The Detroit Free Press is running a week-long series about Michigan’s charter sector. The first story was about a $1 billion industry with no accountability and poor results. Most charters in the state operate for profit.
The industry’s response? National Heritage Academies, a for-profit charter chain, bought up the advertising space around the story to tout their wares. See the screen shot.
Peter Greene comments here on the U. S. Department of Education’s decision to bail out Corinthian Colleges, Inc., a for-profit chain.
Not so long ago, the U.S. DOE pledged to monitor predatory for-profit colleges. Not so, it seems. Not now.
Greene writes:
“Corinthian has a somewhat checkered past. Okay, checkered might be generous. They have grown prodigiously since being founded in 1995, acquiring around twenty other post-secondary institutions from Duff’s Business School to the American Motorcycle Institute. They operate the Everest College chain, plus a few others. They’ve been called “the nation’s worst private college chain” and have been sued more times than anybody seems to be able to count. The State of California in particular seems to be intent on driving them out of business, charging them with the usual predatory practices of marketing to poverty-level folks with promises of careers that never appear. This would also be the chain who got caught (by Huffington Post, of all people) hiring their own grads to keep their grad-employment numbers up.
They are, in short, exactly the kind of for-profit college that the feds said they were going to shut down.”
The announcement was made by Ted Mitchell, Undersecretary of Education, who served previously on the boards of for-profit education institutions and was CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, which is a major supporter of privatization efforts.
Arizona State Commissioner of Education John Huppenthal admitted he left many comments anonymously on blogs.
This is causing him some problems in his re-election campaign, as some of his comments were highly insulting and inflammatory to various groups.
The Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry canceled plans to honor him at its annual awards ceremony.
Here are what one blog calls his “top ten” anonymous comments.
Huppenthal is in hot water. As one editorialist in Arizona wrote:
“He called poor people “lazy pigs” and made inane comparisons between stuff he doesn’t like and Hitler, but let’s honor the First Amendment here and leave the content of his speech off the table. He did two things wrong – he hid behind pseudonyms, and when caught he offered up a non-apology apology.
“If you’re going out in the public sphere, use your name, be you and own it. Otherwise, you don’t deserve an audience.
“And if you step in it, do not say what Huppenthal did (and in a “statement,” no less): “I sincerely regret if my comments have offended anyone.”
“What a load of horse puckey.
“What he’s saying is, if no one’s offended by what he said, then he’s not sorry. So if there’s no fundamental level of sorry-ness, why are you apologizing?
Mr. Huppenthal, you’re a leader. If you’re sorry about what you posted, say, “What I said was wrong, I renounce it, and I promise not to promote those beliefs again.” If you’re not sorry, say, “Yeah, I said it, I meant it, and I will use my own name from now on.”
Huppenthal is identified on Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education website as “one of Arizona’s leading education reformers” because of his support for school choice and the Common Core.
Yesterday I posted a clip of students at Nashville Prep chanting the answers to questions. I should have mentioned that chanting the answers to questions was a common practice in mid-nineteenth century schools. Students would chant their geography lessons, for example, singing out the names of continents or mountains or oceans. They did not necessarily knew where to find them on a map, but they knew the words to the chant.
Peter Greene reports that this chanting is today called “whole brain teaching,” and is associated with someone named Chris Biffle.
Greene says that WBT has a website, and its goal is to put “organized fun” into the classroom.
But he takes a dim view of this chanting:
“Some of the groupiness aspects are recognizable to anyone who was ever in band, choir, or the armed forces. And I have to tell you– given the youtube and on-line testimonials, and WBT’s persistence over fifteen years, there are people out there who love this. I can see the appeal if you are in a school mired in endless chaos, or if you’ve always struggled with classroom management, or if you’re Dolores Umbridge.
“All that aside, it is creepy as hell. Set your individuality aside, become part of the group, do as you’re told, sit up, lie down, roll over , speak (but only as directed). Just imagine what this would look like with someone more stern, more authoritarian, more Hitlerish, in front of the classroom. If you can handle it, you can find sample lessons all the way down to Kindergartners.
“But in a funny twist, per Ravitch’s post this morning, it turns out that Biffle was a man ahead of his time, because what Nashville Prep and others have discovered is that WBT is great for test prep. It turns out that subsuming your individuality, spitting out dictated exact answers on demand, and generally being a good little all-fit-one-size widget is excellent training for taking standardized tests.
“So if you find this little mini-re-enactment of the Cultural Revolution unappealing, the bad news is that this is exactly what high stakes standardized testing call for.”
Texas journalist Jason Stanford says it is time to recognize one of the heroes of the Education Spring: former Texas Commissioner Robert Scott, who bluntly said that high-stakes testing had grown too powerful and who warned that Common Core was intended to create a national curriculum and testing system. He came under a lot of criticism at the time and had to step down, but he has been proven right. The movement against high-stakes testing continues to escalate, and the number of states dropping out of Common Core seems likely to increase.
“Scott announced his resignation as Texas Education Commissioner in May 2012, but his public career effectively ended that January when he said that standardized testing had become a “perversion of its original intent.” Testing was wagging the dog, and Scott placed the blame on testing companies and lobbyists that have “become not only a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex.”
“You’ve reached a point now of having this one thing that the entire system is dependent upon. It is the heart of the vampire, so to speak,” said Scott, who stood by his remarks even as others failed to do the same for him.”
Texas was the heart of the testing movement, and a vast majority of local school boards passed resolutions opposing the misuse of testing. Even the Legislature took a stand against high-stakes testing. Much of that momentum can be credited to Robert Scott, who had the courage to speak out when it was unpopular. He is a hero of American education.
On the eve of the national conventions of the two major teachers’ unions, the BATS–a voluntary association of 48,000 teachers–voted “no confidence” in Arne Duncan and called for his replacement.
This is their statement:
“Badass Teachers Association
Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 22, 2014
More Information Contact:
Marla Kilfoyle, General Manager, BATs
Melissa Tomlinson, Asst. General Manager, BATs
contact.batmanager@gmail.com
The Badass Teachers Association (BATs), an association of over 48,000 teachers, has taken a vote of NO CONFIDENCE in U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. This vote signifies that teachers around the nation do not support the educational agenda set forth by the Obama Administration and Secretary Duncan. Race to the Top fails to serve our neediest children and it fails to address race and class inequalities in the education system.
BATs Co-Founder Mark Naison states in his letter to President Obama, “The joy and creative learning that your own children experience in one of the nation’s top private schools are being driven out of public schools throughout the nation with startling rapidity. Teachers work in fear. Students learn under extreme stress. Parents wonder why their children have started to hate school. ”
Marla Kilfoyle, General Manager of BATs states, “Secretary Duncan’s continued public attacks on parents, students, and teachers have further eroded our confidence in his ability to run the U.S.D.O.E. and to make decisions for our nation’s public schools. His continued support of corporate education reform, which is dismantling public education in America, furthers our resolve to have him removed from office.”
Melissa Tomlinson, Asst. General Manager of BATs claims, “Arne Duncan, as Secretary of Education, has failed to fulfill the responsibility of this position to provide and maintain the basic human right to education as set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations. His failure to fulfill the obligation, and responsibility to provide the necessary financial support to public schools, is neglectful of the required compliance to the ‘4 A’s Framework’ that dictate all schools be available, accessible, acceptable, and adaptable. With this in mind,we have an obligation to replace him with a person that is better qualified to do so.”
###
Starbucks received wonderful publicity for its offer to pay the tuition of thousands of workers who took online courses at Arizona State University.
But there is a catch.
“Any Starbucks employee who works at least 20 hours per week will soon be able to complete his/her junior and senior years of college at Arizona State University (ASU) Online, thanks to a deal between the coffeehouse colossus and the institute of higher learning. But not everyone thinks that the new plan is such a great deal for Starbucks employees.
The Starbucks College Achievement Plan, which replaces an earlier tuition assistance program in the company’s benefits package, was officially unveiled at a public forum in New York’s Times Center. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan put in an appearance at the forum during which he told Starbucks employees, “I urge you to take advantage of this.”
A joint statement from Starbucks and ASU hailed the new tuition reimbursement plan as “a powerful, first-of-its-kind program designed to unleash [a] lifetime opportunity for thousands of eligible part-time and full-time U.S. partners (employees).” Under the new plan, employees who complete their freshman and sophomore years at ASU Online would receive a major discount, and the remaining two years would be totally free.
Sounds great, right? Not according to Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who said she found it “incredibly problematic” that Starbucks has decided to limit its tuition assistance to a single online university.
““ASU Online is a profit venture,” said Goldrick-Rab. “And basically, these two businesses have gotten together and created a monopoly on college ventures for Starbucks employees.”
“Although ASU is a public university, its online wing is definitely a revenue-generating enterprise, helping the university manage its finances in an era of declining state aid. Online courses are taught by ASU professors, but much of the technical and administrative work that goes into managing ASU Online has been handed over to a private company, Pearson.
“In addition to limiting student choices, Goldrick-Rab said she believes it will leave them with a shoddier education. Recent research has suggested that online-only classes may leave low-income students at a disadvantage. Those are precisely the people, said Goldrick-Rab, who are mostly likely to enroll in ASU Online through the Starbucks program.
“These studies indicate that online education not only doesn’t work well for them, but can also propel them backwards,” she said. Students would also be expected to become full-time students, while still working an average 20 hours per week at Starbucks.”
And that is not all. The New York Times reports: that “students could have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket, and wait months or years before being reimbursed.”
“That feature of the program was not mentioned in the Starbucks news release announcing the program, or on its publicly accessible web page about the program. But as word of it leaked out, educators and education experts took to the Internet to say that the benefit was less than it seemed, and might even frighten away some potential users.
“Given the upfront cost, it pushes a lot of risk onto the student,” Rachel Fishman, an education policy analyst at the New America Foundation, wrote in a blog post dissecting the program.”
When the Gates Foundation issued a press release calling for a two-year moratorium on the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, its position met a mixed reception. Some saw it as a victory for the critics of high-stakes testing; others as an attempt to weaken the critics by deferring the high stakes.
Anthony Cody says, don’t be fooled. The Gates Foundation gives no indication that it understands that its path is wrong, it is simply buying time.
The question we should all be asking is how this one very rich foundation took charge of American education and is in a position to issue policy statements that should be the domain of state and local school boards. What we have lost is democratic control of public education; while no one was looking, it got outsourced to the Gates Foundation.
Cody writes:
“As a thought experiment, what would it look like if the Gates Foundation truly was attending to the research and evidence that is showing how damaging the new Common Core tests and high stakes accountability systems are? Would they simply be calling to defer the worst effects of this system for two years?
A real appraisal of the evidence would reveal:
“VAM systems are unreliable and destructive when used for teacher evaluations, even as one of several measurements.
“School closures based on test scores result in no real gains for the students, and tremendous community disruption.
“Charter schools are not providing systemic improvements, and are expanding inequity and segregation.
“Attacks on teacher seniority and due process are destabilizing a fragile profession, increasing turnover.
“Tech-based solutions are often wildly oversold, and deliver disappointing results. Witness K12 Inc’s rapidly expanded virtual charter school chain, described here earlier this year.
“Our public education system is not broken, but is burdened with growing levels of poverty, inequity and racial isolation. Genuine reform means supporting schools, not abandoning them.
“The fundamental problem with the Gates Foundation is that it is driving education down a path towards more and more reliance on tests as the feedback mechanism for a market-driven system. This is indeed a full-blown ideology, reinforced by Gates’ own experience as a successful technocrat. The most likely hypothesis regarding the recent suggestion that high stakes be delayed by two years is that this is a tactical maneuver intended to diffuse opposition and preserve the Common Core project – rather than a recognition that these consequences do more harm than good.”
Moratorium or no, he notes, we are locked into a failed paradigm of testing and accountability. Standards and tests are not vehicles to advance equity and civil rights. If anything, they have become a way to undermine democracy and standardize education.
After a year-long investigation, the Detroit Free Press published a scathing report on the state’s thriving charter sector.
Charter schools receive $1 billion in taxpayer funding with virtually no accountability.
They get worse results than traditional public schools.
140,000 children attend charter schools in Michigan.
Michigan has more for-profit charters than any other state. The for-profit organizations are secretive about their finances because they are private.
“In reviewing two decades of charter school records, the Free Press found:
“Wasteful spending and double-dipping. Board members, school founders and employees steering lucrative deals to themselves or insiders. Schools allowed to operate for years despite poor academic records. No state standards for who operates charter schools or how to oversee them.”
““People should get a fair return on their investment,” said former state schools Superintendent Tom Watkins, a longtime charter advocate who has argued for higher standards for all schools. “But it has to come after the bottom line of meeting the educational needs of the children. And in a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids aren’t getting educated.”
“According to the Free Press’ review, 38% of charter schools that received state academic rankings during the 2012-13 school year fell below the 25th percentile, meaning at least 75% of all schools in the state performed better. Only 23% of traditional public schools fell below the 25th percentile.
“Advocates argue that charter schools have a much higher percentage of children in poverty compared with traditional schools. But traditional schools, on average, perform slightly better on standardized tests even when poverty levels are taken into account.”
Some examples of charter abuses of the public trust:
“Michigan’s laws are either nonexistent or so lenient that there are often no consequences for abuses or poor academics. Taxpayers and parents are left clueless about how charter schools spend the public’s money, and lawmakers have resisted measures to close schools down for poor academic performance year after year.
“The Free Press found that questionable decisions, excessive spending and misuse of taxpayer dollars run the gamut:
■ A Sault Ste. Marie charter school board gave its administrator a severance package worth $520,000 in taxpayer money.
■ A Bedford Township charter school spent more than $1 million on swampland.
■ A mostly online charter school in Charlotte spent $263,000 on a Dale Carnegie confidence-building class, $100,000 more than it spent on laptops and iPads.
■ Two board members who challenged their Romulus school’s management company over finances and transparency were ousted when the length of their terms was summarily reduced by Grand Valley State University.
■ National Heritage Academies, the state’s largest for-profit school management company, charges 14 of its Michigan schools $1 million or more in rent — which many real estate experts say is excessive.
■ A charter school in Pittsfield Township gave jobs and millions of dollars in business to multiple members of the founder’s family.
■ Charter authorizers have allowed management companies to open multiple schools without a proven track record of success.”
[I am reposting this because the original post earlier today seems to have disappeared.]
Sixty years after the landmark Brown decision, school segregation is on the rise. The nation marks the anniversary of the decision every ten years but neglects its promise to end racial segregation. One of the most egregious examples of malign neglect occurred recently in the Normandy school district in Missouri. That district had been a high-achieving all-white district in the 1950s. After years of white flight, the district became all-African-American. As its test scores fell, the state of Missouri put the district on provisional accreditation. Help was definitely not on the way. After 18 years of provisional accreditation, the state merged the struggling Normandy district with another struggling, all-black district that had been under state supervision for five years. After the merger, the new district was stripped of accreditation.
Dr. Stanton Lawrence, who wrote the post below, was appointed superintendent of the Normandy school district in 2008. At that time, it was the second lowest-performing district in the state of Missouri (98% African American students/94.5% poverty) and had been provisionally accredited for 15 years. Two years later, the State Board of Education merged Normandy with the only lower performing school district (100% African American students/98% poverty) in the state, Wellston School District and stripped Normandy of its accreditation two years later. Dr. Lawrence wrote me to say, “My understanding is that this has never happened anywhere else in the country. There was a much higher performing district adjoining Wellston, but there would have been an atomic explosion if the African American students had been sent to University City School District.” The new district, like the old one, will be nearly 100% African American.
Stanton Lawrence asks in this post, “Has the Brown v. Board of Education Decision Been Institutionally Annulled?” He describes the actions of the state of Missouri as “punitive disparity.” Did any civil rights organization sue the state of Missouri? No. Did the U.S. Department of Education intervene? No. Did Secretary of Education Arne Duncan use his bully pulpit to demand desegregation and support for the children in the Normandy School District? No. The children in this district were essentially written off by the state of Missouri, and no one cares. Where is the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, Democrats for Education Reform, StudentsFirst, and Students Matter? Why aren’t the billionaires saving these children?
Stanton Lawrence writes:
On May 17, 1954, the United State Supreme Court handed down its historic decision in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, lawsuit. This landmark ruling stipulated that “de jure” segregation, racial separation that is required by law, could no longer exist in public schools. Further, the high court ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”. The reluctance of many southern school districts to enforce this new law resulted in many school districts receiving federal desegregation court orders mandating that they desegregate their schools. In recent years, despite Brown v. Board, many of these school districts have once again become more segregated than they were prior to 1965.
Nearly fifty-eight and one-half years later, on September 18, 2012, the Missouri State Board of Education decided to reclassify the Normandy School District as unaccredited. On its face, there was nothing unusual about the decision. The school district had been provisionally accredited for nearly eighteen years, and the dismal academic performance of its students was largely to blame. One could certainly make a strong case that the time had arrived for the state board of education to take meaningful action and send a clear message that a change was imperative if Normandy students were indeed deserving of a high quality educational experience.
But what was kept strangely quiet during the two hours of deliberations preceding the Missouri State Board of Education’s vote was the fact that only two years earlier, this same Board decided to merge a failed school district into the Normandy School District. That fact was never mentioned even once, almost as though it had never happened. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had exercised oversight of the Wellston School District for five years. When the state determined that there was insufficient progress in Wellston, they decided to lapse the school district and merge it into the similarly struggling Normandy School District.
Again, the decision would have been considered unremarkable, however, with a couple of critical exceptions. Every student in the Wellston School District was African American, and ninety-eight percent of those students received free or reduced price lunch, the federal threshold for determining poverty. In fact, Wellston was the only school district in the state of Missouri that was 100% African-American. Ninety-eight percent of Normandy’s students were African-American, and ninety-four and one-half percent of those students were from impoverished families. In essence, both communities were experiencing concentrated poverty and racial segregation. Was this decision made to effectively segregate the students in both school districts?
Not surprisingly, a trend line of longitudinal academic data of all school districts in the state of Missouri, when juxtaposed on a trend line reflecting the percentage of African American students from impoverished families in each school district, offers some distressing reflections. There is a near perfect match which reflects that the school districts with the highest percentage of impoverished African American students were performing least well on the state assessment. One can easily make a relatively compelling argument that the state could have easily projected that the Normandy-Wellston merger would, in essence, be disastrous from the outset and that it would not turn out well for any of the students involved.
The decision of the Missouri State Board of Education becomes problematic at best when one considers that no state board of education in any state has ever made a decision to attach two failing school districts (both characterized by concentrated poverty) as a remedy for poor performance. Routinely, such a decision would involve merging the failed school district with one that is performing quite well academically and, at the same time, a school district that is fiscally viable. A fitting example is the recent merger of the North Forest Independent School District (Texas) into the Houston Independent School District. In September, 2013, the Houston system received the $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education, which implies that it is the best urban school district in the nation. It would have been nearly impossible for the poor academic performance of 5,500 students from North Forest to adversely impact the progress of Houston’s 203,000 students.
In essence, what has occurred is indeed a disturbing political precedent. In the 1950s, Normandy School District was one of the preeminent school districts in the state of Missouri. Concentrated poverty was not on the horizon, and not one African American learner attended school in the district. However, the white flight trend that occurred in the seventies in suburban communities across the country signaled dramatic residential shifts in the racial makeup of the school district. Normandy alumni who graduated prior to the 1950s have an extremely difficult time identifying with the circumstances that prevail in the district today. A front page headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 5, 2013 proclaimed in two inch-high letters, Normandy High: The Most Dangerous School in the Area. The school reform of punitive disparity in the form of the Missouri State Board of Education proclaimed that the Normandy School District would be closed, effective June 30, 2014.
Diane Ravitch's blog 