John King awards $245M to charters incl $8M to the Uncommon Schools charter chain, a chain he previously ran that is known for outrageously high suspension rates. Jersey Jazzman called him the King of Student Suspensions. (His own children never attended a no-excuses charter school; when he lived in New York, they were enrolled in a Montessori school.)
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/10/john-king-new-seced-is-king-of-student.html?m=1
Research accumulates that charters don’t necessarily outperform public schools. That they drain resources from public schools, thus harming the great majority of children who attend public schools. That they fail to be accountable or transparent. That their sponsors and advocates are funded by billionaires and hedge fund managers. That even the best of them, according to a new study by Dobbie and Fryer, have no long-term effects. That they open and close with alarming frequency. That many are abject failures.
Yet John King is using his brief tenure to hand over hundreds of millions to continue the Public School Demolition Derby.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
John King is an idiot. I like Obama, but supporting people like this turd makes me consider voting Republican…
Please don’t go off the deep end like that, Tony.
Help is on the way:
Tony, do you like Obama? When he appointed John King? Really?
Someone who is supposed to be on vacation is posting this news?
John King sits in his office and smiles as if there is absolutely no collatoral damage from these awards.
Same for the billionaires scrambling to fund more.
Anyone betting on John King’s next job?
Secretary of Education
Abigail….John King is already Sect. of Education. Obama replaced Arne Duncan with the failed NY King…and there is little reason to think that either presidential candidate will change that.
It will be the first true educational test of Hillary’s Presidency is she wins. If she is willing to keep King in place, nothing has changed.
Paraphrasing Forrest: “Insane is as 245M inane dollars do.”
Wish I had access to just .001% of that inanity.
And if I did have that $ I’d pay hookers to set him up for some troubles. Hey, it’s a fantasy, why not?
Do the words conflict of interest mean anything to the corrupt Obama administration?! What criminals run our government!
No conflict of interest?
It’s really a large amount of money, considering they spent 360 million on their other priority, which is new standardized tests for all public school students.
Charters and testing- that’s the Obama Administration in a nutshell.
It’s really a pretty grim and joyless agenda for public school students. They could drop in for testing season and not show up the rest of the year and they would have fulfilled their purpose as far as the Obama Administration is concerned.
testing
…should not be high stakes.
My service provider, centurytel is quite inconsistent, especially in the early evenings. Sometimes it takes pages a half a minute to load on what is supposed to be high speed internet. Oh, well the price to pay for living in the woods, eh!
I knew I should have built that fire to sit by. No need to wait for connections, just for a flame to get going and boy scout juice helps that!
I’d trade my high speed for the woods in a New York minute. Just playing around with the testing comment, though. Actually, I occasionally post “testing” because I occasionally have the same problem loading content here in la la land. So do my students during — wait for it — testing.
DC is hopeless as far as public schools. They’re ga-ga over charters. Over the moon. Listen to any of them talk.
It’s a droning recitation of the problems with public schools and then charter cheerleading.
Public schools are unfashionable. The only hope for their continued survival is at the state level. Give up on these people. They’re not interested in public schools.
If anyone thought the grants were carefully vetted, don’t kid yourself.
The Obama Administration gave 71 million to Ohio based on a fraudulent application.
The only reason anyone found out it was fraudulent was because of a sharp-eyed reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Had it not been for that ONE guy 71 million would have gone to the worst charter state in the country.
As a future public school teacher, I can only wonder where my future career will be…gotta keep hoping
To quote from JerseyJazzman’s blog (post by Michael Fiorillo)”
“It’s more than a little ironic that the first Black President (or as I once heard journalist Gwen Ifill say during an interview, “the so-called Black President”) has promoted and insisted upon schools and a pedagogy based upon the once-discredited-but-again-fashionable accommodations of the Jim Crow/Booker T. Washington era.”
I’d call it bitter irony, especially considering Obama’s hints about his next job.
“The conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests … in a way I find really satisfying,” the president said.
The uniquely American idiom “selling us down the river” comes to mind.
History will judge Obama harshly but only if the country will have remained democratic in principle and practice and will not have devolved into an oligarchy or corporatocracy. Should the country so devolve, then history will praise Obama.
If people think we have a representative government, meaning legislators who actually represent us….that is generally a farce. Once elected, most legislators represent themselves. They enter public service as people of modest means, and leave as millionaires. Follow the money. Follow the insider trading they allow themselves (but no on else). Follow the lobbyists junkets, and even Gulen junkets to Turkey. See Congress and Senate reps whose mates are weapons manufacturers…so they avoid voting for gun safety. See the same reps vote for deregulation of industry, banking, Wall Street, so that their personal corporate connections are protected in and by DC. See the Bush family, the Clintons, Obama…makes little difference if it is a Dem or Rep Congress and Prez….. tRump admits all this….but he is still the most arrogant, ignorant, and vile…so I am still voting for Hillary.
However…..
What we have is “taxation without representation”.
Can we stop paying income and property tax when these self serving legislators do not follow the voters choices, and they proceed to flush their constituents down the toilet for ready cash of the billionaires?
This $245 Million is one more example of our skewed democratic republic. A travesty. The system must be changed.
We need a revolution.
Yes . . . You do.
sad day – those are my taxes I pay…and the taxes Trump does not pay…
what about universal pre K…public college students that need it…extra support for high schools in areas that have need…
I protest against the large number of bad and frustrating news today. Is it too late for posting something calming?
Breathe in…1,2,3,4,…breathe out 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,…breathe in 1,2,3,4,…breathe out…1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8… Keep going long enough and you will either fall blessedly asleep or pass out. 🙂
Mate,
Here is good news. I am in Las Vegas. Saw the great Lionel Ritchie. Won $8 at the slots and walked away. Last night saw a fabulous magician named Mat Franco. 28 years old and a star. America’s Got Talent winner.
I made my first batch of Caesar salad dressing, and it was delicious, waking up every piece of lettuce and endive in my platter. Not bad for a first attempt.
The squares of three consecutive natural numbers is the same as the number of days it takes the sun to watch the earth go around it. That sounds like good news.
Huh?
Charter schools amount to a parallel school system, separate school districts unto themselves. They do not work in cooperation with the host district, they operate as parasites that do drain funds and resources from the host schools with which they “compete.” It’s a weird kind of competition; they get the money from the district schools and the district schools must supply the bussing for these schools as well. They duplicate many of the top administrative positions that are richly rewarded with six figure salaries. The district superintendent has no say over the charter schools that he must budget for because the charter school (each charter school) has its own mini superintendent. The charter school has its own unelected board of directors. When kids leave the district schools for a charter school, the fixed costs of the district school do not go down. Hey, no problem, bleed the district schools until they drop dead so the charter cheerleaders can declaim with glee, “The failure factory deserved to die, ha, ha, ha!!”
This is probably how WA State just got $7 million for the 8 privatized “charter schools” we have that are currently using a questionable money laundering technique of having state $ go to a (fiscally insolvent) rural district, which then takes a cut and hands the $$ off to the privatized “charter schools” that are now labeled as ALEs (Alternative Learning Environments). All arranged by our WA state office of education – OSPI. (I now think of them as the Office for Substandard Privatized Instruction)
Washington’s 800 # gorilla, Gates (a Trump clone), is similar to his fellow rich Washingtonians. They exploit the poor and middle class, by shifting the payment for the factors of production, like education and transportation, from taxes on incomes to, taxes on sales, which results in the poorest, paying up to 7 times the rate that the rich pay and, 3 times the rate, the middle class pays. Gates’ huge income, avoids taxes and, his palatial estate is capped at a 1% tax rate. It was completely predictable that community education would be ripped off by the colony’s greediest.
Fling bling sling. He is the “Kingpin” of edudrug cartel that feeds the undying charter zombies.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
“Progressive” Senator Sherrod Brown can be credited with the federal taxpayer rip-off,
for the amount of privatizing money, that was sent to Ohio. The Waltons want privatization and, they are willing to pay for it. Yet, Brown asked the US Dept. of Ed. to send the citizens’ tax dollars ($71 mil.) to Ohio, to expand privatization, that the citizens don’t want and, that has been an abject failure.
The US Department of Education willfully deceives Americans, by perpetuating the fraud that charter schools are “public”. In the US Dept. of Ed.’s Press Office release, about the $245 mil. sent to states, charter schools were called, public. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled the assets that taxpayers bought, are the property of charter school operators, making charter schools, government contractors. The records of charter schools, e.g. expenses, are protected by the courts, as proprietary, private business information. The regulations for public school employees, when raising funds for public schools, are stringent. There are no similar rules for charters. in a case, currently, before the Ohio Supreme Court, the requirement that charter schools merely have instruction available, whether students utilize it or not, is vastly different then the safeguards that were put in place for public schools, to prevent this interpretation. The list of reasons that charter schools are not public entities, is huge.
It is a bold-faced lie for a federal department to label charter schools, a public entity.
Reblogged this on rjknudsen.
To Mate above–more (& even better!) good news–from New Orleans Times-Picayune–
a Rapides Parish, LA teacher–fired in 2001–won a more than $1 million judgement against her school district after proving harassment (her gifted class was disbanded, she was transferred, then fired, for speaking out about a former superintendent).
Here’s a link– http://www.edweek.org/…fired-rapides-teacher-wins-1m-judgement
One for our side!
At your suggestion I applied to be a reader for these grants. I did not even get a reply to my application. It is fairly obvious that they fill the reader positions with corporate plants and ignore the applications of people who have spent years in the service of children.