PAA Action News

Apr. 30, 2015

Welcome to PAA Action News, the information and action newsletter of Parents Across America.

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PAA Action Alert

New charter school scandals:
$200 million in charter school
waste and fraud

Did you know that President Obama has asked for an extra $120 million for charter schools in his FY16 budget? The increase would bring the total amount of federal funds for charter schools to $375 million, a48 percent increase over last year.

Overall, Congress has spent $3,352,841,281 to create and expand charter schools.

Yet a new report by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and the Alliance to Reclaim our Schools just documented over $200 million in charter school waste and fraud.

Join PAA and Kyle Serrette of the CPD in our May 5 webinar

on charter school accountability

Who is watching the charter schools???

PAA is pleased to join with the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) in a webinar on the many problems with poor charter school oversight which wastes millions of dollars every year. Lawmakers ignore this growing scandal as they continue to push for rapid charter school expansion.

Parents need to learn the facts about charter school waste, confront your representatives, and push for common-sense reforms.

Join PAA and CPD policy experts in a webinar to learn about the results and the policy implications of the findings.

When: Tuesday, May 5, 8 pm ET, 5 pm PT
Where: Sign up here!

Support the Tester amendment for fewer tests

We love the fact that it is the aptly-named Senator Jon Tester (D-Mont) who came through for us and offered a grade-span testing amendment to ESEA.

Here's the language of the amendment -- called the Student Testing Improvement and Accountability Act -- and the Senator's press release announcing the amendment.

We don't have a bill number yet, but we'll let you know once we do so that you can contact your Senators to support it

Join us!

If you share our overall goals of progressive, positive education reform and more parent input in education policy making, we invite you to affiliate with us if you are an existing group, or to form a new PAA chapter. The more of us there are, the stronger our voice will be at every level. Here's how!

PAA chapter and affiliate news

Nate Harris at NPE

Great session at the NPE conference

We were excited to be able to present a very well-received workshop to an overflow crowd at the Network for Public Education conference in Chicago last week.

Great thanks to PAA leaders Nate Harris, Deb Mayer, Steven Norton and Julie Woestehoff for presenting "The Impact of Poverty, Race, and Cultural Bias on Educational Opportunity."

In addition to our power point presentation, we shared these printed materials with many of the key points, charts and data from the presentation. These materials may be used freely - we just ask that you leave PAA's name on them. We want to thank Dr. Paul Thomas for bringing most of this information to our attention, and for sharing many of the charts we have included.

So, what can we do about the problems of poverty, race and cultural bias? You can read about some of the ideas we shared at the workshop here. We plan to keep working on this focus area - share your ideas with us! Send them to JulieW@parentsacrossamerica.org.

PAA-Northeast Texas to co-host Texas education documentary

Parents Across America-Northeast Texas is partnering with Parents4LISD to host a

free community screening of "The Texas Promise" on Saturday, May 2 at 1:00 pm at Briarhill Middle School in Highland Village.

This is an excellent documentary about public education in Texas. The screening will be followed by a Q&A led by Lewisville ISD Trustee Kristi Hassett who serves as LISD's representative to the Texas House Public Education Committee. This free screening is open to the public. Movie is 1 hour and 15 minutes.

More info here. You can watch the 2-minute movie trailer here.

PAA blog highlights

Keep up with our blog for more news and commentary on public education from the parents' point of view.

To learn more...

If you have questions, comments, suggestions or stories to share, please e-mail us at info@parentsacrossamerica.org or visitwww.parentsacrossamerica.org.

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