Archives for the month of: March, 2015
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Charter Investors’ Conference: Your Tax Dollars at Work:

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2015 //
42

Laura Chapman investigated the charter investors’ conference on March 10. And this is what she learned:

The US Department of Education will be at the charter school “investors” conference, representing you, dear taxpayer, in a scheme to subsidize the financing of charter school facilities that LISC is marketing, along with the Gates and Walton Foundations and a long list of profit seekers investors who get tax credits for doing deals, among other perks.

LISC stands for Local Initiatives Support Corporation, in operation for about 35 years and known mainly as a “partner” in leveraging public and private financing for community development projects. Here is the pitch for the NYC investor’s conference:

“LISC’s education work is focused on the need to create efficient financing sources for charter schools in low-income communities. Charter schools often struggle to cover school facilities costs and therefore must sacrifice competitive teacher salaries, robust extracurriculars, and much needed learning materials.” (Pitch: If we did not have to pay for facilities, we could pay teachers more, buy important stuff, and add some frills).

“Our keynote speakers…. will be Whitney Tilson, co-founder of Democrats for Education Reform and vice-chairman of the Board of Trustees of KIPP NYC and Ryan Hill, executive director of KIPP New Jersey.

“Join us for this one day symposium on charter school credit worthiness. Hear inside perspectives from investors, authorizers, academic experts, nonprofit lenders, rating agencies, and charter school borrowers. Learn and understand the value of investing in charter schools and best practices.”
Here is the program lightly edited, without names.

9:00 am – 10:15 am Morning Keynote Speaker(s) (see above)

10:30 am – 11:15 am. Panelists cite data from LISC’s Charter School Facility Finance Landscape and Bond Study and report on innovative financing mechanisms for facilities. Panelists from Utah State Treasurer’s Office, LISC, Charter School Advisors.

11:20 am – 12:20 pm. Charter school authorizers and lenders assess academic and financial performance. Panelists from SUNY Charter Schools Institute, Self-Help, New Jersey Dept. of Education, Wells Capital Management, New Orleans Parish School Board, National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

2:15 pm – 3:15 pm. Assessing the credit quality of a charter school (e.g. enrollment, financials, relationship with the authorizer, academic quality.) Panelists from Public Impact, Charter School Growth Fund, KIPP New Jersey, Charter Schools Development Corp., EdBuild, LISC.

3:30 pm – 4:30 pm Assessing charter schools from investors’ perspectives.
Panelists from Nuveen Investments, Utah State Treasurer’s Office, Standard & Poor’s, Piper Jaffray, Bank of America, LISC

4:35 pm – 5:30 pm Tools to create a more efficient market, such as: pools, credit enhancement, more state involvement, etc. Trends in borrower characteristics and continued disclosure needs. Panelists from Alliance Bernstein; BB&T Capital Markets; Prudential Financial; US DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION (USDE), Achievement First, Orrick.

Here is why USDE is represented at this conference. USDE operates a State Charter School Facilities Incentive Grant Program. State education agencies may apply for a grant if the state has a law in place authorizing “per-pupil facilities aid” for charter schools. (This is not the first instance of USDE baiting states to change laws so charters are given favorable treatment.)

These USDE facilities grants, available since 2004, are authorized by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Title V, Part B, Subpart 1, Section 5205B). Awards have averaged $10 million annually, and can be continued at lower levels for up to five years. Under a new authority in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014, funds may be channeled to preschool education in charter schools.

The marketing schemes championed at this NYC March 10, 2015 conference are designed to put private dollars into “brick and mortar” charter schools with token public support (federal, state), but with ownership of the facilities in the hands of private investors.

Here is the unpublicized caveat.

LISC supports charter and alternative schools, but only in “distressed neighborhoods.” LISC set up its Educational Facilities Financing Center in 2003. This center functions as a national operation to pool funds from low-interest loans, then leverage the funds for charter and alternative school facilities (new or renovated) “for underserved children, families, and neighborhoods.”

Schools financed by private entities and profit-seeking investors are PINOs “public in name only.” By design LISC and its many bundlers of money intend to keep low-income students and their families trapped in distressed neighborhoods, and coincidently, in my opinion, support the segregation that usually defines such neighborhoods. The cover story is all about neighborhood revitalization.

LISC boasts that it has raised millions in grants and loans from the Walton Family Foundation, Prudential Insurance, Bank One, The Boston Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, CEOs for Fundamental Change in Education, Citibank, City National Bank, Excellent Education Development, the Indianapolis Local Public Improvement Bond Bank, the Indianapolis Mayor’s Charter Schools Office, the Low Income Investment Fund, the Massachusetts Charter School Association, the Massachusetts Department of Education’s Charter School Office, the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency, Prudential Insurance, Wells Fargo,

and…. you—courtesy of Congress and the U.S. Department of Education.

Learn more at http://www.lisc.org/section/ourwork/national/education

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, U.S. Department of Education

EduShyster: What the NY Times Got Wrong About Rahm

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2015 //
5

EduShyster hosts a Chicago citizen who shows what the New York Times got wrong about Rahm.

 

The newspaper article mostly repeated the Mayor’s talking points instead of digging to find out if they were true.

 

The author, Maria Moser, writes:

 

“Here’s what happened: Rahm systematically attacked nearly every city service through a neoliberal privatization plan. As a friend put it, *Rahm’s not so much the mayor as the guy auctioning off what’s left of our public goods.* And public goods have a disproportionate value to middle class and poor people in our city. Your library is open less and has less staff. There are fewer lifeguards on our beaches in the summer. Or you spent hours on the phone trying to activate your new Ventra card only to be disconnected. We’ve taken notice as these things have happened because they affect our lives. What’s it like to live in a city with an auctioneer at the helm?”

 

And read this correction:

 

“NYT: And many of the neighborhoods that faced schools closings were in predominantly black or Latino areas.

 

“Chicago: Uh, that’s a bit of an understatement. As it turns out, of 46,000 students impacted by school closures (not 30,000, as CPS tried to suggest), 88% were black, 10% were Latino, and .7% were white. So yes, predominantly. Like, 98%.”

Categories Chicago, Emanuel, Rahm

Ohio: Three High School Girls Take the PARCC Practice Test

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2015 //
11

This is a video of three girls at Elyria High School taking a PARCC practice test. Two of them are honor students. As you will see, they find the test questions baffling.

The girl in the middle has started a new group called the Badass Student Organization. It is likely to spread.

Categories Common Core, Ohio, Testing

What Are the Lessons of Jeb Bush’s Own Charter School?

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2015 //
24

[Reposting in case you missed this story last night, DR]

 

The Néw York Times tells the sad story of the life and death of Jeb Bush’s charter school. Bush now recalls his involvement in the school to demonstrate his prowess as an education reformer. But the actual experience of the school shows the perils of Bush’s free-market ideology.

In 1996, Jeb Bush co-founded Florida’s first charter school, called Liberty City Charter School, in an impoverished black neighborhood in Miami. His co-founder was head of the city’s Urban League. Two years earlier, he had narrowly lost the governor’s race. When asked what he would do for blacks if elected, he responded, “Probably nothing.” Looking ahead to the next election, he needed to “soften” his image. The founding of a charter school for poor black children was his vehicle.

After he was elected governor in 1998, Jeb Bush created a model of tough accountability, pre-dating his brother George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Among other things, Jeb graded every school, A-F. His charter school won an A in 2006, and he was very proud.

However, the school sunk into financial trouble, and its grade plummeted to D. Bush’s second term as governor ended in 2007, and he did not do much to help the school as it struggled with debt. In 2008, it closed.

What did Jeb Bush learn from the failure of his model school? Not much. He certainly didn’t learn about the limits of the free market in education.

Nonetheless, the now defunct school still remains valuable to Presidential candidate Jeb Bush.

Times’ reporter Jason Horowitz writes:

“But with Mr. Bush all but certain to be running for office again, this time for the White House, the school he once championed is again useful. As he tries to sell himself to the conservative Republicans wary of his support for the testing standards they consider emblematic of government overreach, he can speak with authority on charter schools, funded largely by taxpayers but run by private companies, as a free-market antidote to liberal teachers’ unions and low performance.

“And his firsthand experience in the education of underprivileged urban grade-schoolers lends him credibility in a party that has suddenly seized upon the gap between the rich and poor as politically promising terrain. In his first speech as a likely presidential candidate in Detroit last month, Mr. Bush credited Liberty City Charter School with helping “change education in Florida”

“But Mr. Bush’s uplifting story of achievement and reform avoided mentioning the school by name or its unhappy ending. For all his early and vital involvement during his 1998 campaign for governor, and for all the help he offered from afar in the governor’s office, Mr. Bush’s commitment to his school project was not as enduring as some students and teachers might have hoped.”

Others might view Liberty City Charter School as a symbol not of “achievement and reform,” but of the impermanence and empty promises of charter schools.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Florida

David Gamberg: In Defense of Childhood

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2015 //
4

David Gamberg, superintendent of the Southold and Greenport districts in Long Island, Néw York, here defends childhood and the value of play against the endless barrage of high-stakes testing coming from federal and state officials.

 

He writes:

 

“The curiosity and creativity of a child is at stake. They should be full of wonder. They should be given the proper time and space to venture into the world of others as they read for pleasure, dabble in watercolors that know no bounds, or expend the boundless energy of a little boy or girl on the playground without the fear of being cut short in the name of preparing for a high stakes test. The experiences that children should be engaged in are being sacrificed at an alarming rate…..

 

“The idea that we must designate scores to a narrow band of testable content areas (math and English Language skills) as future predictors of global competitiveness is about as sensible as mining for fool’s gold in the desert. The future of our nation more likely hinges on educating a generation of well-nourished children, who arrive at school excited by the prospect of being socially and emotionally engaged in learning that is joyous. School must promote the use of time that is filled as much with singing, dancing, drawing and running as it is with experimenting in science or practicing essential skills in reading, writing, and math.

 

“I call upon our elected leaders and policymakers to fashion a more balanced and sensible path forward. The current plan that looks at one side of the educational ledger is as misguided as it is destined to produce a generation of children who fail to fully experience childhood to the detriment of our civil well being in the years ahead.”

Categories Childhood, Testing

Outrage: High-Stakes Testing in Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2015 //
52

High-stakes testing has reached down into kindergarten, where it is developmentally inappropriate. Kindergarten is supposed to be the children’s garden. It is supposed to be a time for learning to socialize with others, to work and play with others, to engage in imaginative activities, to plan with building blocks and games. It is a time when little children learn letters and numbers as part of their activities. They listen as the teacher reads stories, and they want to learn to read.

 

But in the era of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, kindergarten has changed. Little children must be tested. The great data monster needs data. How can their teachers be evaluated if there are no standardized tests and no data?

 

This frightening article in Slate by Alexandria Neason describes how high-stakes testing now permeates kindergarten.

 

The author describes the kindergarten classroom of Molly Mansel in Néw Orleans.

 

“Mansel’s students started taking tests just three weeks into the 2014–15 school year. They began with a state-required early childhood exam in August, which covered everything from basic math to letter identification. Mansel estimates that it took between four and five weeks for the teachers to test all 58 kindergarten students—and that was with the help of the prekindergarten team. The test requires an adult to sit individually with each student, reading questions and asking them to perform various tasks. The test is 11 pages long and “it’s very time-consuming,” according to Mansel, who is 24 and in her third year of teaching (her first in kindergarten).

 

The rest of the demanding testing schedule involves repeated administrations of two different school-mandated tests. The first, Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, is used to measure how students are doing compared with their peers nationally—and to evaluate teachers’ performance. The students take the test in both reading and math three times a year. They have about an hour to complete the test, and slower test takers are pulled from class to finish.

 

The second test, called Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress, or STEP, is a literacy assessment that measures and ranks children’s progress as they learn letters, words, sentences, and, eventually, how to read. Mansel gives the test individually to students four times throughout the year. It takes several days to administer as Mansel progresses through a series of tasks: asking the students to write their names, to point to uppercase and lowercase versions of letters, and to identify words that rhyme, for example.

 

Although more informal, the students also take about four quizzes per week in writing, English, math, science, and social studies. The school’s other kindergarten teacher designs most of the quizzes, which might ask students to draw a picture describing what they learned, or write about it in a journal.

 

“By the end of the school year, Mansel estimates that she’ll have lost about 95 hours of class time to test administration—a number inconceivable to her when she reflects on her own kindergarten experience. She doesn’t remember taking any tests at all until she was in at least second grade. And she’s probably right.”

 

Whoever made this happen should be arrested for child abuse and theft of childhood.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Mathematica Study: TFA Recruits No Better Than Other Teachers

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2015 //
61

A new study by Mathematica Policy Research finds that young corps members in Teach for America get no better results than other teachers.

 

Normally, this would not be big news, since TFA teachers have only five weeks of training. But for years, TFA has boasted that their young people were far superior to other teachers who had gone through professional preparation programs. Now, TFA leaders are claiming to be satisfied that their five weeks of training allows them to do just as well as those who spent a year or more learning to teach. The implicit logic of their perspective is that teaching is not a profession and that no preparation is needed beyond five weeks of TFA training. However you slice it, the TFA message degrades the profession. No profession would be considered to be a profession if any bright young person could succeed with only a few weeks of preparation. One cannot even imagine doctors or lawyers or accountants boasting that they were successful with a five-week training program.

 

The Mathematica study may not end the debate about the value of TFA. Its biggest fans seem to be the Walton Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and other foundations that want to support the proliferation of non-union charter schools with low costs and high teacher turnover. Walton gave $50 million to TFA; Broad collected $100 million from a group of foundations for TFA. And Arne Duncan gave TFA $50 million. TFA’s special contributions to American education, it appears, are to staff non-union charter schools and to demonstrate that teaching is not a profession.

Categories Charter Schools, Research, Teach for America, Unions

Peter Greene vs. Robert Pondiscio: Should Kindergartners Be Required to Read?

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2015 //
35

Robert Pondiscio wrote an article for US News defending Common Core’s requirement that all children in kindergarten must learn to read. [Full disclosure: Robert is a friend though I don’t agree with him about Common Core.]

 

Peter Greene disagrees with Pondiscio.

 

Robert writes:

 

“I’m a fan of the Common Core State Standards, but I recognize there are many reasonable and honorable areas of disagreement about them, both politically and educationally. However one recent thread of opposition strikes me as quite unreasonable: the idea that Common Core demands too much by expecting children to be able to read by the end of kindergarten.

 

“A recent report from a pair of early childhood advocacy organizations (Defending the Early Years and Alliance for Childhood) makes the argument that “forcing some kids to read before they are ready could be harmful” and calls for Common Core to be dropped in kindergarten and “rethought along developmental lines.” It’s a really bad idea. Early reading struggles left unaddressed tend to persist, setting kids up for failure. Common Core is not without faults, but its urgency about early childhood literacy is not one of them.

 

“The first red flag in the report is its insistence that Common Core is “developmentally inappropriate.” That sounds scientific and authoritative, but it’s a notoriously slippery concept, harkening back to the day when Piaget theorized that children go through discrete developmental stages. As Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia points out, “children’s cognition is fairly variable day to day, even when the same child tries the same task.” What critics seem to be saying is that Common Core is simply too hard for kindergarten. But that’s clearly not true either.”

 

Peter Greene responds:

 

“There is a world of difference between saying, “It’s a good idea for children to proceed as quickly as they can toward reading skills” and “All students must demonstrate the ability to read emergent reader texts with purpose and understanding by the last day of kindergarten.”

 

“The development of reading skills, like the development of speech, height, weight, hair and potty training, is a developmental landmark that each child will reach on his or her own schedule.

 

“We would like all children to grow up to be tall and strong. It does not automatically follow that we should therefore set a height standard that all children must meet by their fifth birthday– especially if we are going to label all those who come up short as failures or slow or developmentally disabled, and then use those labels in turn to label their schools and their teachers failures as well. These standards demand that students develop at a time we’ve set for them. Trying to force, pressure and coerce them to mature or grow or develop sooner so that they don’t “fail”– how can that be a benefit to the child.

 

“And these are five year olds in kindergarten. On top of the developmental differences that naturally occur among baby humans, we’ve also got the arbitrary age requirements of the kindergarten system itself, meaning that there can be as much as a six-month age difference (10% of their lives so far) between the students.”

 

 

As for myself, I agree with Dan Willingham, who was quoted by Robert. Children’s development is highly variable, making it impossible to set a hard and fast deadline, such as, they must be able to read at the end of kindergarten. My own children learned to read before they started kindergarten (I read to them and with them daily), but others in their class started reading in first grade; a few became readers as late as second grade. Now they are all adults, and no one remembers when they started reading, except their parents.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Testing

A Petition Calling on Scott Walker to Apologize for Insulting…..Other Americans

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2015 //
23

William Schuth, an Iraq war veteran, was insulted when Governor Scott Walker compared fighting the unions in Wisconsin to fighting terrorists in the Middle East.

 

He is now a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin and a member of AFT Local 3220, the Teaching Assistants’ Association.

 

He created a petition on Moveon.org. He asks if you will sign it.

Categories Unions, Wisconsin

Why Did California Buy K12 Snake Oil?

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2015 //
10

K12 has a well-established record as a highly profitable virtual charter school chain with low graduation rates, high turnover, and low test scores. The NCAA removed accreditation from a dozen K12 schools because of poor academics. So why is there a K12 in California?

 

Here is a report from Donald Cohen of “In the Public Interest”:

 

It says:

 

In every year since it began graduating students, except 2013, CAVA has had more dropouts than graduates. Its academic growth was negative for most of its history and it did not keep up with other demographically similar schools after 2005. Its Academic Performance Index scores consistently ranked poorly against oth- er demographically similar schools and the state as a whole….

 

Each CAVA location currently re- ceives full, per-pupil public education funding.18 Students attend school from home computers. The majority of the teachers we interviewed reported that their students are eligible to be counted as having attended with as little as one minute of log in time each day.

 

CAVA had an average graduation rate of 36%, compared to the state graduation rate for the same period of 78%.

 

Donald Cohen wrote the following in his newsletter about CAVA:

 

 

You’re receiving our newsletter a little later than usual this week. That’s because today I’m in California’s capitol to speak about ITPI’s extensive research into the largest provider of online K-12 education in California known as CAVA (California Virtual Academies) and I want to share our findings with you, too. Funded by taxpayers with public education dollars, CAVA enrolls 14,497 students in kindergarten through 12th grade at 11 virtual schools. The schools are managed by a subsidiary of K12 Inc., a publicly traded education company that produced $55 million in profits last year.

 

Our report shows that students at CAVA are at risk of low-quality educational outcomes, and some are falling through the cracks entirely, in a poorly resourced and troubled educational environment. The numbers show lower graduation rates and higher dropout rates, as well as lower academic performance and rankings, than in traditional schools in the state with similar demographics. Teachers we interviewed reported technological problems, limited availability of textbooks, and an environment that makes it difficult for students to thrive. The books show that in 2011-2012, the average CAVA teacher salary was close to half of average teacher pay in the state while K12 Inc. paid almost $11 million total to its top six executives.

 

CAVA’s problems in California are not isolated incidents. K12 Inc. managed schools have a track record of poor outcomes, including struggling academic performance and low graduation rates, in multiple states including Illinois, Colorado and Pennsylvania. K12’s reputation and CAVA’s extensive issues add up to a case study on the need for better oversight to ensure children are receiving a quality education.

 

It’s too easy for kids to fall through the cracks in CAVA’s current online schooling system so we are calling on California to immediately increase oversight of online education. Despite the state having passed some of the most forward-thinking regulations around virtual learning, leaders in Sacramento must revisit what the state can do to ensure quality education for students no matter what kind of institution they are enrolled in. It is their responsibility to ensure the state is spending public education dollars efficiently and wisely.

Thanks,

 

Donald Cohen
Executive Director
In The Public Interest

Categories K12 Inc., Virtual Charter Schools
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