You might want to remember this statistic the next time you hear a Reformer claim that charter schools enroll the same demographic as public schools.
In Detroit, the public schools are 22 times more likely to enroll children with autism than are charter schools.
The charter schools have to protect their test scores, so they don’t want those children.
Tom Ultican reviews here how school choice has devastated (DeVos-tated?) the public schools of Milwaukee.
Milwaukee is the city with public schools, charter schools, and voucher schools. It is also one of the lowest performing urban districts tested by NAEP.
He begins:
This past school year, Wisconsin taxpayers sent $250,000,000 to religious schools. Catholics received the largest slice, but protestants, evangelicals and Jews got their cuts. Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) reveals that private Islamic schools took in $6,350,000. Of the 212 schools collecting voucher money, 197 were religious schools.
The Wisconsin voucher program was expanded before the 2014-2015 school year. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “Seventy-five percent of eligible students who applied for taxpayer-funded subsidies to attend private and religious schools this fall in the statewide voucher program already attend private schools, ….”
Money taken from the public schools attended by the vast majority of Milwaukee’s students is sent to private religious schools. Public schools must adjust for stranded costs while paying to serve a higher percentage of special education students because private schools won’t take them. Forcing public schools to increase class sizes, reduce offerings such as music and lay off staff.
The public schools have a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, because the charter schools and voucher schools don’t want them.
Ultican recounts the history of charters and vouchers in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. He reminds us that charter schools are NOT public schools. They are privately managed organizations draining money from public schools.
And he concludes:
In the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that vouchers to religious school did not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. This decision re-wrote more than a century worth of precedence and further eroded the separation of church and state. No matter how this case was decided, it is patently un-American to force citizens to send money to religious organizations that they do not support.
Privatizing public education is a horrible idea. Public-schools are the bedrock upon which America’s democracy is built. Now strange conservatives and their fellow traveler in the Democratic party, the neoliberals, are claiming that democratically elected school boards are an anachronism. Know this; if someone is opposing democratic governance, they are proposing totalitarian rule by the wealthy.
Late night talk show host Seth Meyers Reviews Betsy DeVos on civil rights enforcement.
She promises to adhere to the letter of the law but makes clear that her goal is to guy civil rights enforcement.
Since the protection of LGBT students is not written into law, she will deep-six it.
As Meyers shows, she is very concerned about discrimination against white men. An overlooked and much abused minority.
The Celerity charter chain in Los Angeles was raided by the FBI because of the financial shenanigans of its founder and CEO, who resigned. The chain did an overhaul, worked to change the management, but one of its schools just closed due to under-enrollment. Where was that waiting list with tens of thousands of students that we always hear about?
Celerity Rojas was unable to attract enough students to balance its budget. Its doors will close, and its students are on their own. The deadline has passed for most charter schools, so–sob!–it is fortunate that public schools accept every student who walks in the door.
The closure is the first public sign that Celerity is under considerable financial strain.
In the aftermath of the January 2017 raid and news that the FBI was investigating the nonprofit and questioning its employees, Celerity was thrown into turmoil. The State Board of Education refused to renew two of its charter schools, and although both schools were able to reopen under different names, the network said some its families never came back.
At Celerity Rolas, an elementary and middle school split between two sites — one in Eagle Rock and one in Highland Park — the school needed 435 students to break even, according to the organization’s correspondence with the state. But only 309 students enrolled last year.
The loss of students meant less funding from the state. Meanwhile, the organization’s legal fees were rising.
Facing investigations by federal agencies and L.A. Unified’s Office of Inspector General, the group hired the law firm Gibson Dunn to aid it during the inquiries and help it separate from its founder, Vielka McFarlane, a target of the investigations. Celerity has also continued to pay a separate firm that specializes in charter school law.
The group’s most recent financial projections show that while its individual schools are bringing in more money than they are spending, the organization that manages them is on less firm ground.
An L.A. Unified analysis described the fiscal condition of the group as weak. Within a year, the nonprofit’s expenses are expected to exceed its revenue by $826,000. Out of its total budget of $5.3 million for the coming school year, the group expects to spend more than $500,000 on legal fees alone.
The former CEO of the chain, Vielka McFarlane, got into trouble for her profligate use of the schools’ credit card for her luxurious lifestyle. Chauffeur-driven cars, expensive dinners, designer suits, etc. It was good while it lasted. She became the poster person for the lack of oversight and regulation of charter schools in California, at least for a few days.
Don’t expect the California Charter School Association to care about the closure of another charter school. They are busy hatching more.
I have been waiting for the sentencing of Nicholas Trombetta for years, ever since he was arrested for tax evasion after not reporting the millions of dollars he stole from his cyber charter, the first such in the state of Pennsylvania.
Steven Singer reports the sentencing here, and he is outraged that Trombetta got a slap on the wrist, as compared to the long jail sentences meted out to Atlanta teachers who changed test scores.
What Steven doesn’t understand is that Trombetta was sentenced for tax evasion, not for embezzlement of millions of dollars. Embezzlement of public funds was not an issue, although it should have been. Apparently it is okay to steal from the state as long as you report it on your tax returns. Some of the embezzlement occurred by setting up shell companies with which Trombetta did business with himself, using public money. Watch for the “related companies” when following the money.
Steven writes:
Nick Trombetta stole millions of dollars from Pennsylvania’s children.
And he cheated the federal government out of hundreds of thousands in taxes.
Yet at Tuesday’s sentencing, he got little more than a slap on the wrist – a handful of years in jail and a few fines.
He’ll serve 20 months in prison, be on supervised release for three years, and payback the tax money he concealed.
As CEO and founder of PA Cyber, the biggest virtual charter school network in the state, he funneled $8 million into his own pocket.
Instead of that money going to educate kids, he used it to buy a Florida condominium, sprawling real estate and even a private jet.
He already took home between $127,000 and $141,000 a year in salary.
But it wasn’t enough.
He needed to support his extravagant lifestyle, buy a $933,000 condo in the Sunshine State, score a $300,000 twin jet plane, purchase $180,000 houses for his mother and girlfriend in Ohio, and horde a pile of cash.
What does a man like that deserve for stealing from the most vulnerable among us – kids just asking for an education?
At very least, you’d think the judge would throw the book at him.
But no.
Having been part of TFA, Gary Rubinstein understands that Teach for America is conflicted about unions. They are both for and against them.
He tried to get TFA to take a position on the Janus decision, but that was fruitless.
So he reviews the responses of leading Reformers and finds that they are either happy, silent, or conflicted.
Nonetheless, he thinks that new members of TFA should join the union, and he explains why.
Comsewogue is a small district on Long Island in New York. Its superintendent, Joseph Rella, is an outspoken critic of standardized testing and “one-size-fits-all” education.
His district developed and applied a problem-based curriculum to prepare students in high school.
“Teaching to the test” is a concept that no longer computes in Comsewogue School District.
Administration and faculty in Comsewogue, for the last two school years, have experimented with a problem-based learning curriculum for small groups of interested ninth- and 10th-graders, an alternative to the traditional educational strategy of focusing assignments and assessments toward the goal of performing well on state-mandated standardized tests at the end of the year. Now, Superintendent Joe Rella has data to back up his notorious aversion to one-size-fits-all education and assessment.
In all subjects, Comsewogue students in PBL classes passed 2018 Regents exams, scoring 65 or better, at a higher rate than those in traditional classrooms, according to data released by the district. On chemistry, geometry, algebra II, global history and English 11 exams, PBL students achieved mastery level, scoring 85 or better, at significantly higher rates than their non-PBL classmates.
“We played in your ballpark — we scored runs,” Rella said of how he interpreted the data, meaning students taught by alternative methods still displayed an aptitude on the state’s required tests.
Though Rella and the district have taken steps to try to have PBL assessments replace Regents exams, no avenue to do so has been greenlighted by the New York State Department of Education to this point for Comsewogue. Emails requesting comment on the significance of Comsewogue’s test results sent to the education department and Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) press office were not returned.
During the 2017-18 school year, about half of Comsewogue’s ninth- and 10th-graders, roughly 300 students, took part voluntarily in PBL classes, which emphasize hands-on learning and real-world application of concepts as assessments — similar to a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation — as opposed to the traditional “Regents model.” The students were still required by the state to take the Regents exams as all students are, and their performance has inspired the district in year three of the pilot to expand its PBL curriculum offerings on a voluntary basis for 2018-19 to its entire student body — kindergarten through 12th grade.
The superintendent said the impetus for the district to experiment with PBL started three years ago, when he and about 20 Comsewogue teachers spent a day at the New York Performance Standards Consortium in Manhattan. The organization was founded on the belief that there was a better way to assess student learning than dependence upon standardized testing, according to its website.
Open the article to see the stunning results of the district’s problem-based curriculum.
Rella has proven that student learning is created by asking questions that stimulate curiosity, not by checking the “right” box or responding with a canned answer on a standardized test.
Last night, I woke at about 2 am, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. My head was filled with images of children torn from their mothers and fathers. Of children shipped to far-away cities. Of parents crying. Of children frightened and alone. Of babies in the care of strangers who don’t touch them. Of 6-year-olds, terrified and crying for their mothers. Children in cages.
I couldn’t fall asleep. I was tortured by the thoughts and images of the children and their weeping parents. Our government is doing this.
I was outraged by the decision of the Trump administration not to reunite children whose parents were criminals. Does the government have the right to steal the babies of criminals? When was that law passed?
I had a thought. A fantasy. Lock up the Secretary of Homeland Security until every child is reunited with their family.
Words can’t express my outrage at what our government is doing to families. What happened to family values? Maybe that’s reserved for native-born citizens. Maybe they didn’t mean it.
Some parents will never see their children again. They made the mistake of seeking refuge in our country.
Can we report the Trump administration to some international court? The Hague? Where do you go to register a complaint about human rights abuses committed by a nation?
I sometimes post articles by Once-proud Republicans who now recoil in horror at how Trump has lobotomized their party. Please don’t waste your time telling me why you don’t like Joe Scarborough, who wrote this piece for the Washington Post. At least, he is sane. I hope the number of disgusted Republicans grows. Trump is destroying their party. Joe knows it. So does George Will.
The morning after my first congressional reelection campaign, I was driving around Pensacola, Fla., collecting signs from supporters’ yards. It was an opportunity to spend time with my dad, who I had always suspected favored my brother over me. But I was confident that the previous night’s victory would make him proud. As we began driving through my neighborhood, the car radio was reporting election results: “And freshman Republican congressman Joe Scarborough breezed to reelection with an impressive 73 percent of the vote.” Turning toward my father in anticipation of some welcome adulation and praise, I found him instead glaring at the radio.
“Who the hell were the other 27 percent?” he bellowed.
Twenty years later, I am asking my father’s question of the party I once represented in Congress. For if it is true that only 40 percent of Republicans believe the United States should remain in NATO, as recent polling indicates, then who exactly are the other 60 percent?
Were they sleepwalking through history while our North Atlantic allies stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States during that long, twilight struggle against Communist Russia? Have they forgotten that during that Cold War, nothing less than the planet’s survival hung in the balance? Or that it was the North Atlantic alliance that pushed back tirelessly against Kremlin thugs who were trying to undermine the Western democracies? Or that American presidents from Harry S. Truman to George H.W. Bush shared NATO’s mission to free 100 million Eastern Europeans from the cruel grip of a regime that enslaved an entire continent and killed tens of millions of its own people?
Are today’s Republicans now so tribal as to blindly endorse a foreign policy warped by President Trump’s obvious allegiance to a former KGB chief who controls Russia through repression, bribery and political assassination and who has called the collapse of that evil empire the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”?
Exactly who are these people, and what have they done with my party? And how could any American support Trump’s tragically weak performance at Helsinki?
What loyal American would embrace a “Putin First” foreign policy that aligns U.S. interests with a Russian dictator’s goals rather than those long championed by America’s military and intelligence communities?
How can any red-blooded Republican not be repulsed by their commander in chief’s blubbering belief that a former Soviet spy’s cynical lies were as compelling as the clear and convincing evidence presented by the U.S. military community, the CIA and his own director of national intelligence?
It strains credulity to believe that any Republican would be so foolish as to defend the diplomatic debacle that led one European newspaper to call the U.S. president “Putin’s Poodle.” Even at home, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post blasted Trump’s “see-no-evil” approach, and the Wall Street Journal editorialized that Congress needed to develop a containment strategy for both Vladimir Putin and Trump.
If anything can still be shocking three years into Trump’s chaotic political career, it may be that 71 percent of Republicans still support his handling of Russian relations, even after a summit that many considered treasonous.
If he were still alive, my rock-ribbed Republican father would be asking who these 71 percent were, and why they were selling out America’s national security in the name of a hapless reality TV host. But there is no good answer to that question. Further speculation over Trump’s disloyalty to the United States or Republicans’ fealty to their dumpy dupe of a demagogue is best left to political historians and the ongoing investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
After President Trump cast doubt on U.S. intelligence findings on Russia’s election meddling, network news anchors were flabbergasted, outraged and disgusted.
But regardless of the verdicts ultimately handed down by historians and the special counsel’s office, the Helsinki summit brought two distressing realities into even sharper focus: The president of the United States is under the thumb of Putin. And the Republican Party he leads no longer deserves to survive.
This should be an interesting case. Minnesota has some of the most segregated charter schools in the nation. They are designed to be segregated. Seven years ago, journalist John Hechinger wrote about the charter schools of Minneapolis as a revival of “separate but equal,” with schools created for Somali students, white students, black students, Hispanic students, Hmong students. Joe Nathan, charter advocate, explained that no one is forced to go to these segregated charters. That makes segregation okay. But now this idea of voluntary segregation will go to trial.
MINNESOTA HIGH COURT ALLOWS CLAIM OF UNCONSTITUTIONAL SEGREGATION TO MOVE FORWARD
By Wendy Lecker
In a groundbreaking decision, the Minnesota Supreme Court has determined that claims of public school segregation brought under the State constitution’s education clause are justiciable, that is, they may be adjudicated by the courts. The Court, in its July 25 ruling in Cruz-Guzman v. Minnesota, concluded that a constitutionally adequate education in Minnesota includes ensuring schools are free from segregation by race and socio-economic status.
The plaintiffs in Cruz-Guzman are parents and children enrolled in public schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. They filed a class action complaint in 2015, contending that school segregation deprived children in these districts of an adequate education under Minnesota’s constitution, as well as the guarantee of Equal Protection and Due Process. The plaintiffs are represented by a team led by Daniel Schulman of the Minneapolis law firm, Gray Plant Mooty.
Education Law Center, along with over twenty of the nation’s leading education and constitutional law scholars, filed an amicus curae brief in the Minnesota Supreme Court in support of the plaintiffs in this case. Jones Day attorneys Todd Geremia and James Gross, as well as Christina Lindberg, represented ELC and the scholars pro bono.
The State moved to dismiss the case, and, in 2017, the district court denied that motion. However, the court of appeals reversed the decision, holding that claims of State violations of the Minnesota constitution’s education guarantee were non-justiciable political questions to be determined solely by the Legislature.
On July 25, the Minnesota Supreme Court forcefully disagreed and reaffirmed the judiciary’s role in ensuring the education rights of Minnesota children.
School Segregation in Minneapolis and St. Paul
In its ruling, the Court noted that the complaint set forth “copious data demonstrating a ‘high degree of segregation based on race and socioeconomic status’ in Minneapolis and Saint Paul public schools.” The Court further acknowledged that these segregated schools “have significantly worse academic outcomes in comparison with neighboring schools and suburban school districts.”
The plaintiffs identified State policies that cause this segregation, including:
*boundary decisions for school districts and school attendance areas;
*the formation of segregated charter schools;
*the decision to exempt charter schools from desegregation plans;
*the use of federal and state desegregation funds for other purposes;
*the failure to implement effective desegregation remedies; and
*the inequitable allocation of resources.
Justiciability
Minnesota’s constitution provides that “it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools.” The State argued that because it is the legislature’s duty to provide an adequate education, it would violate the separation of powers doctrine for the judiciary to rule on matters of educational adequacy. The State also argued that ruling on these claims would improperly embroil the judiciary in complex educational policy matters. The Supreme Court disagreed.
The Court noted that specific educational policy matters are the province of the legislature, but that fact does not bar courts from determining whether the legislature has fulfilled its obligation under the constitution.
To the contrary, the Court ruled, it would be an abdication of the judiciary’s duty if the Court “unquestioningly accep that whatever the Legislature has chosen to do fulfills the Legislature’s duty to provide an adequate education.” As the Court noted, the education clause is a mandate to the Legislature, not a grant of power.
The Court further held that to rule that these claims are non-justiciable would be to leave claims under the education clause without a remedy, violating the long-held principle that where there is a right, there is a remedy.
The Court also rejected the notion that the judiciary cannot manage complex education claims. It noted the judicial branch role is to interpret the language of the constitution-and “[w]e will not shy away from our proper role to provide remedies for violations of fundamental rights merely because education is a complex area.” The Court pointed out that the plaintiffs are merely asking the Court to declare that the State violated the constitution-they did not ask the Court to dictate to the State how to remedy this violation. Thus, thus the Court need not engage in any improper policy-making.
Definition of Adequacy
The State contended that judicial interpretation of the education article would involve an improper qualitative assessment by the Court of what constitutes an adequate education. The Court agreed that a qualitative assessment is required, but rejected the claim that a judicial definition of adequacy is improper, holding instead that this task is intrinsic to the court’s role.
The Court pointed out that, in a previous case, it had ruled that education is a fundamental right under Minnesota’s constitution. In this case, the Court elaborated, ruling that “an education that does not equip Minnesotans to discharge their duties as citizens intelligently cannot fulfill the Legislature’s duty to provide an adequate education under the Education Clause.”
Importantly, the Court emphasized that “[i]t is self-evident that a segregated system of public schools is not ‘general,’ ‘uniform,’ ‘thorough,’ or ‘efficient'” under Minnesota’s Education Clause.
Districts and Charters Not “Necessary Parties”
The State argued that the case must be dismissed because the districts and charter schools were not joined as “necessary parties.” The Court ruled that the mere fact that the districts and charters may be affected by any ruling in this case does not require their joinder. The plaintiffs are seeking relief solely from the State. The Court noted that “many non-parties are bound to be affected by a judicial ruling in an action regarding the constitutionality of state statutes or state action, but they cannot all be required to be a part of the suit.”
Next Steps
This Supreme Court decision allows the Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs’ claim to proceed to trial. It also provides guidance for the trial court to set qualitative standards against which to assess the evidence of student segregation in the Minneapolis and St. Paul schools. Finally, the Court makes abundantly clear that the courts are available for school children across Minnesota to seek redress of violations of their rights to a constitutionally adequate education which, according to this Court, includes an education that is free from segregation.
Wendy Lecker is a Senior Attorney at Education Law Center
Education Law Center Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 24
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