The charter sector is riddled with fraud. The fraud gets uncovered whenever you see a charter claiming a miraculous success with poor, inner-city kids who are identical to the kids in the neighboring failing public schools. When they boast of their 100% graduation rates or their 100% passing rates on state tests, look behind the curtain.
Watch a master at work as Bruce Baker pulls back the curtain on Newark’s awesome North Star Academy. 100% of the seniors graduate! (But half the kids drop out before senior year.) 100% of the students pass the state tests! (But North Star has remarkably few students with disabilities or English language learners, compared to the neighborhood schools.)
Schools like North Star are so bleeping awesome that they have their very own “graduate” schools of education, where they learn to be driven by data and how to “teach like a champion.” Really cool “graduate” schools with no researchers or scholars. Just charter teachers giving masters’ degrees to other charter teachers. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. What will they think of next?
Doctored data, make-believe degrees, pretend teachers.
This is called “education reform.”
What a world.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What will they think of next? Well next they will continue to post ed reform-related rubbish like this at today’s NYT, neglecting to mention the developmentally inappropriate curriculum that is making us all Fidgety as we sacrifice our boys and girls on the various altars of the economy’s so-called earning potential.
“The Role of Fidgety Boys in a Sputtering Economy
By DAVID LEONHARDT
A gender gap in behavioral skills, evident by kindergarten, hurts boys’ academic prospects and their earning potential.”
That was column was horrendous. It was actually less offensive and rage-inducing than I expected after seeing the headline and callout. But just totally useless.
North Star told my daughter, who did a teaching demo for a position, that she was not rigid enough, and it was believed she would not fall in line with its discipline policies. Let me add that my daughter graduated college with a teaching degree, and obtained 2 certifications, 1 p-3 and the other k-5, and had a full year of clinical (1 & 2). This news that she didn’t get the job was met with elation – she had already decided had she been offered a spot she would decline. She adores children, and education. This place left her feeling dead.
Part of her demonstration day included sitting and watching TFA recruits teach summer school to a handful of children. Here she was. 2 years after graduating and trying hard to find a teaching job (and having worked those 2 years in public schools as an aide and substitute), and she was compared to just graduated TFA summer recruits getting their 5 weeks of training, and she was told THAT is how she should be teaching…the TFA way. Taking the demo at North Star was desperation. Thank God she never worked there.
After her 5 hour interview/demo – she was deflated. She said her heart breaks for those little children who would be treated as if their parents had enlisted them in the service.
Run by TFA zombies, of course, that is what you get a North Star. Where discipline means all, where children are taught to be silent and still, where creativity is stifled, and where just a few teachers with proper credentials are needed to add the untrained TFAers into the mix.
When the truth is found out….they may be run out of town. Can Kipp be far behind? You know, there is a special place in hell for Wendy Kopp and her zombies; its just a matter of time.
“. . . there is a special place in hell for Wendy Kopp and her zombies.”
Yes, there is:
Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
“Doctored data. make believe degrees, pretend teachers,
This is called ‘education reform.’ ”
It’s also called lying and privateering.
Well, we do have GREED in charge. This is a good one, Diane. TY. And please do take good care of yourself.
Yvonne Siu-Runyan: and as an old dead Roman put it—
“For greed all nature is too little.” [Lucius Annaeus Seneca]
Michael Fiorillo: when supposed principled opposition to tyranny and mendacity turns out to have really been [with the death of the Soviet Union] a burning envy and desire to emulate, you end up with the Potemkin Village Business Plan for $tudent $ucce$$.
To put it another way: massaged and tortured data, incompetence and ignorance masking as expertise, people playing teacher who can’t even recite properly their scripted lines.
To sum up [with help from a commenter]: that’s what happens when all you have is a plan for ed biz that relies on worst business practices rather than a goal of a “better education for all” that utilizes an education model that attempts to incorporate best pedagogical practice.
And it didn’t take ten years [thank you, Bill Gates!] to figure that out.
😎
Other than a deep pathological hatred toward RealTeachers, and making them jump through every fabricated hoop…while flooding the market w/ charters, TFA, box-store grad programs – all without standards and accountabilities …..makes no other sense than pure evil hatred and despising RealTeachers and RealEducators with HQ credentials, RealDegrees, RealExperience and RealKnowledge.
Pure unresolved evil, locker room taunting, fun with inflicting pain, watch’m squirm, love it when they cry, take away pensions, let’m rot in old age, bast***dly deeds!
Unbelievable! Who are these evil beings and what have RealTeachers done? Nothing ever to deserve this treatment.
It is all about money. The teacher bashing is just a vehicle to obtain more money. These schools are nothing but a bs fraud on the people.
Public schools are not allowed to call their dropouts “voluntary transfers”, are they? The “reformers” think that by changing the label they can call a man a dog.
Yes, they tell the parents that instead of putting the expulsion on the records they can “voluntarily withdraw” their student.
the charters in New York are not much better. pathetically low retention rates while squawking great data…
what ever happened to freedom to teach, to learn, to choice?
why are we turning children into automatons that will have no real world skills, while telling them that they need to spend every penny they have on “higher education” that will be useless to them?
does any politician care about the kids anymore?
This is great. On more thing I forgot to tell you yesterday. We were talking about the discipline at the public school vs. the charter school. The glaring fact was the charter school charged the parents a fee every time their child misbehaved. Of course the parents got sick of that and began demanding the students behave. The problem is you can’t do that in a public school. And worse they eliminate the hard core problem kids with suspension and expulsion. That article you sent today said only 20 percent of the black boys that started in the charter made it to 12 th grade. That is not awesome as the article stated. Just saying if public schools could do what charter schools do, suspend, get rid of and charge fees to the behavior problems then they would probable have more discipline. But teachers can’t even send them to the principals office anymore they just get laughed at. It’s a really serious problem I agree. Love, Julie
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