Rep. Frierson: Medicaid expansion will reduce education funding.

Funding for education is falling short because Medicaid is devouring a larger share of state money than it did a few years ago, a top Mississippi budget writer says in a letter to teachers and school administrators.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Herb Frierson, R-Poplarville, wrote that expanding Medicaid would create more uncertainty about funding for all levels of education, from kindergarten through universities.

“Do you think we should expand the Medicaid program knowing how it may cost the educational community?” Frierson wrote. “Can the educational institutions afford not to take a position on the expansion of the Medicaid program?”

But a Democrat who used to be a budget writer disputes the premise of Frierson’s letter. Rep. Cecil Brown, of Jackson, said in an interview Wednesday that money for education has fallen short because of many financial choices, including giving tax breaks to corporations and setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild the state’s financial reserves.

“Education hasn’t been funded because there hasn’t been a willingness to fund it,” Brown said, criticizing Republican leaders, including former two-term Gov. Haley Barbour, who left office in January 2012.

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State paying Iowa consulting firm $38K to find next Superintendent of Education.

Consultant Gary Ray and his employees will survey educational leaders and associations about what they want to see in the next superintendent, drawing up a profile that the board could approve by the end of the month. The candidate pool would be winnowed to a group of 8 to 12 people, with the board making its selection after one or two rounds of interviews in September.

Board member Charles McClelland, of Jackson, said he’d like to expedite the process because he fears that candidates might not want to leave their current jobs in the middle of the fall semester. But Ray told board members through a video conference that because many school personnel would be on vacation during the summer, his firm needed the full 90 days to publicize the opening and recruitment of candidates.

“The summer time is a difficult time to recruit because a lot of people are just not around,” Ray said. He agreed that the planned schedule might mean the next superintendent won’t start work until early 2014.

The state is paying Ray and Associates, based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, more than $38,000 to help with the search.

Board members agreed to pay a new superintendent “in the range” of $300,000. Board members said the superintendent’s pay is capped at $305,000 a year.

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Thousands of MS public school seniors flunk exams required to graduate.

Mississippi officials are trying to retest hundreds of high school seniors who flunked exams that are required for graduation.

Seniors statewide are streaming to Mississippi State University to get over the hurdle and receive diplomas with classmates. Any student who needs to pass only one exam to graduate is being offered the chance to try one more time.

Interim state Superintendent of Education Lynn House said more than 100 students registered for tests Thursday, and the state could give more tests than that Friday. MSU’s Research and Curriculum Unit is giving the exams, which normally cost as much as $250 per student, per test.

“We need to do what we can to get students to graduate on time and that is one thing we could do,” said Wayne Gann of Corinth, chairman of the state Board of Education.

Gann said both he and House had received phone calls from school officials trying to win another chance for seniors. The Hazlehurst school district, for example, took seven students to MSU Thursday.

Since 2003, Mississippi public high school students seeking to graduate have been required to pass four subject-area tests — algebra I, English II, biology I and U.S. history.

Of the roughly 28,400 Mississippi seniors this year, about 3,000 have not passed all four tests, said James Mason of the state Department of Education.

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Plunkett: More evidence of collaboration to steal public funds at Mississippi Dept. of Education.

BY: B. Keith Plunkett @Keithplunkett
I first noticed a blog post by the Bigger Pie Forum that published emails showing the Dept. of Education’s interior politics and pressures when it comes to school rankings on May 10 through a tweet. Now that story has been picked up by the Clarion Ledger. It ran this morning.

What it clearly shows is how out of whack things have been as it relates to accountability at the states government run schools, and how the more populous districts have used their considerable power to sway officials at MDE to keep taxpayer money flowing into the coffers.

Bigger Pie reported:

In August 2011, MDE’s former director of its Office of Research and Statistics (ORS) told an MDE contract worker via e-mail that he arbitrarily changed school ratings to make certain schools look more successful than they actually were. Some ratings alternations were made at the request of superintendents.

Former ORS director, Ken Thompson, e-mailed computer programmer Steve Hebbler (who is still under contract with MDE) about finalizing assessment files for the accountability model. Thompson mentioned “appeals” by school administrators who were not happy with their schools’ ratings and wanted them changed.

Judging by Thompson’s emails the pressure must have been intense. In the published emails he said he had become “too tired to fight”.

“I just finished wading through the appeals. We received 33 appeals but it was mostly garbage. I swear I think someone gave out stupid pills this year by the truck load.

“Jackson Public Schools decided they didn’t like the grade-level of 45 students so they want them excluded just because they think they are too old to be in the grade that JPS placed them.

“Hinds County thinks we should apportion proficiency rather than use FAY so they sent pages of students to apportion.

“Tupelo just can’t read and sent pages of students that they claimed weren’t in the SLAIF.

“And the list goes on….

“Some appeals were close enough to valid that I let them have them since it made a difference in the school. Some I let have them just because I’m too tired to fight. There were several errors by schools miscoding test forms that resulted in Pearson restoring the assessments. Arthur is working on getting those results updated. We will have a few MAAECF scoring appeals to change as well. Arthur is going to get those results from Susan in Student Assessment.”

Thompson resigned from MDE in December 2011. He now works as a private educational consultant

Thompson told the Clarion Ledger that “he sometimes gave schools the benefit of the doubt when making decisions because he feels accountability labels in some cases serve as “a ‘gotcha’ system to judge schools.”

The labels put public pressure on schools, Thompson said, and he understands why schools fight for every percentage point.

The Clarion Ledger reporter also decided to call on government school apologist and protector Nancy Loome of The Parents’ Campaign who began circling the wagons for her benefactors at the Superintendents Association.

“When we use assessments and accountability labels to demonize public education, that is a misuse of that system,” she said.

In another email exchange with DeSoto County Schools Accountability and Research Director Ryan Kuykendall, Thompson freely admitted to cooking the books.

“Since your public rate is higher than the rate on your final report, the correct graduation rate was slightly lower than the graduation rate I had originally given you,” Thompson said in an email later that same day. “Consequently, I used the incorrect rate since it was the most advantageous to the district.”

Is there any wonder our education system is in the shape it’s in?

Mrs. Loome has it partially correct. The use of assessments and accountability labels have been misused. But, not to demonize public education. Government school administrators have managed to do that job all on their own.

This effort has been an outright fraud perpetrated by public school administrators against the taxpayers, the students and the parents of Mississippi. Will none of our public officials charged with the job of protecting the public interest call it what it is?

This deserves, at the very least, to be the subject of an investigation.

About Keith: Keith Plunkett has worked on communications issues with a range of public officials from aldermen to Congressmen, and a variety of businesses, governmental agencies and non-profits. He serves or has served as a board member of several non-profit, civic and political organizations. Contact him by going to HorizonMediaMarketing.com or follow him on Twitter @Keithplunkett

Related articles

• Plunkett: Dems, civil rights groups continue pushing “angry teacher” narrative in fight against student protection. (mississippipep.wordpress.com)
• Anderson: Take a closer look at Common Core authors (mississippipep.wordpress.com)
• How much do Mississippi’s public college presidents make? (mississippipep.wordpress.com)
• Separate public, charter school boards will hurt education (newsobserver.com)

Snowden: Medicaid sponging up education dollars.

BY: Rep. Greg Snowden

A few years ago, a then prominent member of the House Appropriations Committee (a Democrat who no longer serves in the Legislature) stated during floor debate that “Medicaid is a cancer which will eat up the General Fund.” This legislator was not trashing the Medicaid program itself, which he in fact supported; however, he was making the sensible (indeed, undeniable) observation that whenever our state’s Medicaid spending increases, there simply is less money left to spend on Education, Public Safety, and everything else.

Rep. Herb Frierson (R-Poplarville), Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee
Mississippi’s current House Appropriations Chairman, Rep. Herb Frierson (R-Poplarville), wrestles first hand with this fiscal phenomenon every year as he provides leadership in the state budgeting process. A coach and teacher in earlier life, Herb has a head for numbers, and a heart for Education. No one is more committed to sufficiently funding public Education at all levels than is Herb Frierson.

This week, Herb has sent out a letter to Educational leaders all over Mississippi: school superintendents, school board members, college presidents and trustees, etc. His message? Mississippi Educators have a stake in the decision whether Mississippi’s Medicaid program should be expanded under Obamacare so as to add 300,000 new recipients to the rolls. Why? Because the same pot of money (i.e., the General Fund) is used both to fund Education and to pay our state’s Medicaid match; a critical truth seemingly missed altogether by advocates recklessly pushing the Legislature to embrace a premature Obamacare expansion.

Although the choice for Mississippians isn’t whether we prefer to fund schools or to fund hospitals (not yet, at least), a decision by Mississippi lawmakers to expand Medicaid necessarily would result in serious long term consequences for the state General Fund budget. A “rush to judgment” is exactly the wrong approach, and certainly one Mississippi Educators, especially, should resist.

Read the letter HERE.

Anderson: Take a closer look at Common Core authors

BY: Rita Anderson

Dot Ward’s column warning of the Common Core state standards in the Clarion Ledger appeared on the same day, coincidentally, that I received a MississippiPEP article with more detailed warnings. Keith Plunkett points out that Marc Tucker, who spoke to a MS Department of Education forum in 2011 and is a chief player in the Common Core initiative, has never taught a day in his life in a K-12 classroom.

This morning on SuperTalk Radio the on-air guest was Joy Pullman, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, who stated that the four persons responsible for crafting the Common Core state standards have never been K-12 classroom teachers and have no background in writing such standards.

Common Core is not a state-led initiative. The National Governors’ Association is a D.C.- based trade association, which receives half its funds from the federal government. According to Heartland, as recently as two weeks ago, NGA had not released what, if any, resolution that governors voted to authorize Common Core.

Common Core assessments begin in 2014 and this element brings another set of challenges. Then there is the requirement that states establish a longitudinal data system, which includes the sharing of private information about students across state lines.

Granted, our individual liberties are being systematically eroded at the federal level, but must we just roll over?

Who had the authority to commit Mississippi school children to a massive new and untested educational initiative? If there is no local control of education, why do we even have local school boards?

Related articles

• Michigan Pulling Away from Common Core (heritage.org)
• Obama trying to take over public education with “common core” curriculum that teaches socialism (mb50.wordpress.com)

Harrison: Will charter schools survive a constitutional challenge?

The Legislature passed a comprehensive charter school law that allows public funds to be spent on charter schools that do not have to adhere to many of the guidelines and governance of traditional public schools. In return, the schools agree to a charter to meet certain goals.

On the surface, there does not appear to be any legal issue surrounding charter schools. The Legislature also created a whole new state agency – the Mississippi Charter School Authorizing Board – to oversee and to approve charter schools, which also does not appear to create any legal issues.

It is of interest to note, though, that the state Board of Education is one of the only boards established in the Mississippi Constitution. Most boards and commissions that oversee state agencies are created only in law – at a lower level than the Constitution.

But the Board of Education and the Board of Trustees of state Institutions of Higher Learning, notably, are created in the state Constitution.

The Constitution states specifically that the Board of Education “shall manage and invest in public schools, according to law,” and “formulate policies according to law” for the public schools.

Could it be argued that since the Authorizing Board will be managing money and setting policy for charter schools, which have been described as public schools, that it is usurping the constitutional authority of the Board of Education?

That could be an issue for the courts to decide here in Mississippi at some point.

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Plunkett: Gulfport High School’s Academic Institute sounds very familiar.

BY: B. Keith Plunkett @Keithplunkett

Back on September 3, 2011 Mississippi PEP was a month-old website. At the time, I was the only person writing and linking articles from state news sources to the site. I was focused a great deal on public education as the state prepared to take on the charter school issue, and other education reforms in 2012. So, when I found a Department of Education forum taking place on September 14, 2011 in Rankin County involving a controversial speaker I posted an article about that speaker.

It became one of my most linked articles, and has been shared all over the web by websites all over the country. Even today, a year and a half later, we continue to get web traffic from links to the article.

Marc Tucker was the speaker. He is considered controversial due, in part, to a letter he wrote to Hillary Clinton in 1992 that outlined a radical new approach to education that would have the federal government take over education standards across the country. What is even more interesting about this is that Tucker has never taught a day in his life in K-12. He has no education degree, and only for a brief two-year stint taught a college course.

A System of Control

In the “Dear Hillary” letter, as it’s come to be called, Tucker lays out a plan “to remold the entire American system” into “a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone,” coordinated by “a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels” where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by counselors “accessing the integrated computer-based program.”

Tucker’s plan would change the mission of schools from teaching children academic basics and knowledge to training them to serve the global economy in jobs selected by workforce boards. Nothing in this comprehensive plan has anything to do with teaching schoolchildren how to read, write, or calculate.

The plan would use “national standards” and “national testing” to cement national control of tests, assessments, school honors and rewards, financial aid, and the Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM), which is designed to replace the high school diploma.

Designed on the German system, the Tucker plan is to train children in specific jobs to serve the workforce and the global economy instead of to educate them so they can make their own life choices.

It’s Here.

That’s why yesterday I felt a certain familiarity when I read that Gulfport High School was announced as the first school in Mississippi to implement an Academic Institute.

The Sun Herald reported:

Gulfport is the first district in the state to offer Academic Institutes, which is a mix of intensive curriculum and project-based learning that integrates academic course work with real-life experiences to better prepare students for life after graduation, Superintendent Glen East said.

Administrators studied similar curriculums in Tennessee, California, Florida and GERMANY before starting the program in Gulfport.

Tucker’s ambitious plan began to be implemented in three laws passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1994: the Goals 2000 Act, the School-to-Work Act, and the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The move to nationalize standards continued with President Bush’s No Child Left Behind.

Some of the implementation mechanisms in those laws have been altered somewhat over the years, and the names have changed. But, the plan itself lives on under a new name: Common Core. Mississippi is one of the 48 states that have bought into the Common Core push.

Computer Database Employment Matching

The Tucker Plan proposed using a computer database, a.k.a. “a labor market information system,” into which school personnel would scan all information about every schoolchild and his family, identified by the child’s social security number: academic, medical, mental, psychological, behavioral, and interrogations by counselors. The computerized data would be available to the school, the government, and future employers.

Again, the similarities to the Gulfport High School program are eye-opening. From the Sun Herald article:

Freshmen and sophomores begin with Common Core Institutes, a rigorous college-preparatory experience with compressed high school coursework. It focuses on math, science, English, history and other electives required for graduation.

Students will complete advanced algebra, trigonometry and even pre-calculus by their sophomore years.

As this group prepares to enter its junior year, the learning will be focused on developing specific interests, skills and abilities for college and career readiness, he said.

Students are evaluated on their skills, interests and abilities beginning in elementary school with the goal of preparing them for college or a career.

That evaluation sounds a lot like Tuckers plan of a computer database where “school personnel would scan all information about every schoolchild and his family, identified by the child’s social security number: academic, medical, mental, psychological, behavioral, and interrogations by counselors.”

Here is the final point from the Sun Herald article about Gulfport High School’s plan:

The district will work with business and industry to provide students with mentoring opportunities and paid and unpaid internships in their chosen fields, East said.

Sounds a great deal like Tucker’s proposal that the “computerized data would be available to the school, the government, and future employers”, doesn’t it?

Keep Pushing for Choices

In 1988, Tucker became the president of the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) where he joined up with Hillary Clinton, Mario Cuomo, and Ira Magaziner to get states to move away from local control of their schools and migrate to national standards.

In 1991, Marc Tucker and Lauren Resnick created New Standards that pushed standards-based reform. In 1998, he and Judy Codding created America’s Choice that made sure the national standards were further implemented into the schools; and in 2005, Tucker created the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.

Tucker’s whole plan has been to require public school teachers to quit focusing on knowledge-based, academic content that emphasizes mostly objective testing with right-or-wrong answers. Instead, Tucker and his cohorts have managed to restructure public schools into a national program of social engineering through subjective assessments that emphasize feelings, opinions, beliefs, multiculturalism, political correctness, diversity, global warming, homosexuality, and “social justice.”

This effort has been given a new level of control under President Obama and Arne Duncan who have added federal “teeth” by creating Common Core Standards and the millions of federal dollars available through Race to the Top funding.

The whole thing reminds me of a Pink Floyd video where school children dressed in gray march in lines through a dark dank factory school “system”, as they are trained to take their place in the corporate world.

If this is the future of public education, then the push for continued education reforms is sorely needed to include vouchers to give parents the ability to opt out. I pray that my youngest will be out of school before this makes it to our school district.

One of the major arguments against Governor Bryant’s proposal to increase standards for students entering college to become teachers was that many of those in college change, sometimes dramatically, from the time they enter university until the time they have completed courses and entered the workforce. It’s a very valid point.

The Mississippi Department of Education’s 2013 teacher of the year from Hancock High School, Joshua Lindsey, says he didn’t even go to college to become a teacher, but found it to be his calling.

Would Lindsey have been picked to be a teacher by the government school bureaucrats? Do we want government making those choices for our children?

None of us knows what wonderful things God has in store for us. Yet we somehow are going to buy in to a government program that evaluates children’s career capabilities and puts them on an employment track beginning in elementary school?

This absolutely flies in the face of personal freedom and the freedom to maintain Faith in Divine Providence. Instead, future generations will see the role of god replaced with the all knowing government school system.

Do as your told. March to that new job, and don’t get out of line.

God help us.

About Keith: Keith Plunkett has worked on communications issues with a range of public officials from aldermen to Congressmen, and a variety of businesses, governmental agencies and non-profits. He serves or has served as a board member of several non-profit, civic and political organizations. Contact him by going to HorizonMediaMarketing.com or follow him on Twitter @Keithplunkett

Related articles

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Bennett: Mississippi’s education policymakers must continue reform with vouchers.

BY: Eric Bennett @ericbennett18

The Charter Schools Bill, House Bill 369, which was recently passed by the Mississippi Legislature, was a great start for improving Mississippi schools, but it is not the final destination. Countless kids in Mississippi are still stuck in failing schools and not all will be able to find a spot in the new charter schools when the program goes into effect. There are multiple schools spread around the state that fail to give children the education they deserve in order to make it to college and be successful. Without this opportunity, students get trapped in the endless cycle of dead-end jobs and poverty that has strangled Mississippi for far too long.

I am not a stranger to this problem. I grew up in a school district that was known for three things: football, drugs, and a terrible education. From kindergarten until eighth grade I was smothered under a system that was not doing its job of preparing my classmates and me to get into college, to earn scholarships, and to try our hand at the American Dream.

There were teachers that truly did care about us. They went above and beyond their jobs to do everything in their power to help us break out of the poverty that dominated the district. But, many students still became stuck in a cycle of crime as their only way out. Sadly, these teachers were the exception and often times did not stay for long.

By the time I made it to middle school, the district was taken over by the state after a massive misappropriation of funds by the school board. My ninth grade year, with the help of church members, I was able to find a loophole to transfer to a highly successful school that was the exact distance from my house as my original school. Because it was in another county, I could not go there until I got my lucky break thanks to the massive generosity and giving of a family in my church. At the new school, I was able to eventually catch up with my high-performing peers after a couple of years and graduate at the top of my class.

Too often in Mississippi, children are stuck in failing schools. Students see high-performing schools nearby and want the chance to transfer and be rewarded with a great education that gets them ready to be successful college students. Unfortunately, most students do not get lucky like I did.

To change this, we have to keep pushing for more school choice in Mississippi. A school voucher program does exactly that. I would like to see a policy debated that would give states the power to allocate federal funding for education into a voucher program. This program would give parents a voucher for each child that would enable the parents to choose their children’s school instead of forcing their children to go to a public school that may not be successfully preparing them for college. The voucher system would allow the taxpayer funds that are given to schools for each child enrolled to instead follow that child to the school of the family’s choice. This allows for competition among schools that would drive up success rates and accountability. Ideally, the program would also allow parents to enroll their children in a private school if they feel the school would provide a better education than the public school the child is otherwise forced to attend.

Under the current system, families have to pay taxes to the government, which provides the federal funding for public schools. Families who send their children to private schools are forced to pay these taxes without reaping the benefits while also having to pay for the private school education. The voucher system would allow parents to pay once for education instead of twice.

This would help ease the financial burden for some families and allow more access into better schools. Children in poverty would have access to the same good education that some private schools offer. By passing this proposal to give states the ability to divert federal educational funding into a voucher system that would be valid for any school, public or private, we would encourage more parental involvement, drive down education costs, increase competition to attract students by offering better educational opportunities, and make schools more accountable to the parents instead of government.

The current government solution of increasing spending in education at both the federal and state levels over the last twenty years has not worked, and the quality of education has steadily decreased as America and Mississippi has fallen behind other developed nations in overall levels of education. According to a report released by the American Council on Education, the current generation in American schools will be the first generation since before World War II that will not attain higher levels of education than the previous generation.

Policymakers must work towards a program now to ensure that this generation achieves the level of education that will be required to jump start economic growth. By giving parents control over their children’s education as well as over their own tax dollars we allow the people who care most about the success of their kids to make the decisions that will ensure they reach that success.

We owe it to the children currently trapped in underperforming schools as well as to our own future descendants to ensure that the educational system in Mississippi is prepared to make them the best Mississippians they can be. If we devote ourselves to ensuring the success of all then they will launch Mississippi into a more prosperous future.

It is time to take our future into our own hands and make sure we leave this state a much better place than we found it. We must remember that charter schools are only a step in the right direction. Vouchers are the next step in helping Mississippi be the model for the country instead of the punchline of another distasteful joke.

Policymakers must understand that the future of this state depends on continuing a push for excellent education across all fronts. That is ultimately about allowing individuals, like me, to choose their own paths to excellence.

About Eric: Eric Bennett is from Sumrall, Mississippi, and is a freshman Public Policy Leadership and Political Science double-major at the University of Mississippi. He is a member of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College and is active with Generation Mississippi, working to engage youth in discussing politics and policy.

Rankin Superintendent accused of retaliatory job threat.

Map of Mississippi highlighting Rankin County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rankin County schools Superintendent Lynn Weathersby allegedly tried to tie up the renewal of an assistant principal’s contract in retaliation for his son-in-law being passed over for a promotion.

The contract has since been renewed, ending a related investigation, but complaints about those allegations have gone to the county district attorney and to the school board president.

Weathersby’s son-in-law, John Maulding, the county’s assistant director of community development, was being considered to head that department. Around the same time, the contract for Tanza Brown, the daughter-in-law of District 2 Supervisor Wood Brown, was up for renewal as assistant principal at Highland Bluff Elementary.

Supervisor Brown said he and Weathersby had an exchange in which the superintendent noted his son-in-law was up for the position and he wanted him to be considered. Maulding was considered, along with three other candidates, and was not picked for the position, Brown said.

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