Archives for the month of: August, 2018

Trump and the Mob

August 11, 2018 //

David Drehle, a writer for the Washington Post, wrote today about Trump’s long Association with unsavory characters.

This won’t trouble Trump’s base. Nor will it trouble the Republican members of Congress who live in fear of The Don.

How did our society sink so low?

He writes:

Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas titled their classic group portrait of Harry S. Truman’s foreign policy team, “The Wise Men.” A book about Donald Trump’s associations might be called “The Wise Guys.”

Mario Puzo would’ve been just the man to write it. Martin Scorsese could option the movie rights.

And if he’s not in prison when filming starts, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort deserves a role. Though Manafort hasn’t been accused of Mafia membership, Smooth Paulie certainly acts the part, judging from testimony at his trial in federal court on charges of fraud and tax evasion. He has a closet full of suits worthy of John Gotti (though even the Dapper Don might have balked at an ostrich-skin windbreaker) and a maze of offshore bank accounts dense enough to addle Meyer Lansky.

When Manafort’s turncoat lieutenant Rick Gates took the stand to detail their alleged conspiracies, I was transported to the day back in 1992 when Gotti’s underboss Sammy Gravano began singing at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn. Gotti’s lawyers attacked Sammy the Bull by demanding to know how many people he’d whacked. Manafort’s team asked Gates how many affairs he’s had.

If it seems harsh to compare Manafort to a mobster, take it up with President Trump, who got the ball rolling with a tweet before the trial began. “Looking back at history, who was treated worse, [Al] Capone, legendary mob boss . . . or Paul Manafort?” Trump mused.

And the president ought to know: He has spent plenty of time in mobbed-up milieus. As many journalists have documented — the late Wayne Barrett and decorated investigator David Cay Johnston most deeply — Trump’s trail was blazed through one business after another notorious for corruption by organized crime.

Michael Cohen flipping? Opinion writer Jennifer Rubin says the Mueller investigation is looking more and more like a mafia case. (Gillian Brockell, Kate Woodsome/The Washington Post)
New York construction, for starters. In 1988, Vincent “the Fish” Cafaro of the Genovese crime family testified before a U.S. Senate committee concerning the Mafia’s control of building projects in New York. Construction unions and concrete contractors were deeply dirty, Cafaro confirmed, and four of the city’s five crime families worked cooperatively to keep it that way.

This would not have been news to Trump, whose early political mentor and personal lawyer was Roy Cohn, consigliere to such dons as Fat Tony Salerno and Carmine Galante. After Cohn guided the brash young developer through the gutters of city politics to win permits for Trump Plaza and Trump Tower, it happened that Trump elected to build primarily with concrete rather than steel. He bought the mud at inflated prices from S&A Concrete, co-owned by Cohn’s client Salerno and Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family.

Coincidence? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Trump moved next into the New Jersey casino business, which was every bit as clean as it sounds. State officials merely shrugged when Trump bought a piece of land from associates of Philadelphia mob boss “Little Nicky” Scarfo for roughly $500,000 more than it was worth. However, this and other ties persuaded police in Australia to block Trump’s bid to build a casino in Sydney in 1987, citing Trump’s “Mafia connections.”

His gambling interests led him into the world of boxing promotion, where Trump became chums with fight impresario Don King, a former Cleveland numbers runner. (Trump once told me that he owes his remarkable coiffure to King, who advised the future president, from personal experience, that outlandish hair is great PR) King hasn’t been convicted since the 1960s, when he did time for stomping a man to death. But investigators at the FBI and U.S. Senate concluded that his Mafia ties ran from Cleveland to New York, Las Vegas to Atlantic City. Mobsters “were looking to launder illicit cash,” wrote one sleuth. “Boxing, of all the sports, was perhaps the most accommodating laundromat, what with its international subculture of unsavory characters who play by their own rules.”

But an even more accommodating laundromat came along: luxury real estate — yet another mob-adjacent field in which the Trump name has loomed large. Because buyers of high-end properties often hide their identities, it’s impossible to say how many Russian Mafia oligarchs own Trump-branded condos. Donald Trump Jr. gave a hint in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

For instance: In 2013, federal prosecutors indicted Russian mob boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov and 33 others on charges related to a gambling ring operating from two Trump Tower condos that allegedly laundered more than $100 million. A few months later, the same Mr. Tokhtakhounov, a fugitive from U.S. justice, was seen on the red carpet at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Obviously, not everyone in these industries is corrupt, and if Donald Trump spent four decades rubbing elbows with wiseguys and never got dirty, he has nothing to worry about from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. But does he look unworried to you?

Categories Education Reform

Mississippi: Southern Poverty Law Center Sues Mississippi for Diverting Funds from District Schools to Charter Schools

By dianeravitch

August 11, 2018 //

This is very good news.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the most respected civil rights groups in the nation. It is suing the state of Mississippi for diverting funding from district schools to charter schools. SPLC argues that doing this violates the State Constitution, which explicitly says that the funding allocated to each district is to be used solely for its schools. The charter schools are not part of the district. They should not be funded in any way by taking money from the district. The public schools of Mississippi are already woefully underfunded, and the Governor and Legislature have fought efforts to increase funding.

This litigation could have national significance.

Here are a few excerpts.

“The question presented by this case is an issue of first impression. Its determination implicates constitutional issues of enormous importance: the Legislature’s power to interfere with local control of public education, and the Constitution’s restrictions on school funding. The local funding for Mississippi’s second- largest school district will be decided by this case. The Court would benefit from the thorough examination that oral argument provides….”

“Section 206 of the Mississippi Constitution allows a school district to levy an ad valorem tax, and it “clearly states that the purpose of the tax is to maintain the levying school district’s schools.” Pascagoula Sch. Dist. v. Tucker, 91 So. 3d 598, 605 (Miss. 2012). A charter school operates as its own school district. Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-39. Yet Section 37-28-55(2) of the Mississippi Code requires a school district to transfer ad valorem revenue from its budget to charter schools that are not part of the tax-levying school district.

This case is not about whether charter schools are good or bad. This case is also not about whether the Legislature has the authority to allow charter schools in Mississippi. The Legislature indisputably has that authority.

This appeal presents a single constitutional question — the same question that the Supreme Court addressed in Tucker: “[w]hen Section 206 of the Mississippi Constitution says the purpose of the local school district tax is to maintain ‘its schools,’ can the Legislature force a district to divide its maintenance tax levy with other districts?” Tucker, 91 So. 3d at 602.

STATEMENT OF ASSIGNMENT

Rule 16(d) of the Mississippi Rules of Appellate Procedure provides three reasons why the Supreme Court should retain this case.

First, the constitutionality of Section 37-28-55(2) is “a major question of first impression,” as provided by Rule 16(d)(1).

Second, Section 37-28-55(2) has compelled the Jackson Public Schools District to transfer millions of local ad valorem tax dollars to charter schools that are not part of the district. The constitutionality of this statute is a “fundamental and urgent issue[ ] of
broad public importance requiring prompt or ultimate determination by the Supreme Court,” as provided by Rule 16(d)(2).

Third, this case presents “substantial constitutional questions as to the validity of a statute,” as provided by Rule 16(d)(3).

STATEMENT OF THE CASE I. Factual Background.

The Charter Schools Act was enacted in 2013. Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-1, et seq. Charter schools are approved by the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board, and are exempt from rules, regulations, policies, and procedures established by the State Board of Education, the State Department of Education, and the school district in which the charter school is geographically located. Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-7; Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-45(3),(5). In 2015, two charter schools opened within the geographic boundaries of the Jackson Public School District (“JPS”). In 2016 and 2018, two more charter schools opened within JPS’s geographic boundaries. In 2018, a charter school also opened within the geographic boundaries of the Clarksdale Municipal School District.

The Parents in this case live with their children in Jackson. They own their homes, and they pay ad valorem taxes levied by JPS under Section 206 of the Constitution. They all have children enrolled in JPS. R. at 114-15, R.E. at 16-17 (First Amended Complaint at ¶¶11-15). And they want for their children what most parents want for their child: the best public education that the law allows.
Since 2015, these Parents’ children have attended chronically underfunded schools that have lost millions in ad valorem tax revenue to charter schools. In Mississippi, charter schools receive funding through two revenue streams: one from the State, and one from the school district within whose geographic boundaries the charter school is located. The State provides most of a charter school’s funding through the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. A smaller portion of a charter school’s funding comes from the school district where the charter school is located. When a student enrolls in a charter school, the school district where the student resides sends a pro rata portion of its ad valorem revenue to the charter school. Miss. Code Ann. § 37- 28-55(2) (hereinafter the “Local Tax Transfer Statute”).

This appeal does not concern charter school revenue from the State. The Parents expressly waive their challenge related to the state funding stream. This appeal is only about the ad valorem revenue levied by a school district under Section 206.

In Jackson, where the Parents’ children attend school, the school district’s losses of ad valorem revenue are accelerating. During the 2015-16 school year, the Local Tax Transfer Statute cost JPS schoolchildren approximately $561,000 in district ad valorem revenue. R. at 113, R.E. at 15 (First Amended Complaint at ¶5). Just two years later, during the 2017-18 school year, JPS schoolchildren lost more than $2.5 million through diverted ad valorem revenue. Exhibit A (JPS 2017-18 Charter School Payment).1 To date, in only three years, JPS schoolchildren have lost more than $4.5 million of the school district’s ad valorem funds….”

“SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

“Section 206 of the Mississippi Constitution allows a school district to levy an ad valorem tax “to maintain its schools.” In 2012, this Court held that “Section 206 clearly states that the purpose of the tax is to maintain the levying school district’s schools.” Pascagoula Sch. Dist. v. Tucker, 91 So. 3d 598, 605 (Miss. 2012). Charter schools are not part of the school district where they are located. Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-45(3) (“Although a charter school is geographically located within the boundaries of a particular school district and enrolls students who reside within the school district, the charter school may not be considered a school within that district under the purview of the school district’s school board.”). Because charter schools are not part of the school district levying the ad valorem tax, Section 206 forbids the school district from transferring ad valorem revenue to charter schools. Therefore, the statute requiring the transfer of district ad valorem revenue to charter schools violates Section 206 and is unconstitutional.”

Charter schools across the nation are diverting funds from local district schools, whose boards have no authority over the charters, which are independent of the district.

Why should 90% of children suffer budget cuts so that 10% of the children may attend a charter school?

That is why this case might have national implications and encourage activists to fight to keep their taxes devoted to their district schools.

Read the entire brief here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Mississippi

Jan Resseger: Did Students in Chicago Die Because of Arne Duncan’s School Closing Program?

By dianeravitch

August 11, 2018 //

In 2004,Arne Duncan, the new Superintendent of the Chicago public schools announced his radical plan to turn around the entire school system. He called it Renaissance 2010. The plan involved closing over 80 public schools with low test scores and replacing them with 100 shiny new charter schools. Most studies have found little or no impact on test scores.

Now, writes Jan Resseger, it is possible to see the damage done by Renaissance to families and communities.

Renaissance 2010 was a tragedy.

Resseger writes:

“On Tuesday evening’s PBS NewsHour, I was surprised as I listened to an interview about the tragic gun violence in Chicago last weekend to hear the speaker name public high school closures as among the causes. Certainly exploding economic inequality, poverty, lack of jobs, the presence of street gangs, and other structural factors are contributing to this long, hot summer in Chicago. But Lance Williams, a professor at Northeastern Illinois University, blamed Renaissance 2010, a now-20-year-old charter school expansion program, for today’s violence.

“Professor Williams expressed particular concern about the phase out of neighborhood high schools: “(Y)ou’re seeing the violence on the West Side and the South Sides of Chicago because, about 20 years ago, in the early 2000s, the city of Chicago implemented some very, very bad public policy. The most damaging of those policies was the policy of Renaissance 2010, when Chicago basically privatized, through charter schools, neighborhood public elementary and high schools. It became a serious problem, because many of the high schools and communities that had long traditions of street organizations caused young African-American males to be afraid to leave out of their communities, going to new schools throughout the city of Chicago. So, basically, from the early 2000s, too many young Afrcan-American males haven’t been going to school, meaning that they don’t have life prospects. They can’t get jobs. They’re self-medicated to deal with the stress in their community. And it’s driving a lot of the violence.”

“The other speaker in the NewsHour‘s interview, Tamar Manasseh, runs a volunteer organization providing community meals at the corner of Chicago’s 75th Street and South Stewart Avenue—meals that provide food, and meals that try to build community to compensate for the destruction of community institutions. Ms. Manasseh explained: “And it’s not just about the kids. It’s about the wellness of the entire community… There are 100 other organizations just like me who are out here every day in their own way making a contribution to making communities better… Englewood will not have any public schools in the fall. And these kids that Professor Williams spoke of, they will have no options of a public high school in Englewood.”

“The research literature has documented that in Chicago, Portfolio School Reform and the subsequent expansion of school choice has been undermining public schools, which have previously been central institutions binding communities together. This PBS NewsHour interview is the first I’ve seen in the mainstream press to connect the dots between the expansion of school choice and the shredding of the fabric of Chicago’s neighborhoods.”

In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel compounded the harm done to Chicago’s black communities by closing 50 schools in one day.

“Here is how the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research describes the impact of the 2013 public school closures on Chicago’s South and West Sides: “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.” The report continues: “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

“The Consortium on School Research continues: “When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning… The intensity of the feelings of loss were amplified in cases where schools had been open for decades, with generations of families attending the same neighborhood school. Losing their closed schools was not easy and the majority of interviewees spoke about the difficulty they had integrating and socializing into the welcoming schools.” “Even though welcoming school staff and students did not lose their schools per se, many also expressed feelings of loss because incorporating a large number of new students required adjustments… Creating strong relationships and building trust in welcoming schools after schools closed was difficult.. Displaced staff and students, who had just lost their schools, had to go into unfamiliar school environments and start anew. Welcoming school communities also did not want to lose or change the way their schools were previously.”

Please read the post.

Nothing good came of Renaissance 2010, other than to boost Arne Duncan’s reputation as a “Reformer” who was unafraid to close schools, shred communities, and trample on the lives of black people.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Disruption, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform

Tom Ultican: Rightwing Shill Smears Teachers and Their Union

By dianeravitch

August 11, 2018 //

Tom Ultican formerly of Silicon Valley, now retired as a teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, has had it with the rightwingers who sit in air-conditioned offices and complain about teachers. And whine about their unions, who dare to defend them.

In this post, he eviscerates a jerk from a rightwing think-not tank and questions why this highly political organization has a tax-exempt status. We should all wonder why ALEC, the political arm of rightwingers and corporations, is also tax-exempt as if it were a charity, when it is a mean-spirited cabal intent on grinding down the lives and hopes of the 99%.

Ultican writes:

“The article by Edward Ring was a slanted hit piece intended to undermine support for public sector unions and teachers’ unions in particular. This is clearly a political document that has nothing to do with charitable giving, but anyone giving money to further this political agenda can claim a charitable deduction. That means as a citizen I am supporting the propagation of a political ideology I find abhorrent.

“Large giving to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society or the Center for American Progress is political giving. It not only should be taxed; the details of the donations should be made available to the public. Much of the giving at the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, etc. is clearly designed to promote a political point of view. That is not charity. That is politics. It does not or at least should not qualify for non-profit status.

“If we stop this tax cheating, we might see fewer of these baseless attack articles that divide people and communities.”

Stopping this theft of public dollars won’t happen during the Trump administration. Everyone around him, including the family, is stuffing their pockets as fast as possible. Not even Obama dared to challenge the perks of the far-right, like hitting a hornet’s nest.

Maybe, someday we will have an ethical federal government who fearlessly cleans up the IRS deductions for political bill mills.

Categories Accountability, California, Fraud, Lies, Teachers, Unions

Indiana: Voucher Study Finds Negative Effects of Vouchers on Students

By dianeravitch

August 11, 2018 //

More bad news for the voucher advocates.

Another study reports that students in Indiana who used vouchers lose ground academically.

The authors are R. Joseph Waddington and Mark Berends.

Here is the abstract:

This paper examines the impact of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program on student achievement for low‐income students in upper elementary and middle school who used a voucher to transfer from public to private schools during the first four years of the program. We analyzed student‐level longitudinal data from public and private schools taking the same statewide standardized assessment. Overall, voucher students experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 SDs in mathematics during their first year of attending a private school compared with matched students who remained in a public school. This loss persisted regardless of the length of time spent in a private school. In English/Language Arts, we did not observe statistically meaningful effects. Although school vouchers aim to provide greater educational opportunities for students, the goal of improving the academic performance of low‐income students who use a voucher to move to a private school has not yet been realized in Indiana.

This study was published on the same day that Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas (funded by the Walton Family Foundation) posted an article at the conservative Education Next site (funded by the Hoover Institution) saying that vouchers have not been discredited by a recent article in the prestigious Education Researcher by Robert Pianta and Arya Ansari (which demonstrated that private schools do not get better results when demographics are controlled). You remember Patrick Wolf. He was the “independent” evaluator of school vouchers in Milwaukee and in D.C. Maybe he will review the multiple studies of vouchers from Ohio, Louisiana, D.C., and Indiana, all reaching the same conclusion: Vouchers do not help poor kids.

From Politico Morning Education:

UPDATED STUDY BEARS BAD NEWS FOR INDIANA VOUCHER PROGRAM: The final version of a high-profile study of Indiana’s private school voucher program finds that voucher students saw a drop in math scores and those losses persisted “regardless of the length of time spent in a private school.”

— That finding is markedly different from an earlier version of the study released last year, which found initial drops in math scores, but students who remained in private schools for three or four years made up “what they initially lost relative to their public school peers.”

— The study was conducted by Joseph Waddington of the University of Kentucky and Mark Berends from the University of Notre Dame. They released an early version last year after Chalkbeat obtained a copy through a state public records request. The early findings prompted voucher opponents to slam the drop in math scores while supporters touted the improvements students made over time

— But amid rounds of revision with the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management — where the research published this week — Waddington said they revised their statistical approach. More students who participated in the voucher program over the first four years were included in the analysis and as a result, researchers said they were able to estimate the effects of the program with a greater degree of precision. And that meant bad news for the program’s overall effect on student achievement.

http://go.politicoemail.com/?qs=832a19f54909219487d02e78b3286cc1c5f3b1968ec5aa734f4702a216b21e75bcb010c9f51bd8956bfe967801535814

Categories Indiana, Research, Vouchers

Puerto Rico: PR Supreme Court Approves Privatization of Public Schools

By dianeravitch

August 10, 2018 //

Disaster capitalism strikes again! A victory for rapacious billionaires, Betsy DeVos, and DFER. Instead of putting the PR economy on a path to recovery, the disaster capitalists will give them charters and vouchers.

The following is a jubilant press release from the rightwing group “Center for Education Reform,” which despises public schools:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
(202) 750-0016 | news@edreform.com

PR Supreme Court Confirms: Education Opportunity Constitutional

[Washington, D.C., August 10, 2018—] Students and families of Puerto Rico were given a major victory today when the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico ruled that new education opportunities are constitutional and dismissed the island’s teachers’ union’s challenge to the new education reform law enacted on March 29, 2018, which provided for a path for charter schools and scholarships for students to attend private schools.

“Today’s decision paves the way for what has become an unprecedented island-wide coalition to drive educational excellence, comprising leaders in government, business, higher education, ed tech, and civic groups like the Boys & Girls Club,” said Jeanne Allen, Founder and CEO, Center for Education Reform. “As we have seen throughout the US, such efforts produce exceptional results and provide new and meaningful pathways for children trapped in failing schools,” Allen added.

Math proficiency for Puerto Rico stands at 33%, while only 10% of students in grades 7, 8 and 11 were able to pass standardized tests last year. Although it’s their native language, only 49 percent of students achieved proficiency in Spanish last year. Knowing the value of educational freedom, parents began to exit the state for Florida and beyond even before Hurricane Maria. The Education Secretary Julia Kelleher moved to close schools based on these migrations and failing education and the new law was a bi-partisan response to institute more accountability and inevitably more options for students and families, but it was in jeopardy when the unions filed suit. The teachers unions also were pushed to strike by the US head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, whose now infamous conversation on an Amtrak train plotting the strike was widely reported.

The Supreme Court overruled a highly political ruling by a Superior Court Judge who claimed that the Puerto Rico Education Reform act violates the territory’s Constitution.
“We knew after the first ruling against educational options that the Superior Court’s decision had no grounding in constitutional law,” said Allen, “as precedents have shown time and time again. We congratulate the leaders of Puerto Rico and hope this sends a signal to the establishment that nothing can stand in the way of educational achievement.”

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

Phyllis Bush: A Fork in the Road

By dianeravitch

August 10, 2018 //

Phyllis Bush, our leading resistance fighter in Indiana, is battling cancer.

This is her latest update.

She’s a champion and an exemplar of courage.

Categories Education Reform

A Fast Track to Citizenship: Marry Donald Trump or Be Parents of His Wife

By dianeravitch

August 10, 2018 //

From today’s Washington Post:

THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump is the do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do president. For years, he ripped Barack Obama for taking summer vacations to Martha’s Vineyard and told voters he’d be too busy governing to golf if he got elected. On Thursday, Trump hit the links again on his 11-day summer vacation in New Jersey.

As he did so, his Slovenian in-laws attended a naturalization ceremony in Manhattan. Viktor and Amalija Knavs were able to become U.S. citizens because their daughter, Melania, sponsored them. Trump decries this form of family reunification and has moved aggressively to block other parents from following their children to America.

It’s part of the president’s campaign to reduce the flow of illegal and legal immigrants, even though three of his son Barron’s four grandparents came to this country via what he denigrates as “chain migration.”

The White House declined to answer questions about whether this is hypocritical. “They are not part of the administration,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, said of the Knavses.

But the Trump team has also declined to answer specific questions about Melania’s pathway to citizenship. She got a green card in 2001, five years after arriving in the states to model and one year after she started dating the celebrity billionaire, through a program that was intended to help academic geniuses, corporate executives, Olympic athletes and Oscar-winning actors. “The year she got her legal residency, only five people from Slovenia received green cards under the EB-1 program,” David Nakamura notes.

In August 2016, The Donald announced to great fanfare that his wife would hold a news conference “over the next couple of weeks” to reply to accusations that she violated immigration laws when she first arrived. Melania, he promised, would offer proof that “she came in totally legally.”

Like the tax returns Trump also pledged to release, it never materialized.

There’s nothing wrong with golfing, vacationing or entering the U.S. through legal channels, but yesterday brought another blow to Trump’s credibility as a messenger on the immigration issue.

Categories Education Reform

This is What Privatization Looks Like: Schools Bought and Sold

By dianeravitch

August 10, 2018 //

Why should taxpayers subsidize corporations that buy and sell schools to one another as one fails and the other picks up the offloaded franchise?

Vote them all out of office in November!

Reader Chiara wrote:

“By June of this year, White Hat’s once prolific presence in Ohio had shriveled to a single online school — Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy (OHDELA) — and 10 “Life Skills” centers, which deliver computer-based GED courses to academically faltering teens and young adults.

Virginia-based Accel Schools, which is amassing an education empire the likes of which hasn’t been seen since White Hat dominated the Ohio landscape, has bought out the contract for OHDELA.

Utah-based Fusion Education Group (FusionED) is taking over contracts for seven of the Life Skills centers, including the North Akron branch in a Chapel Hill storefront at 1458 Brittain Road.

Life Skills Northeast Ohio on Larchmere Boulevard in Cleveland has hired Oakmont Education LLC, a company associated with Cambridge Education Group. White Hat could find no buyer for the last two centers, which will close at 4600 Carnegie Ave. in Cleveland and 3405 Market St. in Youngstown.

Information on White Hat’s off-loading of assets came via the schools’ sponsors: the Ohio Council of Community Schools, which oversaw OHDELA and two Life Skills schools, and St. Aloysius Orphanage, a Cincinnati social service provider. ”

This is what privatization looks like. These schools are 100% taxpayer-funded yet they’re being bought and sold by private entities.

All they’re doing is replacing one garbage contractor with others.

Ohio needs to clean house of state-level politicians and get some new people in there.

This situation will not improve until we break the stranglehold these contractors and their lobbyists have on state government.

Old wine, new bottles.

https://www.ohio.com/akron/news/local/schools-out-for-white-hat-david-brennans-pioneering-for-profit-company-exits-ohio-charter-scene

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Los Angeles: What Happened after The Los Angeles Times Published the Test-Based Ratings of Thousands of Teachers

By dianeravitch

August 10, 2018 //

Chalkbeat reports on what happened eight years after the Los Angeles Times paid to create a value-added, test-based rating system to evaluate teachers and then published their ratings online.

The bottom line: The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer. And some teachers left teaching.

New research suggests that’s what happened next — but only for certain families.

Publishing the scores meant already high-achieving students were assigned to the classrooms of higher-rated teachers the next year, the study found. That could be because affluent or well-connected parents were able to pull strings to get their kids assigned to those top teachers, or because those teachers pushed to teach the highest-scoring students.

In other words, the academically rich got even richer — an unintended consequence of what could be considered a journalistic experiment in school reform.

“You shine a light on people who are underperforming and the hope is they improve,” said Jonah Rockoff, a professor at Columbia University who has studied these “value-added” measures. “But when you increase transparency, you may actually exacerbate inequality.”

That analysis is one of a number of studies to examine the lasting effects of the L.A. Times’ decision to publish those ratings eight years ago. Together, the results offer a new way of understanding a significant moment in the national debate over how to improve education, when bad teachers were seen as a central problem and more rigorous evaluations as a key solution.

The latest study, by Peter Bergman and Matthew Hill and published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Economics of Education Review, found that the publication of the ratings caused a one-year spike in teacher turnover. That’s not entirely surprising, considering many teachers felt attacked by the public airing of their ratings.

“Guilty as charged,” wrote one teacher with a low rating. “I am proud to be ‘less effective’ than some of my peers because I chose to teach to the emotional and academic needs of my students. In the future it seems I am being asked to put my public image first.”

But a separate study, by Nolan Pope at the University of Maryland, finds the publication of the ratings may have had some positive effects on students, perhaps by encouraging schools to better support struggling teachers.

Pope’s research showed that Los Angeles teachers’ performance, as measured by their value-added scores, improved after their scores were published. The effects were biggest for the teachers whose initial scores were lowest, and there was no evidence that the improvement was due to “teaching to the test.”

“These results suggest the public release of teacher ratings could raise the performance of low-rated teachers,” Pope concluded.

The Los Angeles Times sued to get additional data so it could rank and rate even more teachers based on test scores, but a three-judge appellate court turned the newspaper down. The public did not have a right to know the ratings of individual teachers, the court said.

The distinguished mathematician John Ewing wrote an important paper in the journal of the American Mathematical Society called “Mathematical Intimidation,” in which he thoroughly debunked the Los Angeles Times ratings. He later debunked the “crisis in education” in a speech at Brown University.

The New York Post followed the lead of the Los Angeles Times and published the ratings for thousands of New York City teachers. The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid identified what it called “the worst teacher” in the city and hounded her, publishing her photo and banging on her apartment door in search of an interview with this terrible teacher.

But another look and it turned out that this teacher taught new immigrant students who cycled in and out of her class all year long. The ratings were meaningless.

Gary Rubinstein reviewed the city’s ratings and found them to be incomprehensible. A teacher might be highly effective in math and ineffective in reading, or vice versa, leaving the choice of which half of him/her should be fired.*

The review of the Los Angeles ratings omitted one consequence that mattered, at least to his family and friends: Roberto Riguelas, a teacher of fifth grade in a rough neighborhood, got a mediocre rating and jumped off a bridge, committing suicide.

Arne Duncan still praises the “courage” of the Los Angeles Times for publicizing the ratings of teachers, no matter how many of those ratings were erroneous and hurtful.

*Here are Gary Rubinstein’s posts about the absurdity of New York City’s value-added ratings. Blog #2 is the most important:

Part I
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-1/

Part II
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-2/

Part III
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-iii/

Part IV
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-4/

Part V
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-5/

Part VI
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-6/

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Teacher Evaluations