Please take this opportunity to learn from the best practices of Success Academy.
As you know, it posted nearly 500 videos. Then it took some of them down after Gary Rubinstein posted one of them. Then they were restored. Then they were all removed.
A reader informed me that one of the videos is back up. It is about teaching middle school math.
Please watch and tell us what you learned.
Teacher Ken Bernstein gathered the best tweets of the night about the encounter between Trump and Clinton. They were all written by Stuart Stevens, who was Romney’s chief strategist.
These include many laugh-out-loud tweets.
For me, the most astonishing remarks by Trump were, first, when he blamed “the generals” for failing to beat ISIS (which was Obama’s fault, of course); and second, when he lavished praise on Putin. Amazing.
Matt Lauer was a huge disappointment. He failed to follow up on any of Trump’s lies and boasts and allowed him to do what he does best: change the subject to how great he is.
Education Week posted an article, like many others, on the growing African American opposition to the expansion of charter schools.
This was in response to resolutions passed by the NAACP annual convention (not yet ratified by the national board, which must be subject to heavy lobbying by Gates and other funders) and by the Movement for Black Lives (a consortium of 50 black organizations including Black Lives Matter).
The resolutions acknowledged that schooling in black communities is being taken over by outside entrepreneurs, and black parents have no voice when this happens. It is a bit like Walmart moving into your town and killing off all the mom-and-pop stores, then hiring mom and pop as greeters in a massive chain operation, which might abandon the community if sales are not sufficiently brisk.
All such stories about this development have two go-to sources to contradict the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives: Howard Fuller of Black Alliance for Educational Options and Shaver Jeffries of Democrats for Education Reform.
Neither is a grassroots black organization.
Howard Fuller is black, but his organization has been bankrolled by white rightwing philanthropies since its inception in 2000. Its biggest funders are the Walton Foundation, the Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee (huge supporters of vouchers), the John M. Olin Foundation (now defunct), and the Gates Foundation.
Shavar Jeffries is black, but DFER is an organization that represents white hedge fund managers, including billionaires, who are contemptuous of public schools and eager to privatize them.
Nonetheless, it is heartening to see that truly grassroots groups like the NAACP and many of its chapters (including the New England chapter, which opposes Question 2 to expand charters in Massachusetts) are speaking up and opposing privatization of public schools.
Stephen Dyer wonders why Donald Trump chose to visit one of Cleveland’s lowest performing charter schools today.
He finds it odd because Cleveland has some high-performing charter schools.
So why would Trump visit a school with an F in the most important performance metric when he had plenty of much higher performing options? Perhaps it’s because the school he’s visiting is run by a for-profit company called Accel Schools Ohio. Accel is an imprint of Pansophic — a charter school firm started by K12, Inc. founder Ron Packard. Packard has an infamous reputation for political gamesmanship.
Caroline Grannan writes here about the rise and fall of a Big Reform Idea called “the parent trigger,” championed by an organization called Parent Revolution. Ben Austin started Parent Revolution as a way to empower disgruntled parents to take control of their low-scoring public school and turn it over to a charter operator. Austin led the charge for new legislation to codify Parent Revolution’s big idea (Gloria Romero claimed credit for writing the legislation; she became executive director of DFER after leaving the legislature). Parent Revolution attracted millions of dollars from the usual billionaires, including Gates, Broad, and Wasserman.
After many favorable articles, editorials, and massive publicity, what has PR accomplished?
Not much.
Grannan writes:
“Parent Revolution (PRev) started in Los Angeles in a blaze of publicity in 2009, predicting with great fanfare and much enthusiastic press coverage that it would transform many “failing” public schools into charter schools. PRev created the “parent trigger,” whereby a 50%+1 majority of parents at a school can sign a petition forcing “transformation” of the school, or forcing the school to close. PRev lobbying led to a California law in early 2010 allowing parent triggers statewide.
“Despite the fanfare, in those seven years, PRev has succeeded in turning only one school into a charter school – Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto (San Bernardino County), Calif., in 2012. That effort ripped the school community apart — splitting up friendships, creating deeply hostile factions and even leading to schoolyard fights among the kids. Reports on the results of the charterization are wildly mixed, and the mainstream media, which descended on Adelanto eagerly to cover the battle, lost interest in following up afterward.
“Parent Revolution began in 2009 under the auspices of Los Angeles’ Green Dot charter school chain, launched by the mercurial, once-admired Green Dot founder Steve Barr. The intent appeared to be to enable Green Dot to take over schools.
“Barr’s name is no longer mentioned in connection with PRev, possibly because of his checkered history, including a rapidly squelched flap about misuse of funds and some much-publicized failed projects. The story of Barr and the Green Dot charters he founded has been marked by rifts, feuds and separations, as has the story of PRev itself. Since PRev began operating on a statewide and then national scope, there has never again been public discussion of Green Dot taking over a parent trigger school.
PRev has run parent triggers in a few schools around Los Angeles, claiming to have achieved some changes less drastic than charterization. In one case, its petitions got the principal fired – and all but one or two teachers left the school in protest, with many parents objecting that they hadn’t meant to get rid of the principal or drive out the teachers.
The
“There’s never anything but the most vague and sketchy press follow-up of PRev efforts. Reports pop up in the press trumpeting PRev efforts that are never heard from again. I started following PRev to begin with because former PRev Executive Director Ben Austin told the press he had operations going in my school community in San Francisco. Yet there has never again been a sighting of PRev operations here.
PRev moved to the national stage, lobbying to get laws allowing parent triggers in various states. Because my ability as a volunteer to keep tabs on every PRev activity is limited, I can’t give a complete count of what states PRev lobbied in and what states passed parent trigger laws, but the efforts and the story that the parent trigger was spreading nationwide were widely and enthusiastically covered in the press.
“During those campaigns, PRev had paid staffers pose as school parents and testify before lawmakers – as was known to happen in Florida and Texas – and PRev claimed routinely and falsely that it had successfully transformed many schools in California, as reported in the Florida press.”
In short, after spending millions of dollars, PRev took over one public school.
PRev now plans to advise parents on how to choose a school.
PRev has been yet another disastrous failure for corporate reform.
The parent trigger fires blanks.
You may recall that the huge Corinthian College for-profit chain closed down last year, stranding over 16,000 students who were saddled with debt and worthless credits. The bankruptcy was precipitated when the U.S. Department of Education cut off federal funding after investigations revealed numerous frauds.
Now the ITT chain of for-profit colleges is going belly-up, after the Feds pulled the plug. The move leaves 35,000 students and employees out of luck. The students will have difficulty transferring their credits to another college or university since the for-profits are not respected by established institutions.
“Just days before the start of a new school term, ITT Educational Services, one of the nation’s largest for-profit educational companies, closed nearly all its campuses on Tuesday.
“The company cited the Education Department’s recent decision to bar the chain of colleges from using federal financial aid to enroll new students as the reason for the sudden shutdown.
“Except for a small school that operates under a different name, the move puts an end to an operation that has been accused of widespread fraud and abuse, leaving roughly 35,000 students and 8,000 employees in the lurch.
“ITT Educational Services, whose recruitment, lending practices and educational quality have been under scrutiny by federal regulators and state prosecutors for years, said in a news release that it had “exhausted the exploration of alternatives, including transfer of the schools to a nonprofit or public institution.””
Given their long-standing record of fraud, false promises, worthless degrees, predatory recruitment of veterans and low-income students, why did the Education Department allow them to get federal aid for so many years? At long last, accountability. Only the students are left holding the bag.
Gary Rubinstein explains here what happened when he posted about the nearly 500 videos that Success Academy put up on the Internet.
They were there. Some disappeared. They reappeared. They all disappeared.
What’s next?
For those in the WNYC listening area, I will be on the Brian Lehrer show at 10:30 am on Thursday discussing Common Core.
Jonathan Pelto is first to report on an important ruling by a Superior Court judge in Connecticut. His post contains links to news stories in two major Connecticut newspapers.
More than a decade ago, a group of mayors, parents and education advocates in Connecticut filed a lawsuit claiming the state’s school funding formula was unconstitutional.
On behalf of the state’s children, teachers, public schools and taxpayers, the plaintiffs argued that Connecticut’s school funding formula failed to ensure that every child had access to a quality and productive education, as guaranteed by the state constitution.
Known as CCJEF v. Rell, the case will eventually make its way to the Connecticut Supreme Court before it is fully resolved.
However today, a former Democratic state legislator-turned-judge sought to tread a political and timid path by calling the existing funding system “irrational,” but stopping short of declaring that the plaintiffs were correct in their assertion that Connecticut must both increase its level of school aid as well as distribute that aid in a more equitable manner.
I hope to get further analysis by Wendy Lecker, a civil rights attorney who is reading the decision now.
Connecticut’s funding formula is based on property taxes, which advantages affluent districts and harms poor district.
The Hartford Courant reports:
In a sweeping ruling Tuesday, Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher declared that “Connecticut is defaulting on its constitutional duty” to fairly educate the state’s poorest children and ordered the state to come up with a new funding formula for public education.
Moukawsher’s unexpectedly far-reaching decision also orders the state to come up with clear standards at both the elementary and high school level and to improve the evaluation of teachers. Moukawsher did not address the level of funding for schools, but he blasted the General Assembly for recent cuts to public schools in the state’s poorest cities.
“So change must come. The state has to accept that the schools its blessing and its burden, and if it cannot be wise, it must at least be sensible,” Moukawsher said.
Reading his 254-page ruling for more than two hours, Moukawsher ordered the General Assembly to devise a new school spending plan within 180 days. He also found that “the state is paralyzed about high school graduation,” producing graduates in urban districts unready for “college nor career.”
The remarkable ruling orders the state to revamp virtually all areas of public education, from the hiring and firing of teachers to special education students to education standards for elementary and high school students.
Again, I await further analysis but it sounds as if the judge, in addition to chastising the state for its funding formula, also calls for more testing and test-based teacher evaluation.
In Chicago, hunger strikers sat in front of Dyett High School, demanding that Mayor Emanuel keep the school open.
They wanted an open enrollment neighborhood high school, and Dyett was the last one in the city.
Not only is the school open, the city spent $14 million to renovate it. It reopened as an arts-themed neighborhood high school.
Total victory for our friend Jitu Brown and his steadfast, courageous allies.
Jitu would be the first to say that he does not deserve credit or recognition. But he was there every day. He led. The hunger strikers won.
Jitu Brown hereby joins the honor roll of this blog. I am happy to say that he is a member of the board of the Network for Public Education.
