Archives for the month of: July, 2016
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Tom Ultican: Why is the San Diego Foundation Funding Privatization of the Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2016 //
11

Foundations are tax-exempt because they are supposed to do good works on behalf of society. But more and more foundations are putting their vast, untaxed wealth into the national effort to undermine public education and to hand it over to entrepreneurs, amateurs, fast-buck operators, and religious institutions. Privatization does not promote the common good. Privatization is harmful to the commonweal.

Tom Ultican, a high school teacher of advanced math and physics, takes a look at the powerful San Diego Foundation. Sadly, most of its funding in education goes to nonpublic schools. Public schools seem to be an afterthought.

He writes:

San Diego Foundation was established in 1975 and has grown to almost $700 million in assets. It’s self-described purpose: “As one of the nation’s leading community foundations, The San Diego Foundation strives to improve San Diegans’ quality of life by creating equity and ensuring opportunities to be WELL (Work, Enjoy, Live & Learn).” In 2014, they gave over $10 million to educational endeavors. The following table illustrates the spending bias against public education.

Of that $10 million, only $373,000 went to public schools. That’s odd, because the overwhelming majority of children in San Diego attend the neglected public schools.

Another favorite recipient of San Diego Foundation funds is competency-based education. The goal of CBE is to put every child on a computer. We know from multiple studies that children learn best from human teachers who respond to them. Yet the San Diego Foundation has jumped on the Bandwagon to Nowhere.

And here is another strange pattern:

The largest single grant bestowed by the SD Foundation was $2,6 5 0,7 0 9 to the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego. The JC Foundation had net assets at the end of 2014 of $171,593,990.

The Jewish Community Foundation spending on education follows a similar pattern as the San Diego Foundation. They spent $466,830 for groups working to privatize public education most of which went to TFA ($406,330). They also spent lavishly on private schools including $146,000 to La Jolla Country Day, a decidedly upscale K-12 private school.

By far the largest grant by the Jewish Community Foundation was the $25,817,228 bequeathed to University of California San Diego. A major patron of both the Jewish Community Foundation and UCSD is the Qualcomm founder and billionaire, Irwin Jacobs.

Three more grants from the Jewish Community Foundation were interesting. They gave Cornell University $5,511,000. They also gave the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund $6,362,171. The Goldman Sachs fund asset total at the end of 2013 was $1,500,395,380. And the JC Foundation gave the SD Foundation $1,515,800. Why give money back? It is like the Charter School Growth Fund giving their benefactors from Walmart $15,000,000 in 2013. Why?

Why would any foundation give a donation to the Goldman Sachs fund, which has assets of $1.5 billion? Puzzling.

Categories Funding, San Diego

Michael Arnovitz: In Defense of Hillary Clinton

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2016 //
154

Michael Arnovitz writes here about the attacks on Hillary Clinton and the reasons behind them.

Arnovitz probes the hatred for Hillary that is so pronounced on both the left and the right. And he notes that until she starting running for office, she was one of the most admired women in the world.

He writes:

To conservatives she is a radical left-wing insurgent who has on multiple occasions been compared to Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Kremlin’s long-time Chief of Ideology. To many progressives (you know who you are), she is a Republican fox in Democratic sheep’s clothing, a shill for Wall Street who doesn’t give a damn about the working class. The fact that these views could not possibly apply to the same person does not seem to give either side pause. Hillary haters on the right and the left seem perfectly happy to maintain their mutually incompatible delusions about why she is awful. The only thing both teams seem to share is the insistence that Hillary is a Machiavellian conspirator and implacable liar, unworthy of society’s trust.

And this claim of unabated mendacity is particularly interesting, because while it is not the oldest defamation aimed at Hillary, it is the one that most effortlessly glides across partisan lines. Indeed, for a surprisingly large percentage of the electorate, the claim that Hillary is innately dishonest is simply accepted as a given. It is an accusation and conviction so ingrained in the conversation about her that any attempt to even question it is often met with shock. And yet here’s the thing: it’s not actually true. Politifact, the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking project, determined for example that Hillary was actually the most truthful candidate (of either Party) in the 2016 election season. And in general Politifact has determined that Hillary is more honest than most (but not all) politicians they have tracked over the years.

He reviews data about her polling numbers and concludes:

So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.

Especially interesting is his commentary on her speaking fees, which Donald Trump points to as a mark of corruption:

Money — OK let’s talk about her money. Hillary has a lot of it. And she has earned most of it through well-paid speaking fees. And the idea of getting paid $200,000 or more for a single speech seems so ludicrous to many people that they assume that it simply must be some form of bribery. But the truth is that there is a large, well-established and extremely lucrative industry for speaking and appearance fees. And within that industry many celebrities, sports stars, business leaders and former politicians get paid very well. At her most popular for example, Paris Hilton was being paid as much as $750,000 just to make an appearance. Kylie Jenner was once paid over $100,000 to go to her own birthday party, and to this day Vanilla Ice gets $15,000 simply to show up with his hat turned sideways.

And let’s talk about the more cerebral cousin of the appearance agreement, which is the speaking engagement. Is $200k really that unusual? In fact “All American Speakers”, the agency that represents Clinton, currently represents 135 people whose MINIMUM speaking fee is $200,000. Some of the luminaries that get paid this much include: Guy Fieri, Ang Lee, Cara Delevingne, Chelsea Handler, Elon Musk, Mehmet Oz, Michael Phelps, Nate Berkus, and “Larry the Cable Guy”. And no that last one is not a joke. And if you drop the speaking fee to $100k, the number of people they represent jumps to over 500. At $50,000 the number jumps to over 1,200. And All American Speakers are obviously not the only agency that represents speakers. So there are in fact thousands of people getting paid this kind of money to give a speech.

For millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills, the very idea that someone can make $100,000 or more for just giving a speech or hanging out at a Vegas nightclub is obscene. But as Richard Nixon used to say, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Hillary didn’t invent the speaking engagement industry, and she isn’t anywhere near the first person to make a lot of money from it. And while her fees are in the upper range of what speakers make, neither they nor the total amount of money she has made are unusual. It’s just unusual FOR A WOMAN.

And yes, I’m back on that, because I feel compelled to point out that before he ran for President in 2007, Rudy Giuliani was making about $700,000 a month in speaking fees with an average of $270k per speech. It’s estimated that in the 5 years before his run he earned as much as $40 million in speaking fees. Nobody cared, no accusations of impropriety were made, and there was almost no media interest. So why did Giuliani get a pass, while Hillary stands accused of inherent corruption for making less money doing the same thing?

Arnovitz does not write about Hillary Clinton’s stance on education. Perhaps he doesn’t know or care about it. Personally, I do not expect her to join the Network for Public Education. She may turn out to be as bad as Obama on education. My expectations are low. But the alternative is far worse: Putting a racist, misogynistic, unethical, self-serving, narcissistic, jingoist bully in the White House is unthinkable.

Categories Education Reform, Politics

The Failure of Pay-for-Performance Plans in Hospitals

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2016 //
27

Harvard Magazine published a noteworthy article about the failure of pay-for-performance plans in hospitals, written by Marina N. Bolotnikova. It is worth your time to read. It is devastating.

The logic of pay-for-performance systems is simple enough: pay doctors and hospitals based on how well their patients are doing, rather than on the number of medical services they provide. The payment structure was designed to fix a central problem in American healthcare. The United States spends far more per person on healthcare than any other country, yet has the poorest health outcomes in the advanced world. Pay-for-performance, also known as value-based purchasing, was meant to encourage doctors to optimize the welfare of patients while discouraging spending on unnecessary care.

There was never any evidence that pay-for-performance works, said Li professor of international health Ashish Jha, who investigates the effectiveness of economic incentives in the healthcare market. A recent paper published this April in the BMJ by Jha finds that the federal pay-for-performance program under Medicare, the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP) program, hasn’t had any impact on mortality rates. Nor do HVBP-participating programs show any statistically significant advances over the small number of hospitals that don’t participate in the program. No hospitals, not even those with the worst mortality rates before the program was implemented, showed an improvement that could be attributed to pay-for-performance. “We looked across all different conditions and couldn’t find a single one where it seemed to have a meaningful effect,” Jha explained.

In the early 2000s, the Bush administration ran a pilot version of pay-for-performance at about 200 hospitals that agreed to tie their payments to certain quality measures. Even then, Jha said, “the broad consensus in the community was that it didn’t really work.” Despite this, the system was implemented on a national scale by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which created the HVBP program at more than 90 percent of U.S. hospitals. “There was a sense that we needed to begin somewhere,” he explained, “and that this program would be good to test out nationally.”

Medicine and education could learn from one another. Why has there been so little attention to the persistent failure of pay-for-performance plans in education? States and districts and the federal government pour hundreds of millions, billions, into developing incentives, despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences studied the issue in education and said that such plans don’t work, especially when the bonuses are tied to test scores.

Categories Merit pay, VAM (value-added modeling)

BREAKING NEWS: Trump Picks Foe of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2016 //
42

Jonathan Pelto reports that Donald Trump has chosen Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate.

http://jonathanpelto.com/2016/07/14/breaking-news-trump-goes-anti-public-education-running-mate/

His far-right credentials include dedication to privatization of public schools.

Just on Tuesday, a commentator on CNN predicted that Trump would not choose Oence because he is so far out of the mainstream, far to the right of the Republican Party. He was wrong.

Categories Education Reform

Rafe Esquith Wins His Day in Court

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2016 //
19

Rafe Esquith, the celebrated Los Angeles public school teacher and founder of the Hobart Shakespeareans, won an important legal victory. He is suing LAUSD, which fired him, as a class action on behalf of all teachers in the district who have been removed from their jobs and placed in limbo awaiting due process. LAUSD moved to dismiss his lawsuit, but the judge denied the district’s request. This brings the fifth-grade teacher to a trial of his claims.

http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-rafe-esquith-lawsuit-20160713-snap-story.html

http://laschoolreport.com/just-in-judge-denies-la-unified-request-to-dismiss-lawsuit-filed-by-fired-teacher-rafe-esquith/

Categories Los Angeles

Los Angeles “Reform” Group Makes Grants to Other Reformers

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2016 //
14

We were told when “Great Public Schools Now” began functioning, it would support all schools, whether they were public schools or charter schools. This is the group funded by Eli Broad and his friends that intends to take over half the student population in the Los Angeles public schools and put them into privately managed charters.

But Great Public Schools Now made its first grants, and none of the money went to public schools.

A group that has vowed to start high-quality schools across Los Angeles on Thursday announced its first grant recipients: a charter school that is expanding, an after-school and summer enrichment program for children, and an organization that recruits recent college graduates for two-year teaching stints.

None of the money went to the Los Angeles Unified School District, although it’s likely to benefit from the teacher-recruitment effort.

Of course, it is doubtful that the public schools will benefit from a program that recruits more inexperienced, ill-prepared Teach for America recruits. Why not fund a program that recruits experienced teachers or creates a pipeline to develop career teachers?

What has logic got to do with it?

We knew all along that Eli Broad and his fellow billionaires don’t want public schools in Los Angeles, except as a dumping ground for kids kicked out of charters.

My bet is that the group will make a contribution to a public school to maintain the illusion of even-handedness. But we know where its heart is. Privatization.

Categories Broad Foundation, Los Angeles

ECOT’s Sweet Deal: Free from Regulation or Oversight

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2016 //
10

Today is beat up on ECOT day. It makes an easy target. Its owner William Lager rakes in tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers, which he profits from, and he uses a small portion of the profits to reward his benefactors in the Republican party of Ohio. Meanwhile his school has truly horrible results, but accountability is not for him! He has really good friends who take care of his operation.

But it is even worse than it appears.

Bill Phillis, a former deputy commissioner of education in Ohio (and now in his 80s, fighting to restore integrity to education), posted this newsletter on his Ohio Equity and Adequacy blog:

ECOT: If we can’t rig enrollment data and make staggering profits, we will have to close

In an early year of ECOT’s operation, this money-making machine was required to pay back a million dollars to rectify enrollment/student participation issues. In the context of the return of funds gained illegally, an Ohio Department of Education (ODE) person signed an agreement that ECOT would only be required to offer educational programming in order to receive funds, whether or not enrollees participated.

Now that ODE is in the process of auditing student participation, ECOT is protesting by legal action and engaging in political tactics to stir up their supporters. Their bevy of highly paid lobbyists is on high alert.

Some observations:

ECOT is demonstrating a high level of brazen behavior in protesting an audit of their suspicious enrollment/student participation practices. Possibly they believe their record of huge campaign contributions will give them cover.

The ODE person who signed a contract that has allowed ECOT to collect funds for students not participating should be investigated and prosecuted.

The provision of online programming ECOT-style can’t possibly cost as much as ECOT receives per student. The profit certainly must be really huge.

Personnel in districts losing students to the failed ECOT machine should be outraged and make every attempt to recover those students.

William Phillis
Ohio E & A

Do you want to know the definition of BRAZEN? Are how about chutzpah?

ECOT is suing the state to prevent it from auditing whether students log in and receive instruction. ECOT thinks it should be paid whether students log in for a minute or not at all.

Accountability is only for the little people, to paraphrase the billionaire Leona Helmsley. (She said “taxes are only for the little people,” but she was wrong. She went to jail.)

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

ECOT’s Secret Sauce: Money, Money, Money.

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2016 //
6

Denis Smith worked in the Ohio charter school office, and he saw the combustible mix of deregulation, money, and politics. This is a combination sure to produce scandal. And it has.

Smith reports here on the biggest scandal: the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT). It has the lowest graduation rate in the nation, according to the New York Times. It is a for-profit virtual charter. Its owner William Lager is one of the state’s major donors to the Republican Party. His patrons protect him from scrutiny or accountability.

One of the supporters of ECOT is Andrew Brenner, chairman of the Ohio House Education Committee. He despises public schools.

Brenner has said previously that “public education is socialism.” But if we follow the Chairman’s logic (hmm, I thought only well-known socialists and collectivists like Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev were referred to as Chairman), we find illogic, viz., the Chairman of the Education Committee seems very much opposed to public education.

But the illogic gets worse.

Profits generated from the public funds received by charter school operators like Lager and White Hat Management’s David Brennan flow to their favorite Republican politicians in the form of contributions. These profits, snared by privately operated management companies with hand-picked, unelected boards not subject to full public transparency and exempt from 150 sections of state law, ultimately wind their way to committee chairs in the legislature as well as more senior leadership in the House and Senate.

To Chairman Brenner, this is capitalism at work. And capitalism is the very opposite of socialism, right? Yes socialism, as evidenced by the operation of public school districts who raise their revenue from the taxation of local property and who are subject to full legal transparency and accountability, governed by a group of citizens elected by qualified voters in the community where they operate. These are community schools, the real public schools. Contrast that with charter schools, where, unlike public schools, there is no requirement for board members to be qualified voters, viz. citizens.

I wonder why Republicans aren’t in favor of requiring proof of citizenship for charter school board members, as they are for some voters. Hmmm.

Public money for private purposes.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization

Nevada: Vouchers Steal Funding from Public Schools 

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2016 //
5

A pro-public education group called Educate Nevada Now issued the following statement: 
 

“Dear Friends:

 

“On July 29, 2016, we will proudly support a group of parents who stepped forward on behalf of Nevada’s 460,000 public school students. These parents said, “No!” to vouchers for private education, and so did a Nevada judge. On July 29, Nevada Supreme Court Justices will hear why the state’s voucher program is unconstitutional and illegal.

 

“Nevada’s Education Savings Account (ESA) voucher program would siphon off critically needed funds from Nevada’s public schools – as much as $30 million a year! That money would be available to any Nevada family to pay for private education, even if that family already has the means to pay and currently affords private education for their children.

 

“Our public schools are already suffering from underfunding. Some schools don’t have enough money to fix air conditioning units or have working lockers. Others don’t have enough teachers or can’t afford the necessary programs for our growing population of English language learners.

 

“If the voucher program is implemented, vital school programs and services will be cut. More teaching positions will be cut. Class sizes will balloon.

 

“Your tax dollars contribute to Nevada’s public schools, and our state constitution mandates that those dollars go to public education FIRST—before roads, infrastructure, prisons, or any other state expense. Your tax money will be taken away from the public schools and instead used for private education expenses that could range from private schools to private tutors, from textbooks to transportation and more.

 

“There are many reasons why the voucher program doesn’t make sense for Nevada. Please visit our website to learn more about the unconstitutional and illegal nature of the program, and what it means for Nevada’s hardworking families and children: http://www.educatenevadanow.com.

 

“Nevada’s future depends on public schools that provide a quality education to every child. And the public money that Nevada’s taxpayers provide to our state should be used for those public schools – not for private purposes.

 

“Please join us in our fight to ensure that the voucher program is never implemented. Let’s work together to support our children, our public schools and the future of our state.

 

“Sincerely,
“Educate Nevada Now ”

Our mailing address is: 

Educate Nevada Now powered by The Rogers Foundation

701 S. 9th StreetLas Vegas, NV 89101

Categories Education Reform, Vouchers

Jersey Jazzman Takes Charter Cheerleaders to the Woodshed for Destroying Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2016 //
24

Jersey Jazzman, aka public school teacher and Ph.D. candidate Mark Weber, wrote a blistering reproach to the charter school cheerleaders who have persuaded Governor Chris Christie that charters accomplish more with less. This enables Christie to propose an outrageously inequitable plan that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

He shows how certain loud charter zealots in New Jersey have argued that charters in Newark are way better than Newark public schools, despite the clear evidence that the charters enroll a different demographic and have high attrition rates.

He points out that when honest critics point out the verifiable facts, they can expect to be slimed and smeared by the charter cheerleaders, who glory in the privatization of public schools.

Weber reviews the shameless attacks by charter zealot Laura Waters and refutes her claims with data, evidence, not rhetoric.

He concludes:

I’ve spent more time answering Waters’ post than it deserves; however, I’m doing so this time for a reason. Chris Christie has proposed a radical change in school funding — one that even Peter Cunningham agrees is pernicious for this state’s neediest children. Yet how does Christie justify his plan? With stories of charter school “success.” And who has sold this tale?

Laura Waters, Peter Cunningham, and the well-heeled charter school operators themselves. In their zeal to pump up charters and shoot down honest critics like Julia Sass Rubin, these fine, reformy folks have set up the students who attend New Jersey’s urban, public, district schools for a huge cut in their schools’ budgets.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I don’t ever pretend that I don’t have a point of view. I’m a New Jersey public school teacher and I am damn tired of being blamed for things completely out of my and my colleagues’ control. I think the celebration of charter school “success” is largely a pretext for beating up teachers unions, gutting teacher workplace protections, and cutting back even further on public school funding, particularly in urban districts. I think charter cheerleading keeps us from having a real conversation about the structural problems related to race and economic inequality in America.

But now we’re seeing the consequences of unbridled charter love are even more dangerous than mere charter expansion. Charlatans like Christie are using the very arguments charter cheerleaders spout daily to make the case that we can simply turn our backs on urban schools and their students. So long as a few charter schools get better than average test scores — by whatever means necessary — it’s perfectly fine to cut the budgets of urban district schools.

This awful rhetoric can be laid directly at the feet of the charter industry and their willing saps in the media — and that includes the professional reformy propaganda machine that exists solely to counter informed critics like me or Bruce Baker or Julia Sass Rubin.

I won’t speak for Bruce [Baker] or Julia, but I’m pretty sure they’d agree with me when I say this: I am not against school choice or charter schools per se. I started my K-12 career in a charter school. I think there are worthwhile reasons for having charters and other forms of alternative schools. I have been teaching long enough to know not every kid is going to fit well in her neighborhood school, and that there are good reasons to offer other choices. I think there are charters that have practices that may well be worth studying.

So folks like me and Bruce and Julia may have a point of view our opinions, but we aren’t questioning charter cheerleading simply as a reflex; our criticisms are reasonable and informed by the evidence. Do you disagree? Fine, I’m happy to debate.

But understand: your ill-informed, statistically-inept charter cheerleading is no longer simply about justifying your own school; it’s now being used to excuse a wholesale defunding of our urban public schools.

Do you really want that on your hands?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, New Jersey, Privatization
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