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“School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice”

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2018 //
56

The editorial pages of the New York Times have been an echo chamber for school choice for years. The editorials regularly applaud charter schools as escape hatches from public schools and repeat the talking points of the billionaires and hedge fund managers who have gleefully replaced public schools with privately managed schools. I can’t recall an editorial that acknowledged the importance of rebuilding, revitalizing, and strengthening public education as a major responsibility of our society. I can’t recall one that criticized the onslaught of privatization against public education in our nation’s urban schools, where parents of color have lost not only their public schools, but their voice as citizens in creating public schools that serve the entire community. The editorial board has steadfastly ignored the coordinated and bipartisan assault on democratic governance of public schools in cities and states across the nation. The op-ed page, which was created to provide a space for views different from the editorial page has seldom challenged school choice orthodoxy. Almost every regular opinion writer has lauded the “miracle” of charter schools, including David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, and David Leonhardt. The op-ed page recently included an article urging liberals not to give up on charters even though Betsy DeVos likes them too, even though they are segregated and non-union.

But now comes a new and welcome voice.

Erin Aubrey Kaplan writes that school choice is the enemy of justice. She has been selected as a regular opinion writer, which is more good news. She writes about her personal experience as a child in California, a state that is controlled by Democrats but purchased by the billionaires who sneer at public schools and want to replace them with charter schools. She reminds us that school choice was the battle cry of segregationists. In many states and cities, it still is.

Her article poses an essential question: Is public education, democratically controlled, still part of the social contract? And she writes that many white liberals, including Jerry Brown (and in New York, Andrew Cuomo) have said no.

She writes:

“LOS ANGELES — In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place.

“In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.

“Still, I believed, even as a fifth grader, that education is a social contract and that Los Angeles was uniquely suited to carry it out. Los Angeles would surely accomplish what Louisiana could not.

“I was wrong. Today Los Angeles and California as a whole have abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.

“This has happened all over the country, of course, but California has led the way — it has 630,000 students in charter schools, more than any other state, and the Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 154,000 of them. Charters are associated with choice and innovation, important elements of the good life that California is famous for. In a deep-blue state, that good life theoretically includes diversity, and many white liberals believe charters can achieve that, too. After all, a do-it-yourself school can do anything it wants.

“But that’s what makes me uneasy, the notion that public schools, which charters technically are, have a choice about how or to what degree to enforce the social contract. There are many charter success stories, I know, and many make a diverse student body part of their mission. But charters as a group are ill suited to the task of justice because they are a legacy of failed justice.

“Integration did not happen. The effect of my father’s and my foray into those white schools was not more equality but white flight. Largely white schools became largely black, and Latino schools were stigmatized as “bad” and never had a place in the California good life.

“It’s partly because diversity can be managed — or minimized — that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind. This is in direct contrast to the risky, almost revolutionary energy that fueled past integration efforts, which by their nature created tension and confrontation. But as a society — certainly as a state — we have lost our appetite for that engagement, and the rise of charters is an expression of that loss.

“Choice and innovation sound nice, but they also echo what happened after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, when entire white communities in the South closed down schools to avoid the dread integration.

“This kind of racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience. It seems particularly so in Los Angeles, a suburb-driven city designed for geographical separation. What looks like segregation to the rest of the world is, to many white residents, entirely neutral — simply another choice.

“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in 2010, researchers at the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found, in a study of 40 states and several dozen municipalities, that black students in charters are much more likely than their counterparts in traditional public schools to be educated in an intensely segregated setting. The report says that while charters had more potential to integrate because they are not bound by school district lines, “charter schools make up a separate, segregated sector of our already deeply stratified public school system.”

“In a 2017 analysis, data journalists at The Associated Press found that charter schools were significantly overrepresented among the country’s most racially isolated schools. In other words, black and brown students have more or less resegregated within charters, the very institutions that promised to equalize education.

“This has not stemmed the popular appeal of charters. School board races in California that were once sleepy are now face-offs between well-funded charter advocates and less well-funded teachers’ unions. Progressive politicians are expected to support charters, and they do. Gov. Jerry Brown, who opened a couple of charters during his stint as mayor of Oakland, vetoed legislation two years ago that would have made charter schools more accountable. Antonio Villaraigosa built a reputation as a community organizer who supported unions, but as mayor of Los Angeles, he started a charter-like endeavor called Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.

“This year, charter advocates got their pick for school superintendent, Austin Beutner. And billionaires like Eli Broad have made charters a primary cause: In 2015, an initiative backed in part by Mr. Broad’s foundation outlined a $490 million plan to place half of the students in the Los Angeles district into charters by 2023.

“I live in Inglewood, a chiefly black and brown city in Los Angeles County that’s facing gentrification and the usual displacement of people of color. Traditional public schools are struggling to stay open as they lose students to charters. But those who support the gentrifying, which includes a new billion-dollar N.F.L. stadium in the heart of town, see charters as part of the improvements. They see them as progress.

“Despite all this, I continue to believe in the social contract that in my mind is synonymous with public schools and public good. I continue to believe that California will at some point fulfill that contract. I believe this most consciously when I go back to Westchester and reflect on my formative two years in school there. In the good life there is such a thing as a good fight, and it is not over.“

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Education Industry, Education Reform, Inequity, Justice, Privatization, Racism, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Trump’s “Preposterous ‘Collusion is Not a Crime’ Defense”

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2018 //
28

Rudy Guiliani and Trump have recently contended that “collusion is not a crime” but real lawyers know that “collusion” is a straw man, not the issue. A friend sent me a post that explains why the word “collusion”is actually shorthand for very serious crimes.


The term “collusion” may be useful shorthand for describing an illicit political alliance between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, but it has been far less productive as a framework for understanding possible illegal conduct committed as a result of that association. Alan Dershowitz has seized on the point there is no election law “crime” of collusion and thinks that settles matters: no crime, and therefore no grounds for impeachment. Now Rudy Giuliani has embraced this theory of the case, apparently motivated by the renewed attention to the Trump campaign meeting with a Kremlin delegation in 2016 and the reports that Michael Cohen is ready to testify that Donald Trump knew in advance of and approved the meeting. President Trump, meanwhile, keeps pounding away on this claim that the legal issue is “collusion”—and that there is no such thing.

This defense is vintage “straw person” reasoning. It is correct that federal campaign finance laws, which prohibit activity undertaken by foreign nationals to influence elections, do not refer to collusion. That does not mean, of course, that they do not directly address activities of the kind in which the Trump campaign reportedly engaged in encouraging and supporting the Russian electoral intervention of 2016. It is perhaps precisely because of the sweep of the ban on foreign national campaign activity—and American collaboration with it—that Trump and his lawyers are eager to direct attention elsewhere.

When Giuliani states “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime,” the disingenuousness of his position is plain. He is looking for what does not exist to enable him to skip over what he is eager to ignore and avoid discussing.

The untenable position Giuliani is staking out is well illustrated by the following questions: Did the Trump campaign ever consult lawyers on the legal implications of planned or proposed Russian contacts? If not, why not? And had the campaign done so, what would a lawyer have advised about the legal risks? Any reasonably experienced, competent campaign counsel would say that he or she would never have advised the campaign management that it was legal to take up the Russian offer and hold the meeting. Nor would any such lawyer have given a green light to other points of contacts between the campaign and Russia, or to dodgy maneuvers like the president’s public appeal to the Russians to locate deleted Clinton emails.

A presidential campaign normally talks to lawyers about complex, unusual or obviously sensitive plans or projects. The campaign’s goal is typically to seek counsel’s blessing or advice on how to work ingeniously around legal obstacles to safely accomplish the desired objective. In the best of all worlds, the campaign management identifies a course of action that it can pursue with the confidence that, if challenged, its lawyers can provide a defense.

What hope did the Trump campaign have of help from its lawyers in maximizing political support from a foreign government? In the case of the Russian travel to New York in the summer of 2016 to provide derogatory information about Secretary Clinton, the issue would have been clear and the legal path closed.

The ban on foreign national involvement in federal elections is exceptionally broad. It applies to any spending to affect an election: The prohibition applies to “contributions,” “expenditures,” “donations,” and “disbursements.” A “contribution” for this purpose includes any “thing of value.” The rules reach “promises” of such spending whether express or “implied,” and to campaign spending provided either directly or “indirectly.”

This basic prohibition extends even to foreign national “participation” in the decisions that a U.S. national makes about election-related spending. It is stringent enough that it has shaped the legal requirements that the American subsidiary of a foreign corporation must satisfy in setting up a political action committee. The American management of the subsidiary can establish a political-action committee to make contributions to U.S. candidates, but only with U.S. national funding—and without any involvement from the foreign nationals a the parent company. A foreign national cannot so much as advise on how the PAC money would be spent. For foreign management to suggest that the U.S. PAC consider a contribution for candidate X is a violation of the law. A U.S. national who solicits this guidance is providing illegal substantial assistance to unlawful foreign national activity.

The Federal Election Commission for some time even equivocated on the question of whether a foreign national could volunteer personal services to a campaign. It eventually held that because the law exempts volunteer personal services from the scope of regulated contributions, foreign nationals could provide them. The standard example is the foreign national entertainer performing at a fundraising event: He or she cannot spend any money to support the event, including funding the transportation of equipment, travel or lodging expenses for personal staff or other band members.

Congress has enacted and reenacted the foreign-national prohibition in 1966, 1974 and 2002, seeking on each occasion to strengthen it. So the lawyer reviewing a contact between the campaign and a foreign national—particularly a foreign national with apparent ties to a foreign government—would understand that the rules in question are not among the backwater provisions of the law, under-enforced relics of the aged and discredited regulations. The lawyer would also be familiar with the congressional investigations and criminal investigations that arose out of allegations that China developed and implemented a plan to influence the course of the 1996 presidential election. And, finally, he or she would keep in mind that the Supreme Court recently affirmed in Bluman v. Federal Election Commission the constitutionality of these draconian legal controls.

Federal election law pairs the these prohibitions on foreign national electoral activity with restrictions on the behavior of the would-be U.S. beneficiaries. U.S. nationals, including campaigns, cannot “substantially assist” a foreign national in any of these activities, and Americans cannot solicit, accept or receive any such illegal foreign-national support. Viewed together, these prohibited activities— assistance, solicitation, acceptance, or receipt—certainly capture the essence of what some might understand by references to “collusion.”

From the standpoint of a competent lawyer, the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin emissaries directly implicates these rules. The Russians did not merely offer information, plucked from the sky: In the first place, they had to have procured it. To have done so would normally require the expenditure of funds “in connection with” a federal election: opposition material assembled on a U.S. presidential candidate. Certainly the Russian traveling party spent money to travel to the United States for the meeting. Both the material they proposed to provide and the expenses associated with creating and arranging to deliver it raise the serious question of in-kind contributions to the campaign. Moreover, the hypothetical campaign lawyer would have to be concerned that urging the campaign to invest its own resources in a specific line of attack on Hillary Clinton would constitute illegal “participation” in the campaign’s decision-making on its own spending.

In addition, the lawyer would consider that any meeting with a foreign government to discuss mutual goals in winning an election could constitute an illegal “solicitation” of unlawful foreign national spending.. The “acceptance” of the meeting could be such a solicitation if the foreign national dangled the possibility of a benefit and the U. S. campaign, in pursuing the discussion, made clear that it was in the market and open for business. The willingness to discuss Russian government support on this one occasion could be an additional ground for exposure under the solicitation ban. By taking the meeting, the campaign would be signaling an interest in whatever the foreign government might have to offer in the future. How much exposure the campaign incurred on this score could depend in part on what was said at the meeting. But it is yet another issue the lawyer would identify in the Russian offer and the American openness to entertaining it.

The campaign counsel would know well that in this area, there is little room for maneuver, and for the standard exploration of “loopholes.” Foreign nationals have no constitutional rights to influence U.S. elections, and so the U.S. national supporting an illegal Russian national scheme would have limited First Amendment rights to claim in its own defense. To take one example, it would not help the American manager of a PAC to appeal to “freedom of speech” in defending a conversation with a foreign national colleague about the choice of candidates for PAC support. It is highly unlikely that a lawyer would conclude that, after all this effort over the years, Congress had designed a statute somehow reasonably interpreted to prevent an individual foreign national from giving a $25 contribution to a campaign but failing, despite all these detailed legal restrictions, prohibit a relationship like the one that the Trump campaign seems to have fashioned with the Putin regime.

All these questions would compel the lawyer to advise in strongest terms against campaign representatives agreeing to meet with a Russian government delegation to hear the “dirt” it claimed to have. And this is the outcome even without bringing into the discussion the lawyer’s option under Rule 2.1 of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct to advise on the “political” or “moral” implications of agreeing to the meeting. It is the legal judgment that the lawyer would be virtually required to reach and convey to the client. What does or does not constitute “collusion” would have nothing to do with the legal analysis.

These are only the campaign finance law issues raised by the Trump Tower meeting. There are others presented by the campaign’s course of conduct with the Russians, such as the signaling to the Russians through WikiLeaks—or directly from the candidate—that their hacking and carefully timed distribution of stolen material was welcome and valuable to the Trump candidacy. Evidence of this encouragement and guidance could support a case of illegal “substantial assistance” to the Russian electoral intervention. This assistance was, by any measure, substantial: The Russians were operating with the advantage of direct discussion with the campaign, such as the one at Trump Tower, and other channels of communication that could have guided their understanding of how the campaign might benefit from Russia’s use of online political messaging and the release of stolen materials. A lawyer consulted on actions like these would not have to strain to spot the campaign finance issues in this political alliance.

Of course, the campaign counsel lawyers could know only what the campaign understood of the extent of the Russian electoral activity. They would not have had the benefit of the detailed picture that the Mueller indictments have drawn of the wide-ranging political program directed from the Kremlin and managed by Russian intelligence agencies. But what they would have known would have been more than enough to detect the serious legal issues under federal campaign finance law. Some lawyers in that position might even have responsibly advised that the campaign report the Russian offer to U.S. legal authorities. Even those who rejected that option would have appreciated that the campaign needed to reject the overture from Moscow and create at least an internal record that it had done so.

But then again, Trump and his senior campaign team may not have asked the lawyers for their opinion. They could well have had their reasons: The most obvious and troubling of the possible explanations is that, anticipating a negative response, they may have chosen to proceed without the advice of counsel to pursue victory with Russian help. Then the lawyers would have been consulted only after the fact, to come up with whatever public defense they could devise. This is the road that may have brought the Trump team to this moment—that is, to Rudy Giuliani and the absurd “collusion is not a crime” theory of the president’s case.

Categories Education Reform

D.C.: Prominent Charter Chain is Abandoning Its D.C. School, Can’t Make it Work

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2018 //
24

Democracy Prep is leaving the District of Columbia. Its charter school is a failure. Interestingly, Democracy Prep was chosen to take over the Andre Agassi Charter School in Las Vegas after that well-funded school failed.

Charters come, charters go. Kids, go find another school. Tough luck. Better luck next time. Walmart opens and closes stores all the time. What’s the big deal? You know, disruption.

A prominent Southeast Washington charter school with more than 600 students announced Friday that the coming school year will be its last.

Leaders of Democracy Prep Congress Heights said in an email to parents that the school, which has students in preschool through eighth grade, was unable “to provide Congress Heights scholars the school they deserve.”

The letter said Democracy Prep will seek a new organization to run the campus for the 2019-2020 academic year. School leaders said they are confident they will find a new operator and that students will not have to be displaced.

Democracy Prep, a New York-based charter network, made big promises when it entered the District in 2014 to take over Imagine Southeast, which was on the cusp of being shut down over poor performance.

The charter network had built a reputation for lifting test scores among poor children from low-income families in New York’s Harlem neighborhood and promised to bring its model of college prep and civic education to Washington. The network operates nearly 20 schools across the country, and the D.C. school is the only one it is closing.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization

Florida: Is It Possible to Close Down a Financially Troubled, Floundering, Under-Enrolled Charter School?

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2018 //
10

Palm Beach County is struggling to close down a floundering charter school called Eagle Arts Academy.

Frustrated so far in their attempts to close Eagle Arts Academy, Palm Beach County public school leaders are going for the nuclear option: an immediate shutdown of the troubled Wellington charter school.

Schools Superintendent Donald Fennoy is proposing to close the school this week, arguing that its financial woes and evident lack of a campus or teaching staff make it unsafe for students.

The school’s “fiscal mismanagement and deteriorating financial condition have reached such a critical point that there now exists an immediate and serious danger to the health, safety and welfare of (Eagle Arts’) students,” Fennoy wrote in a letter to school board members.

Board members are expected to vote Wednesday on the proposal for an “immediate termination” of the school’s charter.

Monday afternoon, the school’s executive director, Gregory Blount, told the school parents via email that it would be “difficult” to reopen the school next month and recommended that they enroll their children in other area charter schools.

The move to close Eagle Arts comes after a series of delays thwarted the district’s first attempt to shut it down before the school year begins Aug. 13. As a charter school, Eagle Arts is publicly financed but operated by a private board of directors.

RELATED: Eagle Arts charter school may reopen despite vote to close it

In March, the school district initiated a gradual shutdown process, one that requires 90 days’ notice and allows the school to remain open if it chooses to appeal.

Eagle Arts appealed the decision and then convinced an administrative judge to twice postpone a hearing in the case. The delays ensured that the school would be able to reopen next month before the case is decided.

This month the school district tried instead to end its monthly payments to the school, but the judge in the case last week ordered that the payments continue.

But the school district had another tool in its belt: an immediate shutdown of the school.

Under state law, the district can immediately close a charter school only if it determines that an “immediate and serious danger to the health, safety, or welfare of the charter school’s students exists.”

Eagle Arts can appeal, but under the law it wouldn’t get to stay open while it does so. The school district could take control of the school, but Fennoy recommends shutting it down instead while any appeal process plays out.

If the school board votes Wednesday to immediately close the school, it’s not clear what becomes of a $255,000 payment that the school district withheld from it this month.

An administrative judge ordered the school district to pay the money by the end of last week, but by Monday the district had not released the money, a school official with knowledge of the case told The Palm Beach Post.

It’s also unclear whether the decision to immediately close the school would override the ongoing appeal, or if the administrative judge overseeing the appeal would attempt to block the board’s new move to close it.

Neither Blount nor a school district spokeswoman responded to requests for comment on the case.

Eagle Arts has been in trouble for a long while, and the law protects the charter, even though it is in financial trouble and has no campus. Why close it down just because it is failing?

For years, Blount has faced criticism for his combative management style and for steering hundreds of thousands of dollars in school funding into his personal businesses.

Once one of the county’s largest charter schools, Eagle Arts’ enrollment plummeted in recent years after a series of scandals and frequent staff turnover. By the end of the last school year, enrollment had fallen to about 273 students.

The district has argued that the school must be closed because it is in “deteriorating financial condition,” has not paid rent for its 13-acre campus since September and is spending “excessive” amounts on administrative salaries while its student enrollment falls.

In making its case to immediately close the school, the school district is citing its latest woes as evidence that it is an unsafe environment for children. The owner of the school’s campus filed an eviction action in June, saying that the school owed it more than $700,000 in unpaid rent.

Okay, so the director puts the school’s money into his personal business. Is that a problem? So it hasn’t paid rent? No problem. The director explained that the test scores are low because the students are visual learners, you know, artistic types.

It must not be a “no excuses” school. It has so many excuses. Open the article for lots of links.

Eagle Arts Academy has been a problem for Palm Beach County for a long while. Last April, the school was struggling to pay its staff, yet paying the executive director for the right to use the name of the school and its logo.

Since June, the financially struggling Wellington charter school has paid at least $42,000 to director Gregory Blount’s company for the right to call itself Eagle Arts Academy and use an eagle logo, website and data-processing system that the company owns, school records reviewed by The Palm Beach Post show.

This charade (joke) has been going on for about two years.

Here are the most recent reports, which include the two above.

July 30 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/pbc-schools-chief-calls-for-immediate-shutdown-eagle-arts-academy/imcd7DdXPVTIYITRpgRblL/

July 17 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/did-eagle-arts-director-steal-church-camera-feud-leads-theft-probe/JVK24WXtdIAoDCmTqUtsEK/

July 10 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/the-school-board-can-close-eagle-arts-cutting-off-its-money/fjXxdbwjURYqMHwPQinQXM/

June 6 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/eagle-arts-charter-school-may-reopen-despite-vote-close/m2VLePcn8kIMqVWMmA0DfM/

May 1 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/eagle-arts-academy-withholds-teachers-pay-for-second-time-month/ts6tgRDgjvCcNev7kpvALO/

April 13 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/despites-worries-eagle-arts-teachers-report-receiving-full-paychecks/tFJU8OOfXsWVIO0gcIyEAK/

April 13 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/while-struggling-pay-staff-eagle-arts-pays-its-leader-for-its-own-name/09EWrdHvSG9QJCxTjfl2nO/

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Florida, Privatization

The Walton-Funded Hijacking of the Little Rock School District

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2018 //
11

It was inevitable that the Waltons would make their move to privatize the public schools of Little Rock, the largest city in Arkansas, which the Waltons consider their fiefdom. The Waltons have used their billions to leverage control of the State Education Department, the Legislature, and the State Education Board.

The Waltons have long coveted control of Little Rock’s public schools. Local citizens resisted, but David doesn’t usually defeat Goliath. For example, as the Arkansas Times reported earlier this year, the Legislature passed a law Legislation “requiring Arkansas school districts to turn over buildings constructed with local property taxes to be turned over to any charter school that wants them, no matter how unproven the charter operator, no matter how damaging the charter might be to existing — and successful — true public schools.”

When six of Little Rock’s 48 public schools were labeled “failing,” that was the pretext for the state to take control of the entire district, ending local control. Read that again. The low test scores of 6 of 48 schools were grounds for the dissolution of democratic control in the entire district. The goal, of course, was to enable the Walton puppets to introduce private charter schools, which are controlled by private boards.

The Waltons and other corporate reformers prey on black and brown communities, whose voices are easily ignored by the predominantly white male-controlled state legislatures that control their fates. State Commissioner Johnny Key was formerly a legislator and lobbyist for the University of Arkansas. He became state commissioner in 2015. The state law, which required that the person in that position have at least a masters’ degree and 10 years experience as a teacher, had to be changed to allow him to serve.

The following is an Open Letter to the State Commissioner and Governor. It was written by Rev. Anika Whitfield, a pastor in Little Rock who believes in democracy and public education.


Commissioner Key and Governor Hutchinson,

It is now more than apparent that you both are participating in the continual hijacking, undermining, and weakening of the LRSD, the largest public school district in our state.

What evidence do I have to support this assertion?

1) Since the hijacking of the LRSD (when 6 out of 48 schools failed to meet the raised student achievement standardized test scores from 25% for proficiency to 49.5% and the former AR Commissioner of Education and State Board of Education voted to take over the entire LRSD), on January 28, 2015, the overall student enrollment and teacher moral has shown a significant and devastating decline.

2) The AR State Board of Education, under your watch, has re-approved charter schools in the city of LR that as an entire school system/district, Covenant Keepers Charter School, for example, that has continued to fail to meet the academic achievement test score requirements that were legislated by the state. Yet, when three (half of the LRSS schools that were labeled distressed) have moved off the distressed list (one that came off as a result of actions of consecutive test score improvements that were evidenced in the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 academic years), you have not shown the LRSD the same mercy and released us back to locally, elected representation by residents of Little Rock.

3) The LRSD students are suffering by the loss of their beloved teachers by the threat from your administration and your apparent support for hiring uncertified teachers, (persons not trained nor licensed to teach our children). This weakening of the quality of the LRSD has also continued to weaken its overall moral. And, unfortunately, these practices are consistent with other waivers (legal passes to avoid compliance with current laws) you have approved in academic administration positions such as hiring non-certified Prinicipals and Superintendents in the LRSD, and creating a law to exempt the AR State Education Commissioner to be a certified academic administrator.

When one doesn’t respect a profession enough to honor it’s process of licensure and certification, one suggests that it is not important. Is this your overall message and rationale for hijacking our beloved LRSD to show us that you don’t value our children? Let me assure you that if that is your aim, you are successfully achieving your goals.

4) The student enrollment of the LRSD has continued to decline under your watch, since 2015 when you both came into office. We have seen a rise in the numbers of charter schools approved under your leadership. We have witnessed the closure of four schools in the LRSD that were not suffering from academic distress, yet, many of the schools these students have been forced to attend are showing instability in staff retention and a decline in student academic achievement.

5) The processes you have approved to “more easily” register students in the LRSD has not only caused more confusion, found more students not currently enrolled, and unintentionally (perhaps) displaced students from their “assigned” schools, but they have exponentially worsened over the past three academic years.

There seems to be a disconnect and disregard between the administration and the parents/guardians of the LRSD. How many parents, guardians and school administrators were polled to determine whether or not there needed to be extensive training before implementing the Gateway registration process this academic year? What were the results of so? How did you address any push back or evidence of disapproval of this all electronic registration process?

In school systems like eStem, Covenant Keepers and other public-private charter schools, student registration processes are less likely to be as challenging since they only currently have one school for all grade levels or one school for elementary, middle, and high school students. It would not be chaotic nor frustrating for those parents to know which building or school their children are assigned. Again, it appears that your interest lies more in making sure charter school districts are appearing to operate with more ease than the LRSD, the district you have continued to hold hostage from parents and guardians in Little Rock.

6) You both have continued to refused, since February 2015, to hold a city wide meeting to dialogue and discuss with concerned parents, guardians, students, and community members of Little Rock, a way forward to return local representation to the residents of Little Rock.

We want our schools back.

As tax paying residents of Little Rock, we demand elected representation from our selected peers.

What is the ransom you require for Little Rock School District parents, guardians, students, and community supporters to pay for you to release our district back to us now?

Rev. Anika T. Whitfield

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Resistance, Walton Foundation

Mercedes Schneider: Louisiana Bracing for Lower School Grades, Which Will Clear the Way for More Privatization

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2018 //
25

Mercedes Schneider reports that the state of Louisiana has recalibrated letter grades for the state’s schools, which will lead to a dramatic increase in the number of “failing schools.”

The number of A rated schools will decrease by 38%.

The number of F rated schools will increase by 57%.

Ominously, this means that more districts will be eligible for charter schools.

She notes:

“Of course, the great irony here is that most charter schools in Louisiana are concentrated in New Orleans, and 40 percent of those scored D or F in 2017— prior to the anticipated, 57 percent increase in F-graded schools. But in the view of market-based ed reform, it is okay for charter schools have Fs because theoretically, these can be replaced by new charter schools ad infinitum with charter-closure churn being branded as a success.

“In 2010, Louisiana state ed board (BESE) president, Penny Dastugue, commented that “people can relate to letter grades,” implying that letter grades are simple.

“The shifting criteria behind them is not “simple”; it is simplistic, and as such, it is destructive and feeds a joyless, authoritarian, fear-centered atmosphere in schools and systems unfortunate enough to not have access to hefty doses of wealth, privilege, or the capacity for selective admission.”

Dropping grades across the board is a hasty maneuver to drop more schools into the F category so they can be handed off to private corporations.

Please note that, as I have written here on many occasions in the past, giving a letter grade to a school is a very stupid idea. It was pioneered by Jeb Bush in Florida as a way to label schools for state takeover and privatization. Imagine if your child came home with a single letter grade. You would go to the school the next day and raise the roof. What a dumb idea to think that all the facets of your child’s knowledge, skills, interests, activities, and performance could be reduced to a single letter.

Then think of doing the same to a school with 500 students and staff. This is madness. No, it is sheer malevolent stupidity.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Louisiana, Privatization, Testing

Dobbie and Fryer: Charter Schools in Texas Make Little or No Difference

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2018 //
22

Roland G. Fryer and Will Dobbie are economists who study charter schools, among other topics. Fryer’s research has been subsidized heavily by Eli Broad. For several years, he studied the value of incentives in getting students to post higher test scores or read more books.

Most recently Fryer of Harvard and Dobbie of Princeton posted a working paper about the outcomes of charter schools in Texas, which they originally posted in 206. The results are sobering for those who are selling charters as a replacement for public schools, overpromising the benefits of entrepreneurship.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/charter-schools-and-labor-market-outcomes

The abstract summarizes their findings:

“We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings, while other types of charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings. Moving to school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease test scores
also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase test scores have no discernible impact on earnings. In contrast, high school graduation effects are predictive of earnings effects throughout the distribution of school quality. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of what might explain our set of facts.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Puerto Rico: Disaster Capitalism Finds Opening Wedge for School Privatization

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2018 //
10

So, now the privatization begins: First, a swallow. Eventually, the crows, the buzzards, and the vultures. Watch for KIPP, Achievement First, Academica, Imagine, and the other corporate chains to get into line to open schools in P.R. As we now know, no experience is needed to open and run a school. Anyone can do it, and anyone can teach. New worlds to conquer.

Politico reports today:

AFTER COURT VICTORY, PUERTO RICO ANNOUNCES FIRST CHARTER SCHOOLS: Government officials in Puerto Rico announced Sunday the opening of the territory’s first charter school, just days after a victory in court that sanctioned Puerto Rico’s new school choice law.

— The Boys and Girls Club of Puerto Rico on Aug. 20 will open the Vimenti School — a K-5 school with 58 students. The school will be in the capital city of San Juan and is approved to enroll 190 students by its fifth year. The emphasis will be on social and emotional learning, and students will be educated in both Spanish and English.

— “There is much left to do to implement the plan for education reform, but this is an important step. Doing more of the same is not an option for this administration,” Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said during a press conference, joined by Keleher.

— Officials also announced that a second nonprofit, Caras de las Américas, was also approved to operate a charter school. The organization will have a year to plan for the new school, which is expected to enroll 315 students. Keleher said that other nonprofits and local government agencies are being vetted as potential charter school operators for the 2019-2020 school year. Among those are LEAP Social Enterprise, Techno Innovators and Centro para PR.

— The announcement comes days after the Tribunal Supremo of Puerto Rico, the territory’s highest court, overturned a July decision from a lower court that found privately run charter schools and private school vouchers unconstitutional and potentially harmful to Puerto Rico’s traditional public schools.

— In a victory for Rosselló and Keleher, the justices found that charter schools are constitutional because the state “exerts control and ample power over the implementation and administration of these schools, which are free, nonsectarian … and open to the community.” As for vouchers, they wrote that even when private schools stand to benefit from the funding, it is “not to a degree that would lead to the subsidizing of private education in violation of our constitution.” More on that from your host here.

— Meanwhile, traditional public schools on the island bring students back for the new school year today. Keleher, who has touted an overhaul of the traditional public education system there, is welcoming students after the closure of dozens of public schools. “Change is happening here,” she told POLITICO. “Change creates uncertainty and anxiety, but this is a system that has been stagnant for over a decade.”

— But the teachers union has said it anticipates mayhem. School closures, a new system for online student registrations and the shuffle of teachers from closed schools could result in overcrowded classrooms and schools short on the necessary staff, spokeswoman Grichelle Toledo told POLITICO. Toledo said the union has asked the territory’s commission for civil rights to serve as an observer over the process.

To read the links, open Politico link.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Puerto Rico, Teachers

Stephen Miller, Architect of Trump’s Cruel Immigration Policies, is Beneficiary of “Chain Immigration”

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2018 //
35

Stephen Miller’s uncle wrote the story of the family’s arrival in the U.S. in the early 20th century and their success as Americans.

The author is the brother of Stephen’s mother. What he does not explain is how this grandson of immigrants, this child of privilege, became so hateful and bigoted. As a Jew, he embarrasses me. I just did 23&Me. Thank God I’m not related to this vile little man.

The story begins in 1903:

“Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.

“It begins at the turn of the 20th century in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

“He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweat-shop toil Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hard-working immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

“What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.

“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.

“I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants— been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America First” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family would likely have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.”

Read the rest of the story.

I recall that Miller wants to admit only those immigrants with skills the country needs and English language. That would have excluded his forebears.

What a terrible man.

Categories Education Reform

Tennessee: Knoxville School Board Votes “No Confidence” in State Education Department

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2018 //
20

Tennessee has one of the most intrusive, micromanaging, incompetent state education departments in the nation. So says the Knoxville school board, and so agrees the school boards of Memphis and Nashville.

The problem right now is the state’s failed teacher evaluation program, but there are many reasons to lose trust in the State Education Department.

Problems with pre-K and kindergarten teacher portfolio evaluations became the issue that pushed board Chairwoman Patti Bounds to say the department “still takes no ownership” of its mistakes. Portfolios are used to evaluate educators who teach pre-K, kindergarten, and subjects not included in TNReady standardized testing. Portfolios can include videos showing student progress during the year.

Earlier this week, the superintendents of the state’s two largest districts, Memphis and Nashville, wrote to Haslam and Education Commissioner Candice McQueen to pause state testing until after the election because “educator and public trust in TNReady has fallen to irretrievably low levels.”

Tennessee has taken pride in the progress of its students on national tests and has toughened up its requirements for student learning and evaluating teachers. But the foundation for its analysis, the state’s new online test, TNReady, has been fraught with technical setbacks since it was introduced in 2016.

State lawmakers were so concerned about the problems with TNReady that they passed legislation ensuring the scores would not be used to negatively impact teachers, students, or schools. School-level scores could be released as early as late next week.

Some Knoxville board members wanted to echo the sentiment of Memphis and Nashville superintendents about TNReady, but settled on highlighting the more timely portfolio issue, Bounds said.

“The portfolio system is a mess,” she told Chalkbeat. “The Department of Education has had multiple years of failure.”

The board will likely meet Tuesday in a special meeting to approve a letter, she said.

First-year problems for the teacher portfolios have resulted in error messages or questionable low scores for teachers. It is unclear how many teachers across the state are affected, but a spokeswoman for the department said about 7 percent got the lowest overall score. The state department attributed the problems to user error while one of the state’s teacher organizations blamed a system glitch.

“Every time something fails, the Department of Education blames it on the teachers. And some of their reasons are just not valid,” Bounds told Chalkbeat.

But wait. There is more.

Year after year, state testing has been a disaster. The state has changed vendors but nothing goes write.

Governor Haslam, who is on his way out, fortunately, has been a disaster for public education.

The State Education Department has been pushing charters, trying to to override the wishes of local school boards.

The Achievement School District was a total failure, wasting $100 million and destroying community schools by handing them off to charter operators, who were unable to help the kids.

Categories Memphis, Nashville, Tennessee
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