Archives for the month of: August, 2016
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Randi’s Statement on Latest Vergara Decision

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
13

This just in:

WASHINGTON—American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on the California Supreme Court’s decision to reject the plaintiffs’ petition for review in Vergara v. California.

“I am relieved by the court’s decision declining an appeal of the unanimous California Court of Appeal ruling upholding California educators’ due process rights. The billionaire-funded attack, from its inception, tried to pit our children against their teachers—people who make a difference in our children’s lives every day—rather than understand and solve the real problems ailing public education. Now that this chapter is closed, we must embrace our shared responsibility to help disadvantaged kids by supporting them so they can reach their full potential. While that starts with teachers, it also means providing programs and services that engage students and address their well-being.

“I hope this decision closes the book on the flawed and divisive argument that links educators’ workplace protections with student disadvantage. Instead, as the expert evidence clearly showed—and the Court of Appeal carefully reasoned—it was the discretionary decisions of some administrators, rather than the statutes themselves, that contributed to the problems cited by the plaintiffs.

“It is now well past time that we move beyond damaging lawsuits like Vergara that demonize educators and begin to work with teachers to address the real issues caused by the massive underinvestment in public education in this country. The state of California, like many others, remains in the throes of a serious teacher shortage. We need to hire, support and retain the best teachers, not pit parents against educators in a pointless blame game that does nothing to help disadvantaged students pursue their dreams.”

– See more at: http://www.aft.org/press-release/afts-weingarten-calif-supreme-courts-decision-decline-hear-vergara#sthash.ZruIIJjh.dpuf

Categories California, Teacher Tenure, Unions

BREAKING NEWS: Teachers Win Vergara Case, California Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal!

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
20

In a big win for teachers and their unions, the California Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from a lower court ruling. The vote was 4-3. See the report in the LA School Report (controlled by Campbell Brown and The 74) here.

The initial decision had over-ruled state laws that protected teacher tenure and seniority. That decision by Judge Rolf Treu was overturned on appeal by a unanimous three-judge court. The state supreme court let stand the last decision.

Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times reports:

In a major victory for teachers unions, the California Supreme Court has let stand a ruling that preserves traditional teacher job protections such as tenure and seniority-based layoffs.

In refusing to hear the case, the state’s high court sided not only with unions, but also the state of California and others, who contended that these job protections are both constitutional and reasonable.

The case was being closely watched across the country as a bellwether on whether courts could be used to invalidate employment rights of teachers on the grounds that they violate the rights of students.

Attorneys for a group of nine students had argued that making it easier to fire bad teachers would improve academic performance. They also claimed that speedier teacher dismissals would narrow the achievement gap that separates white, Asian and wealthier students from their lower income, black and Latino peers.

There are states that have no teacher tenure, but no evidence was introduced to demonstrate that those states have higher academic performance by low-income, black and Latino students or smaller achievement gaps.

StudentsMatter, funded by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and cheered on by the corporate reform movement, spent millions of dollars fighting tenure laws, and forced the unions to do the same.

Categories California, Teacher Tenure

Ohio State Auditor: “We in the Charter Movement”

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
8

The State Auditor is supposed to be the independent, disinterested official who guards the public interest. Ohio has what may be the most wasteful, politically influenced, and low-performing charter industry in the nation. And as you will see in the following post by Bill Phillis of the Ohio Equity & Adequacy Coalition, no one is protecting the public interest. In a state where hundreds of millions of dollars have been squandered on failed charters, law enforcement should be investigating state officials.

“Day 2 (August 12) of Charter School Summit-State Auditor: “We in the charter movement must speak with one voice”

“The clear message from the State Auditor to the charter school audience on August 12 was that the charter industry must speak with one voice to get more funding for operations and facilities. He noted that traditional public school advocates speak with one voice. Since when?

“While interviewing some high performing charter school students, the Auditor orchestrated a line of questioning which left the impression that charter students are courageous pioneers in a movement that is preferred to the traditional public system. Meanwhile, notwithstanding that state officials have failed to maintain a thorough and efficient system of common schools, traditional schools outperform the charter industry.”

William Phillis
Ohio E & A

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Categories Charter Schools, Fraud, Ohio

A Milestone for This Blog: 15,000+ Posts!

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
27

I just noticed that yesterday the blog reached a milestone.

I have posted 15,005 times since April 26, 2012.

The blog is closing in on 28 million page views.

You have been very patient in sticking with me through 15,000+ posts!

What great readers I have!

You are fast to correct me when I am wrong, fast to correct errors of syntax, spelling or grammar, and fast to alert me to breaking news in your district, city, and state. Sometimes you read the news here before it is reported in the state or national media. More often, you read news here that is never reported in the national media because they don’t pay the same attention to education as we do.

I am trying to limit myself to only five posts daily, but you can see that I seldom meet that goal!

Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, and thank you for sending me news stories from your communities.

Categories Personal

Julian Vasquez Heilig Debates Howard Fuller about School Choice

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
7

Julian Vasquez Heilig, professor at Sacramento State, researcher, and prominent blogger, debates Howard Fuller, leader of BAEO (Black Advocates for Educational Opportunity). BAEO is funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and other rightwing foundations.

The debate focuses on the recent decision by the NAACP annual conference and by Black Lives Matter to call for a moratorium on new charters, because of the harm done to black communities.

Julian, a leader of the NAACP education division in California, is highly critical of charter schools because of their lack of accountability and their private management; Fuller supports school choice as the best way to help all black children.

This is well worth listening to.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice

Mississippi: Southern Poverty Law Center Sues to Block Charter Funding

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
5

http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2016/07/12/mississippi-charter-school-lawsuit/86984366/

The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing the state of Mississippi to block public funding of charter schools.

The Mississippi Constitution requires schools to be under the supervision of the state and local boards of education to receive public funding. But under the act, charter schools receive public funding even though they are exempt from the oversight of the state Board of Education, the Mississippi Department of Education and local boards of education.

Republican Gov. Phil Bryant called the lawsuit a frivolous attempt by “Democrats and their allies” to usurp decisions made by the GOP-majority Legislature.

You get the picture: the actions of the state legislature are not limited by the actual language of the state constitution.

But to no one’s surprise, a conservative policy group in the state has found charter school parents to intervene in the lawsuit.

Four parents with children in charter schools are seeking to be heard in a lawsuit that could overturn the way Mississippi pays for the alternative form of public education.

The parents, who also either have or had children in the Jackson Public School District, are represented by an attorney for the conservative Mississippi Justice Institute.

They said Wednesday that they’re requesting a chancery judge’s permission to intervene in a lawsuit filed last month by the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of seven parents whose children attend JPS.

So, here is an interesting situation. The conservatives who used to fight against court-ordered desegregation are now able to present themselves as defenders of black children who want to attend segregated charter schools.

School choice in Mississippi is accomplishing exactly what the segregationist of the mid-20th century wanted.

Meanwhile, the public schools of Mississippi are woefully underfunded, and the governor and legislature did their level best to defeat a proposition to require equitable funding. And they succeeded, assuring that the children of Mississippi will continue to be in schools that are lacking the resources they need.

So much for the civil rights movement of our time.

Categories Education Reform

Julian Vasquez Heilig Spars with Steve Perry over Charters and Privatization

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
13

This video shows a panel discussion at the meeting of the National Urban League’s annual meeting.

There are four members of the panel, but the fireworks happen between Julian Vasquez Heilig, a noted scholar, and Steve Perry, who calls himself “America’s Most Trusted Educator.” Perry is opening a charter school in Harlem this fall. He has run a magnet school in Hartford, Connecticut.

Of course, Julian has the advantage in that he is deeply knowledgable about research and has a strong philosophical commitment to democratic governance and social justice. In addition to being a researcher, a professor, and a member of the board of the Network for Public Education, he is education chair of the NAACP in California.

I think you will find it interesting.

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

John Oliver Explains the Frauds and Scams in Charter World!

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
32

John Oliver, who has a regular show on HBO, devoted a big chunk of his program last night to explaining the frauds perpetrated by unregulated and unsupervised charter schools. He also reminds his viewers that the language of competition and choice is a hoax when talking about education. You will see charters opening and closing like shoe stores in a mall. You will see charter owners fattening their bank accounts at the expense of the children. You will see charter operators plagiarizing their applications from others.

Readers of this blog will see some familiar scams–in Philadelphia, Florida, and Ohio, for example–but even you might be surprised by some of the stories he shows and documents.

With enough time, he might have devoted an entire hour to the scams in California, Texas, Indiana, and elsewhere.

But the great thing about his show is that this is the first time that a major media outlet has demonstrated the bipartisan consensus that supports frauds.

Please watch and share with your friends and neighbors.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Privatization

Gary Rubinstein: Beware of ASDs!

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
2

Gary Rubinstein has followed the evolution of the Tennessee Achievement School District closely since it was launched in 2011.

In this post, he warns reformers and others to beware of copying the concept. It failed. Do not replicate failure might be the message. Although states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada seem determined to replicate the ASD, regardless of its failure.

The ASD, you may recall, pledged to take the bottom-scoring 5% of schools in the state and vault them to the top 25% in five years. It hasn’t happened. As Gary shows, achievement gains have been negligible at best.

Despite the failure of the ASD to meet its goals, the new Every Student Succeeds Act endorses the idea that the state should take over the bottom 5% of schools and fix them. ASD have proved that this is no simple matter.

Gary writes:

Each time the idea of creating an ASD is introduced by a state legislator, testimony from people whose own professional futures depend on the perception of success in the Tennessee ASD are used to get the required votes. Various education reform lobbyist groups produce reports and blogs about how successful these ASDs have been.

I think that education is a true science and one that deserves to evolve according to the scientific method. In the case of these ASDs, the initial conjecture would be that tenured teachers cause low test scores. The experiment to verify this conjecture is to create an ASD somewhere like Tennessee, fire the tenured teachers, and let the charter schools take over and teach the students. Education reformers seem to have no problem with these first steps. But the power of the scientific method is completely nullified when the results of the experiment are ignored when they contradict the working conjecture. That is what has happened in this case and why ASDs are gaining momentum around the country.

Any state considering making an ASD would be wise to listen to the words of the pioneer of the Tennessee ASD, former superintendent, Chris Barbic. A few months ago on a panel discussion Barbic was asked if he thought it was good that various states were considering replicating his program. Even he had his doubts. He said that there is a very limited supply of charters capable of executing these difficult turnaround efforts. If twelve states, he said, are all trying to get the same four or five charter operators, “it’s gonna create an issue.” Considering his dream team of charter operators could not move the original ASD schools out of the bottom 5%, this is a sobering assessment of the viability of creating franchises of these turnaround districts around the country.

Education reform is full of false promises and magic beans. Whether it is charter schools, test-based teacher evaluations, school closures, merit pay, making a more difficult curriculum, common core standardized tests, computerized learning, these strategies should not proliferate based on skewed PR, but on actual merit. How can we expect kids to become critical thinkers when decisions about their future are made by people who refuse to be critical thinkers themselves?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Tennessee, Turnaround Schools

Peter Greene: Lab Rats for America, A Kafkaesque Version of Our Future

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
36

Peter Greene writes here about a polished (and terrifying) video released by the ACT Foundation that portrays the programmed education of the future.

He begins:

Oh my God. Oh my effing God.

If you want to see where Competency Based Education, data mining, the cradle to career pipeline, the gig economy, and the transformation into a master and servant class society all intersect– boy, have I got a video for you. Spoiler alert: this is also one way that public education dies.

I’m going to walk you through the video, embed it for your own viewing, and tell you about the people behind this. Hang on. This is stunning. And I’ll warn you right up front– this is not some hack job that looks like amateur hour video production (like, say, an in house USED video). This is slick and well-produced. Which somehow makes it more horrifying.

The video is a little SF film taking us ten years into the future. Imagine you are one of the one billion people using a new technology called The Ledger. And our slogan…?

Learning is earning.

Peter patiently walks you through this dystopian vision of the future of training, disguised as “education.”

He writes:

Exactly what task will certify that you have acquired one hour’s worth of critical thinking?

And how do we even begin to discuss the notion that it doesn’t really matter whether you learn quantum physics from a PhD in the field or from a person who once sat in one class taught by that PhD?

And does anybody think that this is how the children of the wealthy will be educated? Will they accept this sort of “education”? Will they accept this total violation of data privacy?

This is not education. This is training. This is operant conditioning for the servant class that also provides the upper class with tools that let them trickle even fewer benefits down to the working class.

In fact, I would say that this is just training rats to run a maze, but it’s even worse than that, because ultimately even if we were to accept the premise that simply giving some job-ish training for the underclass is good enough, and even if I were to accept the racist, classist bullshit that somehow ignores the immoral and unethical foundations of such a system, the fact remains that this would be a lousy training system. To reduce any job of any level of complexity to this kind of checklist-of-tasks training provides the worst possible type of training.

So, no, this isn’t even sending rats into a maze to earn a pellet of food. This is carrying the pellet dispenser with you as an app. This is saying, “Well, the maze just involves twelve left turns and seven right turns.” Then I hand the rat a tiny phone with an app that measures his ability to turn corners, and once the rat has turned twelve left corners and seven right ones, the app spits out a food pellet.

This is also, not incidentally, the death of public education for any but the wealthy. In the world of the Ledger, there are no teachers, no schools, and no education for any purpose other than to satisfy the requirements of the people with power and money. In the world of the Ledger, education training exists only to help workers better react to the demands of employers. There is no benefit to education training except to trade for money. The Ledger is the wet dream of every corporate boss who said, “Why are they wasting time teaching these kids all this extra stuff. I’m not gonna pay them for that.”

It is important to know what the futuristic thinkers have in mind for us and our children, whether their vision will expand our ideals or contract them. This is most certainly the latter.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Technology
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