Archives for the month of: May, 2018
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Chicago: The Measurable Result of Closing 50 Schools in One Day in 2013

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2018 //
37

Julie Vassilatos read the report of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research about the closing of 50 schools in one day in 2013. She knew that there was no academic gain for the children affected.

http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-public-fools/2018/05/in-the-wake-of-the-mass-school-closings-one-measurable-result/

But there was one measurable result that no one talked about: Sorrow.

“The sorrow of children whose schools were closed.

“It’s measurable. The researchers measured it. They liken the losses that the students–and teachers, staff, and families–experienced, to grief. The technical term for it is “institutional mourning.” Children and staff talked about losing their school “families,” spoke of the forced separations like a divorce, or a death. Generations-long relationships with schools ended abruptly after a pained, humiliating school year of battling to keep them open–schools that served as neighborhood anchors, social roots, home of beloved teachers. Most of the 50 shuttered schools have since stood empty and fallow after the closings, untended eyesores perpetually in the view of the kids who lived nearby, monuments to loss.

“Thousands of children who experienced this loss, all at once. And it’s long term–it did not go away in a week or a month or a year.

“Does it matter to anyone? Does it matter to the mayor? Would he say: but what is that to me?

“What is it to him? The wholesale destruction of 50 communities in predominantly poor and minority neighborhoods, for no measurable benefit, leaving the measurable sadness of thousands of children in its wake?

“We can only hope it’s the beginning of the end of mayoral control of CPS.”

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Closing schools, Disruption, Emanuel, Rahm

What’s Wrong with Charter Schools? A Short Explanation for the Uninitiated

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2018 //
41

Every so often, a friend who is not deep into education issues asks for a short explanation of why I oppose charter schools. Didn’t Obama and Duncan support them? But now Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers support them? I keep meaning to write a brief summary but have not had time.

Recently a friend in California wrote an explanation that might serve the purpose.

What’s wrong with charter schools? The picture in California*

Charter schools take resources away from the public schools, harming public schools and their students. All charter schools do this – whether they’re opportunistic and for-profit or presenting themselves as public, progressive and enlightened.

Charter schools are free to pick and choose and exclude or kick out any student they want. They’re not supposed to, but in real life there’s no enforcement. Many impose demanding application processes, or use mandatory “intake counseling,” or require work hours or financial donations from families – so that only the children of motivated, supportive, compliant families get in. Charter schools publicly deny this, but within many charter schools, the selectivity is well known and viewed as a benefit. Admittedly, families in those schools like that feature – with the more challenging students kept out of the charter – but it’s not fair or honest, and it harms public schools and their students.

Charter schools are often forced into school districts against the districts’ will. School boards’ ability to reject a charter application is limited by law; and if a school board rejects a charter application, the applicant can appeal to the county board of education and the California state board of education. Then the school district winds up with a charter forced upon it, taking resources from the existing public schools. Often this means the district must close a public school.

Anyone can apply to open and operate a charter school, and get public funding for it.The process is designed to work in their favor. They don’t have to have to be educators or show that they’re competent or honest. They may be well-meaning but unqualified and incompetent, or they may be crooks. Imagine allowing this with police stations, fire stations, public bus systems or parks.

Part of a school district’s job is to provide the right number of schools to serve the number of students in the district. When charter schools are forced into the district, that often requires existing public schools to close. Again, that harms the district and its students.

California law (Prop. 39) requires school districts to provide space for charter schools, even if the district didn’t want the charter. Charter schools are often forced into existing public schools (this is called co-location), taking space and amenities away from their students and creating conflict. This is a contentious issue in other states too.

Charter schools can be opened by almost anyone and get little oversight, so they’re ripe for corruption, looting, nepotism, fraud and self-dealing. Corruption happens in public school districts too, but charter schools offer an extra tempting opportunity for crooks, and the history of charters in California nationwide shows that wrongdoers often grab that opportunity.

Charter schools, backed by billionaire-funded pro-privatization support and PR machinery, have positioned themselves as an enemy to school districts, public schools and teachers, sending their damaging message to politicians and the media. These charter backers pour millions into electing charter-friendly candidates. Tearing down our public school system and our teachers, as the charter sector does endlessly, harms our public schools and their students.

The charter sector tends to sort itself into two kinds of schools. Charter schools serving low-income students of color often impose military-style discipline and rigid rules – hands folded on the desk, eyes tracking the speaker, punishment for tiny dress code violations, a focus on public humiliation. By contrast, some charter schools serving children of privilege are designed to isolate the school from a district so that lower-income kids aren’t assigned to the school. Charter schools overall have been found to increase school segregation.

Charter schools overall serve far fewer children with disabilities and English-language learners than public schools. Even those designed to serve children with disabilities serve far fewer children with the types of disabilities that are most challenging and expensive to work with, such as children with severe autism or who are severely emotionally disturbed.

Despite the many advantages charter schools enjoy, they don’t do any better overall than public schools. The rallying cry for charter schools used to be that the “competition” would improve public schools, but that hasn’t happened. In charter schools’ more than 20 years of existence, they haven’t overall brought better education to impoverished communities.

*Note: This commentary applies to California charter schools and California charter laws. Many of the issues apply to charter schools in most or all other states where they exist.

– Created by a longtime Northern California parent volunteer education advocate

Do you have anything to add?

 

Categories Education Reform

Tom Ultican: Why Charter Schools are NOT Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2018 //
6

Over the past 25 years of experience with charter schools, we have learned that they claim to be public when it is time to get the money, but in all other respects, they are private. Their management is private. They are exempt from many of the laws and regulations that govern public schools. They do not report to an elected board, or to a board that is in any sense accountable to the public or transparent. At least 90% are non-union.

Tom Ultican, a retired teacher in San Diego, saw that the director of communications for the California Charter Schools Association, the most powerful lobby in the state, wrote a letter to the San Diego Free Press, saying that they had been unfair to charter schools and that their stories contained many inaccuracies, although he did not identify any.

Ultican took him to task for his failure to document any inaccuracies and wrote:

Unfortunately, charter schools have become profit centers for real estate developers and charter management organizations. Instead of fulfilling their original mission to be education innovators, they have too often become fraud infested enterprises lusting after tax dollars. It did not have to be this way…

Calling charter-schools public-schools is false. It is political spin. That is too nice. It is a lie.

When the city of San Diego contracts with a construction company to repair roads, that company is still a private company. When the state of California approves a contract, known as a charter, with a private company to educate students, the company gets paid with tax dollars. It is still a private company and is not required to comply with open meeting laws, elected school boards, much of the state education code and budget transparency like a public school. They are private businesses.

This lie is very profitable to charter school owners:

Whether they are for-profit or non-profit they are private companies and the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is quite obscure. For example, Mary Bixby, San Diego’s pioneer in the strip mall charter school business, puts children at computers running education software. Very little personal teacher-student interaction takes place but teenagers who don’t like to get up in the morning can go to the strip mall and earn credits toward graduation. In 2015, the non-profit Mary founded paid her a “salary” of $340,810 and her daughter Tiffany Yandell received $135,947.

It is easy to take offense at the truth. But, ignoring the daily lies from the highest levels of our government, honesty is always the best policy. When you tell the truth you don’t need a “communications director” to spin bad stories.

Categories California, Charter Schools, For-Profit, Fraud, Lies, Propaganda

Charles P. Pierce: Betsy DeVos, Profiting Off Students in an Administration of Grifters

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2018 //
6

Charles P. Pierce, blogger for Esquire, is one of my favorite writers. He has a knack for getting right to the point with pithy phrases and colorful images.

In this post, he calls out a few of the unsavory profiteers in the Trump administration, starting with Ryan Zinke and Scott Pruitt, who have a taste for first-class travel on the taxpayers’ dime.

Then he gets to DeVos, and he skewers her for abandoning the Department of Ecucation’s Obligation to protec college students who are victims of fraud by for-profit “universities” like Trump University.

DeVos’s spokeswoman Elizabeth Hill defends DeVos’ indefensible actions, as usual.

Pierce writes:

Where do they find these embarrassingly bot-like public liars? How does one “provide oversight” beyond doing investigations? As to Ms. Hill’s assurances that the presence of so many former higher-ed scamsters in the department had no influence in the decision, well, we are once again up against the most serious ontological question about this administration: How many foxes do there have to be before the henhouse becomes a foxhouse?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education, Lies

No, Al Shanker Did Not Invent the Charter School Industry We Have Now

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2018 //
44

This article unintentionally explains where charter schools went wrong. When Shanker proposed the idea of charter schools in 1988, he thought of them as “schools within schools,” created by teachers and subject to both union rules and the school district. But it all changed when Minnesota passed the first charter law in 1992.

The article was written by Paul Peterson, the Harvard professor who supports charters, vouchers, and all kinds of choice. He is editor of Education Next. I have known Paul for many years (though I have not seen him for nearly a decade). I got to know him during my time as a member of the Koretz Task Force at the Hoover Institution from 1998-2008. He is a very genial man. I recall one night after a meeting at Hoover when David Packard (of Hewlett Packard) invited Paul and me to see the old-time movie theater that he purchased in Palo Alto. It was closed that evening, and he had the projectionist run a classic film for us. Then, as a treat, he had the old-fashioned organ rise from beneath the stage. Paul went onstage and played the organ, a talent he had developed many years earlier in church in Minnesota.

Paul writes in this article about the origins of the charter school. The article is titled, “No, Albert Shanker Did Not Invent the Charter School.” I was frankly happy to read it because I get tired of right-wingers pretending to be progressives and insisting that they are doing exactly what that esteemed labor leader recommended, and that charters are run by progressives and teachers.

Paul makes clear that Shanker’s vision of what a charter school should be was replaced by a very different vision in 1992.

Paul adds an interesting twist to the origins of the contemporary charter school idea. Shanker wanted charters to be authorized by schools and/or districts and subject to collective bargaining. But the first charter law was passed in Minnesota and its proponents were Joe Nathan (who often comments here) and Ted Kolderie. They wanted charter schools to be authorized by state entities, not limited to teachers or subject to collective bargaining, and to compete with public schools. Nathan and Kolderie won, and their model is the one that is dominant today. So now, instead of charter schools that are subject to school district’s needs and collective bargaining, we have corporate charter chains and charters opened by entrepreneurs.

Shanker wanted charters to serve as R&D for the public schools; he did not want them to undermine public schools. Nathan and Kolderie wanted them to compete with the public schools, according to Petersen. And now we have the most rightwing figures in American society–the DeVos family, the Koch brothers, and ALEC–fully embracing charter schools. They would never have tolerated or supported Shanker’s model. They want to use charters to smash public education as a public good.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, History

Nashville: Whistleblowers at Charter School Complain about Financial Practices, Treatment of ELLs and Special Ed Students

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2018 //
6

Whistleblowers at a charter school in Nashville called for financial scrutiny of their school:

The Nashville charter school New Vision Academy is under investigation by the school district for financial irregularities and failing to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

New Vision Academy came under scrutiny in March after an anonymous whistleblower sent a detailed report to school board member Amy Frogge, who forwarded it to the district.

Metro Nashville Public Schools charter schools executive officer Dennis Queen confirmed the investigation is ongoing.

In addition, the whistleblower report, compiled by teachers, said English language-learning students and students with learning disabilities were not receiving required instructional time. However, on those two areas Queen said the district found New Vision to be in compliance in both of those areas.

According to the whistleblower report, students were charged for textbooks even though the school earmarked thousands of dollars for classroom supplies. The top two executives at New Vision, who are married, make a combined $562,000….

The teachers who detailed the allegations said they want New Vision, which has about 200 students, to address the issues, improve its financial management and admit its shortcomings. The Tennessean is not naming the teachers because they feared retribution from the nonprofit, which does not have a policy protecting whistleblowers.

On Monday, the four teachers who talked to The Tennessean for this story were escorted out of the school. Three were told not to return. One was allowed back into the school Tuesday to finish teaching the final three days of the school year. All four were told the school is accepting their resignations as of this week.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Nashville, Privatization, Scandal, Teachers

Thomas Frank: The Teachers’ Strikes Burst a Lot of Bubbles

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2018 //
40

Thomas Frank, author, commends the striking teachers in Arizona and elsewhere for dashing the neoliberal dream of demonizing teachers.

He writes in “The Guardian”:

What I like best about the wave of teachers’ strikes that have swept America these last few months is how they punch so brutally and so directly in the face of the number one neoliberal educational fantasy of the last decade: that all we need to do to fix public education is fire people.

Fire teachers, specifically. They need to learn fear and discipline. That’s what education “reformers” have told us for years. If only, the fantasy goes, we could slay the foot-dragging unions and the red-tape rules that keep mediocre teachers in their jobs, then things would be different. If only some nice “tech millionaires” would step in and help us fire people! If only we could get a thousand clones of Michelle Rhee, the former DC schools chancellor who fired so many people she even once fired someone on TV!

Now just look at what’s happened. We’ve seen enormous teacher protests in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona, with more on the way. Actions that look very much like strikes by people who, in some of these states, are legally forbidden to strike. It was the perfect opportunity for education “reformers” to fire people, and fire them en masse. It was the politicians’ chance to show us what a tough-minded boss could do.

And in most cases, it was state governments that capitulated. It was hard-hearted believers in tax cuts and austerity and discipline who caved, lest they themselves get fired by voters at the next opportunity.

That, folks, is the power of solidarity, and the wave of teacher walkouts is starting to look like our generation’s chance to learn the lesson our grandparents absorbed during the strike wave of the late 1930s: that given the right conditions and the right amount of organization, working people can rally the public and make social change all by themselves. Irresistibly. Organically. From the bottom up.

Teachers won’t stand for austerity any more. They are rising.

It is a wonderful article. I urge you to read it in full.

Categories Resistance, Teachers, Unions

When Bill Gates Fails, He Doesn’t Change Course, He Doubles Down

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2018 //
37

Marin Levine writes in NonProfit Quarterly about Bill Gates’ determination to reshape the nation’s schools. He has gone from failure to failure without changing course. The only time he admitted he was wrong was when he gave up his small schools initiative. Small schools are not a bad idea, but they can’t be stamped out in a cookie cutter fashion. Gates never understood that to succeed, they need to have a guiding spirit. Smallness all alone is not Reform.

On to charter schools, the Common Core and teacher evaluation. Failures. None delivered the Revolution he sought.

Now he is “helping” states with their ESSA plans, which means he is telling them what to do.

If only he could find a new idea, a new toy, a new hobby.

Give it up, Bill! You don’t know how to redesign American education. You never will, unless you made it your mission to give every child the same education you and your children had at Lakeside Academy.

Otherwise, he and Melinda are rich dilettantes playing with the lives of other people’s children.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

David French: I Fought to Protect Free Speech, I Fought So That Athletes Could “Take a Knee”

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2018 //
26

It has often been said that the true test of free speech is whether you protect the speech you disagree with. Popular speech does not need protection. Dissent does.

David French is a senior writer at the National Review and a military veteran. He wrote this article for The New York Times. It is titled “Conservatives Fail the NFL’s Free Speech Test.”

I love this article.


The United States is in the grips of a free-speech paradox. At the same time that the law provides more protection to personal expression than at any time in the nation’s history, large numbers of Americans feel less free to speak. The culprit isn’t government censorship but instead corporate, community and peer intimidation.

Conservatives can recite the names of the publicly shamed from memory. There was Brendan Eich, hounded out of Mozilla for donating to a California ballot initiative that defined marriage as the union of a man and woman. There was James Damore, abruptly terminated from Google after he wrote an essay attributing the company’s difficulty in attracting female software engineers more to biology and free choice than to systemic discrimination. On campus, the list is as long and grows longer every semester.

It is right to decry this culture of intolerance and advocate for civility and engagement instead of boycotts and reprisals. The cure for bad speech is better speech — not censorship. Take that message to the heartland, and conservatives cheer.

Until, that is, Colin Kaepernick chose to kneel. Until, that is, the president demanded that the N.F.L. fire the other players who picked up on his protest after he was essentially banished from the league.

That was when the conservative mob called for heads to roll. Conform or face the consequences.

On Wednesday, the mob won. The N.F.L. announced its anthem rules for 2018, and the message was clear: Respect the flag by standing for the national anthem or stay in the locker room. If you break the rules and kneel, your team can be fined for your behavior.

This isn’t a “middle ground,” as the N.F.L. claims. It’s not a compromise. It’s corporate censorship backed up with a promise of corporate punishment. It’s every bit as oppressive as the campus or corporate attacks on expression that conservatives rightly decry.

But this is different, they say. This isn’t about politics. It’s about the flag.

I agree. It is different. Because it’s about the flag, the censorship is even worse.

One of the most compelling expressions of America’s constitutional values is contained in Justice Robert Jackson’s 1943 majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. At the height of World War II, two sisters, both Jehovah’s Witnesses, challenged the state’s mandate that they salute the flag in school. America was locked in a struggle for its very existence. The outcome was in doubt. National unity was essential.

But even in the darkest days of war, the court wrote liberating words that echo in legal history: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Make no mistake, I want football players to stand for the anthem. I want them to respect the flag. As a veteran of the war in Iraq, I’ve saluted that flag in foreign lands and deployed with it proudly on my uniform. But as much as I love the flag, I love liberty even more.

The N.F.L. isn’t the government. It has the ability to craft the speech rules its owners want. So does Google. So does Mozilla. So does Yale. American citizens can shame whomever they want to shame.

But what should they do? Should they use their liberty to punish dissent? Or should a free people protect a culture of freedom?

In our polarized times, I’ve adopted a simple standard, a civil liberties corollary to the golden rule: Fight for the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself. Do you want corporations obliterating speech the state can’t touch? Do you want the price of participation in public debate to include the fear of lost livelihoods? Then, by all means, support the N.F.L. Cheer Silicon Valley’s terminations. Join the boycotts and shame campaigns. Watch this country’s culture of liberty wither in front of your eyes.

The vice president tweeted news of the N.F.L.’s new policy and called it “#Winning.” He’s dead wrong. It diminishes the marketplace of ideas. It mocks the convictions of his fellow citizens. And it divides in the name of a false, coerced uniformity. Writing in the Barnette decision, Justice Jackson wisely observed, “As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be.”

The N.F.L. should let players kneel. If it lets them kneel, it increases immeasurably the chances that when they do rise, they will rise with respect and joy, not fear and resentment. That’s the “winning” America needs.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Freedom of Speech

“What NFL Owners Can Learn from the History of Memorial Day”

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2018 //
8

E.J. Dionne writes here about the lessons of Memorial Day for NFL owners, who have agreed that their players are not allowed to “take a knee” when the National Anthem is sung to protest police brutality, although it is allowed in the privacy of the locker room.

It is, unfortunately, appropriate that the National Football League’s owners decided to issue their rule attacking free expression the week before Memorial Day.

A holiday dedicated to those who gave their lives for our nation’s freedom has itself been mired in political controversy almost from the beginning. The latest round of posturing and pandering around patriotism should not surprise us.

Samuel Johnson saw patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Let’s qualify that. An honest love of country is a virtue, not a vice. And nothing should sully the honor of the men and women whose sacrifices make it possible for us to speak and worship freely, and to exercise democratic control over our government.

Nonetheless, Johnson was onto something, because patriotism often is manipulated in the name of power, advantage and, in the case of the NFL’s wealthy overseers, money. And the contested history of Memorial Day is a story not only of innocent local pride but also of political and cultural clashes.

It took until 1966 for Congress to grant official recognition to Waterloo, N.Y. — it first decorated the graves of Union soldiers on May 5, 1866 — as the originator of the holiday.

But there are many other claims. The great Civil War historian James McPherson told the story of a Northern abolitionist who traveled to Charleston, S.C., to organize schools for freed slaves. On May 1, 1865, a year before Waterloo, he led a group of black children to a cemetery for Union soldiers “to scatter flowers on their graves.”

In the meantime, Southern women began organizing ceremonies for those who died doing battle for secession, culminating in the practice of Confederate Memorial Days. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the politically influential Union veterans group, is widely credited with taking the holiday national. He called on the GAR’s posts to hold decoration rites on May 30, 1868, for those who died to keep the country together. By 1891, every Northern state had established May 30 as a holiday.

It’s no shock that the holiday’s many currents of regional and racial tension rose to the surface during President Barack Obama’s time in office. In 2009, a group of scholars, including McPherson, wrote Obama, urging him to abandon the practice that began with President Woodrow Wilson of sending a wreath to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

As was his way, Obama responded with what he hoped would be unifying gestures. He lay the traditional wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, had a wreath delivered to the Confederate Memorial and became the first president to send one as well to the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington . It commemorates the service of more than 200,000 people of color who fought for the Union.

Oh, yes, and in 2010, when Obama chose to honor the war dead in Chicago, some of his conservative critics intimated he was the only president not to lay a Memorial Day wreath at Arlington.

That was flatly untrue. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and others had all been elsewhere on Memorial Day at least once during their terms.

So phony claims and nasty innuendo built around imagined sins against patriotism and our veterans predate President Trump. But Trump’s attacks on NFL players who have knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice represent a particularly vile effort to mobilize political support by implying that the dissenting athletes, most of them black, lack a devotion to country.

The privileged NFL owners chose to capitulate to this divisive propaganda. The anthem at the heart of this discussion celebrates our country as “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Yet the owners’ action is the opposite of bravery and a blow to freedom. Many on the right have spoken out forcefully for free speech on college campuses. But do they now propose to turn stadiums into “safe spaces” where conservatives deny others the liberties they claim for themselves? (And kudos to conservative writer and Iraq War vet David French for calling out this contradiction.)

Democrats fret that even engaging with Trump on all of this risks placing progressives on the wrong side of patriotism. But the history of Memorial Day should teach us that the meaning of our patriotism has long been a matter of necessary struggle.

We should not let the divider in the Oval Office keep us from joining together in profound appreciation of our fallen. They perished under a flag that represents “liberty and justice for all.” The living cannot surrender either of these commitments.

Categories Democracy, Freedom of Speech
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