Archives for the year of: 2013
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Did Skandera’s All-Expense Paid Travel Break New Mexico Law?

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
11

According to a report in the Santa Fe Reporter, Hanna Skandera has taken numerous trips to conferences and meetings, with travel expenses paid by organizations that do business with the state.

The story says, “… over the past two years, various PED [Public Education Department] contractors have paid for Skandera’s flights and hotel rooms. For instance, in 2011, PED paid the Minnesota-based Summit Education Associates, LLC, more than $96,000 for “professional services,” according to the state’s Sunshine Portal.

“The company lists as its manager FEE [Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence] Senior Policy Fellow Christy Hovanetz, who helped advise Skandera on legislation [news, Feb. 19: “Business School”]. Then, in June 2012, FEE paid nearly $3,000 to fly Skandera—who is a member of Chiefs for Change, a FEE-operated group of public officials who support the nonprofit’s reform agenda—to a Chiefs meeting in Washington, DC, followed by FEE’s “Festival of Education” in London.

Skandera also serves on the board of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, a consortium of 22 states “working together to develop a common set of K-12 assessments in English and math”—online evaluations Skandera plans to implement in New Mexico in 2015. Travel vouchers show PARCC paid a total of more than $2,000 for Skandera to attend board meetings in Washington, DC, and Alexandria, Va.

PARCC, too, has ties to state money: It’s run by Washington, DC-based nonprofit Achieve, Inc., which last year landed a $39,660 contract with PED, according to the Sunshine Portal.”

A spokesman for the PEDRO said, “Over two days of the hearing, supporters for Secretary Skandera and reform for our students outnumbered those who stand for the status quo. As far as responding to the presentation, it is beyond disappointing that a political operative funded by special interests is given more time before this committee than the citizens of New Mexico who traveled hundreds of miles to testify.”

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change

Newtown Students Will Not Take State Tests

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
25

In January, the Newtown Board of Education asked the state education department of Connecticut to exempt students in the district from the state tests, due to the trauma of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December.

The state education department agreed, but needed to get permission from the U.S. Department of Education.

The U.S. Department of Education agreed, and now the Connecticut General Asembly must give its consent.

So much for local control.

Categories Connecticut

Nashville: Charter School Sticker Shock

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
11

The Metro Nashville school board was surprised to learn that new charter schools will absorb millions of dollars from the district’s budget, with more on the way.

The state legislature is about to approve legislation to override the veto of local school boards, so Nashville is sure to get more charters than it wants or needs.

But most of the money for the charters’ budgets will come from the city’s coffers, not the state’s.

Sort of like the state inviting someone to dine at your table, at your cost.

Thanks a lot.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization

TFA Wins Award for Hubris

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
20

Louisiana is in a budget crisis, and Governor Bobby Jindal has been closing hospitals that serve indigent patients and other social services for the needy. He has also been trying to find a way to fund his expensive voucher program, since a state court declared it unconstitutional last fall.

But Teach for America is undaunted by the state’s budget crisis. It has applied for a grant of $5 million.

Blogger Louisiana Voice writes:

“According to the project summary submitted with its application, the money would apparently be used to provide 550 to 700 teachers and 1,000 alumni who would serve as teachers, leaders and “positive change agents (whatever that is) in the lowest income schools throughout the greater New Orleans and greater Baton Rouge areas, central Louisiana, Acadiana and the Louisiana Delta.”

But wait. LouisianaVoice has come across three state contracts with TFA totaling almost $1.6 million to recruit, train and place 570 TFA teachers in the Delta region of Louisiana and the Recovery School District.”

Meanwhile, colleges in Louisiana are producing teachers who can’t find jobs.

Shouldn’t Louisiana be encouraging career educators who plan to stay in their jobs and remain in their communities?

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Louisiana, Teach for America TFA

Oprah: Is It for Real or a Ploy?

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
38

Last week, I posted a comment from a teacher in Louisiana who watched the first segment of Oprah’s “Blackboard Wars” and was pleasantly surprised to see that the program showed how hard it is for a novice to teach and that charter schools have the same problems as public schools, that they are not a magic solution.

Gary Rubinstein cautions us to be wary. He notes that the struggling teacher is never identified as Teach for America, and that the struggles may be just a set-up to prepare us for redemption and triumph and the familiar story line.

Categories Charter Schools, New Orleans, Teach for America TFA

A Parent Reflects on the LA Election

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
13

This parent was not opposed to charters. She didn’t pay much attention to battles over school issues, although her own children attend a public school in Los Angeles.

But when she realized that millions of dollars were flowing into the school board race, many from out of state, she began to realize that something big was going on.

She realized that the big money was interested in something other than its stated aims. She realized that the rhetoric of “reform” was a cover for privatization of public goods:

“This election, with its shockingly outsized spending has revealed a hidden agenda, as old as the hills. With massive institutions and systems is embedded the opportunity for equally massive personal gain. Prerequisite is private control, wrenched from what was formerly public, democratic governance. Couching this banality of greed in educational ideology has been an effective strategy, but tonight’s results suggest a whisper of increasing awareness and resistance to uncontrolled and unbridled, unjustified change.

“Because the evidence is starting to pour in. The Reform School agenda which seeks to install privately setup small, isolated, corporately run charter schools are at best no worse than their public counterparts, and reach a small, select subset of the public besides. They result in breathtaking segregation and privation and an impoverished educational landscape. They leach public resources. Unaffordable, now, are the rich opportunities of varied educational “services” like music programs and art programs, lending libraries and speech and behavioural therapists. This School Reform Emperor has no clothes, and the evidence while slow to come in, is arriving at last.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Los Angeles, Privatization

How Corporate Reformers Explain Big Loss in Los Angeles

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
15

While we were celebrating Steve Zimmer’s thrilling win over Kate Anderson in the Los Angeles school board race, the corporate reform crowd had to figure out how to spin this embarrassing defeat.

Here it is, fresh from Twitter: Deasey kept his school board majority! Monica Garcia was re-elected! Big money saves Deasey!

Inconvenient facts: The billionaires put together about $5 million to beat Steve Zimmer, who is a member of the school board in his first term. Steve is an independent thinker who dared to propose oversight for charters and a moratorium on new charters until the board had established some means of holding them accountable. Steve is also a TFA alum who remained as a public school teacher for 17 years. To the billionaires who own the charter movement, he had to be punished.

Monica Garcia, the board president, had about $1 million of the billionaire fund and four opponents. The man who came in second–Robert Skeels– raised about $20,000.

So now the corporate reformers are exulting that they helped Garcia beat back Skeels.

Really, they are pathetic.

Spare a little sympathy for those who just suffered a huge loss and are trying to salvage something from the wreckage.

Tears for Goliath.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Los Angeles

Chain Store Charter School To Open in Memphis

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
12

Aspire Charter Schools will open in Memphis, its first venture outside of California.

It comes with a big wad of money to guarantee success. The perks are munificent, since the chain has set aside $100,000 for marketing before the school opens this fall under private management.

Philanthropists–eager to prove that privatization works better than public schools–have pledged $28 million to help Aspire take over ten public schools in Memphis over a five-year period. The federal government–eager to support Secretary Duncan’s belief that private management is always superior to public control–has awarded Aspire a tidy $800,000.

You do have to wonder how long that kind of money will be available as new charters open and multiply, or is this just a very high-priced marketing gimmick to sell the idea.

Meanwhile, Aspire is wooing children and parents with games and free trips to California.

One inducement for Aspire to enter the Tennessee market is that Tennessee pays more state tuition per pupil for public schools than California, an amazing fact. Also, Tennessee is a welcoming state for privatization, since far-right Republicans have a super-majority in the legislature and there is a compliant state Commissioner, Kevin Huffman, who is not only Michelle Rhee’s ex-husband but former communications director of TFA.

Last year, Chris Barbic (founder of Yes Prep Academies) moved from Houston to Tennessee to take over the state’s Achievement School District (the usual euphemism for the lowest performing schools) and pledged that all would be in the top 20% in five years. In four years, we will check up on his pledge.

Meanwhile, what is getting firmly rooted is the belief that schools can and should be run like chain stores, with headquarters in another state.

Categories Charter Schools, Tennessee

If Only Mayor Bloomberg Understood Proficiency Rates…

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
8

Matt Di Carlo noticed an odd sentence in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “State of the City” address. The mayor, as is now customary, was applauding his administration for the amazing progress of the schools under his stewardship, and he said the following, in anticipation of the new Common Core assessments:

“But no matter where the definition of proficiency is arbitrarily set on the new tests, I expect that our students’ progress will continue outpacing the rest of the State’s[,] the only meaningful measurement of progress we have.”

Di Carlo skillfully takes apart that sentence to show that the mayor has no idea what he is talking about. If the “definition of proficiency” is “arbitrary,” as the mayor says, then the state tests cannot possibly by “the only meaningful measurement of progress we have.”

Di Carlo provides a graph to show that proficiency rates can be set arbitrarily, in which case they can give whatever answer you want, not a “meaningful measurement of progress.”

I know that Di Carlo won’t agree, but we won’t be able to reclaim education until we stop using statistics to measure what matters most in education. Nor will we be able to have good education until politicians give up their effort to impose their uninformed ideas on the schools and stop claiming credit for work they did not do.

 

Categories Education Reform

How Georgia Politicians Violate State Constitution

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2013 //
8

As Anthony Cody explains, the Georgia state constitution is clear:

“No money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly, or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, cult, or religious denomination or of any sectarian institution.”

What part of that is ambiguous. Even the phase “directly or indirectly” says NO.

Yet Georgia has enacted a tax credit plan to divert money from the public treasury to send children to sectarian, religious schools.

It is a back-door voucher.

Where are the lawyers?

Does the state constitution mean nothing?

When did a Georgia conservatives adopt the idea that the constitution means whatever you want it to mean?

Categories Georgia, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers
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