Archives for the month of: March, 2014
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When I Spoke at the Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh, North Carolina

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
25

This is a video of my speech at the Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh, North Carolina, on February 11, 2014.

This was an important challenge because I strongly believe that the state is on the wrong path. Its governor and legislature are far to the right of the Tea Party. They are a government that doesn’t like public education or teachers. They seem to want to drive teachers away. They don’t want good public schools. They want charters–where only half the teachers are certified. And they passed voucher legislation, for schools with no accountability.

I was fortunate in the day’s agenda, because my keynote followed directly after a very interesting panel of teachers who quit teaching because the salaries were so low that they could not afford to teach. Yet all of them loved teaching. North Carolina, once a bastion of forward-looking education, now ranks 46th in the nation in teacher pay. John Merrow moderated the panel and brought out the best in this wonderful group of teachers, whose departure was a loss to the state.

Categories Charter Schools, North Carolina, Teachers, Vouchers

North Carolina: How to Lower Standards While Pretending to Improve Education

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
40

The legislature in North Carolina, apparently joined at the hip with ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), passed legislation establishing charter schools a few months ago.

Buried in the bill is a stipulation that only 50% of teachers in charter schools need to hold a teaching license (see page 7 of the bill).

In public schools, ALL teachers must be licensed.

Apparently in the minds of the North Carolina legislature, the way to “improve student learning” (the alleged goal of creating charters) is to lower standards for teachers.

Perhaps we will soon see the legislature lower the requirements to practice medicine, law, and other professions and occupations in that state.

And they will no doubt say it “improves the profession by letting anyone do it.”

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, North Carolina, Teachers

Jersey Jazzman: Star-Ledger in NJ Compliments Charter with Very Few Poor Kids

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
8

Jersey Jazzman calls out New Jersey’s leading newspaper for making really surprising comments about a charter school in Hoboken.

The Hola charter school is innovative, and parents are lining up to get their kids in. It gets high test scores, and only 11% of its students are poor in a district where 72% of the kids are poor.

JJ writes:

Let’s recap: there’s a charter school that takes far fewer kids in poverty than the neighboring public schools. It does a “terrific job,” but — and this isn’t me saying this, but the Star-Ledger itself — that’s only because the charter serves so few kids in poverty. So it’s not fair to compare Hola to the public schools — again, even the S-L admits this — because they don’t serve the same children. And every dollar Hola takes away from the Hoboken school district is a dollar that doesn’t go to children who live in poverty — the children who are more expensive to educate than the children who, the S-L acknowledges, go to Hola. Everyone clear on this? OK…

Now, let’s get something straight about what is happening in Hoboken.

It is a tiny district. It has three charter schools. The charter schools serve the white and black middle-class residents of the city, while the public schools are for the poor and non-white.

I think this used to be called racial segregation.

Whatever happened to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision?

Yeah, that was sixty years ago, but is it a dead letter?

Categories Charter Schools, New Jersey, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Andrew Cuomo: Why He Loves Charters and Despises Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
55

You can’t say this often enough.

Money matters in politics.

Forget principle. Think money.

Andrew Cuomo wants to be re-elected Governor of New York with a large majority.

He has raised $33 million.

One of his biggest sources of money is Wall Street.

Wall Street loves charter schools.

Wall Street doesn’t love public schools.

The fact that only 3% of students in New York State attend charter schools doesn’t matter to Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo now wants to take charge of dispensing millions in public funds to charter schools for construction, and he wants to assure them that they can have public space without paying rent. He wants the power to give free space to charters, no matter what Mayor Bill de Blasio says.

The fact that high-flying charters like Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy not only excludes children with special needs but literally pushes them out of their schools does not matter to Andrew Cuomo. Success Academy is for winners, not losers. Children with disabilities don’t belong in Success Academy’s charters.

I have been trying to remember something that his father Mario Cuomo said. I can’t find it. I have googled, and I can’t find it. Mario Cuomo, known for his eloquence, once explained that a parent gives more love and affection to the weakest child, not the strongest one. I remember it well, even though I can’t find the source. It was very moving, spoken by a decent and kind human being, a loving father.

Did he teach this lesson to Andrew? I think not. Andrew is ready to toss the neediest children overboard. They don’t have high test scores. They don’t count. They drag down scores. They don’t matter to Andrew Cuomo. In his eyes, they are dispensable. They are invisible. And the hedge fund managers, so necessary for his re-election, don’t like losers. They like high scores. They like winners.

And that is why Andrew Cuomo has become the lobbyist for the hedge-fund supported charter sector. After all, they did give him $800,000 for his re-election campaign.

Categories Charter Schools, Cuomo, Andrew, Harlem Success Academy, Special Education

NYC Protest Today at Noon Against “Protect Eva Act” and Gubernatorial Control

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
5

Parents and other supporters of public schools will rally today against Governor Cuomo’s attempt to wrest control of the New York City public schools for the benefit of his campaign contributors.

Dan Morris. 917.952.8920.

Julian Vinocur. 212.328.9268.

Media Advisory for Fri. March 14, Noon, Cuomo’s Midtown Office

Rally Against Quid Pro Cuomo State Budget Deal and Gubernatorial Control of NYC Schools

*Parents condemn Cuomo’s pay-to-play budget deal with charter school lobbyists who are bankrolling his re-election campaign and want to undermine New York City’s power over its schools.*

WHAT: Public school parents, community leaders, and elected officials will rally against the budget deal Cuomo clearly orchestrated with the Senate Majority to advance the extremist, anti-de Blasio agenda of charter school lobbyists who are heavily funding the Governor’s re-election campaign. This disturbing Quid pro Cuomo opens the door to gubernatorial control of New York City schools.

WHO: Outraged public school parents, community leaders, and elected officials who won’t stand for Cuomo and the Senate Majority cutting a pay-to-play budget deal with charter school lobbyists.

WHERE: Governor Cuomo’s Midtown office: 633 Third Avenue, between E40th and E41st Streets.

WHEN: Friday, March 14, Noon.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York City, Parents, Privatization, Students, Supporting public schools

How Testing Regime Drives Out Our Best Teachers

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
47

Wherever I go, I hear stories about the exodus of teachers from the profession. The same story is told everywhere: I am sick of the non-stop testing. I didn’t become a teacher to administer tests, I became a teacher to make a difference in the lives of children, I became a teacher because I love history and want to share my love. The testing regime is crushing my kids and crushing me too.

Our nation is losing talented and experienced teachers. They are literally being driven out of the profession by federal and state mandates attached to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Many states now administer tests not to measure student progress, but to measure teacher “effectiveness,” despite the fact that there is no research base for this practice.

Why would any nation want to drive teachers out of a profession that is under-paid, under-respected, and constantly criticized by non-educators? Enrollments in education programs are dropping. The federal government, abetted by extremist legislatures and governors, are literally attacking the teachers of our nation. Who will take their place? Certainly not Teach for America. It sends 10,000 young, inexperienced, ill-trained college graduates to teach for two years, into a profession of more than 3 million teachers.

Does anyone think that the teaching profession is getting better as a result of the relentless attacks on teachers?

The modal year of teacher experience dropped dramatically in the past generation from 15 to 1 (see page 10). Do we want most of our doctors and airline pilots to be novices?

Here is the story of one teacher, Ron Maggiano, an award-winning Virginia teacher who quit after 33 years.

Valerie Strauss wrote about him here. She wrote:

Ron Maggiano is a social studies teacher at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County. In 2005, he won the Disney Teacher Award for innovation and creativity, and in 2006, he won the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Family Teaching Prize for outstanding K-12 teaching. Now, after a 33-year teaching career, he is resigning, just four years away from full retirement.

Why? He’s had enough of the high-stakes testing obsession that he believes has undermined public education.

Maggiano wrote:

I have taught history at West Springfield High School for the past 19 years. I have been a successful classroom teacher for more than thirty years, but now I have had enough. As a result of the obsessive emphasis on standardized test scores in FCPS and across the educational landscape, I have decided to retire at the end of the current academic year. I have made this decision, because I can no longer cooperate with a testing regime that I believe is suffocating creativity and innovation in the classroom. We are not really educating our students anymore. We are merely teaching them to pass a test. This is wrong. Period.

As for myself, I won the Disney Teacher Award for innovation and creativity in education in 2005 and the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Family Teaching Prize for outstanding K-12 teaching in 2006. I am four years away from full retirement, so my decision to retire was not made lightly. It will cost me. Our school newspaper, The Oracle, just ran a story on my retirement and why I am leaving the classroom and the job that I love.

The student newspaper wrote an article about his retirement. Maggiano told the student writer:

“I don’t think I’m leaving the education system. I think the education system left me,” said Maggiano.

In another article, he wrote:

It was a difficult decision, but I am confident that it was the correct one. For me this was a moral choice. I believe that our current national obsession with high-stakes testing is wrong, because it hurts kids and deprives students of an education that is meaningful, imaginative, and relevant to the demands of the 21st century.

Research shows that today’s students need to be prepared to think critically, analyze problems, weigh solutions, and work collaboratively to successfully compete in the modern work environment. These are precisely the type of skills that cannot be measured by a multiple-choice standardized test.

More significantly, critical thinking skills and analytical problem solving have now been replaced with rote memorization and simple recall of facts, figures, names, and dates. Educators have been forced to adopt a “drill and kill” model of teaching to ensure that their students pass the all-important end-of-course test. Teaching to the test, a practice once universally condemned administrators and educators alike, has now become the new normal in classrooms across the country.

If teaching to the test was wrong 30 some years ago when I first entered the classroom, it is just as wrong today as I leave my classroom for the final time. The fact is that we are not really educating our students. We are merely teaching them how to pass a test.

And we are not preparing them for success at the college level or in the workplace. If we were, colleges and universities would not have to require remediation courses for incoming freshmen, and businesses and corporations would not have to spend millions to reteach skills their employees should have mastered after twelve years of education.

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Testing

NYC Judge Rules That State May Not Audit Eva’s Charters

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
52

In a stunning decision, a judge in Manhattan ruled that the State Comptroller may not audit Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools or any other charter schools because they are “not units of the state.” In other words, they are not public schools. If they were public schools, they would be “units of the state” and could be audited by the State Comptroller. As private contractors, they audit themselves.

Charter schools have claimed in federal courts that they are not public schools and may not be held to the same laws governing public schools. In every case, the courts and the National Labor Relations Board have agreed with the charter operators that charter schools are private corporations with a contract receiving public funds from the government. When charter founders in Los Angeles were convicted of misappropriating public funds, the California Charter Schools Association defended them by arguing that charter schools are not public schools but private corporations. In other words, in their words, they are private schools, not public schools, so they are not subject to public audit.

Categories Charter Schools, New York, New York City

Charter School Magnate Wants to End Local School Boards: Democracy is the Problem

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
92

Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Netflix, is a major player in the corporate reform movement.

He is on the board of various charter schools and charter chains, including Rocketship and KIPP.

The organization fighting the proliferation of Rocketship charters forwarded his address to the California Charter School Association:

Watch the 2 minute synopsis video.

Get the story and the full keynote.

The long-term goal is to replace most locally elected school boards with charters, all operated by independent boards, all competing for higher test scores.

And the longer term goal is to replace our present system of democratically-controlled schools by a system of privately-managed charters.

Underlying this plan is the assumption that the main problem in American education is democracy, since school boards are elected.

Other corporate reformers prefer mayoral control or governor control, whereby a single chief executive can override objections to open charters at will.

ALEC has pushed the idea of a state charter panel, appointed by the governor (and sometimes the legislature), whose decisions override local control.

The problem with school boards is that the local populace can replace them by vote.

In other words, as Chubb and Moe argued 25 years ago in their book advocating for vouchers, Politics, Markets, and Schools, markets are better than democracy.

No high-performing nation in the world has handed its schools over to private management; instead, they have a strong and equitable public school system, with a respected teaching profession and a well-prepared staff.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Resistance

Will Sheldon Silver Stop the “Protect Eva” Act?

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
11

In New York state, the Assembly is led by Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the Assembly. In this interview, he expressed opposition to the State Senate’s bill to protect Eva Moskowitz and to assure that all of New York City’s nearly 200 charters get rent-free space in public school buildings. Eva has a chain of 22 charters. Mayor de Blasio just agreed to give her five more, but turned down three proposed charters for her chain. Two of those schools do not exist and have no pupils. The third will have to relocate 194 students.

Silver said about the State Senate’s proposal:

“This whole right of having a building around you — yet there’s thousands of children sitting in trailers in city public schools. Does anybody speak for their right?” Silver asked reporters during a rare visit to the Capitol’s press room. “They don’t have Wall Street billionaires who can put ads on, or contribute to campaigns, and therefore, nobody represents them and they’re doomed to sitting in trailers for the rest of their school career? That’s unfortunate. Some of that money, maybe, from all the advertising, would do well to build some buildings for a lot of students if they actually support them.”

If Silver acts on his views, the legislation won’t pass.

194 children were displaced from one of Eva Moskowitz’s 22 charters. Her chain, which spends millions on marketing, public relations, and advertising can easily afford to rent space for a school for them. The legislation proposed by the State Senate would guarantee
Eva the right to expand in a public school without regard to the children they displace and to stay there rent-free.

On the other side are 1.1 million children in the public schools, who have no billionaires to fight for them. They now depend on Speaker Silver to defend them from those who would bully their way into their schools, take away their art room, their dance room, their resource room for special education kids, their computer room, and any other space they choose.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Charter Schools, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Charters Rule: New York State Senate Proposes to Protect Charters But Not Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
3

The New York State Senate has drafted a budget proposal to make sure that Eva Moskowitz gets the eight charters she wants, not just the five that Mayor Bill de Blasio approved. This is how big money talks. Under the proposal, Eva can kick the special education kids out of their school to make way for her new middle school, which has no high-needs special education students. Furthermore, the proposal would protect all rent-free co-locations, allowing handsomely funded charters whose boards include billionaires to take public space at no cost to them. Even more astonishing, charters that are co-located inside public school buildings are given the power to veto any effort to move them; in other words, the charters are given greater “rights” than the public schools that they invade.

Amazing that the Republican-dominated State Senate would write legislation that guts mayoral control to benefit one charter entrepreneur, while simultaneously undercutting the education and rights of the 94% of kids in New York City who do not go to charters.

I am no fan of mayoral control, but I am also no fan of special-interest legislation written for the protection of privately managed charters.

If ever there was a demonstration of the toxic and divisive role of charters in politics, this is it. This bill to protect the billionaires’ plaything is not about improving education for all. It is about me-first and he devil take the other 94%.

Here is a response from the Alliance for Quality Education:

For Immediate Release
For Info:
Billy Easton 518-461-9171

Alliance for Quality Education Reacts to Senate Majority Budget Resolution

The Senate Majority budget proposal adds only $217 million in new school aid—only 56% of what the Assembly added. The Senate Majority actually offers more state funding to private schools than it does to public schools by authorizing a tax credit for private schools that is estimated to cost the state at least $250 million in the first year.

“It is unconscionable that the State Senate Majority is proposing to do more for private and charter schools than for our public schools,” said Billy Easton, Executive Director, Alliance for Quality Education. “The Senate adds $250 million in state funding for private schools, but only adds $217 million for public schools. The $250 million the Senate is giving in state financed tax credits to fund private schools should instead be invested in restoring arts, music, and high quality curriculum in our public schools. They said their priority was to cut the Gap Elimination Adjustment, but when it came time to give out the money, private schools won out.”

On privately-run charter schools the Senate Majority would make a number of changes to favor charter schools in New York City at the expense of public school students. These include:

· Increasing the amount of money that public schools are required to pay to charter schools;

· Requiring free rent for private charter schools in public school buildings;

· Overriding the decisions of Mayor de Blasio to reverse the co-location of three of Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools;

· Giving charter schools power to veto any changes in co-location arrangements, even though public schools are denied the same rights under the mayoral control legislation that the Senate Majority championed.

“The Senate Majority, Governor Cuomo and the wealthy campaign donors providing the political muscle to the charter school movement are all in synch when it comes to special treatment for charter schools,” Easton said. “While our public schools are hemorrhaging programs, the Senate Majority and the Governor have clearly signaled that privately run charter schools that serve only 3% of students top the list of priorities.”

About AQE

The Alliance for Quality Education is a coalition mobilizing communities across the state to keep New York true to its promise of ensuring a high quality public education to all students regardless of zip code, income or race. Combining its legislative and policy expertise with grassroots organizing, AQE advances proven-to-work strategies that lead to student success and echo a powerful public demand for a high quality education.

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Categories Charter Schools, Harlem Success Academy, New York
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