Spain’s students and teachers have taken to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with government plans to cut education funding, Al Jazeera reports. Protesters carrying signs and wearing t-shirts emblazoned with their message marched on the education ministry this week calling on the ed minister Jose Ignacio Wert to step down.

One of the protesters, 39-year-old English teacher Fernanda Gonzalez, said that there was no more room in the Spain’s tight education budget for further cuts proposed by the government. More funding reductions will just exacerbate existing problems in a country that is already struggling to keep up with other European Union education systems in mathematics and foreign languages.

The protests coincided with a one-day strike by teachers, students and support staff that affected all levels of education. Organisers claimed a 70-percent turnout by teachers for the strike, while the education ministry put the figure at 20 percent. Protests were also held in several other cities, including Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city, Seville, Valencia and Zaragoza.

Education reform is a popular cause for many residents of Spain, but protesters are arguing that the way the government is approaching the demands of the populace is wrongheaded. The country’s public education system has in recent years taken a substantial funding hit, as Spain complied with the austerity measures imposed on it by the EU and IMF as a condition for bailing it out after the 2008 financial collapse.

The protest and the strike were organized by the Platform for the Defense of Public Schools, an organization that’s claiming to be publicizing the impact of austerity policies on Spain’s schools.

They are also angered by a planned education reform, which sets new grading systems, allows for larger class sizes and boosts the proportion of Spanish-language classes at the expense of regional languages. The education ministry’s budget has been cut by 14 percent between 2012 and 2013. The cuts have caused university tuition fees to soar, led to larger class sizes, fewer grants for graduate studies and cuts to school buses for primary school students in rural areas.

Parents of students in schools around the country have taken some extreme measures to offset some of the problems created by tighter budgets. In the Monserrat district of Valencia, a group of mothers posed for an erotic calendar to fund school bus services for their kids that were cut.

Although the campaigners had their tongues firmly in cheek when discussing their money-raising scheme, the humor masks a serious problem that women have stripped to expose. Unemployment rates in their region are very high and many families are struggling to afford the gas money needed to drive their children to school themselves.

The post In Spain, Protests and Strikes Rage Against Funding Cuts appeared first on Education News.

Students in Buena Vista schools in Michigan haven’t been to class since last Friday, mlive reports, and it is expected the classrooms will remain vacant for days more. The district, which educates about 420 students, found itself in severe financial difficulty after the state declined to turn over education funds for the next three months as a penalty for district overcharging.

As a result, Buena Vista has no money to pay the salaries of its staff.

Earlier this week, the Board of Education voted to retain only three staff members employed by the district and lay off the rest.

Michigan Board of Education is refusing to turn over state aid payments for at least the months of April, May and June because Buena Vista accepted nearly half a million dollars to educate a number of students from the Wolverine Secure Treatment Center who are no longer part of the district.

The Board of Education will meet next at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 9, at Buena Vista High School, 3943 E. Holland. Jackson said the board plans to declare a financial emergency. About 100 people attended an informational community meeting on Tuesday evening at the high school. Parents and students said the meeting didn’t answer their questions about the district’s future.

Board President Randy L. Jackson hopes that the declaration of emergency will mean the release of some emergency funding from the Michigan Board of Education to help the district continue operating. In order to facilitate the release of the money, the district plans to submit a deficit elimination plan to the state BoE.

At the moment, Buena Vista School District is running a $1 million budget deficit on top of the payments on a $2 million loan from the state treasurury that is has to make this August.

Withholding of state aid isn’t the only problem facing Buena Vista – one of the worst-performing districts in the state. It is also attempting to balance its resources to deal with a student population which is today barely half of what it was only three years ago.

Buena Vista School District since 2010 has lost nearly $3 million in state funding because of declining enrollment. Richard Syrek, Saginaw Intermediate School District superintendent, said the district’s financial situation stemmed from a combination of a rapid decline in students and administrators not reacting quickly enough to declining state aid.

Syrek says that leaders are not willing to make the needed cuts because they don’t want to lose programs. Yet the administrators – who were caught completely flatfooted by the declines in both student numbers and aid – don’t seem to have a plan to deal with the budget crisis in any other way.

Until the crisis is resolved, students have no school to attend.

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A trial appears to be imminent in the lawsuit brought by parents of Morgan Hill special education students that could see services for disabled students in California substantially expand in both scope and cost. Parents are claiming that the state is not doing enough to live up to the guarantees made by the government that special needs students receive a free and appropriate education, according to the Mercury News report.

Plaintiffs – now including parents of special education students throughout the whole of California – are alleging that the quality of education provided to the disabled in the state is abysmal and that the systems in place to identify students with special needs and provide them with additional help is inadequate.

Parents also claim that they’re being consistently left out of the process to determine what are the best educational options for their children. Even when individual districts blatantly fail in their obligations, according to the parents bringing the lawsuit, asking the state to intervene has been pointless.

A victory could possibly force districts to offer more programs to more children with physical, mental and social-emotional disabilities. As it is now, parents claim, districts put up unreasonable challenges to those seeking special services for their children.

“I fought the district for 10 years,” trying to overcome denial of requests for services, McNulty said. “I believe it’s systemic in Morgan Hill. There are a lot of great teachers there. But they don’t realize that what they’re doing is noncompliant” with the law.

Providing additional services for special needs students has been required since four decades ago when Congress made those services mandatory. Schools were ordered to begin testing students to identify those who need special services and then make arrangements to offer them.

It was not a mandate districts around California enthusiastically embraced, mainly due to the fact that accommodations for special education students are typically expensive and require hiring of trained personnel.

he federal government requires the program but pays only a fraction of its share; the state also pays only a portion, leaving districts to pick up the rest while expressing resentment about the “encroachment” on their tight budgets. And the expense can be considerable. San Jose Unified spokesman Paul Higgins says the district budgeted $42 million this school year for special education, or 14 percent of the operating budget.

Plaintiffs believe that the state refusing to enforce the disability education mandate is the chief issue in the lawsuit. Although parents can complain to the state when they feel their district is not meeting the special education requirements, in the past, the California Department of Education has sided with districts the majority of the time.

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Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is putting his conservative credentials on the line by stumping for an extension to the state sales tax in order to use the money for higher education funding. Since a call for additional taxes is likely to put him at odds with the Legislature’s conservative lawmakers, Brownback is taking his appeal directly to the voters by making personal appearances and speeches all around the state.

Legislators have already expressed the desire to end the sales tax and impose further higher education funding cuts to close a budget deficit of nearly $700 million in next year’s budget. If Brownback manages to win over both the public opinion and Kansas Republicans, any political benefits that are gained will accrue directly to him.

However, according to Bob Beatty, who is a professor of political science at Washburn University, Brownback is an enviable position of not standing to lose anything regardless of the eventual outcome.

“If he loses, he’d say, ‘The Legislature didn’t agree with me, but I fought for higher education,’ ” said Washburn University political scientist Bob Beatty.

“This is the sort of thing,” Beatty said, “that can drive Brownback’s opponents crazy.”

While critics can argue the governor’s tax cuts set the stage for paring back higher education and other state services, the detailed explanation of how it unfolded may be a hard case to make in the heat of an election.

“It would be much easier to say, ‘I went to the campuses and urged that we protect higher education,’ ” Beatty said.

Of course, Brownback’s sincerity could be tested if the lawmakers carry the day and he’s put in a position to sign or veto the final version of the budget. So far, he has not committed one way or the other.

Meanwhile, he’s touring university campuses around Kansas, starting with Wichita State earlier this week followed by a stop at the University of Kansas. Next week he will deliver a speech at the University of Kansas Medical Center and Kansas City Community College.

However, Brownback is having trouble getting House members to support the tax extension. Many conservatives either voted against it in 2010 or campaigned against the sales tax to get elected. It puts the governor in an unfamiliar political position.

“In some ways it makes him look (like) a slightly more moderating force in the politics of the state,” said Wichita State University political scientist Ed Flentje. “I don’t know that’s where he wants to be.”

Democrats think that’s clearly by design.

“They are trying to make him look more moderate,” said House Minority Leader Paul Davis, D-Lawrence. “(But) people know that the Republicans have total control of government and he’s in charge.”

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How is the higher education sector coping with lower levels of funding since 2008? A new report published by the Instructional Technology Council attempts to illuminate strategies adopted by both schools and their students to exist in a new financial reality in the wake of the recession.

According to a report titled “2012 Distance Education Survey”, although enrollment in colleges and universities across the country has stabilized, the reductions in funding imposed by state and federal governments in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse appear to be permanent. Community colleges were particularly hard hit by the combination of less funding and higher enrollment numbers in the years following as students sought to enroll in classes that would burnish their resumes.

Since then, although the number and the level of urgency of the applicants has been reduced somewhat, community colleges are still struggling to cover their operating expenses which oftentimes exceed the amount they collect in tuition.

Participants in this ITC survey reported that distance education enrollments grew by 6.52 percent from fall 2011 to fall 2012. This pace was slower than in previous years (fall 2007 to 2008 saw a 22 percent increase), but the increase distance education saw surpassed the overall 2.64 percent decline in student enrollment that the entire student population (including those enrolled in face-to-face classes) at colleges experienced.

There has been increased scrutiny of distance learning programs among state and federal lawmakers to examine their money-saving potential. The federal funding for such programs is disbursed according to the Higher Education Act of 1965, which comes up for reauthorization every four to six years. The report’s authors warn that this could mean substantial funding changes as early as 2014, including new requirements placed on state governments when it comes to schools providing distance learning courses.

Fred Lokken, member of the ITC Board of Directors, WebCollege, Truckee Meadows Community College draws the attention of higher education stakeholders to several visible trends:

Student demand for distance education courses at community colleges continues to grow—at a rate that is much greater than the demand for on-campus, face-to-face courses. However, the unprecedented growth of the past decade has slowed on many campuses, as overall student enrollment at many community colleges has declined due to the resurgent economy.

As online instruction continues to mature, distance education administrators see a pressing need to address course quality and design, faculty training and preparation, course assessment, and improvements in student readiness and retention.

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What will Philadelphia schools look like if the anticipated revenue streams from the city and the state, as well as concessions from unions, don’t materialize this summer? According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, not much like schools.

Although there will still be buildings and classrooms and presumablystudents, there will be no counselors, librarians, summer school staff or extra-curricular activities. This will all be in addition to more than 3,000 layoffs including at least some instructional positions.

The changes will be implemented to close more than $300 million in deficits from the district’s $2.7 billion total budget.

It’s no wonder that the district Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. called this the “catastrophic” budget. It was Hite’s intention to draw the grimmest picture possible as he lobbies state and city lawmakers for more money at the same time as he sits down with union reps to renegotiate existing contracts.

But $220 million in additional school-based cuts is a very real possibility. Union officials have said they would not bow to demands for big concessions, and while Mayor Nutter has signaled his support for the district’s request, early signs from the state are not promising and City Council seems skeptical.

Even Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said this budget picture could come to pass.
“Clearly, this is a possibility,” Jordan said. “Our kids are in the middle.”

Commissioner Wendell Pritchett called it a “sobering presentation” that would cut not frills, but “basic things that every child should have.”

This year the district has had to borrow $300 million just to meet its operating expenses, an option that is not on the table next year according to Chief Financial Officer Matthew Stanski. He said that to keep borrowing instead of developing new revenue streams would be just pushing forward the inevitable problems and putting the district on the path to insolvency.

Instead, principals will be receiving budgets that will ask them to make cuts up to 25% with enough money only to fund the absolute minimum: costs for classes at to the contractual maximum and the teachers to staff them. Hite said that this is the limit of what the district can presently afford.

There is little room left to maneuver, Hite said. Many costs are rising – the district will pay more for employee benefits and must contribute more to pension funds – or fixed, including $280 million in debt service and $729 million for charter schools.
(The School Reform Commission on Thursday night budgeted up to $15 million over two years for a new cyber school, but officials have said that the figure was a ceiling and that the virtual school would bring back students now in cyber charters, meaning savings for the district.)

Charter advocates are pushing hard for a number of expansions, but those seem unlikely.

“We are not crying wolf,” Hite said. “Our budget situation is dire.”

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One of the goals of the Obama administration’s budget released earlier this week is to encourage affordability in higher education. Nearly $1 billion of the total education budget will go towards funding programs that would contain college costs and expand research initiatives.

In addition, the budget would take away the power of Congress to regulate interest rates on student loans and instead tying them to the market. Although supporters of the move believe that this will ensure that this week keep interest rates low and prevent them from swinging wildly, opponents think that the market will push the rates higher in the future — a move that risks sticking students with unexpectedly high payments.

The budget calls for using 10-year Treasury bills as the student loan interest marker.

The interest rate provision isn’t the only part of the budget that deals with student loans. Another proposal calls for expanding the options for student loan repayments while also capping monthly payments at 10% of discretionary income.

The current rate for subsidized Stafford loans, which go mainly to low- and middle-income students, is 3.4 percent; that rate is due to double this summer. This week, Republican Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and Richard Burr of North Carolina proposed legislation that would have set new student loan rates at the yield on 10-year treasury notes, plus 3 percent. Right now, that would mean an interest rate of 4.75 percent — higher than the 3.4 percent rate on subsidized Stafford loans but substantially lower than the rates on other student loans, all of which are at least 6.8 percent.

Although some lawmakers, especially those on the Democratic side of the aisle, have gone on record praising the budget, the reaction has not been universally positive. Wisconsin Representative and former Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan panned the proposal, saying that adopting the President’s budget would grow the deficit while doing nothing to shore up the country’s long-term economic health.

The president’s budget is such a disappointment because it’s a missed opportunity,” Ryan said. “We need a new approach to meet our generation’s most pressing challenges. I hope the other side will join us in proposing real reforms … [b]ut until then, we need to take steps in the right direction.”

Additionally, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said Obama’s budget did not accurately address the depth of the country’s problems, such as health-care and social-security spending.

The President’s proposal is not expected to be final and the budget is expected to undergo a number of revision before eventual adoption by both houses of Congress and certified with the President’s signature.

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As part of the new federal budget proposal the Obama Administration submitted to Congress, pre-K programs as well as high school improvement plans would get a big funding boost — but the proposal also calls for something similar to Race to the Top grants that would award programs that propose innovative reform measures for higher education.

The budget calls for a substantial funding boost for the U.S. Department of Education, with nearly $72 billion out of a total federal budget for nearly $4 trillion. Disregarding sequestration, this would represent a nearly 5% increase over the budget for the fiscal year 2012.

As announced in the State of the Union Address, the president is seeking $75 billion over the next 10 years for a major expansion of preschool programs for low- and moderate-income 4-year-olds. The program would be paid for through a new tax on tobacco products of 94 cents bringing the total federal tax to nearly $2 per pack. The initiative also would include a $750 million investment in preschool development grants to help states expand access to such services and improve program quality.

“This would constitute the largest expansion of educational opportunity in the 21st century,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told reporters in an afternoon press call.

Although the federal government will cover up to 90% of the expense for the first year, its contribution is slated to decline gradually to about a quarter of the total cost. In order to participate, states would have to meet a number of criteria to be eligible for the program — something that the administration expects will limit participation in the first year.

The grant money could be used to expand pre-K programs targeted at low-income families as well as to offer similar programs to children from the middle class.

The entire price-tag of the program would be paid for using the tobacco tax, and the industry is not particularly happy about it. David Sutton, a spokesman for Altria Group, the parent company of Philip Morris USA Inc., said in email that tobacco taxes soared by 158 percent four years ago, making another tax difficult to weather. And he added, “We think it is patently unfair to single out adult tobacco consumers with another federal tobacco tax increase to pay for a broad, new government spending program claimed to have benefits for everyone.”

The recent findings regarding discipline programs must have played a part in the budget design as $50 million of the total allocated to the DOE is to go towards the School Climate Transformation Grants to fund programs that will reduce bullying as well as handle chronic discipline and behavior problems among students.

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The Louisiana State Senate will consider a measure that would link higher education funding to college performance, The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. The bill was approved by the Senate Education Committee earlier this week with members signing on to the proposal to put more pressure on public colleges and universities to raise their student retention and graduation rates.

Senate Bill 117 would authorize the creation of a 15-member panel that would be charged with developing the metrics by which the state’s public universities’ performances are to be judged for funding purposes. The final proposals would then go before the Board of Regents who would have the final say over the implementation.

Although the list of the criteria hasn’t been finalized, nor how much each would weigh on the final funding decisions, the bill calls for the schools to focus on timely graduation, dedicating resources to STEM majors, graduation rates and the the graduates’ potential future earnings.

“What we are doing is asking to move to an outcomes-based funding model…for that portion of the university’s funding that is the state appropriation,” Appel, who also chairs the committee, said at Wednesday’s meeting.

Around 60 percent of public university funding comes from tuition, fees and other self-generated sources while 40 percent comes from the state.

According to the Times-Picayune, since high tech manufacturing and jobs in energy production are vital to the state’s economic future, colleges that manage to produce more specialists in those fields and in the fields of computer science, engineering and mathematics are likely to get better access to state funding than those that do not.

As Jim Purcell – he Commissioner of Higher Education – put it, Louisiana public colleges should work to produce employees in high demand upon graduation. He also pointed out that people who think of funding as a zero-sum game are being wrong-headed as it is highly unlikely that a new focus on STEM would really damage the schools’ liberal arts programs.

“There’s always a balance. Certainly we want to make sure we offer the whole plethora of higher education experience to students in the state. At the same time, state institutions have a function of trying to address the workforce and economic needs of the state. So, to me, it is wise for us to reward institutions for addressing those areas,” Purcell said after the meeting.

While committee members raised concerns over whether the 15-member board would be able to agree on a funding mechanism, Appel said he did not foresee this to be a problem as he had already spoken with all the stakeholders and they agree on the need for such a discussion.

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Sometimes it’s difficult to get right down to the skin of the story. And sometimes, the skin is right there for you to see. According to a video uploaded to the internet, a group of mothers in Spain who were told that their kids will no longer taken to and from school during the day have turned to stripping to raise the funds to restore service.

A new law was introduced during the summer months which cuts funding for the school bus that runs in the Monserrat district of Valencia in eastern Spain. A group of mothers met and posed for an erotic calendar to raise money for the transportation of their children.

The catalyst was a new law published over the summer that removed school bus service from students in the Monserrat district of Valencia in the eastern part of Spain. To raise money to restore the transportation option, a group of mothers posed for a provocative calendar with the money raised going to paying for a new school bus route.

The problem was that under the previous Spanish law, the government only had to provide transportation if students lived more than three miles away from school. However, according to the new law, the distance is now calculated in a straight line and this meant that Monserrat, was no longer eligible for a school bus.

However, as Silvia Lucas, one of the mothers, said: “We have to climb a mountain and down a ravine to get to school. On foot, using the most direct route it is 4.5 km, if you walk in the road it is 6 km.”

The cuts were put into effect as a cost-saving measure but it left the mothers of Monserrat without many other options.

Although the campaigners had their tongues firmly in cheek when discussing their money-raising scheme, the humor masks a serious problem that women have stripped to expose. Unemployment rates in their region are very high and many families are struggling to afford the gas money needed to drive their children to school themselves.

After a month on the newsstands, the mothers have reached their goal of $50,000 — which will keep 83 affected students on the bus for at least three more months.

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