Hannah Oh, of State Budget Solutions, wonders whether states and districts can afford the required technology.
Question: why should all tests be taken online? Whose idea was that? Why shouldn’t the federal government pay for the new technology? Why the windfall for the tech industry?
Gary Rubinstein, one of the best bloggers and thinkers about education in the nation, sends his daughter to the local public school in New York City. It is PS 163. The parents learned recently that a 20-story apartment building will be constructed within 50 feet of the school. The children will not be allowed in the playground during construction because of dust and toxins. The noise levels during school hours will be deafening.
The parents have complained but the Mayor and the Department of Education are unresponsive.
Gary asks for your help, especially if you live in New York City.
He writes:
“The parents have urged our local lawmakers to intervene and we are grateful to Mark Levine, Helen Rosenthal, and other city council people who are sponsoring bill number 420 which would require:
that noise shall not exceed 45 DB during normal school operating hours in any receiving classroom in any public or private preschool or primary or secondary school on lots that are within seventy-five feet from the construction site, and that noise levels at such schools sites shall be continuously monitored during normal school operating hours.
“With all the talk nowadays about putting students needs above ‘adult interests’ it is amazing that a common sense bill like this will require a lot of phone calls to the council people who have not yet agreed to support it. Parents from the school are currently making calls to the different council members, but the council members will be more likely to support this bill if they are getting calls from all over as this is something that will not just affect the kids in PS 163, but all the kids from all the other schools that may face a similar situation in the future.”
The parents have created a website.
Here is a list of City Council members and heir contact information.
This is a chance to put students first. Please help.
In an earlier post, I referred to the long-running saga in Los Angeles as a soap opera.
Well, friends, it is time for another installment.
Howard Blume writes in the Los Angeles Times that Superintendent John Deasy has joined litigation against the state that puts him at odds with the board that he works for. This is a situation that Deasy relishes.
Blume writes:
“The goal of the litigation is to compel the state to eliminate non-academic periods that have hindered students from fulfilling graduation and college requirements. Those periods include “service classes,” which involve answering the phones and running errands, and “home periods,” during which unsupervised students are allowed to leave campus.
“The ‘classes’ are not designed to deliver real instruction or learning opportunities to students, but rather are no more than fillers to plug gaps where no genuine courses are readily available,” Deasy wrote. He asked the judge in the case to halt these “outrageous” practices at L.A. Unified and other districts. “I can’t think of a better gift to give this school district than to expose this indefensible practice that is antithetical to learning.”
“In an interview with The Times on Monday, Deasy called his declaration a matter of conscience.
“Although it is not unusual for superintendents to support student causes, Deasy has aligned himself with critics of the district he runs — on matters that he has the power to influence.
“I hope our superintendent would remedy untenable situations within his direct control immediately,” said school board member Monica Ratliff.
“A senior state official also questioned why Deasy didn’t remedy the problem on his own campuses.
“It certainly is befuddling that he would encourage the state to fix a problem that is within his authority to fix,” said Richard Zeiger, the state’s chief deputy schools superintendent. “If he doesn’t like these classes, he doesn’t have to have them. He and the school board can work this out.”
The board is supposed to evaluate Deasy’s job performance by October 21. Deasy seems to be picking a fight with the board or trying to demonstrate yet again that he is not accountable to the board. Whenever Deasy thumbs his nose at the board, he says he is doing it to defend the civil rights of students, implying that he cares more about students than the board does.
Blume writes:
“The superintendent has talked of possibly leaving the job; a majority of board members voted in closed session last week to begin negotiations over a possible departure agreement.
“An ongoing point of dispute is whether Deasy follows the direction of the board — an issue that also came up this year in a lawsuit over teacher job protections. Deasy became a star witness in that litigation, which eventually overturned laws that made it more difficult to fire teachers. Deasy never sought board guidance or assent for his participation. He characterized his involvement as fighting on behalf of student civil rights…..
“He’s entitled to his opinions,” said school board member George McKenna. “But if he testifies and it doesn’t represent the board, it would be a concern. Any superintendent should be working on behalf of the district and be working at the direction of the board.”
“McKenna, a former principal, said that in certain situations, for example, a student who works in the school’s office can learn responsibility and skills that could help land a job. Deasy’s declaration lacked that nuance, McKenna said.”
Florida never ceases to amaze. In 2012, the voters overwhelmingly defeated a constitutional amendment to permit school vouchers, yet the Legislature keeps finding ingenious ways to siphon off public funds for vouchers.
Now, Julie Delegal writes, a local school board member–presumably elected to strengthen and support his district’s public schools–has come out strongly in opposition to the Florida School Boards Association’s lawsuit against private school vouchers.
What you need to know to understand this story is that former Governor Jeb Bush loves vouchers, and everyone on his team does what Jeb wants.
This is how her article begins. It is worth reading it all to see how the privatization movement is trying to starve public education and send money to unaccountable private schools:
Duval County School board member Jason Fischer is a nice young man. But in politics, I’ve learned, it’s the nice young men you have to watch.
His most recent actions reveal that he’s a foot soldier in the war to destroy public education. And his bread may be getting buttered by lieutenants in the Jeb-Bush-brand, school privatization movement — the ones who are affiliated with his employer, Uretek Holdings.
Fischer’s recent activities put him squarely in the camp that has been systematically destroying Florida’s public schools for more than a decade. As both governor and puppet-master, Bush has overseen the implementation of a punitive school-grades system and an overreaching teacher-accountability scheme.
Meanwhile, the Bush camp has promoted privatization — and the funding choices that go with it – while the Legislature has been starving our public schools. Despite Gov. Rick Scott’s claims that he’s boosted spending for education, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that, in real dollars, per pupil spending in Florida public schools is still not up to pre-recessionary levels.
Fischer has come out strongly against the lawsuit filed by the Florida School Boards Association, which questions the constitutionality of Florida’s private-school voucher program. He not only published a guest editorial in the Jacksonvlle Times Union, he also asked his fellow public school board members to pass a resolution condemning the suit.
Voucher funding now drains state coffers by more than $300 million yearly.
Duval Superintendent Nikolai Vitti is on record saying that privatization — voucher schools, charter schools, etc. — could siphon away up to $70 million from Duval next year.
With support from the FEA, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, the Florida PTA, and other education advocates, the FSBA is asking a Leon County judge to declare the tax credit voucher program unconstitutional on two grounds. Plaintiffs say that by permitting corporations to pay their taxes to the voucher program called “Step Up for Students,” instead of to the Florida treasury, the program creates a separate, shadow school system. The Florida Constitution, the suit points out, calls for a single, “high quality,” and “uniform” public school system.
The Constitution also forbids aid to religious institutions, and the majority of schools funded by “Step Up” are religious schools.
The response to the lawsuit from voucher supporters is, essentially, “You’re picking on poor children who need to have ‘choice,’ you big meanies.”
Is there hope for public education in Florida? Yes. Parents must organize and fight this attack on their public schools. School boards must be vigilant against privatization. Working together, they stopped the “parent trigger” twice in the Legislature. They have the power, and they can’t let down their guard for a minute. The privatization movement never rests, and neither should the defenders of public education.
Tony Bennett, once the State Commissioner of Education in Indiana, then defeated by Glenda Ritz in 2012, then appointed as State Commissioner of Florida, then resigned after news broke that the state grades were manipulated to favor a charter school owned by one of Bennett’s major campaign contributors. After the scores were adjusted, the charter’s grade miraculously rose from a C to an A.
Bennett was leader of Jeb Bush’s “Chiefs for Change” and an outspoken advocate for the Common Core.
Now there is more scandal in the wake of Bennett’s Indiana tenure in office. One of his top aides has been questioned about his dealings with Cisco, for whom he worked before and after he worked for Tony Bennett.
AP reporter Tom LoBianco, who broke the original story about Tony Bennett and grade-rigging, wrote:
“A former top Indiana education official’s role in the sale of $1.7 million worth of videoconferencing equipment to the state by Cisco Systems Inc., where he worked before and after holding that state position, has added to calls to strengthen Indiana’s ethics laws amid a recent spate of boundary-pushing incidents.
“Todd Huston left his Department of Education job as chief of staff to former Indiana Schools Superintendent Tony Bennett in 2010 for a position with Cisco, where he had previously worked. He was involved in the 2012 sale of a new TelePresence videoconferencing system to the DOE that officials later determined was a waste of taxpayer money.
“Although Huston says he was careful to keep his work for the state and for Cisco separate over the years, good-governance watchdogs say his role in the sale violated the spirit of Indiana’s ethics rules designed to stop state employees from cashing in on their public experience in the private sector.”
More on Todd Huston: He now works for the College Board, whose CEO is David Coleman, architect of the Common Core standards:
https://www.collegeboard.org/about/leadership/todd-huston
Todd Huston
Senior Vice President, State and District Partners
Todd plays an integral role in the College Board’s mission to meet the needs of K–12 and higher education clients, as well as the needs of state governments. He directs key aspects of College Board strategy, as influenced and determined by external market trends, policy and standards.
Todd’s extensive experience in education includes serving as a local school board member, a member of the Indiana State Board of Education and as the chief of staff for the Indiana Department of Education. Most recently, Todd was the strategic business development manager at Cisco Systems, where he helped higher education and K–12 customers transform their operations and student experience with new technologies.
Todd earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from Indiana University and is the father of two.
P.S. Todd Huston is an elected member of the Indiana House of Representatives.
Question: How many jobs can one man hold?
Joseph Ricciotti, a retired college professor, wrote the following statement to major newspapers in Connecticut:
He writes:
“A teacher involved in implementing Common Core in her classroom writes, “Common Core for the most part is teaching with a script, and scripts suck the oxygen out of a classroom.” We are hearing more and more from teachers involved in the teaching of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that it is simply not working. In the State of Tennessee, which is one of the earliest states to hop on the Common Core bandwagon and one of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s favorite states because it quickly fell into line, a recent survey by Vanderbilt University conducted of teachers in Tennessee now show a majority of the teachers (56%) believe that the Common Core should be abandoned. Not fine-tune or refine it, mind you, but abandon it ! Another poll released by “Education Next”, a journal published by the conservative Hoover Institution, found that the term “Common Core” has become toxic.
“Common Core’s architect is David Coleman, a non-educator who wrote and developed the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that are now being implemented in many states across the nation including Connecticut. And who is David Coleman? Dana Goldstein in “The Atlantic” describes him as the pompous architect of Common Core who “is an idealistic, poetry-loving, controversy-stoking and a former McKinsey consultant who has determined, more than anyone else, what kids learn in American schools.” Unfortunately, classroom teachers were deliberately excluded from the process
of choosing curricula and devising the standards. Can you imagine doctors being excluded from helping to determine standards for the practice of medicine?
“In the use of scripts in teaching the Common Core lessons, teachers are not allowed to use their own methods to introduce the material, manage the classroom, or share their own wisdom. Likewise, the students are not encouraged to connect the material to their own lives or things that may interest them. Hence, the script tells the teachers and students, at all times, what to say and do. In essence, Common Core does not treat teachers or students with dignity.
“Moreover, to make matters worse, with the increased amount of testing, referred to as SBAC, that will be ushered in and aligned with Common Core, teachers will be evaluated on how well students do on the SBAC tests. Is it any wonder why the teachers in Tennessee want to abandon Common Core? Needless to say, this also explains why parents across the country are revolting against Common Core as they learn what it does to the classroom and to their children’s learning.
“Another problem of Common Core is that it is not developmentally appropriate and how CCSS does harm to young children. A kindergarten teacher, Ms. Angie Sullivan, cites
“ I teach kindergarten. There is very little that is developmentally appropriate about the K-2 Common Core. Write a fact and opinion essay at age 5?……we have 2nd or 3rd grade curriculum “pushed” down to Kindergarten.” Christina Leventis in “Truth in American Education” writes, “Why is it that teachers involved in Common Core are afraid to speak out? Those who do speak will only do so anonymously and what they have to say about
CCSS is not positive, These are the award winning, quality, caring teachers we are losing to the bureaucratic take over of our classrooms”
“The tide is turning for many states concerning Common Core as parents learn more about its impact on learning as well as the negative impact on teaching as a profession. If the money that is being wasted on high-stakes standardized testing could only be invested in teaching and learning, it could spark a renewal of interest in the teaching profession. Tests should only be used for diagnostic purposes to enhance learning, not to rank students and schools or evaluate teachers. Good teachers know how to awaken the minds and spirits of their students and to instill a love of learning. We have had enough of the so-called accountability movement that has emanated from politicians as well as from the Bill Gates and Arne Duncans of the world. It is time to end the madness of Common Core and allow teachers the opportunity to teach without having to teach to the test.”
Joseph A. Ricciotti, Ed.D.
Fairfield, CT 06824
Philadelphia has been under state control since 1998, imposed in the midst of a financial crisis. A School Reform Commission was created to govern the schools. The city schools have been in financial crisis ever since, with the state providing little financial support. Under the current administration of Governor Tom Corbett, the Philadelphia public schools have been stripped to the bone, lacking essential resources. Corbett has slashed the state budget for education while lowering corporate taxes and refusing to tax the corporations that are hydrofracking across the state.
At one point, the state-appointed superintendent was Paul Vallas, who launched an experiment in privatization. The district’s public schools outperformed the privately run schools. Currently, the business and civic leaders of the city have advocated for more charters, even though several of the city’s charters have been investigated for financial misdeeds. They seem sure that privatization is the cure, despite the absence of evidence for their belief.
The School Reform Commission, trying to close the deficit created by Governor Corbett, canceled the teachers’ contract unilaterally. This follows on thousands of layoffs. The SRC will increase teachers’ payments to their health care and phase out benefits for retirees. Salaries will not be cut. State and city officials defended the action, saying it would save money and help balance the budget. It is not clear whether the SRC has the legal authority to cancel the contract unilaterally.
Angie Sullivan teaches kindergarten in Nevada. She writes often about the harm done to 5-year-olds by developmentally inappropriate demands inspired by Common Core.
State legislators don’t think twice about piling on impossible demands. Apparently none of them have children, none was ever a teacher. They think if you raise a standard, no matter how out of reach, it will be met. The Legislature might start with themselves: they should take high school graduation tests and publish their scores. They should run a four-minute mile, in public. Why not?
Angie Sullivan writes:
https://m.facebook.com/KTVN2/posts/808196485870280
John Eppolito on News 3 – What’s Your Point
Rory Reid and Amy Tarkanian:
As a school teacher and a liberal Democrat – I also oppose common core. I have joined John Eppolito’s group.
I have to teach common core because I am mandated. And I do my Kindergarten job as best I can . . . but common core is crazy.
For Example: There are no writing standards in common core for Kindergarten. So they pushed down third grade standards to teach in Kindergarten. My writing standard for my at-risk 5 year olds is . . . write a fact and opinion paper. Yep – one standard, write a paper. There is not one good kindergarten teacher out there that thinks THAT should be the standard for five year olds who need to learn to hold a pencil and write their name first.
As a primary teacher, I also speak out against common core because it is not developmentally appropriate. Obviously, no one was involved from the Early Childhood Community in writing these standards.
Across the nation Kindergarten Teachers are protesting against common core. Something is very wrong when you push down standards for second and third grade and they end up in a Kindergarten classroom.
National Early Childhood Experts have spoken out:
Click to access joint_statement_on_core_standards.pdf
When I have tried to speak to Nevada Democratic legislators about my concerns – I was told I was annoying. I don’t give them anything to work with? My opinion is not valued.
Noted.
And it is not stopping me from speaking out for my kids.
The support my lawmakers profess for common core – renamed Nevada Academic Standards – is blind to the reality in the classroom. Teaching almost everyone far above the place they are able to learn – at their frustrational level – does not work. And that strategy is in direct conflict with best teaching practice which would demand teaching at instructional level.
We have to implement common core because everyone else is doing this? Have you followed the national trend closely? Common Core is dying.
When the Nevada Standards became political and mandated by legislators . . . and you took standards out of the hands of teachers, the education experts — what did you think was going to happen?
How do I change a bad standard in Nevada now?
I’m also a mandatory reporter. My at-risk students are being harmed. So I report – is anyone listening?
The testing connected with these standards is ridiculous and useless. And this is what we spend our limited funds on now? Millions of dollars spent to test and fail – rather than to support and instruct students.
And yes – common core and testing are a package deal . . . and both do affect curriculum – and it’s a lie to state otherwise
.
And all of the above leads me to fully believe this is about money and not about kids.
I am convinced that there has been a huge national campaign to invalidate educators and years of real education research — so that corporations can make a profit implementing junk science like common core.
Someone is making millions and billions — it is not helping my Nevada students.
Angie
Kindergarten Teacher
As you may have noticed, we are getting swamped with messages from the corporate reformers about how it is time to restart the conversation. Presumably that is a recognition that the previous conversation wasn’t working. The American public is fed up with high-stakes testing and increasingly suspicious of the grandiose promises about the miracles that privately managed charter schools will accomplish. Having noticed that the charter schools don’t want children with disabilities, don’t want English language learners, and are likely to encourage kids with low test scores to find another school, the public is waking up to the game played by corporate charters. It’s all about the test score, which takes us back to the overuse and misuse of standardized testing. This failed conversation seems to have gotten mixed up, inevitably, with the Common Core, and the public is overwhelmingly opposed to CCSS and federal takeover of state and local decision-making.
So, in the face of a growing public resistance to their plans, we hear more and more about starting over.
In this post, Peter Greene deconstructs the latest effort to begin again, this one from the Center for Reinventing Public Education in Washington State. CRPE was founded by Paul Hill and has been an advocate for “portfolio districts” made up of charter schools, public schools, and other types of management. The basic idea of the portfolio is that district boards should act like stockbrokers, keeping the winning stocks and selling the losers. But the losers, in this case, are public schools that would be closed and replaced by charters.
The authors of the proposal that Greene dissects are our friend Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (a relentless advocate for Common Core), Paul Hill, and Robin Lake of CPRE.
As you can imagine, Greene is critical of the report, but he does see some useful issues raised. The proposal says:
States should hold schools, not individual teachers, accountable for student progress.
Hey look! Something that is, in fact, different. Not new, actually– threatening to punish just schools is what we tried under NCLB, and it didn’t work. Not to mention that we don’t know how to do it, just as we don’t know how to hold individual teachers accountable. This is no more useful than saying “Santa should lend us his naughty and nice list for accountability purposes.”
The article also provides a list of Things To Worry About While Pursuing Accountability.
How to avoid specifying outcomes so exhaustively that schools are unable to innovate and solve problems.
How to drive continuous improvement in all schools, not just the lowest-performing.
How to coordinate and limit federal, state, and district demands for data.
How to prevent cheating on tests and other outcome measures.
How to motivate students to do their best in school and on assessments.
How to give children at risk new options without causing a constant churn in their educational experience.
How to adjust measurement and accountability to innovations in instruction and technology.
This list is actually the best thing about the whole article. There is nothing remotely new about the list of Things To Do– it’s the same old, same old reformster stuff we’ve heard before.
But this list of problem areas? That’s a good piece of work, because it does in fact recognize a host of obstacles that generally go ignored and unrecognized. These are “problems” in the sense that gravity is a problem for people who want to jump naked off high buildings, flap their arms, and not get hurt. I don’t know that CRPE, given its clear focus on charters, finance, and high stakes standardized testing, has goals and objectives any different from a few dozen other reformy iterations. But the recognition of obstacles shows some grasp of reality, and that’s always a nice sign.
Greene actually sees a hopeful sign in this proposal. The writers say:
“These problems are solvable, but they require serious work, not sniping among rival camps. It is time to start working through the problems of accountability, with discipline, open-mindedness, and flexibility.
“We—all the co-signers of the September 24 statement—are eager to work with others, including critics of tests and accountability. Issues of measurement, system design, and implementation must be addressed, carefully and through disciplined trials.”
And Greene responds:
I’ll accept that from a step up from, “Shut up and do as you’re told. We totally know exactly what we’re doing.” I’m not seeing much in CRPE’s ideas that represent a new direction on the issue; it’s basically reframing and repackaging. But the recognition of real-world obstacles is more than a simple shift of tone. (And there’s still the Whose Party Is This problem). But keep talking CRPE. I’m still listening.
My guess is that the September 24 statement is a recognition that parents and educators are rising up to fight the test mania that has gripped policymakers and state education departments. More and more of the public is saying: “Enough is enough! Stop the testing madness!”
In the face of the growing tide of anti-testing sentiment–which is not so much anti-testing as it is opposition to the sheer quantity of time devoted to testing, and the billions stolen from schools to fund Pearson and McGraw-Hill–the reformers are regrouping, trying to find a way to save testing and accountability from a rising public anger. I don’t think it will work. After all, a statement from CPRE is not exactly a big newsworthy deal. The public, quite rightly, will keep on protesting, the government will keep on sending billions to the testing and technology companies, and kids will still be subjected to take tests for many hours each year for no purpose other than evaluating their teachers by failed methods.
In a hard-hitting article in Salon, Jeff Bryant writes that the charter school frauds and scams have become too obvious to ignore.
Bryant notes Bill Clinton’s widely quoted remarks about charter schools, how we have to get back to the original vision.
But, Bryant notes,
“In a real “bargaining process,” those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck.
“But that’s not what’s happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities – either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations.
“Instead of the “bargain” political leaders may have thought they struck with seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired instead looks more like a raw deal for millions of students, their families, and their communities. And what political leaders ought to be doing – rather than spouting unfounded platitudes, as Clinton did, about “what works” – is putting the brakes on a deal gone bad, ensuring those most affected by charter school rollouts are brought to the bargaining table, and completely renegotiating the terms for governing these schools.”
Charters are imposed on unwilling communities, stripped of any voice, by mayors, governors, state commissions, and emergency managers. That’s happening in city after city, where the powerful think that poor people and minorities are unable to govern themselves.
“The “100 percent charter schools” education system in New Orleans that Clinton praised was never presented to the citizens of New Orleans in a negotiation. It was surreptitiously engineered.
“After Katrina, as NPR recently reported, “an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed,” and in “a series of quick decisions,” all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city’s schools were handed over to a state entity called the “Recovery School District” which is governed by unelected officials. Only a “few elite schools were … allowed to maintain their selective admissions……”
“Yet now political leaders tout this model for the rest of the country. So school districts that have not had the “benefit,” according to Arne Duncan, of a natural disaster like Katrina, are having charter schools imposed on them in blatant power plays. An obvious example is what’s currently happening in the York, Pennsylvania.
“School districts across the state of Pennsylvania are financially troubled due to chronic state underfunding – only 36 percent of K-12 revenue comes from the state, way below national averages – and massive budget cuts imposed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett (the state funds education less than it did in 2008).
“The state cuts seemed to have been intentionally targeted to hit high-poverty school districts like York City the hardest. After combing through state financial records, a report from the state’s school employee union found, “State funding cuts to the most impoverished school districts averaged more than three times the size of the cuts for districts with the lowest average child poverty.” The unsurprising results of these cuts has been that in school districts serving low income kids, like York, instruction was cut and scores on state student assessments declined.
“The York City district was exceptionally strapped, having been hit by $8.4 million in cuts, which prompted class size increases and teacher furloughs. Due to financial difficulties, which the state legislature and Governor Corbett had by-and-large engineered, York was targeted in 2012, along with three other districts, for state takeover by an unelected “recovery official,” eerily similar to New Orleans post-Katrina.
“The “recovery” process for York schools also entailed a “transformation model” with challenging financial and academic targets the district had little chance in reaching, and charter school conversion as a consequence of failure. Now the local school board is being forced to pick a charter provider and make their district the first in the state to hand over the education of all its children to a corporation that will call all the shots and give York’s citizens very little say in how their children’s schools are run.
“None of this is happening with the negotiated consent of the citizens of York. The voices of York citizens that have been absent from the bargaining tables are being heard in the streets and in school board meetings. According to a local news outlet, at a recent protest before the city’s school board, “a district teacher and father of three students … presented the board with more than 3,700 signatures of people opposed to a possible conversion of district schools to charter schools,” and “a student at the high school also presented the board with a petition signed by more than 260 students opposed to charter conversion.” Yet the state official demanding charter takeover remains completely unaltered in his view that this action is “what’s best for our kids……”
“What’s happening to York City is not going to help. The two charter operators being considered for that takeover – Mosaica Education, Inc., and Charter Schools USA – have particularly troubling track records.
“According to a report from Politico, after Mosaica took over the Muskegon Heights, Michigan school system in 2012, “complications soon followed.” After massive layoffs, about a quarter of the newly hired teachers quit, and when Mosaica realized they weren’t making a profit within two years, they pulled up stakes and went in search of other targets.
“As for the other candidate in the running, Charter Schools USA, a report from the Florida League of Women Voters produced earlier this year found that charter operation running a real estate racket that diverts taxpayer money for education to private pockets. In Hillsborough County alone, schools owned by Charter Schools USA collaborated with a construction company in Minneapolis, M.N. and a real estate partner called Red Apple Development Company in a scheme to lock in big profits for their operations and saddle county taxpayers with millions of dollars in lease fees every year.”
There is more, and it only gets worse. This is an industry where the well-meaning small charters are crowded out by the well-funded chains that arrive with big promises and end up with big profits.
Perhaps the most notable feature of charter schools today is that they are neither accountable nor transparent. Public money goes into a dark hole. And kids are getting no better education, and in many cases, far worse than what they received when their schools were run by locals, not corporations.
Diane Ravitch's blog 