As all of you who have attended my workshops and as many of you know in live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Our governor, Suzanna Martinez, has proposed paying teachers from high-performing schools to move to low-performance schools. This has already been tried in Albuquerque where $4.5 million has been spent paying teachers $5,000 a year ($100 a week) to move to low-performing schools. At the end of three years, scores in a low performing middle school not improved, but math schools have doubled. In the low-performing high school test scores have remained flat (and low) as have graduation rates. While I believe we need to try a variety of things to improve schools, this plan raises some issues:

Labeling every teacher in a low-performing school as a “failure” and every teacher in a high-performing school as a “success” makes little or no sense. Great schools have low-performing teachers just as low-performing schools have great teachers.

The current high-performers in low-performing schools will not receive the bonuses nor any recognition of their dedication and hard work.

Politicians are looking for sound bite solutions to highly complex problems. Believing that they can solve the problems of education by focusing on one aspect while ignoring other aspects like poverty, and the role family plays in education doesn’t make any sense to me.

If your state/city has similar plans, you might want to send the school board and superintendent this blog.

Franklin Schargel Honored

Brock International Prize in Education

From the Press Release:
Franklin Schargel has been nominated for the Brock International Prize in Education for demonstrating clear evidence of success in dropout prevention and for retaining students in alternative education environments. Franklin is one of nine people, globally, to be nominated.

“The Brock International Prize in Education recognizes an individual who has made a specific innovation or contribution to the science and art of education, resulting in a significant impact on the practice or understanding of the field of education. It must be a specific innovation or contribution that has the potential to provide long-term benefit to all humanity through change and improvement in education at any level, including new teaching techniques, the discovery of learning processes, the organization of a school or school system, the radical modification of government involvement in education, or other innovations. The prize is not intended to recognize an exemplary career or meritorious teaching, administration, or service with a primarily local impact”.

The Separation of Public Charter Schools vs. Church Charter Schools

August 10, 2013

In Texas, the Beta Academy, a private elementary schools hopes to transform itself into a publicly financed charter school operating out of the Houston Christian Temple Assembly of God Church.

If the state of Texas approves Beta’s application this fall, it will join the many charter schools that have partnerships with religious institutions that have cropped up in cities across Texas since the charter school system was established in 1995. In the past three years, 16 of the 23 charter contracts the state has awarded have gone to entities with religious ties.

Some educators question whether the schools receive the proper oversight to ensure that religious groups are not benefiting from taxpayer dollars intended for public school students “” or that faith-based instruction is not entering those classrooms.

The Beta Academy was started when the Christian Temple closed its private school because of declining enrollment.

Because they are publicly financed, charter schools are required to teach secular, state-approved curricula . When founded by a faith-based organization, they are also required to operate under a separate nonprofit entity. Because charter schools do not receive facilities financing from the state, a leasing agreement with a church, whose grounds often stand empty during weekdays, can be a cost-efficient arrangement for both parties.

Texas Education Agency auditors have found inappropriate use of state money in such arrangements. Last summer, in the most recent example, it discovered that a San Antonio-based charter school’s superintendent had used school funds to buy a former church, then leased that building to the school she led.

In June, Gov. Rick Perry signed a bill aimed at expanding the state’s charter school system. Though provisions in the legislation increase state oversight of charters and beef up the vetting process for proposed schools, it does not contain language aimed at charter schools with connections to places of worship.

That is because state and federal laws already impose strict boundaries on public schools with any religious affiliations, said David Dunn, the director of the Texas Charter School Association. While there have been instances of abuse in the past, he said, charter operators overall were “very aware” of those restrictions.

Bracy Wilson, a McKinney-based education consultant, has found a niche business helping build relationships between charter schools and churches. Since 2010, he has worked with nine clients connected with churches, including Beta Academy, through the state’s charter school application process.

The issue is not so simple for others in the education community. In the 15 years that Jack Ammons spent auditing public schools across the state as a monitor for the education agency, he said he found it was “nearly impossible” for charter schools operating out of church facilities to avoid spending state funds on students in ways that also benefited the church.

“There are schools once again where preachers are making good money off of keeping the charter schools in churches,” he said.

Obviously, this calls into account the U.S. Constitutional requirement of the separation of church and state. What is your reaction? Should charter schools be permitted to operate out of churches?

Bullying Prevention

The Huffington Post has just published a blog on Bullying Prevention that has been extracted from my latest book (not yet published).

Thank you very much for your blog post. It’s been published and can be found at this permanent link:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/bullying-what-schools-par_b_4103901.html

It’s also permanently listed in your author archive:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/

Many thanks for blogging on HuffPost,
The Huffington Post Blog Team

Franklin Schargel
Schargel Consulting Group
www.schargel.com
505/823-2339

Facebook Makes Teenagers Vulnerable

I really understand the need for companies to make money. I really do! But I feel that Facebook is going too far.

It has announced that it will allow teenagers, ages 13 to 17, to post status updates, videos and images that can be seen by anyone, not just their friends or people who know their friends.

Facebook claims that it will give these teenagers more choice, I believe it is so they can make more money from their advertisers.” It puts these children more at-risk. Facebook requires users to post under their real identities, which would allow predators as well as business access to personal information. Some privacy advocates said would make it much more difficult to run away from stupid or thoughtless remarks.

Facebook said the company would also educate teenagers about the risks of sharing information and periodically remind them, if they make public posts, that everyone can see what they are sharing.

The company, has about its 1.2 billion users worldwide, is locked in a battle with Twitter and Google to attract consumer advertisers like food, phone and clothing companies. Those brands want to reach people as they engage in passionate public conversation about sports, television, news and live events. Facebook is reducing children’s privacy even as lawmakers are moving in the opposite direction, grappling with difficult issues like online bullying and the question of whether to allow people to erase their digital histories.

In September, a 12-year-old Florida girl, Rebecca Ann Sedwick, committed suicide after extensive bullying on Facebook. This month, Florida authorities charged two youngsters with aggravated stalking in the case. Around 70 percent of children have suffered from some form of bullying online, according to a recent survey of 10,000 children conducted by the British charity Ditch the Label.

Privacy advocates have complained to the F.T.C. that Facebook was violating a 2011 order that required the company to obtain explicit permission from its customers before using their data in advertising. Facebook said it still had certain privacy safeguards in place for teenagers that make it harder for strangers to search and find them, but it declined to be more specific.

If you feel the way that I do, let the Federal Trade Commission and Facebook know!

Why Do Children Drop Out of School

I am proud to announce that an article that I have submitted to the Huffington Post has been accepted and is now on line. It is entitled, “The Real Reason Children Drop out of School.”

Thank you very much for your blog post. It’s been published and can be found at this permanent link:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/the-real-reasons-children-drop-out-of-school_b_4093876.html

It’s also permanently listed in your author archive:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/franklin-schargel/

Franklin Schargel
Schargel Consulting Group
www.schargel.com
505/823-2339

To Our International Friends: Happy Holidays

In Canada, Thanksgiving is this weekend. It is a holiday about family and food, and for many, football, . Some families choose to observe a four day weekend (Friday through Monday), but the official public holiday in Canada is on Monday, giving many a three day weekend. So to our Canadian readers, we wish you a love filled Thanksgiving weekend!

To our International friends, you may celebrate holidays at different times, seasons and days that may be not the same as the ones we celebrate here in the United States. And we may not acknowledge these holidays as we frequently as we would like but we would like to take this time to recognize these holidays and wish you, your families and your students our best wishes.

Latest Statistics on Bullying

I recently posted that 161,000 students a year do not come to school because they were bullied”. I received an email from the National Bullying Prevention Center with the latest statistics dealing with bullying.

Nearly one-third of all school-aged children are bullied each year – upwards of 13 million students.
Nationwide, 20 percent of students in grades 9-12 experienced bullying. (Source: The 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Nationwide, 28 percent of students in grades 6-12 experienced bullying. Source: The 2008-2009 School Crime Supplement – National Center for Education Statistics and Bureau of Justice Statistics)
64 percent of children who were bullied did not report it; only 36 percent reported the bullying. (Petrosino, 2010: What Characteristics of Bullying, Bullying Victims – National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.)
Fifty-seven percent of bullying situations stop when a peer intervenes on behalf of the student being bullied (Social Development, Volume 10, Issue 4, pages 512-527, November 2011)
Children with disabilities were two to three times more likely to be bullied than their nondisabeld peers. (Disabilities: Insights from Across Fields and Around the World, 2009)