OTL Campaign Newsletter 
April 18, 2012
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OTL HIGHLIGHTS
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Seeing Red: Education Redlining in New York City
"Redlining" isn't just denying loans and mortgages to certain communities - it's happening in education too. In New York City public schools, a student's educational outcomes are more likely to be determined by the neighborhood where a child lives, than by his or her ability. A new report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education reveals that the city's poor, Black and Hispanic students are most likely to attend schools with the fewest resources and the least experienced teachers. In contrast, the best-funded schools with the highest percentage of experienced teachers are most often located in the most economically advantaged neighborhoods. Read more >

school closure report
Policies Setting NYC Schools Up For Failure, Closure
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's policy of school closure is punishing schools that lack the resources they needed to succeed in the first place. According to a policy brief from the New York City Working Group on School Transformation, evidence from the NYC Department of Education reveals that its school-assignment policies concentrate the highest-needs students in struggling schools, exacerbating the low performance that leads to the subsequent closing of these schools. Read more>

PA bake sale
Cookies for Ed: PA Mock Bake Sale To Protest Cuts
You would need to sell roughly 343,561,144 cookies (at 50 cents apiece) to pay for the $171,178,572 cuts to school budgets in Southwestern Pennsylvania, according to the PA group Tell Everyone All Cuts Hurts (TEACH). Mock bake sales are popping up across PA as part of a "Statewide Bake Sale for Public Education" to protest cuts to the state's education budget. Here's hoping Gov. Tom Corbett likes cookies; he's going to need to sell a lot of them to make up for the cuts.
Read more>

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CA Data Reveals Inequities in School Discipline
40 percent of suspensions in CA are for "willful defiance," a subjective, non-violent offense that pushes students out of school for minor misbehavior and disproportionately affects students of color. A new study from the Center for Civil Rights Remedies is providing statistical fuel in the push for discipline policy reform. Among its findings: While only 7.1 percent of all CA students were suspended in 2009-10, 18 percent of Black students and 13.4 of students with disabilities were suspended the same year.
Read more>

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MA Students Win Voice in Teacher Evaluations
In 2007, students from the Boston Student Advisory Council began demanding a voice in teacher evaluations. Arguing that since they are the ones in the classroom they ought to have a say in how teachers were evaluated, BSAC designed a student-to-teacher feedback form, which was approved by the Boston School Committee and implemented throughout the district. Several years later, the MA Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to make student feedback a mandatory component of official teacher evaluations.
Read more>


RESOURCES

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Drastic Decrease in State Per-Student Pre-K Funding
More students than ever are enrolled in Pre-K programs in the U.S. But the rising number of Pre-K students, coupled with state education budget cuts across the country, has drastically reduced per-child spending on Pre-K programs. This report from the National Institute for Early Education Research breaks down the quality and availability of early education programs across the U.S. How does your state measure up? Read more>


IN THE NEWS


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