Books will be written about the 2016 election for many years. That is, if AG Sessions doesn’t impose a reign of censorship.
This article describes a part of the puzzle. It connects Bannon, Flynn, Mercer, Cambridge Analytics, and others.
https://narativ.org/2017/09/05/psychological-warfare-cambridge-analytica/amp/
The Nebraska State Education Association recently paid a visit to the state’s major newspaper and explained why Nebraska doesn’t need school choice:
Editor’s note: In a recent visit to the York News-Times, Nebraska State Education Association president Jenni Benson and executive director Maddie Fennell shared that organization’s thoughts on two hot-button education issues – charter schools and private school vouchers. The NSEA is the union that represents Nebraska teachers. It is the oldest professional association in the state.
The NSEA’s 10 reasons to avoid “private school voucher schemes” are:
1. Nebraska cannot afford to finance private education as well as public education. There would be only two ways to pay for vouchers—take money from already underfunded public schools or raise taxes. Both are unacceptable.
2. Tax dollars for private education won’t fix student achievement challenges at public schools. The best way to assist all low-performing students is by strengthening public schools and addressing individual learning problems directly. Vouchers will siphon tax dollars away from our public schools where children have the greatest needs.
3. A voucher would be a ticket to nowhere for most children. Private schools can choose to accept or reject any student, and many have long waiting lists and only admit top students. On average, parochial schools reject 67 percent of all applicants. Other private schools reject nearly 90 percent of applicants. “Choice” does not reside with parents but with private school admissions committees.
4. Parents have an expanding array of choices for the public school their child attends. Among the many public school options available in Nebraska, parents may choose to send their child to another public school in the same or different school district, or enroll their child in various public academy schools, focus or magnet schools, career academies, or other public alternative schools.
5. Vouchers don’t create a “competitive marketplace.” Competition is based on an even playing field; there is no fair competition when “competitors” play by different rules. Public schools accept all applicants, private schools don’t. Private schools are not required to provide transportation, special education, bilingual education, free and reduced price lunches, and many other programs that public schools provide. They are also not required to meet even basic state certification or accreditation requirements.
6. The State of Nebraska should not spend tax dollars to pilot test a bad idea. Tax-funded pilot projects should only be conducted to test good ideas. Vouchers are a bad idea! A pilot voucher program would not be a “lifeboat” for some students, as claimed. A voucher system would be the Titanic, draining needed funds from public schools where most students would remain.
7. Vouchers would destroy the “private” in private schools. Parents of children in private schools don’t want the status quo disturbed for their children—they want their schools to be truly private. Private schools accepting tax-funded vouchers or private school tax credit schemes would become subject to government regulation. Allowing public tax dollars to be spent on private schools would be mean private schools would have to change admission requirements, implement state-required testing, certification and accreditation, comply with discipline and expulsion laws, and allow voucher students to be exempted from religious activities.
8. Inserting the word “private” doesn’t make a school good. There is no proof that private school vouchers would improve students’ academic performance. In fact, students attending private schools under the Milwaukee, Cleveland and other private school voucher programs did not outperform their public school peers.
9. Vouchers would promote further religious and economic stratification in our society. Private elementary and secondary schools have been founded primarily by two types of entities: (1) religious denominations seeking to teach academics interwoven with their religious doctrine; and (2) wealthier parents seeking to give their children an advantage over other children. Tax-funded vouchers for private schools would increase divisions between rich and poor and among different religions, threatening the future of our American democracy.
10. Public policy should respect parental choice but provide for all students. The best public policy is to provide parents with even more choices within the public schools, which serve more than 90 percent of the children in Nebraska. Nebraska legislators should concentrate on making all public schools stronger, safer, more challenging and accountable. Public tax dollars should be spent only to improve public schools—not to assist the small number of parents who choose to enroll their children in private schools.
NSEA on Charter Schools
The fact is that charter schools are not meeting the need they were created to fill—including to serve as lab schools to develop new teaching techniques—and many are failing their students and families, while squandering taxpayer dollars.
Reports detail fraud and waste totaling more than $200 million of taxpayer funds in the charter school sector. It notes that these figures only represent fraud and waste in the charter sector uncovered so far, and that the total that federal, state and local governments “stand to lose” in 2015 is probably more than $1.4 billion. It says, “The vast majority of the fraud perpetrated by charter officials will go undetected because the federal government, the states, and local charter authorizers lack the oversight necessary to detect the fraud.”1
The result of charter schools on student achievement just doesn’t live up to the hype. Less than a third of the total charter schools in the U.S. perform better than comparable public schools. The other two thirds are about the same or worse.
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In fact, the biggest proponents of charter schools are Wall Street hedge fund and venture capital firms like JP Morgan, USB, and Liberty Partners. Unfortunately, Wall Street losses on charter schools such as Edison have proven that charter schools are a bad investment. Further, even in places where the public schools don’t come close to the standard of quality we have in our Nebraska public schools, charter schools are being closed for poor performance and irresponsible management.
The facts could not be any clearer: Investments in our public schools yield the best returns.
“The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, And Abuse,” was released jointly by the nonprofit organizations Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy. It follows a similar report released a year ago by the same groups that detailed $136 million in fraud and waste and mismanagement in 15 of the 42 states that operate charter schools. The 2015 report cites $203 million, including the 2014 total plus $23 million in new cases, and $44 million in earlier cases not included in last year’s report.
Some studies regarding private school vouchers and charter schools:
• Vouchers close neighborhood public schools and benefit wealthy school districts and privately run schools (Vasquez Heilig & Portales, 2014) http://bit.ly/EPAAVouchers
• Vouchers as a reform agenda are not viable given a paucity of peer reviewed evidence that they improve student outcomes in a consistent or large way in the US. (Vasquez Heilig, LeClair, Lemke, & McMurrey 2014). http://bit.ly/TCEPvouchers
• When vouchers are applied universally, education inequity is exacerbated. Schools do the choosing (Vasquez Heilig & Portales, 2012) http://bit.ly/IUPRAChileVouchers
• Charter schools have a 40 percent attrition rate for their African American students (Vasquez Heilig, Williams, McNeil & Lee, 2011). http://bit.ly/BREAttrition
• Charters schools are more segregated relative to public schools in their vicinity. (Vasquez Heilig, LeClair, Redd, 2014 Under Review)
Mercedes Schneider has listened to Betsy DeVos’s complaints about the public schools, the most common of which is that it is time to change. Big change. Real change.
DeVos recently complained that students were sitting around in desks, watching the teacher, and that is so old-timey. She wants something new, really new.
Of course, the classes in the religious schools she loves are also sitting at desks watching the teacher, but let’s put that aside.
Mercedes says she doesn’t mind the desks all that much.
She writes:
As DeVos continues, one senses that she believes desks in rows preclude education being “organized around the needs of students.” Of course, if rows of desks were the result of a pervasive voucher program, then they would be parent-empowered rows of desks, and that would surely vindicate that desk configuration.
I was in my desks-in-rows classroom today, even though it is a Saturday, because I needed to input grades in my computer in order to begin next week without being swamped. Last weekend, much of this past week, and some of this weekend I have spent and will spend time grading essays.
I teach English. Time-consuming essay grading is part of my responsibility to my students, just as it was 100 years ago. (I’m fairly certain that the computerized grading component emerged at least a decade or two later.)
I also spent hours meeting with each student individually to discuss each student’s grade on that essay assignment and to strategize improvements for the next essay, which will be even longer and more complex. I’m not sure if such consultation happened 100 years ago. I do know that my father (born 99 years ago) and my aunt (born 108 years ago) finished school at the eighth grade, which was common in the 1920s-1930s in New Orleans.
Indeed, the amount of time and effort it takes for me to grade a set of essays for my 141 high school seniors does have me siding with DeVos to rethink schools.
But now she is thinking that DeVos is on to something big with that desk issue.
Schneider wants a Harkness table in her classroom. She thinks there should be a Harness table in every high school classroom.
What is a Harkness table?
That is a table where a teacher sits with 12 students and discusses issues. This innovation began at the exclusive Exeter Academy, where Chester Finn Jr. was a student.
Schneider recalls a letter she wrote Finn in 2013:
Yes, Betsy, I would willingly surrender my 28 student desks for one Harkness table.
A wonderful byproduct of this desk-surrendering plan would be the reduced class size that would, in turn, cut my essay-grading burden by more than half.
We are on our way to solving multiple problems.
In my 2013 post, I called my plan the Exeter Plan, named for Finn’s multi-generational, exclusive private school alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy, which started using the Harkness method in 1930.
(DeVos would surely forgive the multi-generational aspect of Finn attendance at a school with the same seating configuration across those generations since the school is a private school, which she prefers above all.)
Still, there are some complications, not the least of which is what would become of the students who don’t secure a seat at the table. That’s one of those old-fashioned hang-ups of traditional public schools: They have an obligation to educate all students– the public. They’ve been doing so for generations, just as private schools have been operating via selective admissions for generations.
So what if it is expensive? It would be a very productive change! Why should we teach 28 (or 35 or more) students in old-fashioned desks when it is so much more innovative to teach 12 students at one table?
In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, accepted nine black students, while white parents jeered and protested. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to safeguard the students and to carry out the order of a federal judge.
That was sixty years ago.
How much has changed? Now Little Rock’s public schools are segregated again. At the behest of the Walton Family (which owns Arkansas), the public schools were taken over by the state. The man in charge is not, never was, an educator. The ostensible reason for the takeover was that six of the city’s 48 schools were “failing.” Since then, three of the 48 schools have been closed. More are on the chopping block, including schools with a long and honorable history.
Barclay Key, a historian at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, writes the sad story of the past sixty years here. (What! The Walton family forgot to buy the history department!)
It appears that the Walton family wants to turn Little Rock into the next New Orleans, the next Memphis. It wants to wipe out public schools and replace them with charters. It wants to silence the voice of local citizens and give them no role in determining the future of their schools.
Key writes:
The two most striking parallels between the past and present are the insistence by white leaders that they know what is best for Black families and students and the recurrent role that local white business leaders play in undermining the public school system and prioritizing their prerogatives for the city…
Sixty years ago Little Rock epitomized desegregation struggles in the South, but the city now follows a path worn by New Orleans, Memphis, and other cities wracked by the proliferation of charter schools. Like they have over the past sixty years, politicians and business leaders presume to know what is best for public schools, and their decisions reflect a preoccupation with the latest trends in business rather than research-based pedagogy. The replacement for the elected board, state education commissioner Johnny Key, was appointed by the new Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson despite having no experience as an educator. Key appointed a superintendent who was generally trusted by the city’s white elites, but that superintendent was promptly replaced when he openly criticized the inefficiency of expanding charter schools in a district that has been gradually losing students for years. With the exception of reconstituting one school, the state made no substantive changes at the distressed schools.
“Reflections of Progress” will serve as the theme for the sixtieth anniversary of the desegregation crisis. Things have certainly changed, but the standard is too low if we measure progress by events that unfolded in 1957. Reflecting on progress since 1967 would be more appropriate and sobering. White men again make all decisions for the school district. They act with the support of the Chamber of Commerce and, today, the Walton charter school lobby controlled by the state’s powerful Walton family. Since the state takeover, many of the same bureaucrats have their six-figure salaries. Many of the same children cannot read. Little Rock periodically commemorates the 1957 controversy, but it constantly relives 1967.
The Walton Family Foundation is engraved on this blog’s Wall of Shame. It doesn’t stand alone, but it has a place of pre-eminence on a wall that lists those who have used their money and power to betray democracy, public schools, and the American dream.
Arthur Camins recently retired after a distinguished career in science, engineering, and the study of innovation.
He has an inspired idea for innovation in education: try equitable, integrated public schools.
He writes:
Secretary of Education Betsy Devos says that students in the US attend schools that are a “mundane malaise that dampens dreams, dims horizons and denies futures.” She accuses public schools of being stuck in the past. She claims to want innovation.
Miriam-Webster defines innovation as follows;
1: the introduction of something new
2: a new idea, method, or device: novelty
DeVos and her allies want to give public funds to parents to send their children to any public, charter or private schools, whether or not they are religious and whether or not they discriminate by race, religion or sexual orientation.
If enacted, her policies would mean returning to a time when schools were more segregated by race, religion, and class. That is not new or novel. In fact, it is stuck in the past. Segregation is not innovative. It is old school.
DeVos believes that individual parents are in the best position to choose a school that is best for their child, rather than democratically elected representatives. That unlimited choice would return us to a time when individual parents’ inclinations and, yes, their prejudices were prioritized over the needs of the communities in which they live and over the needs of the nation.
For several decades after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision in 1954 public schools in the US became more integrated. However, that trend has reversed. Public schools are becoming more segregated, not just by race but by socioeconomic status as well. In other words, it is becoming more likely that student will attend schools with children who are more similar to one another than not. That trend may satisfy the narrow interests and proclivities of some, but it is destructive to the nation.
Segregated schools are destructive to the nation not just because the inherent inequality of separate education shortchanges particular categories of individual students, but because it deprives all students of the benefit of learning to live across differences in our unalterably diverse country. Integrated schools are not only a moral and democratic imperative but an economic one too. Research indicates that diverse groups are more productive and creative and make better decisions. Learning to participate in diverse groups should start in school not on the job….
The idea of mediating racial and socioeconomic school segregation is not new. But, doing something substantive about it would be innovative.
Here are several policies that promote the old, but still vital idea and value of diversity and equity. Isolated boutique enactments are not innovative. Widespread systemic implementation would be.
Stop funding local public schools primarily through property taxes. Since communities have significantly varied tax bases, this is inherently inequitable. Instead, shift school funding to graduated state and personal federal income, capital gains, and corporate taxes.
Incentivize more integrated neighborhoods through changes in lending and zoning practices. It was, in fact, federal policies that help to limit integrated and promote segregated neighborhoods. It is time to reverse that deplorable history.
Since addressing inequity is necessarily a long-term effort, prioritize funding to schools with the greatest percentages of children from low-incomes and traditionally underrepresented groups.
Increase federal funding, so that rather than taking from well endowed, middle-class schools, funding for the rest can be increased.
Increase federal funding for special education, so that meeting the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act does not come at the expense of other children.
Provide nutritional, social, health, and economic support to children and their families, so that all children can engage fully in learning.
Invest in infrastructure and research jobs with decent wages so that adults are employed and provide stability at home.
Promote positive social and emotional learning practices in all schools so that all students are known, valued and respected.
Fund professional learning and formative assessment practices so that teachers continue to learn how to best engage and address the learning needs of all students.
None of these ideas are new. However, as a nation, we have only tinkered at designing solutions. We are a nation of interdependent communities and states. Systemic efforts to address inequity have always been limited not by what is possible, but by the political constraints driven by economic elites. The self-proclaimed realists among the empowered condescendingly claim, “We cannot afford all that.” What they really mean is, “I don’t want to pay for it.”
It’s time to give priority to the needs of the majority of Americans. More integrated, well-funded schools would benefit everyone. That would be innovative.
Whenever Trump goes into a major rant and incites a culture war, he is changing the subject from something he doesn’t want to talk about.
This is what the current attack on athletes is really about.
He had to change the subject.
He has succeeded.
Stop talking about the knee and the flag.
Talk about the subject Trump wants to avoid.
Ref Rodriguez was elected to the Los Angeles school board in 2015. He ran against a respected educator named Bennett Kayser and used some extremely negative television ads. Kayser has a physical disability, and one of Ref’s ads showed a shaking hand holding a tea cup, then dropping it. It came as close to stereotyping someone on grounds of physically disability as possible. It was ugly.
Questions were raised about the finances of Ref’s charter chain, about food services.
A small publication called the LA Progressive raised questions about his campaign donations.
Rodriguez’ campaign disclosure filings with the City of Los Angeles show that several staffers of his charter school, Partnerships to Uplift Communities (PUC), gave small donations in December 2014, before a filing deadline at the end of the year. What is odd and striking about several of the donations is that they come from PUC staffers who first made a very small donation early in the month and then, in the last 3 days of the year, suddenly ponied up the largest donation allowed by campaign ethics laws. Six donated the maximum $1,100. One paid $850.;;;
What is highly irregular about this pattern of donations to Rodriguez, however, is the job category of the PUC employees and the timing of their donations.
A janitor, a tutor, a parent organizer, two maintenance workers, a kitchen manager, and an office manager would not raise eyebrows for donating $25, $50, or even $100 to a candidate, as these seven PUC workers did within days of each other in mid-December 2014.
None of that mattered. He won. He was backed by the usual cabal of very wealthy charter supporters who wanted to put one of their own on the school board.
These donations seem to be at the center of an investigation of campaign finance violations by Ref. A number of charges have been filed against him for breaking the law. He stepped down as LAUSD president, but he did not leave the board. It is unseemly for a public official facing criminal charges to stay in a position of authority, but there he is. Doing it.
Peter Cunningham, who used to be Arne Duncan’s communications director and now runs the pro-charter Education Post, funded by the same people who fund California’s charter schools, wrote an article in defense of Ref. He thinks that what Ref did, if he did it, was a mistake made by a rookie. He thinks that it was unfair to bring criminal charges against Ref when others have done the same things and not faced criminal charges. He thinks that the prosecutors in Los Angeles are persecuting Ref “simply because he was elected board president.”
Up until now, no one has alleged that the district attorney was acting improperly. Ref should not be treated unfairly, but then again, he should not get special treatment just because he founded a chain of charter schools and is beloved of Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, and the California Charter Schools Association.
Justice should be swift and unbiased. Let Ref Rodriguez make his case in court, not in the media.
The Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University has always been pro-school choice, pro-charters, pro-vouchers.
But now the PEPG–headed by the General of the School Choice Movement Paul Petersen–has outdone itself.
It is staging a two-day celebration of Betsy DeVos and the Trump agenda of public school-bashing, funded by the Koch Brothers and other rightwing foundations.
There is nary a critic of this radical rightwing agenda, not as a presenter or a panelist.
The conference is called “The Future of School Choice.”
The Charles Koch Foundation is a major funder, but after it became clear that his name was embarrassing, it was removed from the list of sponsors.
How shameful that Harvard would lend its name to a one-sided effort to cheer on the destruction of public education and would give a platform to a woman with no academic credentials.
As the writer for the New Republic, Graham Vyse, points out, the Harvard Institute of Politics invited Sean Spicer and Corey Lewandowski to accept fellowships, so the University apparently has low standards.
Apparently Jeff Sessions is about to give a speech about “free speech” in which he will decry “political correctness” on campus, meaning I assume the refusal to debate issues.
Do you think he will single out Harvard’s PEPG for refusing to hold a debate about the future of school choice and excluding those who recognize the civic importance of public education and the failure of charters and vouchers to live up to their claims?
I’m not holding my breath.
I am adding Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance to this blog’s Wall of Shame for its failure to permit even the most minimal expectations of academic and scholarly fairness, and for turning itself into a propaganda mill for the privatization movement, at the behest of Big Money.
Ohio legislators decided that it was a nifty idea to give grades to schools, based mainly on their test scores. This was an idea first developed by Jeb Bush, who saw it as a way to identify “failing” public schools and set them up for privatization and handover to his friends in the charter industry.
Most people understood that the test scores would reflect the affluence or poverty of the district, not the efficacy of the school, but legislators ignored what was otherwise common knowledge.
Many Ohio legislators are now unhappy with their school grades, because schools in their own districts are getting low grades.
Most districts…got Cs. And just under 4% of traditional public school districts got As for how their students scored on 26 state tests. More than 80% got Fs in that category.
State school superintendent Paolo DeMaria says report cards show important data, but that the letter grades aren’t the only factor that determines good schools.
“There are lots of things that aren’t measured on the report card – things like art programs, music programs, the school climate, cohesiveness among staff,” said DeMaria.
But the report cards were disappointing to many districts, including where Republican Rep. Mike Duffey lives in Worthington. That district got some of its lowest grades since 2012.
That’s when state lawmakers, including Duffey, voted to replace labels such as “continuous improvement” and “academic watch” with letter grades. On Facebook Duffey called the report cards “utter trash” and “fake news” – because he says they seem to show only that more diverse districts are scoring lower grades.
“Frankly, in my opinion, it’s disrespectful to minorities and it’s borderline racist in the way that it goes about it because it is going to reflect the nature of the district, the socio-economic diversity. It’s not going to show your potential to learn.”
Duffey says he’ll draft legislation to scrap the A-F grading system he once supported, saying it doesn’t result in fair comparisons among districts. He says the cards would still show data on subgroups and student growth, but not an overall letter grade.
House Education Committee chair Andrew Brenner of Powell says the report cards are important, but he’s open to moving away from overall letter grades too.
“The school district is different than a student getting a letter grade on a test or something. If a school district is getting Fs on everything, you know, they need to see something where they’re showing progress and whether they’re improving and they need to focus on the positives and look to see where the negatives are to try to improve those negatives. And if they’re stuck on the report card letter grade they may not be doing any of the underlying corrections.”
Brenner is a non-voting member of the state board of education along with Senate Education Committee chair Peggy Lehner of Kettering. Lehner says she feels improvements could be made, but she says the letter grades aren’t the real problem with the report cards.
“If you look deep down at them, you’re going to find that there’s an increase in poverty in those school districts. And it’s being reflected in some of those scores.”
The Ohio Education Policy Institute’s Howard Fleeter analyzes report card data for Ohio’s traditional public school districts. Fleeter says the highest performing schools have double the median income of the lowest performing districts. And those that got Fs have, on average, nearly 7 times as many economically disadvantaged students as the districts that got As do. Fleeter says for the past two decades, report cards have shown that districts with higher scores have fewer low-income kids, who have a set of needs their higher-income peers don’t face.
“I don’t want people to draw the conclusion that says, low-income kids can’t learn. Districts or schools that have low-income kids are bad schools – they’re not doing their job.’ It’s more challenging. It’s more difficult. I think we need to know this information.”
Fleeter and other advocates for schools have said investing state dollars in preschool and intervention specialists can help lower-income kids catch up to their more economically advantaged peers.
By the way, most of the state’s 276 charter schools got either Ds or Fs in their performance index scores. A spokesman for the pro-charter study group the Fordham Institute says most charters are in urban areas, and have the same challenges the traditional schools in those areas do.
A group of parents in Baltimore County was very unhappy with their high-flying Superintendent, Dallas Dance. Dance planned a huge investment in technology, and the parents didn’t see the evidence for it. They worried that the schools were investing in a pipe dream…or worse. Dance planned to spend at least $272 million so that every student would have his or her own laptop. Where he saw technological salvation, the parents saw expensive snake oil.
Dance wanted to become a national leader in introducing “personalized” (depersonalized) learning in his schools, and he spent freely for technology to make his dream come true.
Some parents in the county saw what was happening and they criticized it, again and again, in their own blog, as a massive waste of taxpayers’ money and a waste of students’ instructional time.
Dance abruptly resigned last spring, and he is now former superintendent of Baltimore County public schools. He is now under criminal investigation by the Maryland State Prosecutor’s Office.
The parent blog, written in this instance by Joanne C. Simpson, reports on Dance’s problems:
Among issues apparently under review: Dance’s “involvement with SUPES Academy,” which did business with BCPS and for which Dance consulted at the time. “In 2014, school system ethics officials ruled that Dance had violated ethics rules by taking a part time job with SUPES after the company got an $875,000 contract with the school system,” the Sun noted. For other info on SUPES and various linkages to Dance, read also this post.
Dance offered no comment to news of a current state prosecutor investigation, but this very recent video by the resigned superintendent speaks volumes.
Other details: The investigative news story on SUPES, which revealed Dance’s consulting job, was first broken in 2013 by The Chicago Reporter and then followed by the Sun. Dance agreed to drop the outside job.
Former chief of Chicago Public Schools Barbara Byrd-Bennett, once named as a favorite mentor by Dance, was among those embroiled in the SUPES scandal and convicted this year of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks and sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison.
Dance, who promised not to consult again after the ethics finding on SUPES, has been cited for other ethics violations and criticized for various “appearances of conflict of interest,” as well as costly taxpayer-funded travel to numerous edtech conferences and events, among other issues. His limited liability corporation Deliberate Excellence Consulting LLC was listed as Active and “Not In Good Standing” a few months ago, as also reported in this blog—a status which remains.
Many related concerns–including promotional videos Dance did for school system vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard–were first brought up in this op-ed in April 2016.
According to revised financial disclosure forms filed “under penalty of perjury” after the last ethics findings, Dance reported no personal income from his LLC, which according to charter records was formed “to consult and partner with school systems, businesses and organizations around best practices to obtain maximum organizational outcomes.”
Dance unexpectedly announced his resignation in April, partly saying he wanted to spend more time with family. Meanwhile, a few of his post-BCPS consulting positions are no longer listed on those firms’ sites nor on Dance’s LinkedIn profile page, including “Partner, Strategos Group,” and a full-time senior vice president position he announced with MGT Consulting Group when he left the superintendent position on June 30.
Parents who watched carefully were concerned about student privacy, data mining, and balanced use of technology. They worried that Dance had gone overboard. They were right to worry.
More:
“Despite Dance’s departure, STAT [Dance’s program] is still being pursued and expanded under current Interim Superintendent Verletta White, who pressed for a nearly $4 million expansion of just two software contracts, iReady and DreamBox Math, this year (see postscript below), despite questions by school board members about the programs’ high costs and lack of objective evidence of benefits. Via the software programs, elementary school children as young as 6 watch math or English language videos, and do gaming-style lessons, or play video games as “rewards” on the devices during the school day.”
The spending on technology with no evidence of its value goes forward:
“As first reported here in The Baltimore Post: The company e.Republic (which backs the Center for Digital Education) works with over 700 companies – from “Fortune 500s to startups” – to help executives ‘power their public sector sales and marketing success.’ Among those listed: Intel, IBM, Blackboard, Microsoft, Aerohive, Apple, Samsung, Dell and Google.” Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and other companies are familiar entities at BCPS.
“Also, among a litany of mostly no-bid digital curricula contracts recently implemented at the county’s public school district: the reading/English language software program iReady, which had a $1.2 million BCPS contract spending authority expanded in July to $3.2 million for fewer than 5 years, as approved by the Board of Education and requested by interim superintendent White.
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iReady by Curriculum Associates:
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https://www.bcps.org/apps/bcpscontracts/contractFiles/012015_JMI-618-14%208%20Mod%20Teach%20Resource%20English%20Language.docx
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“DreamBox Math, meanwhile, jumped nearly $2 million more to $3.2 million for just three more years.
If contacts don’t link, can copy and paste this lengthy link: http://www.boarddocs.com/mabe/bcps/Board.nsf/files/AMQQTE6AD435/$file/061317%20JNI-778-14%20Modification%20and%20Extension%20-%20Mathematics%20Supplemental%20Resources.pdf
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“Such price tags total a whopping more than $6 million for two software programs alone in a cash-strapped school system with many pressing needs.
“In the end, many would agree digital technology has a place as a modern tool of learning. But analyses are required when children’s minds and futures are involved. Consider this objective 2017 National Education Policy Center report on “blended and virtual learning,” and a recent Business Insider story on DreamBox, which also questions the tenets of the “personalized-learning” computer-based approach, and points out just how many data points are collected on children–50,000 per hour per student just by DreamBox. There’s also the widespread industry marketing campaigns and venture capitalist profit-margins behind it all.”
There is a moral to this story: Pay attention to ethics rules. Don’t seek or accept outside money from corporations who want to sell stuff or services to your district. Be satisfied with your salary or look for a different job.
There is another moral: the tech companies view the schools as a market, and they are taking taxpayers’ money because they can.
Every school board, every superintendent has a duty to review these contracts carefully and reject those that are unproven. Don’t take the word of the salesmen.
Diane Ravitch's blog 