Over the past few years, we have seen countless charter scams and frauds. This should not be surprising. When you deregulate a public service and give public money to non-educators to run schools without supervision or accountability, this is what you get.
Here is a prime example, one which I wrote about recently. This post was written and sent to me by Dr. Mitchell Robinson.
An optometrist in Michigan decided he had a new method of learning, which he called “Integrative Visual Learning.”
Robinson writes:
“What’s lost here is any discussion of Dr. Ingersoll’s “innovative” approach to learning, “Integrated Visual Learning,” which has to do with rapid eye movements. Here’s a teacher’s account of IVL, and how it was used in Dr. Ingersoll’s school:
“His claims were/are at best a novelty in my opinion. If I recall correctly, students were initially given a screener to see how their eyes tracked on a page of text. This was done with a special machine and a pair of glasses hooked up to the machine. If their eyes didn’t track from left to right (as in how a person reads a page of text) and from one line to the next in the correct “zig zag” pattern during reading, then they were considered to need “therapy.” Therapy was expensive and rarely covered by insurance.”
“What’s missing here is any description of how children learn. How does this “test” help teachers adapt instruction? What happens when a child’s eyes don’t zig zag? Are they taught differently, or just not admitted to the school?
“Um, not so much…according to another teacher:
“There was NO room in the school specifically for IVL testing. There may have been equipment, but kids were never observed for vision. The IVL methods were taught to all kids, because Ingersoll made the staff do it; middle school and high school as well. Even the Special Education teachers had to teach it. which meant critical standards were not met.”
(http://www.upnorthprogressive.com/2015/01/13/teachers-speak-out-about-integrated-visual-learning-the-continuing-story-of-dr-steve-ingersoll/)
“So while we don’t know if Dr. Ingersoll knows anything about children, or learning, or schools, here’s what we do know:
“1. He stole our money.
2. He subjected our children to radical, untested teaching methods.
3. People like this should not be permitted to set foot in our schools, much less run them.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Back in 1968, I was a reading specialist who worked in a federally funded project. We were “encouraged” to use this same tracking approach. It was called a Controlled Reader. There were probably 1,000-2000 kids we serviced. Everyone had to use these machines for part of their instruction. At the end of the project, reading eye cameras were used to track the eye movements as children read texts. The result of this research study was that there was no significant difference between groups who used the machines and a control group. One big difference between our project and Dr. Ingersoll’s is that he skated with a nice bundle of change.
The takeaway: After you observe the same “innovation” being used in education for the third time, it’s probably time to retire!
“. . . After you observe the same “innovation” being used in education for the third time, it’s probably time to retire!”
Who/what should “retire”? The method, the teacher or both?
I am shocked at how lax the MI charter school authorizers are, but why, why, why would any reasonable parent sign a child up for such a school in the first place????
My son had a problem focusing when he was younger, and some visual therapy seems to have helped, but even visual therapy in those cases is controversial.
What competition breeds is not a superior product but superior marketing. Peter Greene has an excellent post on the topic: http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/02/coke-provides-marketing-lesson.html
I agree. Parents have to do their research before enrolling their children in these schools.
Many of us take short cuts when making decisions. We buy Koch toilet paper. We go to Regal theaters. We buy at Walmart.
We purchase name brand dog food and, later read exposes and learn the reason our beloved pets are sick.
How many of us confirm research that shows we spend more time choosing our first cars than selecting our careers?
Relative to schools, isn’t the information gathering process difficult for parents? If they don’t have access to a computer? If they are unfamiliar or distant from a library? If they lack the ability to assess differences (and, sift out falsehoods) between services, one that is promoted, with highly persuasive paid advertising and the other, unadvertised?
For most of us, finding information about school privatization and corporatization, has been an arduous task. I don’t fault the moms and dads of students. I fault the legislatures for encouraging barbarians to rip off taxpayers, for forcing children into excessive testing and, for the turnover of a public good to privatizers.
Google Steven Ingersoll and read about his doings in Traverse City, MI. Shyster is the word that comes to mind.
It’s good that Michigan is finally looking at charters, but I think the inquiry should go further to the public colleges and universities who are authorizing these schools.
There seems to be a reluctance to ask about that, but maybe it just hasn’t reached the authorizers yet.
What is the role of public colleges and universities in privatizing public K-12 schools? When are they “held accountable” (or even questioned) on this? Is there some kind of partition between their role in sponsoring charters and then producing experts or work on “public ed” in Michigan that is pro-charter?
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/02/19/sanctions-charter-operators-michigan/23653963/
Agree, Chiara. I’d like to see a journalist look at the connections between public universities and regional chambers of commerce…. Indiana University at the “Leadership” level of giving, Wright State University, at the “Director” level of giving, Ohio State University’s Chief Counsel and V.P. , 2nd in command on the Columbus Chamber Board.
Regional chambers have legislative agendas that skew against the middle class, IMO. As I read the legislative agenda of the Columbus Chamber, they advocate reduced state income taxes and portable student funds (linked to the voucher movement?).
Public universities that work against their base, commit a transgression.
“On Tuesday, October 5, 1993, Michigan Governor John Engler stood in front
of an assembly of state legislators with a 20-gauge sawed-off shotgun and
voiced his support for school choice. Engler brandished the gun, “confiscated
from a student, to dramatize school violence and promote his plan to allow
parents more leeway in choosing the schools their children attend”
The coordinated political hit job on public schools is just incredible, and it goes back years.
They’re “agnostics” on public v charter! Yeah, right. Sure they are.
Click to access 7218_miron_ch_1.pdf
The Upnorthprogressive blog chronicles this sordid tale very well.
http://www.upnorthprogressive.com/tag/dr-steve-ingersoll/
Who will make a movie dramatizing how billionaire businessmen and their pocket politicians are stealing our children’s time in the name of corporate profit?
Who will be this generation’s Charles Dickens?
I love how they all have to have their own personal school to run.
We have a manufacturer here who sends employees into public schools to do presentations and projects. They’re headquartered in Germany. My son really enjoyed the project- the emphasis was on “team work” which is how they run their company. They make fasteners for commercial construction and the lead product was actually invented in this county, so they told the kids that history.
Somehow they manage to “contribute” to public education without a hostile takeover or naming themselves CEO Of Schools, or whatever.
I believe this was discredited idea from the70’s.
Simply another in a long line of rheephorm gimmicks. Old or new, borrowed or bought outright, it flows from what I think of as a fundamental tenet of the movers and shakers of self-styled “education reform.”
The heavyweights of corporate education reform are focused on $tudent $ucce$$ and its alleged collateral benefits, e.g., read Anthony Cody’s THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH (2014), for just one example—in this case Bill Gates explaining the benefits of tying the profit motive for doing good for oneself to the motive of doing good for others.
It’s free market fundamentalism. It’s wishful thinking. It’s rhetorical aspirational fantasies. It’s self-justification for excusing worst business and management practices by claiming that somehow, someway, the miraculously wonderful end result of “education reform” will be worth any short-term pain and ludicrous policies and fantastical unproven experiments.
The problem for this business plan that masquerades as an education model is that it assumes that when profit is totaled up and loss is minimized, then other things automatically happen. For example, that teachers will actually teach and students will actually learn and that things will actually be more efficient and productive, and so on. In other words, if the most sacred metric of all, the one that makes the most ₵ent¢, is taken care of, then by and large there is innovation and progress and all sorts of real swell good stuff that just somehow, inevitably, accompanies swelling bank accounts.
At least, that’s what it looks like rhetorically. In reality, it’s nothing but a cover for an increasingly two-tiered education system, one for the already advantaged to increase their advantage, and one for everyone else that reinforces the advantages the former already have.
So what looks and acts like gimmicks is not really a problem for the self-proclaimed leaders and beneficiaries of the “new civil rights movement of our time.” Whether sincerely or cynically or hypocritically, they peddle their wares and sell their products and bray from the rooftops that what they are delivering is not only better now but in the future will be better yet.
So they are genuinely baffled, offended and upset when their ideas and practices are scrutinized, criticized, condemned, and rejected. They wonder why the vast majority of us won’t recognize that they are permitted, even required, to do things TO US, not WITH US.
What looks like and feels like gimmicks to us, feels and looks like gestures of generous noblesse oblige [on their part] to us.
I guess you could call it an “entitlement mentality.” They are truly baffled why we won’t just buckle down by showing “grit” and “determination” and “moral character” by getting on board with their every word and gesture.
So for anyone that thinks that this posting must be the outer limits of gimmickry that rheephorm has to offer, I suggest you get ready in the future to repeat that old line—
“It looks like déjà vu all over again.”
😎