Archives for the month of: June, 2017
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Lordy! Peter Greene Agrees with Checker Finn About a Few Things

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2017 //
10

Peter Greene is kind of busy, what with having two-week-old twins in the House, with crying, diapers, and all that entails. But not too busy to read that Checker Finn describes parts of Jeanne Allen’s pro-choice book as “idiocy.”

See, Jeanne agrees with Betsy DeVos that the government should hand out taxpayer dollars to families to use however they want. Checker recognizes that this is a dumb idea. He has noticed the frauds and thieves who want that money.

It is not even a free market approach, when the government subsidizes choices.

Peter quotes Checker:

“This is idiocy. It’s also entirely unrealistic in the ESSA era. It arises from the view—long since dismissed by every respectable economist—that education is a private good and the public has no interest in an educated citizenry. Once you conclude that education is also a public good—one whose results bear powerfully on our prosperity, our safety, our culture, our governance, and our civic life—you have to recognize that voters and taxpayers have a compelling interest in whether kids are learning what they should, at least in schools that call themselves “public.”

Peter agrees.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos

Do Corporations Care about American Workers?

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2017 //
38

This is an excellent article about the nations’ major corporations and their abandonment of their fellow citizens. It was written by Gordon Later and Greg LeRoy and posted by the Economic Policy Institute.

Gordon Later wrote the wonderful book “The One Percent Solution: How Corporations are Remaking America, One State at a Time,” which I highly recommend, to understand how Dark Money has taken over America, state by state.

Are these corporations so multi-national that they don’t care about their hometown or their state? Are they intentionally withdrawing their support from their fellow citizens? Do they consider Americans to be their “fellow citizens”?


When the term “Rustbelt” was coined in the 1980s and activists learned the early warning signs of a plant closing, one of those indicators was tax dodging. If a company knew it was planning to close a factory, it would often challenge its property tax assessment or seek other tax breaks. And why not? If it didn’t expect to be hiring locally in the future, why should an employer care about the quality of the schools?

The national trend today looks like the Rustbelt 1980s on steroids. President Trump’s budget proposal follows the playbook that corporate lobbyists have long pushed in state legislatures: tax cuts for companies and the rich, coupled with dramatic cuts to services that benefit everyone. The resulting permanent damage to those public services begs the question: is Corporate America intentionally disinvesting, abandoning our nation?

In recent years, states and localities across the country have made drastic cuts to essential public services. Texas eliminated over 10,000 teaching jobs, and ended full-day preschool for 100,000 low-income kids. The city of Muncie, Indiana eliminated so many firefighter positions that the area of the city that fire trucks can reach within eight minutes was cut in half. In Milwaukee, budget cuts left the public transit reaching 1,300 fewer employers in 2015 than in 2001.

Local health departments were forced to cut back everything from neonatal care to cancer screening to vision and hearing tests for school children to inspecting food safety in local restaurants. Officials reported that if the nation faces an outbreak similar to the H1N1 flu epidemic, many localities will be unable to vaccinate their residents. Budget cuts were particularly devastating in the country’s school systems. In 2010, the national student-teacher ratio increased for the first time since the Great Depression; and seven years after the onset of the Great Recession, most states had still not restored per-pupil spending to pre-recession levels.

Most striking about these cuts: the legislators who enacted them and the business lobbies that championed them treated them not as temporary tragedies to be repaired when revenues bounced back, but as long-desired permanent cuts to public services. Indeed, many legislatures locked in poorer tax bases by enacting new tax giveaways to corporations and the rich while slashing funding for schools, libraries, and health care. In the same year that Ohio ended full-day kindergarten, legislators phased out the state’s inheritance tax—which had only ever affected the wealthiest seven percent of families.

This agenda was driven by the country’s premier corporate lobbies: chambers of commerce, manufacturers associations, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and the Fortune 500 corporations that have participated in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Which begs the question about their motives: why would leading corporations seek permanent cuts to education, libraries or public transit? Don’t they need full access to labor pools of educated workers and decently-paid consumers to buy their products and services? The behavior of the nation’s biggest corporate lobbies appears to be irrational, yet it has been repeated in state after state.

One answer appears to lie in the disturbing fact that the fortunes of “American” corporations have become increasingly divorced from those of American citizens. It may never have been entirely true that “what’s good for General Motors is what’s good for the country,” as the company’s president apocryphally suggested in 1953. But it was closer to true when companies relied on Americans both to make and to buy their products. Today, most GM employees and nearly two-thirds of the cars it sells are overseas; it already sells more cars in China than in the U.S. General Motors has been highly engaged in American politics, including as a member of ALEC.

GM is not exceptional. For the first time, many of the country’s most powerful political actors are companies that may be headquartered in America but don’t primarily depend for their profits upon the fortunes of American society. Foreign sales now account for 48 percent of the S&P 500’s total corporate revenues. Among recent ALEC member corporations, Exxon Mobil, Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and IBM all earn more than 60 percent of their revenue outside the U.S. Their political interests are increasingly disconnected from the fate of American workers and taxpayers.

The net effect of corporate tax dodging is that by every key measure—share of state revenue, share of GDP, or effective rate—state corporate income taxes have been steadily declining. This creates pressure to raise other taxes, disproportionately borne by working families, who grow to resent a government that costs them more yet delivers less.

Given this reality, we take this corporate-backed push for disinvestment of America’s public sector as a big, loud early warning signal. ALEC’s agenda is not that of employers committed to their surrounding communities. It more resembles that of a company planning to cut and run. For the rest of us who seek good jobs and future opportunity for ourselves and our children, what’s good for GM is good for GM, period.

Categories ALEC, Budget Cuts, Privatization

Jessica Tang Makes History in Boston

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2017 //
7

Congratulations, Jessica Tang, the newly elected leader of the Boston Teachers Union! What I admire about Jessica, in addition to all the firsts attached to her rise, is that she is determined to fight privatization. Despite the fact that Massachusetts is far and away the highest performing state on NAEP, the plutocrats have been trying to bust the public schools.

She is a fighter. Between Tang and Barbara Madeloni of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state is well prepared to fight corporate reform.

The Boston Globe writes:

“The most remarkable thing about Jessica Tang’s ascension as head of the Boston Teachers Union might be just how unremarkable it feels.

“Tang’s election last week as president of one of the city’s most important unions was anticlimactic: She was unopposed. She’s the first person of color to head the union, the first member of the LGBT community, and the first woman in more than three decades. Since 1983, in fact, only two people, Edward Doherty and the retiring Richard Stutman, have led the city’s teachers.

“But Tang, 35, is a brilliant and passionate advocate for public schools and their teachers.She has learned the art of fiercely defending positions without sparking personal animus, and her rise through the union ranks has been so seamless that she was elected to the presidency unopposed.

“She takes office at a challenging time for the union, which is locked in a contentious contract negotiation with the city. This is also a watershed moment for teachers unions in general, facing fire from several directions.

“The only organized body standing in the way of privatizing education is teachers unions, and I do believe that’s why teachers unions are under attack,” Tang said last week, the day after her election. “The idea that unions obstruct learning, that’s just not true. That whole narrative that unions are the reason that public schools are bad, that’s just wrong.”

Categories Boston

DeVos Puts CEO of Student Loan Company in Charge of Policing Student Loans

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2017 //
8

Can anyone spell “conflict of interest”? Has anyone at the Department of Education ever heard the term?

Betsy Devos just selected the CEO of a corporation collecting student loans to police the collection of student loans.

The strange thing is that the Education Department forgot to mention this interesting fact when his appointment was announced, and it was removed from his resume.

Whose side will he be on–the industry or the students?

When the Trump administration announced its pick to run the $1.3 trillion federal student loan system on Tuesday, there was one notable thing about the candidate that wasn’t mentioned in the press release: he’s the CEO of a private student loan company.

The Education Department’s statement described A. Wayne Johnson as the “Founder, Chairman and former CEO” of a payments technology company called First Performance Corporation. It noted his Ph.D. in education leadership, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, citing his dissertation, said he “actually wrote the book on student loan debt.”

But what wasn’t noted was Johnson is currently the CEO of Reunion Student Loan Services, a detail confirmed by a company representative reached by phone on Tuesday afternoon. Reunion originates and services private student loans, and offers refinancing and consolidation for existing loans.

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

I suppose this is another rebuke to the writer of the strange article in the New York Times who claimed that DeVos was making “surprising” appointments of people who are not as far right as she is. One alleged surprise was that she chose a gay woman to lead the Office of Civil Rights, which isn’t so surprising when you realize, that Candace Jackson may be gay but she opposes affirmative action and feminism, like DeVos and is content to see OCR reduce its civil rights activism. The other “surprise” choice was Jason Botell, who ran a KIPP charter school and advised Trump on education during the campaign. Why is running a charter school somehow a surprising choice for a charter zealot like DeVos. Now she has chosen an industry insider to police the industry. Is that also a surprise to the New York Times?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt, U.S. Department of Education

Here is Andrew Coulson Series on Virtues of Privatization

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2017 //
39

Watch libertarian Andrew Coulson’s film, now showing on some, not all, PBS stations around the nation.

It was paid for by libertarian foundations that support privatization. The lead funder–the Rose-Mary and Jack Anderson Foundation– is a conduit for the Koch brothers and DeVos family foundations.

http://www.pbs.org/show/school-inc/

Here is my response.

Carol Burris and I will soon be posting a point by point refutation.

Please let PBS know what you think.

Categories Education Industry, Privatization

Florida: Charter Operator Charged with Theft, Fraud

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2017 //
13

When will the citizens of Florida say “Enough is enough”?

When will taxpayers stop subsidizing frauds who open charter schools?

The founder of a charter chain in Florida was charged with racketeering and fraud

The founder of a charter school company that managed two schools in Jacksonville was charged Monday, along with a business partner, with racketeering and organized fraud allegedly involving 15 charter schools in Florida.

“Prosecutors say Marcus May, owner of Newpoint Education Partners, is accused of misusing and co-mingling charter school money, as well as taking excessive payments and “kickback” fees, and spending the proceeds on such things as cruises, numerous trips to foreign countries, plastic surgery, home mortgages and a personal watercraft.

“May obtained more than $1 million of public funds from a pattern of thefts from the state department of education, six school districts and 15 Newpoint-managed charter schools,” said District 1 State Attorney Bill Eddins, in a prepared statement.

“In total, Newpoint’s charter schools in Florida received $57 million from the state and from six school districts, including Duval, between 2007 and 2016, the affidavit attached to the charges states.

“In Jacksonville, Newpoint ran the San Jose Academy and San Jose Preparatory High schools on Sunbeam Road. Both are now managed by a different company and serve 310 middle and high school students.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, Fraud, Privatization

Ohio: Vouchers Are Failing to Help Kids, but Legislature Wants to Expand Them

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2017 //
30

Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio writes here that vouchers cost Ohio taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year, yet voucher students are performing worse than their peers in public schools.

I don’t like writing these things. I really don’t. Because even when a policy I think is folly actually works, I’m glad that kids are able to benefit.

“The latest data, both from Ohio and nationally, demonstrate pretty clearly that private school vouchers simply aren’t working. In fact, they are making things worse for kids both in private, mostly religious schools, and those who remain in local public school districts.

“At Innovation Ohio, we released a report today that details many of the issues. Among them:

• Vouchers now affect schools and children in 83 percent of Ohio’s school districts

• More than $310 million will be spent this school year sending public money to private, mostly religious schools through vouchers

• Including additional direct state payments and reimbursements made to private, mostly religious schools, more than $568 million in Ohio taxpayer money is going to support these schools

• Every Ohio student not taking a voucher, on average, loses $63 a year in state funding because of the way Ohio’s lawmakers have decided to fund vouchers ($63 is about $15 more per pupil than we spend statewide on instructional and non-instructional equipment combined. It’s about the cost of a new Amazon Fire tablet.)

• In an era of the state providing less funding for public schools, its insatiable investment in private school vouchers force local taxpayers to subsidize them with $105 million in locally raised money to make up for districts’ state funding losses to Ohio’s voucher programs

• Students who take vouchers perform worse than their public school peers on state assessments

• Some of the highest performing school districts in the state lose money and students to vouchers, turning the original intent of the program on its head.”

Despite these dismal results, the Ohio legislature wants to expand the voucher program and make vouchers available to 75% of all school children.

Why?

Categories Privatization

D.C.: Whether Public or Charter, Teachers Are Leaving at High Rates

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2017 //
5

Thanks to G.F. Brandenburg for pointing me to this important post about teacher attrition rates in D.C. by Valerie Jablow.

D.C., lest we forget, is one of the epicenters of corporate reform. In 2007, D.C. established mayoral control of the schools. Mayor Adrian Fenty hired Michelle Rhee and gave her full authority to remake the schools. Rhee stayed until Fenty was defeated at the next election in 2011 (largely because of Rhee), and Rhee’s deputy Kaya Henderson was put in charge. Henderson stepped down and was replaced by another reform cadre, Antwan Wilson. So, D.C. has been in the hands of the privatizers for a full decade.

The Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation all invested millions in Rhee.

Wendy Kopp, in her last ghostwritten book, pointed to D.C., New York City, and New Orleans as examples of TFA success. D.C. today is the shining star of the reformers.

But teachers don’t last long. They sign up and they leave in startling numbers. Why don’t they stay if the system has had the benefit of reform for ten years?

Read Jablow’s post here.

She writes about D.C.’S dirty little secret. It turns out that reformers don’t know how to create good schools, whether public or charter:

“Quick: Did you hear about the DC public school that lost more than half its teachers after the start of school year 2015-16?

“No, I am not talking about DCPS’s Ballou high school–which, as the Post recently reported, lost 28% of its teachers this just-completed school year.

“Rather, I am talking about a whole host of DC charter schools with high teacher attrition rates in the previous school year, like Achievement Preparatory Academy (57.8% teacher attrition rate) and Friendship’s Tech Prep (Tech Prep Middle, 63%; Tech Prep HS, 52%) and KIPP’s AIM (63%), Lead (58%), and WILL schools (62%)–not to mention Perry Street Prep (62.5%), SEED (52.6%), and Washington Global (60%). Then there are a few charter schools whose reported attrition rates I find difficult to believe and that I hope were mis-reported teacher retention rates: Inspired (70.3%) and Richard Wright (87%). The annual reports indicated that the teacher attrition was determined after the start of the school year.

“Hmm: Didn’t hear about those?”

Categories District of Columbia, Teachers

Maurice Cunningham: Dark Money Combines to Privatize Public Schools: PLEASE READ THIS!

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2017 //
20

This may be the most important post you read today.

Maurice Cunningham, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, began investigating the millions of dollars pouring into the state during the referendum on charter schools last fall. He wondered why so many billionaires from other states wanted to expand the number of charter schools in Massachusetts. He continued his investigation after the election and has lifted the curtain on groups like Families for Excellent Schools, Stand for Children, and Educators4Excellence, and Leadership for Educational Excellence (a group connected to TFA).

He began researching the intersection between philanthropy and dark money.

My descent into darkness led me to decipher the hidden funding of Families for Excellent Schools, a New York based organization that poured over $17 million in dark money into the Great Schools Massachusetts ballot committee for 2016’s Question 2 on charter schools. That brought me to the initial funding to get FES up and running in Massachusetts, which came from a Boston based Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) charity called Strategic Grant Partners. The investments from SGP are consistent with the practice of wealthy individuals using charitable entities to influence the direction of public policy, a topic I explored in Unmasking the Philanthrocapitalists Who Almost Bought Massachusetts Schools. One way for wealthy individuals to grease the path to their public policy goals is to fund organizations that undermine teachers unions, a topic I took up in Philanthrocapitalists Brandish BEANball at BTU.

In the course of this research I have created a database of all Strategic Grant Partners’ publicly available grants since its inception, from its Form 990PF tax returns. The non-profit has dispensed many grants for family support and educational purposes over that time to about seventy grantees, only five of which I would characterize as engaging in political activities: advocacy/organizing/mobilizing for three of them, adding lobbying activities for two, Stand for Children and Families for Excellent Schools. There were no grants to political activities organizations until Stand for Children in 2009, and then no other such organization received a grant until 2013 when Education Reform Now and Families for Excellent Schools received funding.

He concludes:

The Stand for Children and Families for Excellent Schools initiatives both led toward the ballot box and thus we could look at OCFP reports; but these days the reports only tell us which dark money front is laundering for which elegantly named shell. That’s the tip of the iceberg. But there is much more.

Professor Cunningham, keep up the research. Check out Donors Trust, another group that bundles dark money for school privatization. Add ALEC and its donors.

Dark Money wants to destroy our public schools and our democracy.

The people behind these activities use “civil rights” rhetoric to advance anti-democratic goals. They are thieves of democracy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization, Stand for Children

Nancy Flanagan: The War on the Teaching Profession Is No Longer Covert

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2017 //
66

In 2010, the corporate reform movement emerged as a national phenomenon. “Waiting for Superman” was the rage that fall, aided by a massive Gates-funded PR program, asserting that bad schools were caused by lazy, greedy teachers. Suddenly, the push for privately managed charter schools and attacks on teachers merged as a coherent “reform movement,” helped along by $5 billion in Race to the Top federal funding and Arne Duncan’s persistent snide comments about “bad” teachers, low standards, the promise of charter schools, and the necessity to judge teachers by the test scores of their students.

Conservative Stanford economist Eric Hanushek was at the center of the fray, pointing out in 2010 that conservatives and liberals now agreed that teachers were the biggest problem in schools. Hanushek had a featured role in “Superman,” where he reinforced the importance of choice and data as levers of change to raise test scores. In the fall of 2010, he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal asserting that “There is No War on Teachers.” The article was sufficiently popular that Hanushek rewrote it and published it a few more times, first in the Hoover Institution publication in 2011 as “The ‘War on Teachers’ is a Myth,” and again in defense of the Vergara lawsuit in California, which sought to throw out teacher tenure (he said that the teachers’ unions would surely trot out “tired rhetoric” about “the war on teachers” to defend tenure.) No, no, he insisted there was no war on teachers, just a bipartisan effort to hold teachers accountable for student test scores.

But now, Nancy Flanagan writes on her blog at Education Week that the war against teachers and the teaching profession has gone into high gear. The mask is off. Betsy DeVos is leading the charge.

She writes:

“Several years ago, when the concept of a “war on teachers” was first entering the national conversation, I used the phrase in a blog. I got a solicitous message from a casual ed-friend, a man with more degrees (and from more prestigious universities) than I have. He politely told me that using “purple prose” weakened any carefully supported argument I could make.

“Besides, he didn’t believe there was, or ever had been, a concerted, organized effort to demean public school teachers–only disconnected bits of evidence that not everyone thought teachers were universally beneficent and professional. Nothing new. Nothing substantive. Just the same old grumbling about bossy, arrogant teachers, the bottom tier of the academic barrel.

“I was probably more worried about what people thought of my writing back then, because I haven’t used “war on teachers” language since. Until I read this: Parent Unions inviting stakeholders in multiple California districts to weigh on survey questions.

“Sample question: Over the last 10 classes you have taken. How many teachers would you characterize as idle, incompetent, rude, or lacks teaching ability?

“Another question: Unfortunately, the educational system has some bad apples who’s [sic] actions not only affect other teachers, but also the lives of students. Help us identify some of those infected [sic] in order to preserve your educational experience, as well as the experience of the next generation.

“Are there any teachers that are abusing their authority in or outside of the classroom?

“The teacher (#1) I have listed below should be fired:___________________________________

“Sample question: Over the last 10 classes you have taken. How many teachers would you characterize as idle, incompetent, rude, or lacks teaching ability?

“Another question: Unfortunately, the educational system has some bad apples who’s [sic] actions not only affect other teachers, but also the lives of students. Help us identify some of those infected [sic] in order to preserve your educational experience, as well as the experience of the next generation.

“Are there any teachers that are abusing their authority in or outside of the classroom?

“The teacher (#1) I have listed below should be fired:___________________________________

“You get to choose three teachers to be fired. And–to be fair and balanced–you get to choose three who should get a raise. The “survey,” offered to parents and students (and social media trolls, of course) goes on in a similar vein, with small editorial bits about horrible teachers and their horrible unions, urging survey-takers to name names and get those incompetent offenders out of our classrooms, so that children can be better prepared for their future.

“Is this a war on teachers? Organized by corporate-funded “parent unions?”

“Or is it just same-old griping about teachers by resentful adults, including those who were never properly instructed on the difference between “who’s” and “whose”?

“I would argue that we have genuinely reached a tipping point, one where we’re struggling to get young people to go into teaching as professional career (as opposed to two-year adventure before law school). Our state legislators are openly declaring that teaching is now a short-term technical job, not a career, and thus public school educators don’t really need a stable state pension.

“That’s not only a war on individual teachers, but a war on teaching itself.

“In the spring of 2011, the planning team for the Save Our Schools March of July 2011 struggled to clarify our aims. We knew it was important to have a set of lucid, defensible goals. We couldn’t speak to media or explain the purpose of rallying in Washington, D.C., without simple, easily understood objectives…

“It seemed to me then–and still does–that what we were fighting for, in the end, was more basic: the preservation of public education. There were people on the planning team (who had more degrees than I, and from more prestigious universities) arguing that the existence of public education was not endangered. We wanted better support for public education, certainly, and improvements in public schools, changes in policy and practice. We were fending off threats, for sure. But public education itself would survive….

“Last night, I went to my local Indivisible group meeting. I gave a two-minute report on education in my county. I said: There’s a war on teachers and we are facing the end of public education. It’s time to do something. And people applauded. What are you doing, in your county or district, to make these statements out loud?”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing
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