A reader sends this comment:
“Dr. Ravitch refers to a “push to introduce charters to Idaho.” Idaho has had charter schools since 1991, though the initial legislation authorizing them has been so often revised by the Legislature that Idaho’s Office of Performance Evaluation recently reported that there is little difference between Idaho charter schools and traditional public schools, and that Idaho charter schools no longer live up to the legislative intent of the laws that created them. (See “Policy Differences Between Charter and Traditional Schools” http://legislature.idaho.gov/ope/publications/reports/r1304.pdf)
Dr. Ravitch. may be referring to the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho, a 9-member task force formed in August that is assisted by an advisory group consisting of the task-force chair Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education; Jamie MacMillan, executive director of the Albertson Foundation; Mary Wells, managing partner and co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners; and Andy Smarick, a partner at Bellwether. Bellwether is an organization founded and populated by hedge-fund managers and venture capitalists with ties to NewSchools Venture Fund. Upon its creation, NewSchools Venture Fund CEO Ted Mitchell described Bellwether as “a new nonprofit consulting organization designed to strengthen the leadership and organizational capacity of entrepreneurial education organizations by offering specialized executive search, strategic consulting, leadership development, and thought leadership services.”
Andrew Rotherham is on the 9-member task force; he is also a partner at Bellwether. He’s joined by Marguerita Roza, senior research associate at the Center for Reinventing Education, and by Terry Ryan, former VP for Ohio Programs and Policy at the right-wing Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Mr. Ryan is the new president of the Idaho Charter Schools Network. Idaho taxpayers can only hope and pray that he is unable to achieve in Idaho the results he achieved in Ohio, where for-profit charter schools have wreaked havoc on public school finances while embroiling themselves in scandal after scandal involving tax evasion, fraud, and misappropriation of tax dollars.
With the lineup listed here, one can easily imagine that any recommendations coming from the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho will be steeped in the New Markets Tax Credits Program, which enables hedge-fund managers and venture capitalist to almost double their money in seven years by financing the building and operation of charter schools. Vouchers, no doubt, will also be part of the plan, as will the use of tax dollars to fund private and parochial schools.
More about the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho is available here:
http://www.idahoednews.org/news/experts-to-exam-rural-idaho-schools/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sounds like Wall Street traders are branching out… why take risks on Wall Street when you can make “sure dealings” with great and assured monetary boons.. via “Charter School Street” and you don’t even need to go through all the certifications, pay for space on the iconic NYC trading floor etc. The ultimate irony… who is minding the purpose of these charters supposedly created for THE STUDENTS??? Not one person with education and classroom teaching experience is involved in structuring this “education” system! When will this nonsense stop?
Yes, the lineup truly stands out because of the KEY missing ingredient…wise, experienced educators. And that is how it is done in this parallel universe. Once the distinction between charter and public is obliterated, rather than blurred, the takeover will be complete.
Public schools opened the door to this kind of exploitation when they forget what education is for, namely an understanding of freedom under the constitution (equality before the law) and substituted for that understanding the bogus notion of economic equity. That’s why Diane is right on testing but wrong on remedies.
I’m certain that the children being harmed by such exploitation will be comforted by your explanation of its root causes, if they are able to understand it. I don’t.
Also, conspiracy thinking. Such a broad brush. I assure you, Harlan, that I am no Republican. But my primary content (AP European History) covers the very things you rant about daily from your still-existing Y2K bunker.
We cover Adam Smith and point out the sensibility of his economic philosophy. (Smith also warned about the nature of too much corporate power.) We cover Marx, too. After all, they have to have some comprehension to understand Soviet Russia for a Euro history course. We then compare the two ideas and, not surprisingly, Smith wins out in the comparisons. Because Smith should and students know this. So, give me a break.
We also cover the great Enlightenment thinkers and their philosophies including Montesquieu’s highly precious “equality before the law.” This is followed with the French Revolutions and the 1848 Revolutions in which people are fighting for suffrage and individual freedoms. We stress that free societies are the most advanced and generally provide the highest standard of living for its citizens.
This is all done through historical study and with students reading first hand works by philosophers and coming to their own judgments. If you were to ask me where I stand on this, well, Marx loses nearly every time.
So be careful about your little conspiracy theories regarding what gets taught in schools. We’re not a bunch of socialists. If you ever read Michigan’s civics curriculum, you’d realize it couldn’t wave the American flag any more joyously.
Thank you, Steve K for the info. I sincerely hope you are right. YOU have done the reading, and reached realistic conclusions, but strike most public school and many private school teachers, and all you will get is meaningless gonging.
“Terry Ryan, former VP for Ohio Programs and Policy at the right-wing Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Mr. Ryan is the new president of the Idaho Charter Schools Network.”
Ohio ed reform is a disaster. This is what Idaho will get from the Ohio ed reformers:
“The North Central Ohio Educational Service Center warned the First Time Learners Academy late last week that it plans to suspend its contract if it can’t propose an appropriate fix by Friday. At the same time, it told the Directional Academy that its contract will be terminated on Dec. 17. It didn’t open its doors by Sept. 30, which is required by state law.
But the most-recent enrollment report to the state showed that First Time Learners Academy has about 77 students and had been paid about $237,000 so far this year in taxpayer-funded per-pupil payments. It serves students in grades K-8 who are learning English as a second language and operates in a former storefront at the Great Western Shopping Center in the Hilltop neighborhood.
In a letter sent Nov. 14 to the school’s board, the ESC says that, without immediate changes, it will suspend the school for lack of funds and for failing to pay its bills for contracted services and to the ESC, which collects a sponsorship fee. The letter indicates that students aren’t being taught by licensed teachers.
ESC Superintendent Jim Lahoski said the school’s restrooms are filthy, the classrooms are dirty and dusty and there are ceiling tiles missing in the school building.
“That is not what we expect from our school,” he said yesterday, adding that some employees have said they haven’t been paid.
The North Central Ohio ESC, which is based in Marion, oversees 22 schools across Ohio — 12 of them in Columbus. Seven of the Columbus schools are in good standing with the ESC. The rest either didn’t open, are suspended or are in the process of being suspended or terminated.
The ESC also recently notified Barnett Academy and Pschtecin Public School that they face suspension. Barnett was new this year and hadn’t met payroll; staff also reported it had a bedbug problem. It decided to close last week.
Pschtecin, a high school that serves dropouts and those at risk of dropping out, had overstated its enrollment last school year and suffers from related money issues this year, Lahoski said. The school also has until Friday to propose a remedy.
It has been open since the 2005-06 school year.
The two Talented Tenth Leadership Academies, one for boys and one for girls, that opened this school year were suspended last month.”
They’re churning two vulnerable groups in and out of the privatized charter schools -English language learners and at risk teenagers. The parents of at risk teenagers are particularly vulnerable to the sales pitches and recruiting tactics used by Ohio charters.
I wish a responsible adult would look at the “credit recovery” programs, too.
I think Ohio’s high school graduation rates are being inflated with credit recovery scam programs so that ed reformers can claim success with an uptick in grad rates. The kids themselves say the programs are a joke. I think the numbers on high school grad rates can be seriously inflated using “credit recovery” scams. I’d like to see that investigated.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/11/20/charters_stop.html
“Rural schools educate almost as many children as big city schools but they haven’t received anything like the same level of attention from policymakers, the public, or education innovators,” Hill said.”
Rural parents in Idaho need to take a field trip to Ohio’s urban districts and see how “attention” from this identical group of ideologues has worked out here. Ohio ed reform is a disaster.
“Terry Ryan, former VP for Ohio Programs and Policy at the right-wing Thomas B. Fordham Institute. ”
I’m fascinated by the fact that Fordham is moving to privatize rural districts in Idaho rather than in their home state of Ohio. Ohio has lots of rural districts, but we haven’t seen the huge push for privatization here (yet). Why would Fordham go all the way to Idaho to privatize rural public schools? I wonder if it’s because rural districts in Ohio are aware of what has happened to urban districts in Ohio under ed reform. Better to sell it in Idaho, where they don’t have the long and dismal track record.
A plausible explanation, that Fordham is fleeing a fouled nest in Ohio and hoping that no one in Idaho asks any inconvenient questions about Fordham’s responsibility for that fouled nest. However, I’m not sure that I would characterize the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho as “Fordham . . . moving to privatize rural districts in Idaho.” Other than Ryan, the only person involved who is also currently working for Fordham is Andy Smarick.
What is common to many of these people, though, is that they have at one time or another been invited by the Albertson Foundation to speak at the ED Sessions, a monthly speaker series in Boise that’s funded largely by the Albertson Foundation and Idaho Business for Education but which counts among its partners the Idaho School Board Association, the Idaho Department of Education, and the Idaho Charter Schools Network. Rather than a Fordham initiative, I see the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho as an Albertson Foundation initiative, one of the regrettable results of the Foundation’s efforts to lay the groundwork in Idaho for a huge increase in the number and influence of charter schools, the establishment of a voucher system, increased reliance on technology in teaching and teacher evaluations, and the siphoning of tax dollars to individual and corporate investors.
To privatizers, part of Idaho’s appeal is the Albertson Foundation’s money. But also appealing is a conservative, apathetic electorate; a Legislature utterly controlled by the Republican party; and a Libertarian governor masquerading as a Republican, whose disdain for public schools is matched only by his disdain for all things governmental. Adding to the appeal is the fact that this Legislature, that governor, and Tom Luna, the superintendent of schools, don’t give a damn about the will of the people. Though in 2011 Idaho teachers, parents, and citizen activists soundly defeated by ballot initiative the first wave of privatization and marketplace-oriented ed reform–the so-called Luna Laws–we’ve seen much of those laws resurface in legislation passed in 2012. For these reasons alone, I suspect that many of the “reformers” see Idaho as a useful incubator for ideas that might be met with skepticism, scorn, and resistance elsewhere. The appeal is only enhanced by the Albertson Foundation waving wads of cash in the air.
Now seems as good a time as any to remind y’all of the financial connection between Joe Scott, chairman of the board of the Albertson Foundation, and K12, Inc, which has operated Idaho’s largest virtual charter school since its inception over a decade ago.
“Albertson’s heir made millions on K12 Inc., promotes it to Idaho schools”
http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/boise/2011/feb/19/albertsons-heir-made-millions-k12-inc-promotes-it-idaho-schools/
“Though in 2011 Idaho teachers, parents, and citizen activists soundly defeated by ballot initiative the first wave of privatization and marketplace-oriented ed reform–the so-called Luna Laws–we’ve seen much of those laws resurface in legislation passed in 2012. ”
Thanks so much for all the information. I knew that Idaho voters had rejected ed reform in 2011, but I didn’t know how embedded ed reformers were in your state government.
I do not understand why Fordham is not called on to explain the ed reform record in Ohio. It is atrocious.
There’s a real disconnect between local media and national media on Ohio, too. Even the most die-hard media cheerleaders (the Columbus Dispatch) are doing near-daily critical pieces on ed reform in Ohio. The stories are everywhere. Yet the national ed reform promoters keep marching on, unfazed by the results “on the ground” in my state.
Oh look – Paul Hill of CRPE=CRAP is mentioned. How I wish that little Gates project would disappear from UW and WA State. Permanently. It gives UW a bad taste in the mouths of most teachers here – worse than it already has with TFA shill Tom Stritikus at the helm of the College of Ed.
Those who run the public schools don’t believe in freedom. Those who believe in freedom don’t support public education. No wonder the reformers are trying to destroy public education in order to guarantee that their children will no longer be infected by an anti-capitalist/anti-freedom mind set.
Only where the public schools unequivocally support capitalism is there complementary support of the public schools. So many public schools are filled by teachers who see themselves as labor and thus opposed to their employer (but the school board and the citizens are not a business) and thus have a right to unionize.
When each teacher sees himself merely as an entrepreneur and individual contractor, and not an agent of the socialist state, then there will be a chance for harmony between citizens and their schools. As it is the public schools have been captured by a socialist mentality. No wonder the big money capitalists want to diminish their power. Most public school teacher are anti capitalist, and thus anti freedom. That’s what the business interests object to and why they are trying to increase charters and vouchers.