Archives for the month of: May, 2017
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Los Angeles: The Great Smear Campaign Nears Its End

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2017 //
4

Blogger Red Queen in LA has created a graphic to depict the spending in the Los Angeles school board race between Steve Zimmer and Nick Melvoin. A shocking amount of Melvoin’s money has been spent on negative campaigning, ads that smear Zimmer and make false claims. This is an indication of character.

It’s Mother’s Day, and I’m reminded that my mother always told me that the one thing you must never lose is your good name.

Shame on those who think that winning an election for a school board seat can be done with smear tactics and mud-slinging. No good will come of it.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

North Carolina: State Senate Cuts Education Funding from Democrats’ Districts

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2017 //
7

This is unbelievable. The Republican-dominated State Senate in North Carolina vengefully cut education funding from Democrats’ districts in a 3 am vote.

Having gerrymandered the state to keep Tea Party control, the Republicans have lost all sense of decency.

Categories North Carolina, Republicans

California State Board Votes to Close Two Charter Schools!

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
76

At a time when Los Angeles is about to choose between a candidate who favors unlimited charter expansion (Nick Melvoin) and an incumbent who wants some accountability for charters, the state board just denied renewal to two L.A. charter schools.

“California’s State Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday to shutter two Los Angeles charter schools run by a nonprofit that is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education and the inspector general for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Some parents and teachers at the schools cried through their testimony at an emotional hearing, which ended with the board declining to renew the charter petitions for the Celerity Dyad Charter School in South Los Angeles and the Celerity Troika Charter School in Eagle Rock. Explaining their vote, board members said they had lost confidence in the Celerity Educational Group, the organization that manages the schools, and expressed growing concerns about its governance structure and finances, as well as the potential for conflicts of interest.

“This seems to be a very troubling failure on the part of the adults who manage these organizations, rather than on the adults in the classrooms,” said board member Ilene Straus.

“The board’s vote comes at a time when charter school advocates are determined to increase the number of such schools in L.A., and it highlights the growing difficulty of regulating them. The state’s teachers union, which has fought against the growth in charter schools, has argued that all control over which charter schools are approved or rejected should rest with local school districts, rather than county or state boards.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

Watch Rev. William Barber, Our Most Eloquent Spokesman for Civil Rights, Speak at the Schott Foundation Dinner

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
6

Reverend William Barber II is our most eloquent spokesman for civil rights today. Some believe he is the next Martin Luther King Jr.

He just stepped down as head of the North Carolina NAACP, where he saw daily assaults on voting rights, public schools, and poor people. He started the Moral Mondays Movement, where people witnessed on the steps of the Legislature, which busily enacted laws to strip away the rights of citizens of the state.

He is starting a national organization to fight for a moral vision for America.

He spoke at the Schott Foundation dinner on May 11. Here is his speech. You are in for a treat.

Categories Civil Rights, North Carolina

Brave New World: What Links Trump, Brexit, Robert Mercer, Rupert Murdoch, and Steve Bannon?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
28

This is an article in The Guardian that I will not attempt to summarize. What I will Di is urge you to read it. It is about money, power, and a coordinated attack on democracy. It is about data mining psychological warfare financed by a billionaire and used to win elections. It is about the use of technology to subvert democracy and empower a new, far-right elite.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Technology

Thomas Ultican: Shakespeare and the “Ocean God”

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
4

Thomas Ultican teaches physics and mathematics to high school students in San Diego.

In this post, he describes a wonderful day at the home of one of the nation’s greatest oceanographers, where middle school students performed scenes from Shakespeare.

The event was sponsored by the San Diego Shakespeare Society to raise funds for middle and high schools.

You will enjoy his account of a very wonderful day in a fabulous setting.

This is one of many events sponsored by the San Diego Shakespeare Society. Inspired by the idea “Teach a child Shakespeare at an early age and they can learn anything,” the Society sponsors many events for K-12 students. Amongst the largest of these is the annual event held on the various stages in Balboa Park’s Prado area at which about 500 students perform 10-minute scenes.

Ultican concludes his post by noting the virtue of philanthropy motivated by civic spirit:

It was such a pleasure to see how great people share their largess. After years of watching pseudo philanthropy harm public schools, it was refreshing to see genuine public spirit on display.

Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg, the Walton Family, Doris Fisher (the Gap), John Arnold, Michael Dell, and the other billionaires spent their millions enriching the lives of students and teachers, instead of trying to privatize their public schools. I recently saw Bette Midler in “Hello, Dolly” on Broadway (wow wow wow–she was fantastic!), and learned in the program notes that she (though not a billionaire) raises money for a program called “Stages for Success,” which renovates public school auditoriums so that students have a performance space. Now, that’s philanthropy!

Categories Arts Education, Billionaires, California

Los Angeles: The Scurrilous Smear Campaign Against Steve Zimmer

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
14

The run-off campaign in District 4 in Los Angeles for School Board has turned into a national issue. The race between Steve Zimmer, president of the Los Angeles school board, and his challenger, Nick Melvoin, has become an epic struggle between supporters of public schools and supporters of privatization.

Zimmer entered teaching through Teach for America but, unlike the typical TFA, he stayed in the classroom in Los Angeles for 17 years.

Blogger “Red Queen in L.A.,” a parent of children in LAUSD, says this is a dirty and disgraceful campaign, and almost all the dirt has come from Nick Melvoin’s camp. Melvoin is running a campaign based on lies, propaganda, and smears. He is smearing not only Zimmer, but public education. He doesn’t deserve to be elected.

Steve Zimmer understands the gravity of his responsibility as president of the school board. He is a man of honesty, candor, and dignity. Melvoin is a puppet of out-of-town billionaires.

She writes:


Negative Ads Undermine Democracy

Mostly, the fourth board district school board race has been one of incessant negativity and lies. Why do we permit this uncivilized behavior? I can tell you in walking my neighborhood I am met with deep weariness, wariness and hostility. This is the legacy of democracy abused. This race has been nothing if not about Big Lies and electoral abuse, and that’s a lesson being bought – and paid for – dearly.

Independent Committee expenditures (IECs, the new normal for “PAC”s) in favor of both candidates have been about the same, averaging $1.8 million dollars at the moment. Each. You read that right. Think of the children. (Think of the printers.)

What is not similar is IC expenditures in opposition to their candidate. Melvoin’s IC devotes half an order of magnitude more in slandering Zimmer than his IC spends to oppose Melvoin.

Thus quite apart from the overall total spent which is obscene, a dramatic distinction between candidates is evident from what’s being spent to smear the other guy. Zimmer’s adherents spent less than one-quarter, 25%, of that average toward denigrating their opposition ($441K). Melvoin’s buddies sunk 140% of that average spent in support of their candidate ($2.4 million) on negative ads.

In fact, the amount Zimmer’s IEC devoted to negative campaigning is so comparatively trivial, the negligible difference between both campaign’s positive expenditures, which is just 6% – this sum ($114K) is 25% of what Zimmer’s camp spent in negativity altogether. His challenger spent 5.5x as much as the incumbent in stuffing our mailboxes with scurrilous lies.

So the current overall total of IECs is $6.4 million, and the electorate has responded with a resounding: “Beat It”.
The blowback to our electoral democracy is fierce. When I try to speak with my own neighbors with whom I have worked side-by-side for over twenty years improving their neighborhood, my neighborhood, everyone’s lives, their doors stay shut and they make clear they are fortressed against hearing anything “political”.

What they have absorbed are buzz words: “bad”, “failing”, “violent”, “drop-out”, “waste”, “fraud”, “scandal” – and on and on and on.

What they have forgotten is that their littlest neighbors, my children, are part of that system being smeared. And I volunteer within that system improving it just like I work to improve our neighborhoods….

That is what is Trumpian about the might of the California Charter Schools Association’s money and their power in this battle for the school board. Intimidation, slander and ultimately electoral paralysis. They strive to overwhelm us with false equivalence such that even the stark consequence of ideological differences so riven as represented by these candidates, is obscured.

Please do not let all this money win your single democratic voice. You must turn out to the polls in order to use it. This is the one and only way to assert Resistance.

VOTE FOR STEVE ZIMMER ON MAY 16:

KEEP OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM PUBLIC

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Lies, Los Angeles, Privatization

Center for Popular Democracy: Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
8

Is it reasonable to give taxpayer dollars to entities that are deregulated and unsupervised? That are unaccountable and non transparent? What do you think will happen when government funds are turned over to organizations that are basically on their own and who make campaign contributions to legislator who prevent accountability for their donors?

The Center for Popular Democracy explains what you expect under these circumstances: waste, fraud, and abuse.

Here is the executive summary:

“In 2014, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) issued a report demonstrating that charter schools in 15 states—about one third of the states with charter schools—had reported over $100 million
in fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement since 1994. In 2015 and 2016, we released additional reports documenting millions of dollars in new alleged and con rmed cases of fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in charter schools.

This report offers further evidence that the money we know has been misused is just the tip of the iceberg. With the new alleged and con rmed cases reported here, the nancial impact of fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in charter schools has reached over $223 million since our rst report.

“Public funding for charter schools (including local, state, and federal expenditures) has reached over $40 billion annually. Yet despite this tremendous ongoing investment of public dollars in charter schools, all levels of government have failed to implement systems to proactively monitor charter schools for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. While charter schools are subject to signi cant reporting requirements by various public agencies (including federal monitors, chartering entities, county superintendents, and state controllers and auditors), very few of these agencies regularly monitor for fraud.

“The rapid expansion of the charter sector in recent years is a particularly important factor in the fraud epidemic. Local and state entities charged with oversight of charter schools are quickly becoming overwhelmed, yet the federal government continues to pour taxpayer dollars into this expansion project. Over the past 20 years, the federal Department of Education has channeled over $3 billion into states to increase the quantity of charter schools without requiring strong oversight systems. As a result, millions in federal dollars have been lost to fraud, waste, and mismanagement. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed in December 2015, required the federal Department of Education to increase the pace of spending signi cantly over the next 10 years, essentially doubling the total federal investment in charter schools in half the time. In 2017, President Trump and his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, have proposed to increase federal funding for charter schools from $333 million in 2017 to $501 million in 2018. This increase comes after a 2016 report from the US Department of Education’s Of ce of Inspector General which found “significant risk” in the US Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) charter school grant program.

“DeVos should be particularly familiar with the dangers of fraud and abuse in charter schools. As a staunch advocate for charter schools in Michigan, DeVos has spent millions in campaign donations supporting state candidates who favored “school choice” and opposing increased oversight and regulation. The result of Michigan’s experiment in charters has been a system of failing schools run by for-pro t companies, and millions of dollars lost in fraud and waste.

“With the perpetuation of inadequate oversight mechanisms and the new in ux of federal funding, the amount of federal, state, and local dollars at risk of being lost to fraud, waste, and abuse in the charter sector is only going to grow.

“The number of instances of serious fraud uncovered by whistleblowers, reporters, and investigations suggests that the fraud problem extends well beyond the confirmed cases we know about. Based on the widely accepted estimate of the percentage of revenue the typical charter organization loses to fraud, the deficiencies in charter oversight throughout the country suggest that federal, state, and local governments stand to lose more than $2.1 billion in 2017, up from $1.8 billion in 2016.8 The vast majority of fraud perpetrated by charter officials will go undetected because federal and state governments, as well as local charter authorizers, lack the oversight systems necessary to detect the fraud.

“Setting up systems of oversight that can detect and deter charter school fraud is critical. The money saved by these oversight systems will almost certainly offset the cost of implementation. We recommend the following reforms:

“■ Mandate audits specifically designed to detect and prevent fraud, and increase the transparency and accountability of charter school operators and managers

“■ Design clear planning-based public investment programs to ensure that any expansion of charter school investment also ensures equity, transparency, and accountability

“■ Increase transparency and accountability to ensure that charter schools provide the information necessary for state agencies to detect and prevent fraud

“State and federal lawmakers should act now in establishing systems to prevent fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. ESSA unfortunately does very little reduce these vulnerabilities in the Charter Schools Program. Without state and local lawmakers passing policies to increase oversight, taxpayers stand to lose millions of additional dollars to charter school fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.”

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

“Change Is Never Easy,” Say Reformers

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
18

Ed Johnson is a relentless watchdog over public education in Atlanta. He happens to be a devotee of the thought of W. Edwards Deming, and he opposes the current corporate reform philosophy of disruption, top-down orders, ranking, rating, punishment, and rewards. Johnson understands that accountability begins at the top, and that the role of leadership is to support those who work in the organization, not to micro-manage or give orders. He recently sent this mini-essay to members of the Atlanta Board of Education:

Atlanta Superintendent: “Changes are never easy”

Why yet another trifling and regressive catchphrase of the same variety as “change is hard” and “people are afraid of change?” Augh!

All too often the reason the autocratic, self-absorbed leader summarily talks about change being hard or never easy amounts to the leader implicitly self-promoting the leader’s standing and implicitly denigrating the standing of others. It is an ingrained, intentional, and perverted psychopathy of blaming meant to intimidate and silence dissension from the get go. It provides for immediately reframing and thereby dismissing dissenters as “being afraid of change.” It is a slick, accusatory way of saying: “Others have to change, I don’t.”

Heaven forbid such a leader should be asked: “Well, why are changes never easy? What are you doing to make it otherwise?”

change (v.) make or become different

Meanwhile, in reality, in general, change is indeed easy simply because change is a ubiquitous fact of life. No change, no life. In fact, ones very being is change. We all do and experience change, every day, every hour, every second, every whatever time unit. We are so embedded in and involved with change that we rarely notice change. We tend to notice change only when change is imposed, and then when change seems pointless, untenable, threatening, unjust, amoral, unethical, evil, etc.; in short, change for change sake.

Then what, in reality, is not a ubiquitous fact of life? Improvement.

improve (v.) make or become better

Unlike change, improvement stems from getting new knowledge; no new knowledge, no improvement. However, the autocratic, self-absorbed leader already knows all there is to know, so is generally fearful hence wickedly controlling of others learning and getting new knowledge and improving because, for the leader, the collective role of others simply is to perform well to benefit mostly the leader’s standing and aspirations.

Sadly, nowadays, with competitive market-based school reform and school choice and such, “others” includes children controlled and manipulated to perform to “high expectations” and “high standards” of college and career readiness and such, with authentic learning and getting new knowledge and improving made secondary.

Then for whom is change truly hard and not easy?

Consider change is truly hard and not easy, if not impossible, for the autocratic, self-absorbed leader who chooses the easier task of imposing change upon others rather than choosing the harder challenge of leading improvement.

Why bother making Atlanta Public Schools better when making it different, at a cost now approaching one billion dollars, is so much easier, quicker, and efficient to do. Plus, top leadership need not change their ways.

Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Atlanta GA
(404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com

Categories Accountability, Atlanta

An Urgent Message to the Citizens of North Carolina

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
6

Public education is in jeopardy in North Carolina.

Please take action now!

The North Carolina Senate introduced SB 603, a bill creating a new voucher program that would give $9,000 a year to students with disabilities going to non-public schools.

Send an email to tell your house member to vote NO for SB 603.

SB 603 is a bill that:

Expands opportunities for fraud

Costs more to administer than traditional voucher programs

Takes funding from our public schools, with particularly negative impacts for public school programs for students with disabilities

Drains the state budget

Lacks accountability

If passed, parents of eligible students get a debit card loaded with approximately $9,000 per year that they can spend on private school costs, tutoring, technology and even account fees!

In addition, SB 603 would allow parents to double- or triple-dip into North Carolina’s already existing voucher programs. Parents could also receive $4,200 from the Opportunity Scholarship program (for students meeting certain income requirements), an additional $8,000 via the Disabilities Grant Program and $9,000 from this program the new proposed program.

Like the Arizona ESA program on which it is modeled, it is ripe for fraud. Arizona’s program has resulted in parents buying televisions, groceries, cell phones and family planning services. Vendors have also been caught overcharging parents. Monitoring of purchases would rely on self-reporting.

Under the proposed bill, even if an audit uncovers fraud, there is no requirement that the parent be forced to repay the taxpayers.

Worst of all, when a parent misuses these debit cards, their children go undereducated.

This is, in our opinion, just one more attempt to defund and attack public education. And it is shameful.

Send this email today to your representative telling them to oppose SB 603.

We make it easy. Just click here.

Then pick up the phone and call on Monday. You can find their number here.

Then post this link on your Facebook page and share it will all of your friends and family in North Carolina.

https://npeaction.org/2017/05/12/north-carolina-alert-stop-super-voucher/

Thanks for all you do!

Carol Burris

Executive Director

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Vouchers
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