Archives for the month of: January, 2015
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Ohio: Will Charter Titans Permit Reform?

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2015 //
9

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy notes that Governor John Kasich has promised to pass legislation requiring accountability and transparency from charters. But will the big campaign contributors who make millions from charters allow any regulation of their profitable enterprises?

Phillis writes:

“Governor: “We are going to fix the lack of regulation on charter schools” – but will ECOT, White Hat Management, K-12 Inc. and other big campaign funders allow it to happen?

“2014 has been the year of exposure of far-reaching financial fraud and educational malfeasance in the charter industry. To cap off the year, reports of two studies commissioned by the pro-charter Fordham Institute were made public. These reports “revealed” what was already known: charters are neither accountable nor transparent and their students lag significantly behind traditional schools in state academic measures.

“What else could the Governor say about charters but that additional regulations are needed? The real test, and the one the public education community should keep on the radar screen, will be the scope and depth of anticipated legislation on charter reform.

“Consider that, of the $57 million increase in charter funding over 2011-2012, the largest increase goes to William Lager’s ECOT and the largest per pupil increase for a charter group goes to David Brennan’s White Hat charters. Brennan and William Lager are among the largest political contributors in Ohio. Will they allow charter reform in Ohio? Charter reform that protects taxpayers and students would put them out of business. What do you think?

“Realistically, don’t expect genuine reform in accountability and transparency in charterland….unless the taxpayers of Ohio demand it. Right now the contest is between campaign contributions and sound public policy.”

William Phillis
Ohio E & A

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Ohio

What Happened When Arne Tweeted “What If”

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2015 //
31

A few days ago, Secretary Arne Duncan tweeted this question:

“What if every district committed both to identifying what made their 5 best schools successful & providing those opps to all their students?
2:44 PM – 30 Dec 2014”

Within minutes, someone created a hashtag #whatif, and parents and teachers began flooding Twitter with their own “what if” questions. Valerie Strauss reprinted some of them here.

Here is one:

“Jeanne Berrong @kayringe
Follow
@arneduncan #WhatIf the DOE committed both to identifying what made their 5 worst reform initiatives failures & removing them from schools?
5:52 PM – 30 Dec 2014”

Here is another:

“Karen Lewis @KarenLewisCTU
Follow
#whatif @arneduncan, children got their lives back, their joy of discovery and a safe place to learn to think critically? Play is real.
10:48 PM – 30 Dec 2014”

And another:

“Chris Cerrone @Stoptesting15
Follow
#WhatIf Every family & student boycotted @arneduncan ‘s high-stakes testing & we moved to a well-rounded education w/ authentic assessment.
9:41 PM – 30 Dec 2014”

Categories Duncan, Arne

Another Former “Brighter Choice” Charter Teacher in Albany Speaks Out

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2015 //
11

This comment was left by a reader in response to this post from a teacher who had worked in the Brighter Choice charter chain in Albany. A few years ago, this chain was described as “the holy grail” of charter schools. Since then, some of its charters have been closed for poor performance and two more are on the chopping block:

 

 

Hi, I too worked in an Albany Charter and now work in the Albany City School District. I can agree with the post that there are a lot of teachers and administrators who really care about the kids and want to do everything they can to help them. In my time in the charter school I met and learned from a few really fantastic and committed teachers. I can also say most of these teachers and administrators are generally very young and inexperienced. The majority of administrators do not have administrative licenses. The majority of the teachers are still completing their Master’s degree and have limited-no experience.

 

The problem with the Albany Charters is the Brighter Choice Foundation and the tone of the schools. They need to make their money and run the schools like a business. The BCF (which is somehow now called the Albany Charter School Network, not sure why?!) sits on the third floor of the MS that may close. Mr.Carroll, Bender, and the other white, wealthy and older men who run this organization make no effort to get to know the students or interact with the staff. They park in their reserved spots and jet to their cushy offices to send down orders. I don’t really understand how the school can have Board Members who carry the lease of the school and profit from it, work for the BCF or have other clear, financial interests in the school. I think they should have to post all of their board meeting materials in the same manner ACSD does (http://albanyschools.org/district/board/2014-15/12-11/12-11-14.documents.html). Perhaps the public should start attending their board meetings. It is strange that although each school has a separate charter, the four board meetings happen at one time, in one building. I have never seen an agenda or minutes of a meeting, but I understand they are only an hour or two long as well.

 

There is too much pressure on the students, teachers and administrators. Yes, they do not expel as many kids but I have seen them “counsel out” a large, large number of students. They suspend students, have their parents come in and eventually say “maybe the district schools will be a better fit for your family”. The Brighter Choice Middle Schools also do not enroll students in the 7th or 8th grades because “it takes so long to teach the expectations of the school that at 7th grade it is too late”. Their special ed. and ELL population is limited and entirely different than the population of ACSD. They have no self-contained classrooms for students with autism, learning disabilities or emotional disturbances. They have no ELLs who are refugees and have never been to school or learned to read. This is probably a good thing for these students because they teach directly to the test and rarely differentiate instruction. The inexperienced and young teachers are pressured by administrators (who are in turn pressured by the Foundation) to drill test prep and test taking skills. They rarely read novels. Students are pulled during Sci/SS (which they receive in rotation instead of daily) for AIS services. With the high focus on test prep, students receive little to no humanities education. Lunches are often silent and the students do not even have the freedom to stand up to throw away their own lunches. The students know little freedom, so they often rebel any chance they get.

 

The interesting thing about the Brighter Choice MS for Boys and Girls failing is that it is in a way very reflective of both the Albany Charter Schools and the fact that it is not easy to run an effective urban middle school. The majority of the students at BCMS-Girls and Boys are from the area charter elementary schools. This means that the elementary schools (BCCS-Girls, Boys, Henry Johnson, ACC) are not preparing the students for the challenges of middle school as well. Could it be that there is no “quick fix” to better urban middle schools?

 

I imagine the BCF will put up a big fight to keep these schools open as they stand to lose a lot of money if this building closes. I imagine their deep pockets will end up keeping this school open for a few more years. I am sure Cuomo will fight tooth and nail for his friends at the Foundation as well.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, Teachers

A Florida Newspaper Editor Changes His Mind

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2015 //
16

This is a very encouraging editorial that appeared in the Gainesville (Florida) Sun.

 

A “secret Santa” sent a copy of “Reign of Error” to Nathan Crabbe, the editorial page editor. He says he had been going along with the increase in standardized testing and the expansion of charter schools and vouchers, but then he took another look. He noticed the protest of kindergarten teacher Susan Bowles, who refused to give her students a standardized test. He paid attention when Sue Legg of the League of Women Voters explained the LWV report on the lack of accountability of unregulated charter schools. He had a cup of coffee with a local elementary school teacher who showed him why she objects to the Common Core.

 

Not many people in public life listen with an open mind and weigh the evidence. Nathan Crabbe is listening, watching, and thinking. All rare activities these days, practiced only by the best of people.

Categories Charter Schools, Florida, Standardized Testing

Jeb Bush Resigns from All Boards, Including For-Profit Online Firm

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2015 //
30

Preparing to run for the Republican nomination for President in 2016, Jeb Bush resigned from all the corporate and nonprofit boards he belongs to. One of them is a for-profit firm that sells online courses to university students.

 

He also resigned as a paid adviser to a for-profit education company that sells online courses to public university students in exchange for a share of their tuition payments….

 

Bush’s financial stake in Academic Partnerships, the online education firm, has been relatively small for a millionaire — a $60,000-a-year fee and ownership of a small amount of stock, said Randy Best, the company’s founder and chief executive. Even so, Bush’s affiliation with the firm — which has contracts with schools in a half-dozen states and several foreign countries and has annual sales of $100 million — could complicate his effort to promote his record as an education reformer

 

The company receives up to 70 percent of the tuition some students pay to public universities, and some faculty members say it siphons money from the schools while asserting too much control over academic decisions.

 

Best, a Texas entrepreneur and major political donor, said his firm has increased professors’ access to online students and helped schools attract additional revenue, while Bush aides say the former governor does not have business interests related to K-12 education, which has been his policy focus.

 

Randy Best is a friend of the Bush family who founded a reading program called Voyager Learning, a phonics-based program that benefited handsomely from the Reading First portion of No Child Left Behind. Best eventually sold Voyager for $360 million. For more about Voyager and Reading First, read here and here. The Washington Post wrote in 2006:

 

Five years later, an accumulating mound of evidence from reports, interviews and program documents suggests that Reading First has had little to do with science or rigor. Instead, the billions have gone to what is effectively a pilot project for untested programs with friends in high places.

 

Department officials and a small group of influential contractors have strong-armed states and local districts into adopting a small group of unproved textbooks and reading programs with almost no peer-reviewed research behind them. The commercial interests behind those textbooks and programs have paid royalties and consulting fees to the key Reading First contractors, who also served as consultants for states seeking grants and chaired the panels approving the grants. Both the architect of Reading First and former education secretary Roderick R. Paige have gone to work for the owner of one of those programs, who is also a top Bush fundraiser.

 

 

The $60,000-a-year that Bush received from Best’s company was chicken-feed compared to the $1 million+ a year he received from Barclay’s bank.

 

No question, however, that Jeb Bush has a strong interest in digital education. In Florida, and in some other states that have heeded his advice, students must take online courses as a graduation requirement. Bush’s efforts to push digital learning in Maine were the subject of a prize-winning article for investigative journalism by Colin Woodard, called “The Profit Motive Behind Virtual Schools in Maine.”

 

In my book Reign of Error, I described a report produced by Jeb Bush and former Governor Bob Wise called “Digital Learning NOW!” The report, which was sponsored by major technology corporations, claimed that digital learning was key to closing the achievement gap and that it would produce greater learning and almost every good thing that could be imagined. There was no evidence for these claims. The report recommended deregulation of digital learning so that a corporation could sell its services without having to hire certified teachers or even to have a physical location in the state where they were selling their services.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform

Philadelphia Charter School Abruptly Closes, Stranding Students and Teachers

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2015 //
82

During the Christmas holidays, the Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School in Philadelphia announced that it was closing, due to financial problems. The School Reform Commission had already initiated action to close it for poor academic performance. The Philadelphia school district said that the charter school had claimed $1.5 million more than it was entitled to, and the school could not find the money to repay the debt. Why is this kind of turmoil and instability called “reform”?

 

Citing insurmountable financial obstacles, the Palmer charter sent letters to families and staff on Friday informing them that the school would close permanently Wednesday.
The move sent teachers on quests for new jobs and information about filing for unemployment, and left families of the school’s 675 students in kindergarten through eighth grade scrambling for new schools.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20141230_Shuttered_charter_school_leaves_students__staff_scrambling.html#yrkLWoFxtuixU2Th.99

Categories Charter Schools

Happy New Year, 2015

By dianeravitch
January 1, 2015 //
75

I have decided to break precedent today. This is the only post you will see.

 

I wish you and your family a happy, healthy New Year. I hope that 2015 is a year of dreams fulfilled, mountains climbed, happiness achieved. I hope all of us are able to meet the inevitable challenges and setbacks with heart and fortitude. I hope we learn and practice the virtues of patient struggle, unflagging endurance, the ability to build alliances, and the willingness to seek common ground with others.

 

2014 was a rough year for me, physically, and I am glad to bid it farewell. I spent most of the year thinking I would never walk again without a walker or a cane. I’m happy to report that I am walking without either, thanks to the intervention of a wise rehabilitation specialist in Cincinnati who built a rigid (temporary) cast for my bum leg. I have to exercise every single day to keep the scar tissue in my knee supple, but that’s not so awful. I can walk! I can walk! I can’t walk long distances (as I used to do), I can’t sit for too long, I can’t stand for too long, I kick my leg up and down under the dining table. You may occasionally notice a slight limp, but that’s nothing. I can walk, and for that I am grateful.

 

In terms of the education issues that concern us, we made great headway. Charter studies continue to show that private management has no “secret sauce.” The media in Ohio, Michigan, and Florida woke up and began to expose the hollowness of the charter advocates’ claims of superiority to public schools. Except for the charters that actively seek to help the neediest children, the charter boasting is wearing thin. Even better news: Public and professional confidence in VAM continues to plummet. Common Core testing–with its unrealistic passing marks– is in big trouble. The anti-high-stakes testing movement continues to grow in every state. Parents send their children to school to be educated, not to be sorted, rated, and labeled.

 

As Peter Greene put it, the greatest win of 2014 was the fact that teachers continued to teach, continued to knock them selves out day after day, despite the attacks on them and on their profession. I can’t resist quoting a small part of Peter’s wonderful post:

 

In environments ranging from openly hostile to merely unsupportive, teachers went into their classrooms and did their best to meet the needs of their students. Teachers helped millions of young human become smarter, wiser, more capable, more confident, and better educated. Millions of teachers went to school, met students where they were, and helped those students move forward, helped them grasp what it meant to be fully human, to be the most that they could be. Teachers helped millions of students learn to read and write and figure and draw and make music and play games and know history and understand science and a list of things so varied and rich that I have no room here for them all.

When so many groups were slandering us and our own political leaders were giving us a giant middle finger, we squared our shoulders and said, “Well, dammit, I’ve got a job to do, and if even if I’ve got to go in there and do it with my bare hands in a hailstorm, I’m going to do it.” And we did.

 

Leonie Haimson made her list of the best and worst of 2014. I would add the blow-up of the $1 billion iPad fiasco in Los Angeles as another momentous event, which should make us all warier of throwing money at technology without careful planning.

 

Not all news was good news. The midterm elections were a disaster for supporters of public education, especially at the state level. Several anti-education governors were re-elected. There is always next time. American history tends to move in cycles, and we must work together to hasten the end of the current cycle of greed and indifference to suffering. We must restore a healthy belief in democracy and ward off the forces of autocracy. We must fight to protect our children’s privacy from data miners. We must do a better job of informing parents and citizens about the peril posed by privatization to their community’s public schools. And we must be relentless in informing the media that the movement to demonize the teaching profession is NOT reform. True reformers seek to improve public schools and to honor the teaching profession, not to close schools, fire teachers, and turn their children over to entrepreneurs.

 

The Network for Public Education continues to build alliances and to connect activists within and between states. Here is a link to the Top Ten “Why We Will Win” Stories of 2014. Yes, we will persevere in our fight to protect our public schools from hostile takeovers and our efforts to improve them. Our second national conference will be held in Chicago on April 25-26, 2015. I hope you will plan to join us and meet with your friends and colleagues from across the nation.

 

No question there’s a long road ahead of us. But we must and will persist. This must be our cause and our mission. We are many, they are few. Democracy is on our side, and we are on the side of democracy. Not efficiency; not sorting and labeling children for the workforce; not preparing for global competition; but preparing children to live full and free lives in our society, able to make wise choices for themselves, with every chance to develop their interests, talents, and abilities. We must not rest until every child has equality of educational opportunity.

Categories Education Reform
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