Wraparound student supports

Media Mobilizing Project has created an amazing new project to share the personal stories of parents, students and educators in Philadelphia's public schools. Their website, "Voices from our Public Schools" collects these stories to create a larger narrative around why people love their public schools and how they feel Pennsylvania's budget cuts to education have hurt them.

In a column for the Education Opportunity Network, blogger Jeff Bryant paints a stark picture of how state budget fights are decimating public schools and stripping them of the resources they need to support students and teachers.

In this year's state budget deal, organizers in New York defeated a proposed tax credit that would have provided up to $1 million in taxpayer subsidies to wealthy residents for donating to private schools. They also held the line on charter expansion and prevented lawmakers from increasing the charter school cap.

The 4th edition of the Education Law Center's "Is School Funding Fair" report card is out this month, giving advocates and organizers across the country another round of valuable data on how well states are (or aren't) investing in their schools and students.

Last week parents, students, teachers and community members across Massachusetts took part in a statewide week of action against the overuse of high stakes, standardized testing. The events were organized by the newly formed Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance and their local partner, the Boston Education Justice Alliance.

Last year, we release an online toolkit called "Investing in the Future: Revenue Options to Give Every Child the Opportunity to Learn," which presented strategies that states can use to raise revenue to fund important investments in education, transportation and more. Now we are releasing a series of fact sheets that distill the critical takeaways from the toolkit and offer brief overviews of strategies like instituting a millionaire’s tax or closing tax loopholes for large, profitable, multi-state corporations.

Brittini Gray, a community organizer with Metropolitan Congregations United, published a powerful op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch decrying the continued lack of resources for schools in the St. Louis area. She lays out how lack of funding and poor policy decisions have continually damaged the Normandy School District, creating a climate in which students have minimal opportunities to succeed.

Currently over half of students in the U.S. received free or reduced-price lunch, a statistic that is widely used as a proxy for measuring child poverty rates. Now, however, a new strategy to fight hunger in schools might make it more difficult to collect data on the number of low-income students across the country.

Education organizers in New York City celebrated when then-mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio promised to create 100 new community schools to better meet the out-of-school needs of the city's children. Now, just over a year into his term as mayor, de Blasio's administration is upping that number to 200 community schools by 2017.

The school funding case working its way through the Pennsylvania court system ran into a temporary setback when a lower court ruled that the court system lacked the jurisdiction to rule on whether the state was failing to provide adequate funding to schools and students. The defendants are filing an appeal and the case will now advance to the State Supreme Court.