Archives for the month of: July, 2015
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Charter Frauds Increase, But US DOE Plans to Raise Funding

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2015 //
16

Martin Levine reports in “Nonprofit Quarterly” that charter frauds are multiplying, yet the U.S. Department of Education fecklessly plans to increase charter school funding by 48%.

The frauds are facilitated because of inadequate supervision by state or local agencies. Unscrupulous charter operators take advantage of deregulation to steal taxpayers’ dollars or make lucrative contracts with friends, relatives, or their own corporations.

Levine reports:

“Six distinct categories were needed for this report to capture the practices of the charter school operators that were studied:

*Charter operators using funds illegally for personal gain

*School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses

*Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger

*Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided

*Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and

*Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools

“At the federal level, despite the apparent misuse of such large sums of scarce funds and the lack of adequate oversight mechanisms, the 2016 budget that is working its way through Congress includes a significant increase in funding with little if any increase of management. According to Jonas Persson of PR Watch, “Despite drawing repeated criticism from the Office of the Inspector General for suspected waste and inadequate financial controls within the federal Charter Schools Program—designed to create, expand, and replicate charter schools—the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is poised to increase its funding by 48 percent in FY 2016.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, U.S. Department of Education

Andrea Gabor: What Rafe Esquith’s Former Students Say About Him

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2015 //
8

Rafe Esquith, the acclaimed teacher who created the Hobart Shakespeareans, is in teacher jail, suspended from teaching his fifth graders, their production canceled.

Andrea Gabor interviewed one of his former students to get a sense of Esquith the teacher.

He is a teacher who changes lives.

When will LAUSD file charges , present evidence, and give him a chance to clear his name?

Categories Los Angeles

Peter Greene: A Primer on Privatization

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2015 //
23

Most people have no idea about the privatization movement. They don’t know that the narrative of crisis (“our schools are failing, failing, failing”)–repeated again and again–is intended to clear the way for privatization.

Peter Greene explains the insidious plan here.

Step one, create a crisis.

Step two, take power away from the community, dissolve the local school board, give it to the mayor, the governor.

Step three: cash in.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Funding, Privatization, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

Mike Klonsky: Rahm and Rauner Make War on Working People of Chicago

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2015 //
35

Mike Klonsky writes that Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Governor Bruce Rauner have brought the city and state to their knees with their austerity budgets.

“Mayor 1% finally made his long overdue payment to the teachers pension fund, but not without extracting his pound of flesh — 1,400 teachers being laid off and another $1B in borrowing, another windfall for his bankster patrons and another attack on the teachers union and teachers’ collective bargaining rights.

“Aside from the hardship the layoffs will bring to the teachers and their children and families, think about what the loss of so many union jobs means to the community and the continuing destruction of the city’s middle class.

“Think also about spiraling class sizes and program cuts in city schools and what that will mean, especially for the neediest of students who need personalization more than ever. It also makes another teachers strike that much more likely.

“By my figuring, 1,400 teacher jobs lost means minimally, about $84 million in yearly taxable income that won’t be spent in neighborhood groceries, auto dealers, hair salons and shoe stores. That translates to hundreds more lay-offs from local businesses, millions more in lost revenue for the city and state and the further pauperization of the community’s working class and small businesses owners.”

“Likewise for our sociopathic billionaire governor who will shut down the state government, with an even greater civic toll, rather than taxing his corporate and LaSalle St. cronies even one penny more on their speculative windfall profits.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Chicago

SHOCKER: Connecticut Governor Malloy Vetoes Bill Requiring State Commissioner to Have Education Experience

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2015 //
23

Connecticut’s Governor Dannel Malloy vetoed legislation requiring the state education commissioner to have educational experience and qualifications.

 

He said it encroached on the governor’s authority to name anyone he wanted, regardless of qualifications.

 

Mayor Bloomberg took that path when he appointed publisher Cathie Black as schools chancellor. She lasted three months.

 

Will Governor Malloy be comfortable if the pilot of his next flight has no experience? Will he go to a hospital where his surgeons are fresh from college with no training or experience?

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

GOOD NEWS! Feds Drop Plan to Rate Colleges

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2015 //
18

Thanks to successful lobbying by representatives of higher education, the Obama administration has backed away from one of its loopiest ideas: rating every college and university in the nation.

No one loves Big Data more than the U.S. Department of Education. No federal agency understands less about the limitations of Big Data than the U.S. Department of Education.

Categories Higher Education, U.S. Department of Education

Why Douglas County, Colorado, Vouchers Were Ruled Unconstitutional

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2015 //
13

A few days ago, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the voucher plan adopted by the school board in Douglas County was unconstitutional. It was a split decision. It is puzzling that it was a split decision, because the Colorado state constitution explicitly prohibits any public funding of religious institutions.
Text of Section 7:
Aid to Private Schools, Churches, Sectarian Purpose, Forbidden.

 

Neither the general assembly, nor any county, city, town, township, school district or other public corporation, shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any public fund or moneys whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian society, or for any sectarian purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church or sectarian denomination whatsoever; nor shall any grant or donation of land, money or other personal property, ever be made by the state, or any such public corporation to any church, or for any sectarian purpose.

 

s Hess at the American Enterprise Institute writes in the National Review that the U.S. Supreme Court might well decide to throw out this part of the state constitution because it was written in the late 1870s as a Protestant ban on funding Catholic schools. Such amendments, found in 2/3 of the states’ constitutions, are known as Blaine amendments for James G. Blaine of New York, who led the movement to keep public money out of religious schools.

Categories Colorado, Vouchers

Nevada Vouchers Violate the State Constitution

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2015 //
9

The Nevada legislature recently passed one of the most sweeping voucher programs in the nation. Every child in the state is eligible for a grant of $5,000 so long as they previously attended a public school for at least 100 days.

 

Make no mistake, this is a voucher program. Most students will use these vouchers to attend religious schools, which has been the experience of other states.

 

And yet, the Constitution of the state of Nevada clearly states in Article 11:

 

Sec: 9.  Sectarian instruction prohibited in common schools and university.  No sectarian instruction shall be imparted or tolerated in any school or University that may be established under this Constitution.

Section Ten.  No public money to be used for sectarian purposes.  No public funds of any kind or character whatever, State, County or Municipal, shall be used for sectarian purpose.
[Added in 1880. Proposed and passed by the 1877 legislature; agreed to and passed by the 1879 legislature; and approved and ratified by the people at the 1880 general election. See: Statutes of Nevada 1877, p. 221; Statutes of Nevada 1879, p. 149.]

 

The Nevada legislature clearly is violating the state Constitution by enacting a program that allows public money to be transferred to sectarian schools. The language could not be clearer. It is not ambiguous.

 

This voucher program in Nevada is not conservative; conservatives don’t ignore the explicit language of the Constitution. Conservatives don’t destroy traditional institutions that are integral to a democratic society.

 

The voucher promoters should be rebuked by public opinions, editorials, and the courts. They are violating the spirit and the letter of the Nevada Constitution.

 

 

Categories Nevada, Privatization, Vouchers

Arthur Camins Warns Democrats about Dangers of School Choice

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2015 //
21

Arthur Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., has a warning for Democrats that school choice is a bad choice.

He omits Republicans because they have become the party of school choice and privatization.

School choice is an alluring term, but the reality is far different from the rhetoric.

He writes:

“In our culture the “the right to choose” suggests an almost inalienable individual right, making for powerfully resonant political rhetoric. However, behind the easy-to-swallow positive connotation of choice, there is underlying message in its use in the context of education. If stated explicitly, the message might cause a little indigestion: Be out for yourself and don’t worry so much about your neighbors or community…

“However, what is moral or sensible for an individual does not make for sound or just education policy for a society. The moral burden falls not on parents, but on those who knowingly advance the wellbeing of the few at the expense of the many….

“Supporters of equity and democracy must depend upon and develop agency and hope for community solutions because when there is only despair, the only rational course of action is individual survival. Ideological supporters of privatization understand this and actively undermine democratic participation and the promise of collective solutions. That is why since the 1980’s they have followed an explicit starve-the-beast strategy to defund public institutions in order to undermine quality, public trust, and confidence. That is why they favor private charter boards over elected school boards.
I have come to believe that the struggle for equity must include a tandem strategy of opposition and advocacy.
Friends of equity need to oppose funding charter school, not because choice is inherently a bad idea but because the spread of charter schools is morally corrosive and drains money from other local schools. Since funds are always limited, the opportunities for the few come with the sacrifice of others. “They are stealing your child’s future,” might be an appropriate opposition slogan. …

“Progress requires an opt-in campaign for local public schools based on community rather than individualist values. Advocacy should highlight the fundamental characteristics of effective public schools both in the U.S. and abroad and contrast these with prevalent market-based solutions….

“Candidates need to hear from the public: There are better choices than school choice to improve education.”

Categories Charter Schools, Equity, Justice, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers

My Common Core Confession

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2015 //
42

A confession: an anthology that I edited in 1990 is on the Common Core recommended reading list. It is titled “The American Reader.” It has songs, poems, and speeches (thus, a mixture of “literature” and “informational text.” The CC reading list does not mention my name as the editor. I didn’t discover this until I began to receive royalty checks for this book, published 25 years ago.

Regardless, I will continue to criticize the Common Core. I don’t think a group of self-appointed educrats should tell the nation’s teachers what percentage of their time should be devoted to literature or nonfiction

Categories Common Core
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