Keystone State Education Coalition
Pennsylvania Education Policy Roundup for June 3, 2014:
In God We Trust? How about a bill that would require charter and cyber schools to post their PA School Performance Profile scores prominently in any advertising paid for with public tax dollars?
Blogger Rant:
At a recent school board meeting I voted against authorizing a payment to Agora Cyber Charter School. Why? During the NCLB regime, Agora never once made AYP; this year their PA School Performance Profile Score was 48.3 (scale of 100). In my district, our Middle School score was 94; our High School score was 96.4. Agora is run by K12, Inc., a for-profit company founded by convicted bond felon Michael Milken. K12 paid it’s CEO $13 million from 2009 through 2013 and spent our tax dollars on over 19,000 local TV commercials. I do not believe Agora should receive one cent of my neighbors’ tax dollars.
Instead of posting “In God We Trust”, how about a bill that would require charter and cyber schools to post their PA School Performance Profile scores prominently in any advertising paid for with public tax dollars?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Confused. Sometimes standardized test scores are a good way to evaluate school performance? I thought the idea of “Performance Profile Scores” was not a good way to measure a school’s performance?
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I basically agree, but the argument goes that charters aren’t even succeeding by their own metric of test score improvement, which was, in fact, their selling point – they promised to raise test scores.
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That makes sense – if their case for existence or superiority to regular public schools was an increase in test scores, and then they ultimately failed in that attempt, then it should be scorecarded and communicated.
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The point is that, even by the deceptive and debased criteria of test scores, these schools are failures.
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Bruce,
If you don’t mind, who pays your salary?
TIA,
Duane
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Sounds a bit like a trick question – but ultimately in our economy the people in our communities pay our salaries – which is true when I’ve been in public or private organizations.
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Thanks to whoever wrote this. How about “In Empirical Evidence We Trust”?
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Amen to that…
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Really disagree. “Transparency” is way too low a regulatory bar for entities that survive solely on public funds. Charter schools aren’t private companies, or if they are. we should stop calling them “public schools”.
The problem in Pennsylvania is the problem in Ohio (and will soon be the problem in New York). Lobbyists and others took charter regulation from the local to the state level. That is a deregulatory move, and it has had predictably deregulatory results. The state simply can’t directly regulate hundreds of schools. It doesn’t work. They don’t have the staff or the resources even if they had the desire (and they don’t have the desire in Ohio).
Public schools were given LOCAL oversight for a reason. Getting around that by going around local governance in order to open more charter schools was incredibly short-sighted and reckless. They’ve learned nothing from the results in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania either, and they have DECADES of experience in Ohio. They’re STILL lobbying to remove local oversight and regulation in state after state see: Governor Cuomo in NY.
The idea that if we just set up enough “transparency” and hire a “responsible board” we’ll create a marketplace that will act as a replacement for local governance and regulatory mechanism has never worked with private contractors in the US, and it will never work with national private contractors who run charter schools.
They’ll keep trying though, because this isn’t about good governance, it’s about an ideology that says fewer regulations are always better than more (and local) regulation.
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$13 Million? This alone should be enough to deep six the whole thing. this should be on the headlines of every paper! If it is tax dollars, then every citizen has a right to know!
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All school whether charter or not should post score, both pre and post. We will see what charters start with when they brag about passing scores. Do they start with the successful kids.
All charters should be transparent with any monies they receive fromthe govt. That is taxpayer mony and the taxpayer should be able to see where their money is going.
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Reform movement leaders are really pushing cyber schools and online learning hard.
It’s the Next Big Ed Reform Rip-Off:
http://educationnext.org/facing-union-challenge/
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Thank you for providing the link to this, Chiara.
It shows that digitalization, for some, is the Great White Hope for busting the unions
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One day, I think within my lifetime, we’ll find out whether functioning virtual schools are a reality or just hover cars. I tend to think they’ll be a reality, for better or worse or both. Between now and then, though, I expect the virtual schooling sector will see a lot of disappointment and fraud.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
You may not know this, but there a war going that’s designed to destroy the democratically run public schools in the United States that really aren’t broken and don’t need to be reformed. They need some help—not much—but not destroyed and shut down.
The public schools that are as transparent as can be.
But the for profit, private sector, corporate run Charter schools that are mostly owned by the fake education reformers who will profit off the tax payer are as opaque as can be.
Read the rest of this post to discover why those fake schools in the profit driven corporate sector must be as transparent as the public schools they want to replace.
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Has anyone put all the fake education reform charter school fraud in one post or book yet? I keep reading about it in bits and pieces but I haven’t seen it all together yet.
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Lloyd,
No one has told the story of the many fake reforms, the many money hungry charters, in one book. I tried in “Reign of Error” but the scams and frauds are so numerous that I could only s ratchet the surface.
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Maybe try it as a multi-volume reference set, like the Oxford English Dictionary.
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I was thinking of an online data base similar to the format of this page on my Blog:
I’d give “The Fake Education Reformer Fraud Data Base” its own page and anyone could Reblog it, copy and repost it, link to it, leave comments, etc.
Being on a Website means it could be updated when new fraud was discovered.
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Can you set it up Lloyd?
I am sure you will have many contributors!
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I will, but first I want to finish the final revisions of “Crazy is Normal” and launch that teacher’s memoir. It may take a few more weeks to finish the process from e-book to paperback. I’m hoping I have the e-book up in the next few days. Formatting a paperback takes longer.
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I complain all the time that lawmakers and others pay no attention to public schools, that the ed reform/privatization consensus is so strong on DC that there is not even any discussion of public schools, other than opportunistic bashing. I complain about this because I think it’s true. Politicians, not researchers, etc.
Here’s an example. This is the Twitter feed of a Ed/Workforce staffer. Try to find a mention of public schools amid the near-constant promotion of charter schools:
If your kid attends a public school, you should care about this bubble they’re in. We’re paying these folks to work for ALL schools, not just the schools they prefer.
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Michael Milken, who has a criminal background, created powerhouse, K-12 Inc. The company profits from tax payer dollars.
Headquartered in London, Pearson, substantially owned by Swiss company, UBS, profits from U.S tax payer dollars.
Convicted terrorists, living in the middle east, can own schools in the U.S. and profit from U.S. tax dollars?
Politicians claim they are interested in national security.
I’d like to see an ALEC draft law that both denies criminals the right to own publicly supported schools and prohibits foreign nationals from profiting from U.S. public education.
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