Archives for the month of: June, 2016
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

As Detroit’s Schools Collapse, Walton Billionaires Put Another $250 Million into Charter Expansion

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2016 //
27

Irony: on the same day that the New York Times reports that charters and competition have caused an unprecedented collapse of education in Detroit, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart) will pump another $250 million this year alone into starting more new charters.

The Waltons–who are all billionaires–are doubling down on failure. They are doing to public schools what Walmart does to communities: destroying the competition, disrupting the community, and targeting public education for privatization.

I vow never to set foot in a Walmart. I know that is difficult for people because in many communities, all the mom-and-pop stores folded after Walmart arrived. Now mom and pop are low-wage greeters for Walmart.

Walmart relies heavily on foreign imports for its products, thus contributing to the outsourcing of manufacturing in this country. It has undermined American workers and home-grown businesses. Now it wants to drive public schools out of business with the same predatory techniques. The Waltons are not good neighbors.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Pittsburgh Teacher: Don’t Let Big Money and Corporate Media Overrule Our Elected School Board!

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2016 //
1

Jon Parker, a teacher in Pittsburgh, warns that the corporate reformers are trying to reverse the results of the school board election that they lost by attacking the board’s choice of a pro-public education superintendent. The reformers (Gates-funded and called “A+ Schools”) are abetted by the pro-privatization Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Reformers don’t like democracy unless they can buy it. The pro-public education board ended the Gates’ experiment with test-based evaluation and canceled a contract with Teach for America. That sort of thing makes reformers really angry. How dare they assert a vision different from the great Bill Gates! How dare they end his experiment in evaluating teachers! How dare they say no to TFA!

Parker outlines the scenario:

Chapter 1: Pittsburgh has a democratically elected school board.

Chapter 2: Pittsburgh’s citizens vote for pro-public education candidates.

Chapter 3: A+ Schools’ (a.k.a. Bill Gates’ employee) candidates lose.

Chapter 4: A+ Schools doesn’t know what it feels like to lose and becomes upset.

Chapter 5: Pittsburgh’s democratically elected school board selects a pro-public schools superintendent without allowing A+ Schools to railroad the process.

Chapter 6: A+ Schools becomes more upset and elicits the support of local media in a witch hunt against the new superintendent.

Categories Corporate Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Pittsburgh, Privatization, Support for public schools, Teacher Evaluations

Please Join the Save Our Schools March on Washington on July 8

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2016 //
8

Please join me and many others in Washington, D.C., on July 8 to express our support for our nation’s public schools and educators.

If you are fed up with the privatization of public schools and the high-stakes testing that has harmed real education, please join us.

You will meet old friends and make new friends. There are many wonderful activities planned before and after the March.

Join us and raise your voices for better public schools, a respected teaching profession, and a new direction for American education.

I hope you stop and say hello!

Coalition Letterhead

Please Join

Save Our Schools Coalition for Action

People’s March For Public Education & Social Justice

On July 8 a coalition of grassroots groups, union organizations, and activists will rally at the Lincoln Memorial and march in support of education and social justice. We are marching for community-based, equitably-funded schools that are the heart of neighborhoods.

We stand and march for:

 

·         Full, equitable funding for all public schools

·         Safe, racially just schools and communities

·         Community leadership in public school policies

·         Professional, diverse educators for all students

·         Child-centered, culturally appropriate curriculum for all

·         No high-stakes standardized testing

Join us in Washington D.C. on July 8-10th to celebrate democracy by living it.

·         July 8th: Rally & March – Lincoln Memorial

Speakers include:  Diane Ravitch, Rev. William Barber, Jamaal Bowman,  Jonathon Kozol,  Jesse Hagopian, Morna McDermott, the Youth Dreamers, Gus Morales, Detroit Teachers Union members, Denisha Jones, Sam Anderson, Tanaisa Brown, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Barbara Madeloni, Brett Bigham, Ruth Rodriguez, Bishop John Selders, United Opt Out, Yohuru Williams, Lisa Rudley, the Dyett Hunger Strikers and Jitu Brown, Mike Klonsky, Michelle Gunderson.

·         July 9th: Activists Conference: – Howard University

                New & Experienced Organizers Working for Public Education & Communities

            Workshops for individuals and groups so we can return to our communities as leaders, organizers,             participants, artists, and/or performers.   Sessions for families, children & youth.

 

            Keynotes: Jitu Brown and Bishop John L.Selders Jr.

·         July 10th: Coalition Summit Work Session –activists & organizers meet to plan

An action this big requires much collaboration and support, and the Coalition has many involvement opportunities for individuals and organizations alike. Consider helping in the following ways:

1.       Endorse the principles and the 2016 event

2.      Provide active publicity about the 2016 event to your organizations and listserves

3.      Organize in your area and assist people in attending the event

4.      Provide financial support for the 2016 event and/or scholarships to deserving attendees

Free bus July 8  leaves 335 Adams St., Brooklyn at 6:00AM & returns after rally. To sign up email ysiwinski@uft.org; give your name & e-mail.   Only 60 seats

http://saveourschoolsmarch.org/2016/03/sos-coalition-event-lincoln-memorial/.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Resistance, Testing

New York Times: The Expansion of Charters Has Caused a Collapse of Education in Detroit

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2016 //
22

This http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/for-detroits-children-more-school-choice-but-not-better-schools.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news confirms our worst fears about charters. Its conclusion: Detroit parents have many choices but education in that embattled city is in a state of collapse. The politicians, civic leaders, and big money bet on charters instead of focusing like a laser on improving the public schools and services for children and families. That bet turns out to be a disaster for the children of Detroit.

Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.

While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.

Detroit now has more students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse, than Detroit’s traditional public schools.

“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”

Detroit is now the poster child for the failure of charters. Next time a friend asks you why you don’t like competition among schools for students, tell them about Detroit.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Detroit, Education Industry, Privatization

Pennsylvania: Court Dismisses Cyber Charter’s Claims Against 6 Parents Who Accurately Accused It of Fraud

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2016 //
15

This is one of the strangest stories of the week or year. Back in 2008, a group of parents at the Agora Cyber Charter school in Pennsylvania began questioning the financial affairs of the corporation that owned it. Agora was paying rent and management fees to another company, the Cynwyd Group, which June Brown, the founder of Agora, also owned.

In January 2009, the owners of Agora filed suit against the parents:

As parents tried to gather records and sort out the business relationships at Agora, they circulated emails expressing their concerns. They also complained to the state Education Department when the school did not provide information they requested.

In the suit filed in January 2009, Brown and Cynwyd Group charged that the parents had made statements that defamed and libeled Brown.

The complaint also alleged that the parents’ group had tried to interfere with Cynwyd’s contractual relationship with Agora “by spreading untruths about Dr. Brown and by implying that she had improperly used public funds.”

Brown and Cynwyd sought more than $150,000 in damages from the six parents for libel, slander, and civil conspiracy.

The parents denied the allegations and said they had merely sought information about the taxpayer-funded school their children attended.

Brown said the parents had defamed her and she had to defend her reputation. The parents had trouble paying for legal representation.

The suit dragged on, but in 2012, “federal grand jurors indicted Brown and charged her with defrauding Agora and her other charters of $6.7 million.”

The case against the parents remained active, to be addressed after the conclusion of the criminal trial. Brown’s criminal trial ended in a hung jury in 2014, and a retrial was canceled in 2015 after Brown’s lawyer said that she suffered from dementia. So, she escaped legal action, kept the money, but the parents were in limbo, still facing the charges of defamation that Brown had lodged against them.

Earlier this month, the charges were dismissed. The parents were relieved. One had used the family’s mortgage payment to pay a lawyer and lost her home fighting the lawsuit.

It does seem unjust that the parents were dragged through legal proceedings for more than seven years, accused of defaming Brown, even while she was under federal indictment for defrauding her charters of millions of dollars.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Parents, Pennsylvania, Virtual Charter Schools

Are the Reformers Cracking Up?

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2016 //
58

Jeanne Allen’s Center for Education Reform is one of the long-time reformer groups in D.C. Allen was beating the drums for school choice long before it was cool or bipartisan. Before she launched CER in 1993, she was an education analyst at the rightwing Heritage Foundation.

At the time CER was founded, it was a lonely voice on the right, touting the virtues of charter schools, choice, freedom, and innovation. But now she is soul-mates with the reformers in the Obama administration, who are as enthusiastic about charters and choice as Jeanne Allen.

This ought to be a triumphant moment. But no. Allen and CER recently released a manifesto warning that their movement was at risk. Reformers have fallen into complacency, and all the gains of the past quarter century might easily slip away.

Despite domestic and international turmoil, the report says, “the movement to ensure educational attainment for all is at a crossroads. We are losing ground in part because we are losing the argument. And our hopes of systemic change — our progress — will be lost, and we will be a nation at even greater risk, if we do not refocus our collective energies and message to connect with the broad universe of education consumers and citizens everywhere.”

Losing ground and losing the argument. Yep! Reformers must reach out to those “education consumers” and shake them up. Without a renewed sense of crisis, all the “reform” progress might be lost.

It is a strange report, to be sure. It tries to revive the evangelistic fervor of “A Nation at Risk,” the celebrated document of 1983, which warned that our nation was at risk if we didn’t reverse the “rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s schools that threatened our very survival.

Well, here we are, 33 years later, with the world’s most powerful economy and military.

Despite the dire predictions, we survived. The nation’s gravest problem is income inequality and the shrinking middle class, but for reformers, it is always about the schools.

The new reformer manifesto, unlike A Nation at Risk,” was ignored by the media. Peter Gteene and I may be the only people who read it, other than those who were paid to read it.

Damn that complacency! CER wants to rile everyone up again. We are still at risk! Really! We need more choice! More charters! Disrupt those failing schools! Privatize for innovation!

Why has the movement lost its zest and gusto? How do we awaken those 50-somethings to storm the barricades? That’s the problem. When people become too fat and happy, it is difficult to stir those old passions to break the unions and destroy the public schools.

Maybe I’m wrong, but the manifesto reads like the last gasp of a moribund movement.

Peter Greene reviewed the manifesto. He slogged through its turgid prose so you don’t have to. We all owe him a debt of gratitude.

Categories Education Reform

Stuart Egan: Tea Party Legislature in North Carolina Seeks to Lock Steep Tax Cuts into the State Constitution

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2016 //
16

Stuart Egan, NBCT high school teacher in North Carolina, describes the latest disaster cooked up by the North Carolina General Assembly, which is dominated by Tea Party extremists: a constitutional amendment to lock in steep tax cuts.

The General Assembly majority calls it TABOR, a Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

Egan calls it “A Tourniquet Around the Bloodlines of Our Republic.”


GOP leaders in the North Carolina General Assembly are pushing for a proposal to place a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would cap the income tax rate a 5.5% (currently it is 10%).

That proposal is a political tourniquet, pure and simple. And just as limited blood flow would cause harm to the skeletal system in a body, this measure would cause our state’s infrastructure to slowly disintegrate.

Chris Fitzsimon puts it very bluntly in his latest “The Follies” from June 17, 2016 (http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2016/06/17/the-follies-253/). He states,

“As the N.C Budget & Tax Center points out, that cap would cut off a vital source of revenue that the state needs and make it virtually impossible for future lawmakers to use the income tax to increase state investments, even in times of emergencies.

It also locks in place the massive tax cuts for the wealthy passed in 2013 that will cost more than $2 billion a year when fully in effect, more than the entire budget of the community college system and early childhood programs combined.

The new lower tax cap could threaten the state’s coveted AAA bond rating and force increases in the state sales tax and could lead local governments to raise property taxes and fees. It’s a terrible idea that threatens funding for public schools, health care, and environmental protections and makes decisions for future members of the General Assembly that will be elected by the voters just like the current members were.”

That’s scary to think about. The very fabric, the very sinews of society like schools, healthcare, and environmental protections would be instantly jeopardized and it would take years to recover as part of the GOP’s plan is to change the constitution of the state.

Remember that all three of those areas (schools, healthcare, and environment) have already been hazardously affected in the last three years here in North Carolina.

Per pupil expenditures are lower, charter school growth is uncontrolled, and teacher pay is still low despite what the current administration wants to boast.

Medicaid expansion was denied and we as a state are still paying into a system that benefits other states but not ours because of political ideology and a dislike for the current president.

The fracking industry is being given an open door and permission to do whatever it wants. Duke Energy’s coal ash spills have still gone relatively unpunished.

How long will the people of North Carolina let these barbarians rampage through the state and destroy the public sector?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, North Carolina

Archives: Reagan Avoided Trump (Content Added!)

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2016 //
11

Ha! Another article disappeared by WordPress! Or the combination of WordPress and my iPhone, unhappy together.

Here is the link.

I saw Michael Reagan, President Reagan’s conservative son, on CNN last week, and he said that his father had little in common with Trump. His father, he said, was a man of deep humility. He never boasted or bragged. He deflected difficult situations with a joke, and he had a large store of them.

During President Reagan’s second term, I was invited with a group of about 20 other educators to meet with the President. We met in the Cabinet Room of the White House, which is awe-inspiring. I sat next to Vice-President Bush and directly across from President Reagan. He listened to all we had to say, and at the end of the meeting he told a story about an encounter with a young college student when he was governor of California. The angry young man said, “your generation can’t possibly understand my generation. We grew up with space rockets and computers, and….” named the many innovations of the age. Reagan said he replied, “Son, my generation invented all those things.”

That was Reagan. Donald Trump is no Reagan.

Categories Education Reform, Politics

Bob Braun: Who Pays the Salary of Chris Cerf’s Chief of Staff in Newark?

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2016 //
8

Bob Braun has written an astonishing column about the arrogance of power.

Chris Cerf, who was previously the Commissioner of Education in New Jersey, stepped in to take control of the Newark public schools after the unpopular Cami Anderson stepped down. Cerf is a bona fide reformer, having previously worked for for-profit Edison Schools and as deputy chancellor to Joel Klein in New York City.

Cerf’s chief of staff is De’Shawn Wright, who began his education career in Teach for America, then moved from one policy position to another.

Braun stumbles upon a mystery: Who pays Wright’s salary?

Wright, a champion of charter schools in Washington, DC, New York, and Newark, and past associate of Cerf and Cerf’s protégé and predecessor, Cami Anderson, is Cerf’s chief of staff, according to an organizational chart released at Tuesday night’s board meeting. Wright is paid a six figure salary but exactly how much is a secret–as is the source of his income.

Although Wright is probably the second most powerful figure in the Newark schools, he doesn’t work for the Newark schools.

Got that? Let’s repeat it: Although Wright is probably the second most powerful figure in the Newark schools, he doesn’t work for the Newark schools.

Who does he work for? Probably for the Fund for Newark’s Future–otherwise known as what’s left of the $100 million Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Newark schools. But that hasn’t yet been confirmed because the fund is a private organization and not subject to New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act (OPRA). Or some other private foundation devoted to the expansion of charter schools.

Braun began sleuthing:

So how can a school system hire as staff chief someone who doesn’t work for it?

Answer: It doesn’t. Someone else hires him–but you’re not allowed to know.

Only in Newark.

This reporter asked Valerie Wilson, the school’s business administrator, who pays Wright and how much and for whom he really works. She said she didn’t know.

Repeat that: The business administrator of the Newark schools doesn’t know who pays the superintendent’s chief of staff–or how much he is paid.

So then I asked board member Dashay Carter, who, to her credit, is one of the few board members uncomfortable with this unique arrangement.

“We haven’t been told,” she said.

Newark school board members, elected by the city’s residents, are not allowed to know who pays the salary of the superintendent’s chief of staff.

So then this reporter asked Wright who pays his salary. He said I should ask the press officer for Cerf and then he literally ran away. Well, ok, he walked fast away.

Wright refused to say who pays him.

Braun spent 50 years as an investigative reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger. He couldn’t stand not knowing. But no one is talking.

What gives?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Newark

NPE Action: Stop John King from Reviving NCLB Punishment System!

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2016 //
14

Please open the link from NPE Action and, if you agree that John King is overreaching, write a letter to your member of Congress.

King will testify before the Senate Committee that led the revision of NCLB and eliminated the federal punishments. King is trying through regulation to restore them.

Please let your members of Congress hear from you!

Here are the members of the Senate HELP Committee.

http://www.help.senate.gov/about/members

Most of the Democratic members (especially Warren, Sanders, Murphy, and Bennett) are accountability hawks. Write them anyway.

Categories Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »