Archives for the month of: July, 2016
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Texas: Charter Lobby Seeks Capital Funding

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2016 //
10

The charter industry in Texas wants to take part of the capital funding that now goes to public schools. Charter schools in Texas do not perform as well as public schools, but they have a powerful lobby of business elites who are contemptuous of public schools.

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/texas-charter-schools-see-obstacle-to-growth/nr33z/

Currently, public schools are required to give space to charter schools. Public education in Texas have been underfunded since the legislature cut $5.2 Billion from them in 2011.

But charters want their own dedicated funding stream, even though the funding will be taken from public schools.

Here’s a thought: why don’t the billionaires like John Arnold and Tecans for Education pay for charter facilities?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Texas

A Study of Branding and Marketing in the New World of School Competition

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2016 //
8

A few years ago, when I visited Michigan, I spoke with about 80 district superintendents. The most common complaint from them was the money they had to spend every year advertising themselves in a fierce competition with other districts. The money follows the child, so larger enrollments meant bigger budgets. Each district, they said, typically puts about $100,000 into campaign to poach students away from neighboring districts.

They thought this was a huge waste of resources, since they also had to hire people to design their marketing materials.

This study reviews the practices of branding and marketing schools in a competitive environment.

The charter chain that does it best is Success Academies, which targets its audience, sends out mailers, and blankets the neighborhood with notices to parents. Its goal is to have more applicants than places, so it can advertise that it has a long waiting list.

When Success Academy opened its first school in Harlem, it had a marketing budget of $325,000. The public school with which it competed had $500 to print flyers and brochures.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry

ECOT: How Ohio Wastes Money to Pay for Students Who Don’t Participate

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2016 //
19

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Equity and Adequacy Coalition writes about the results of an investigation conducted by the Ohio Department of Education.

ECOT is the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. It is a for-profit online virtual school. It has one of the lowest graduation rates of any school in the nation. Its owner, William Lager, is one of the biggest campaign contributors to Republicans in Ohio.

ECOT’s waste felt at the school district level

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) has determined that a sample of ECOT students participate, on the average, one hour per day-one fifth of the time required. If that holds true of ECOT’s enrollment, of the $108 million ECOT extracted from school districts in FY 2016, a total of more than $80 million was collected for time students were not participating in instruction.

589 districts are suffering funding deductions flowing to ECOT. On the average, the deduction is $183,175 per district. Columbus Public Schools lost $11,618,822 to ECOT at the high end and Indian Creek lost $177 last school year.

The ECOT scheme drains scarce resources from school districts–and for what? Student participation, an average for 20% of the time required. Hence, for a district like Northridge Local in Licking County, over $100,000 of its $154,000 flows to ECOT for time students are not participating.

The district-by-district deduction data should be of concern to school officials and their constituents.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Funding, Ohio, Privatization

Debbie Wassermann Schultz Resigns as Chair of the DNC

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2016 //
150

Debbie Wassermann Schultz announced her resignation as chair of the Democratic National Committee.

During the campaign, Senator Sanders called for her resignation and said the DNC was not playing fair. The leak of emails proved him right.

Her departure should signal more than just a change at the top.

It should open a much-needed discussion of the neoliberal policies that many national Democrats shared with the GOP. The bipartisan consensus on critical issues should be reconsidered.

The party must take a clear stand against fracking, against privatization of the public schools and other public services, against trade deals that hurt working Americans, and for stronger protections for college students, the environment, and the 99%. Regulations of banks must be strengthened to prevent a repeat of the 2008 economic meltdown.

Democrats must begin here and now to renew their commitment to social justice, economic fairness, and promotion of the common good. The blurring of the lines between the two parties is nowhere more obvious than in the Democrats’ support for school privatization and high-stakes testing. Historically, these are Republican issues. Democrats must listen to the experts in every field, the people who do the actual work, not the think tanks in D.C., not the hedge fund managers, not the financiers, and rebuild the trust of their base.

Categories Accountability, Democrats

Lisa Eggert Litvin: Why is New York Sticking with Common Core?

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2016 //
13

The subject of standards and assessments is very much up in the air. Most of the states that signed on to administer either of the federally funded Common Core tests–PARCC and SBAC–have dropped out. A few states have abandoned Common Core, while others are calling it something else. There is a growing trend among states that drop PARCC or SBAC to substitute the SAT or the ACT, but neither of these tests were designed as high school graduation tests or as “college-and-career-ready tests.” They are supposed to predict readiness for college, but have nothing to do with career-readiness. Nor does it make sense to leave the Common Core tests and to adopt instead one of the college entrance examinations, not only because they are inappropriate, but because they are aligned with Common Core. David Coleman, heralded as the “architect” of the Common Core, is now president of the College Board. Representatives of the ACT were members of the small group that wrote the Common Core standards. The system has been designed so that students are stuck with Common Core whichever way the state turns, unless it writes its own standards and tests.

Lisa Eggert Litvin, president emeritus of the Hastings-on-Hudson PTSA and co-chair of the New York Suburban Consortium for Public Education wonders why New York continues to hang on to the Common Core standards even though Governor Cuomo’s task force said they should be completely revised.

She notes that early childhood experts have excoriated the standards as developmentally inappropriate. As a result of the Common Core standards, she says,

children’s love for learning is dissipating rather than growing. Parents report that their children don’t want to go to school, that they feel like failures if they can’t read, that there’s no time for play or choice, and that the children are exhausted — in kindergarten. Children lose confidence and feel insecure, all because they aren’t reaching standards that, for many, simply cannot be reached at their stage of development, or because of their challenges.

Yet despite what children are feeling, despite the detailed findings of the Task Force, despite the loss of learning that is occurring, CC is slated to remain in effect well into the future. Specifically, the transition to replacement standards outlined by the Task Force will take several years, until fall 2019 at the earliest — with CC staying in place in the interim.

This makes no sense. Instead, the CC standards should be be put on hold, and already existing, well regarded non-CC standards should instead be used in the interim — just as is being done in other states.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Common Core, New York

Bernie Sanders on Wikileaks: Debbie Wasserman Schultz Must Go

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2016 //
63

Senator Bernie Sanders was interviewed this morning by Jake Tapper on CNN this morning, and the subject was the Wikileaks that revealed the efforts by staff members of the Democratic National Committee to undermine his candidacy. Senator Sanders said he was not shocked; he has known for months that the DNC was not playing fair, and he once again called for the resignation of its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Washerman Schultz must be held accountable, and it is only a matter of time–minutes, hours, or days–until she steps aside. If she should appear at the podium during the convention, she will get a hostile reception from the delegates. The DNC staff must support all Democratic candidates in primaries. It compromised its integrity during the primaries in this election.

Whoever takes her place should be committed to broadening the base of the party and reaching out to the supporters of Senator Sanders. Not as a gesture, but as a genuine program of remaking the Democratic party and restoring its progressive values. As Senator Sanders said in the interview, the focus for now must be on uniting to prevent the election of Donald Trump. Jake Tapper asked him about Tim Kaine, his colleague in the Senate. Sanders replied that Kaine is not as progressive as he (Sanders) is. But on Kaine’s “worst day,” he said, he is 100 times better than Donald Trump. Trump is already reaching out to disaffected Sanders voters, hoping to woo them and win them at the height of their rage and disappointment.

Bernie Sanders created a political earthquake, and it won’t go away. He raised the issues that had been brushed aside for years by a faux bipartisan consensus: about economic inequality, about further enrichment of the 1%, about the need to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure and produce good jobs by doing so, about disastrous trade deals that outsourced jobs and hurt working people, about making public college tuition-free for all students with the aspirations to go to college, and a host of other issues that go to the character of our country and our future. The movement he started will not disappear. He will use his energies, first, to defeat Donald Trump, and second, to build an organization to sustain the movement for a fair and just society that serves all people, not the 1%.

Bernie has won a place of honor in American history as a seer, a champion for causes that will survive and continue until they have won general acceptance and are no longer controversial.

If you believe in his ideals and goals, help him build his organization. Keep the momentum going.

Norman Thomas, the Socialist who ran for president six times, once wrote something that could be a description of Bernie’s contribution to political discourse:

“I am not the champion of lost causes, but the champion of causes not yet won.”

Categories Accountability, Democrats

Russia Leaked the DNC Emails

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2016 //
114

About a month ago, there were news reports that Russian government hackers broke into the Democratic National Committee’s email server and stole thousands of emails.

The Washington Post reported this security breach on June 14.

Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.

The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.

CNN said that the target of the Russian hacking was the opposition research on Donald Trump.

The emails were released this week by Wikileaks.

Gawker reports here that the leaks came from Russia.

The emails showed that the DNC staff favored Clinton–a party stalwart–over Sanders–a newcomer to the party. This is not surprising. Bernie said so many times and he was right.

Why would the Russian government want to leak these emails on the weekend before the Democratic convention?

Now here is a curious coincidence. The Trump campaign weighed in hard on the Republican platform to eliminate any language threatening to arm the Ukrainians against the Russian rebels, contrary to longstanding Republican policy.

The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has been dismissive of calls for supporting the Ukraine government as it fights an ongoing Russian-led intervention. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, worked as a lobbyist for the Russian-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych for more than a decade.

Still, Republican delegates at last week’s national security committee platform meeting in Cleveland were surprised when the Trump campaign orchestrated a set of events to make sure that the GOP would not pledge to give Ukraine the weapons it has been asking for from the United States.

Inside the meeting, Diana Denman, a platform committee member from Texas who was a Ted Cruz supporter, proposed a platform amendment that would call for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia, increasing aid for Ukraine and “providing lethal defensive weapons” to the Ukrainian military.

“Today, the post-Cold War ideal of a ‘Europe whole and free’ is being severely tested by Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine,” the amendment read. “The Ukrainian people deserve our admiration and support in their struggle.”

Trump staffers in the room, who are not delegates but are there to oversee the process, intervened. By working with pro-Trump delegates, they were able to get the issue tabled while they devised a method to roll back the language.

On the sideline, Denman tried to persuade the Trump staffers not to change the language, but failed. “I was troubled when they put aside my amendment and then watered it down,” Denman told me. “I said, ‘What is your problem with a country that wants to remain free?’ It seems like a simple thing.”

Finally, Trump staffers wrote an amendment to Denman’s amendment that stripped out the platform’s call for “providing lethal defensive weapons” and replaced it with softer language calling for “appropriate assistance.”

That amendment was voted on and passed. When the Republican Party releases its platform Monday, the official Republican party position on arms for Ukraine will be at odds with almost all the party’s national security leaders….

Trump’s view of Russia has always been friendlier than most Republicans. He’s said he would “get along very well” with Vladimir Putin and called it a “great honor” when Putin praised him. Trump has done a lot of business in Russia and has been traveling there since 1987. Last August, he said of Ukraine joining NATO, “I wouldn’t care.” He traveled there in September, and he told Ukrainians their war is “really a problem that affects Europe a lot more than it affects us.”

For Trump, the biggest threat to Europe is not Russia, according to people familiar with his thinking. He believes the United States should focus on helping Europe fight Islamist terrorism and open borders, not confronting Putin. He has called for a reduction of the U.S. commitment to NATO. He simply doesn’t see Russia as a dangerous threat.

Now who would want to sow discord among Democrats as the convention begins?

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Republicans

Venture Capitalist Slams Boston Parents Who Object to More Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2016 //
19

Massachusetts has been engaged this past year in a heated public debate about “lifting the cap” on charter schools. Public school parents are concerned that lifting the cap will encourage a proliferation of charter schools that will harm public schools, draining away students and funding.

One blogger, known as Public School Mama, has become deeply invested in protecting her children’s public school. Recently she and other parents have been slammed on Twitter by an out of state venture capitalist who thinks he knows what is best for parents in Boston and everywhere else.

This venture capitalist doesn’t like public schools. He calls those who defend them ugly names, suggesting they are akin to Nazis or segregationists. He thinks he is a “freedom rider,” although he is not on a bus risking his life for anyone.

My own experience has taught me that it is useless to engage with people who won’t listen. It is passing strange to tell parents that they should open the flood gates to privatization and relinquish their attachment to their community public schools, especially when the person doing the lecture doesn’t even live in the state.

Categories Boston, Charter Schools, Massachusetts

Denver: 47 Teachers Will Lose Their Tenure Because of Ratings System Based 50% on Test Scores

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2016 //
25

According to Chalkbeat Colorado, Denver is set to strip 47 teachers of their tenure because they received two consecutive ineffective ratings.

The state law passed in 2010 called S. 191 requires that teachers be evaluated annually, with student scores counting for 50% of the teachers’ ratings. The law was written by State Senator Michael Johnston, who spent two years as a Teach for America recruit. Johnston predicted that his law would cause every teacher, every principal, and every school in Colorado to be “great.” There is no evidence that it has had that effect.

DPS did not provide a list of the schools at which the 47 teachers set to lose tenure taught. But the district did provide some information about the teachers and their students:

— Twenty-eight of the 47 teachers set to lose tenure — or 60 percent — have more than 15 years of experience. Ten of those teachers — 21 percent — have 20 years or more of experience.
Overall, about 33 percent of non-probationary DPS teachers have more than 15 years experience, and about 14 percent have more than twenty years of experience.

— The majority of the 47 teachers — 26 of them — are white. Another 14 are Latino, four are African-American, two are multi-racial and one is Asian.
About three-quarters of all DPS teachers — probationary and non-probationary — are white.

— Thirty-one of the 47 teachers set to lose tenure — or 66 percent — teach in “green” or “blue” schools, the two highest ratings on Denver’s color-coded School Performance Framework. Only three — or 6 percent — teach in “red” schools, the lowest rating.

About 60 percent of all DPS schools are “green” or “blue,” while 14 percent are “red.”

— Thirty-eight of the 47 teachers — or 81 percent — teach at schools where more than half of the students qualify for federally subsidized lunches, an indicator of poverty….

Pam Shamburg, executive director of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, said the union has long been concerned about this provision of Senate Bill 191 because teachers who are demoted to probationary status lose their due process rights.

She’s also worried it will lead to higher teacher turnover. Ten of the 47 DPS teachers set to lose non-probationary status have submitted notices of resignation or retirement, officials said, though nine of them did so before learning they would lose tenure.

“This happening to 47 teachers has a much bigger impact,” Shamburg said. “There will be hundreds of teachers who know about this. They’ll say if they can do that to (that teacher), they can do that to me.”

Categories Denver, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

George Lakoff: Understanding the Appeal of Donald Trump

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2016 //
27

George Lakoff, the psycholinguist, is expert in explaining how people respond to verbal messages. His book “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” was a best-seller.

I met Lakoff a few years back and asked him about how to frame issues in the education debate. We spent two hours talking. He left a lasting lesson with me: liberals think that people are persuaded by facts; conservatives persuade with narratives, not facts.

In this important article, he explains the reason for Trump’s success: Trump is the Father, the strong authoritarian father who will protect us and keep us safe from all threats.

“In the 1900s, as part of my research in the cognitive and brain sciences, I undertook to answer a question in my field: How do the various policy positions of conservatives and progressives hang together? Take conservatism: What does being against abortion have to do with being for owning guns? What does owning guns have to do with denying the reality of global warming? How does being anti-government fit with wanting a stronger military? How can you be pro-life and for the death penalty? Progressives have the opposite views. How do their views hang together?

The answer came from a realization that we tend to understand the nation metaphorically in family terms: We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have homeland security. The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).

What do social issues and the politics have to do with the family? We are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families.

In the strict father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says, which is taken to be what is right. Many conservative spouses accept this worldview, uphold the father’s authority, and are strict in those realms of family life that they are in charge of. When his children disobey, it is his moral duty to punish them painfully enough so that, to avoid punishment, they will obey him (do what is right) and not just do what feels good. Through physical discipline they are supposed to become disciplined, internally strong, and able to prosper in the external world. What if they don’t prosper? That means they are not disciplined, and therefore cannot be moral, and so deserve their poverty. This reasoning shows up in conservative politics in which the poor are seen as lazy and undeserving, and the rich as deserving their wealth. Responsibility is thus taken to be personal responsibility not social responsibility. What you become is only up to you; society has nothing to do with it. You are responsible for yourself, not for others — who are responsible for themselves.

Winning and Insulting

As the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, Vince Lombardi, said,

“Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” In a world governed by personal responsibility and discipline, those who win deserve to win. Why does Donald Trump publicly insult other candidates and political leaders mercilessly? Quite simply, because he knows he can win an onstage TV insult game. In strict conservative eyes, that makes him a formidable winning candidate who deserves to be a winning candidate. Electoral competition is seen as a battle. Insults that stick are seen as victories — deserved victories.”

Categories Accountability, Trump
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