Archives for the month of: November, 2018
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Kentucky: Beware Voucher Fraud!

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2018 //
9

EdChoice (formerly the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation) conducted a telephone poll of 600 people in Kentucky and found support for “scholarships,” also known as “vouchers.”

Proponents of vouchers avoid using the V word, because the public understands that it means sending public money to religious and private schools. The public is okay with scholarships but opposes vouchers.

When proposals for vouchers (or scholarships that allow public money to be spent for religious or private schools) is on the ballot, the voters say no. They said NO last week in Arizona by a vote of 65-35%.

EdChoice and the Goldwater Institute are based in Arizona. The Koch brothers and DeVos’ American Federation for Children supported the voucher referendum (called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts), and despite the money and the euphemism, it was defeated overwhelmingly.

Watch out, Kentucky. The voucher zombies are coming for you.

Categories Kentucky, Lies, Vouchers

Kansas Will Pay TFA $270,000 for Recruiting 3 Teachers

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2018 //
9

You read that right. Kansas is a state that has cut taxes and cut its education budget repeatedly and whose teachers are paid poorly. It is under court order to finance its schools adequately. You may recall that former Governor Sam Brownback imposed a far-right policy of cutting taxes to “grow the economy” while starving the schools and other public services. The experiment failed. Trump appointed him the
“Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.”

So now, because of low salaries, Kansas has teacher shortages. The remedy? A lavish contract with TFA to bring in temp teachers.


The Kansas Legislature agreed to pay education nonprofit Teach For America more than $500,000 this year for a pilot program to recruit 12 teachers to the state.

But the national organization only recruited three teachers for the state in 2018. All of them were placed in Kansas City, Kansas, where the local school district pays their salaries and benefits on top of another $3,000 per teacher per year to Teach For America.

Meanwhile, the state is still on the hook to pay the nonprofit $270,000 for training and recruiting teachers with no guarantee they will work in Kansas schools.

Mischel Miller, director of teacher licensure and accreditation at the Kansas State Department of Education, said the contract was intended to help fill a teacher shortage in the state.

“Our intention,” Miller said in an interview, “is that those dollars would be used for Kansas teachers.”

Yet the Kansas City, Kansas school district says it only hired three Teach For America instructors this year. Two other recruits started teaching in the district last year before Kansas hired the organization.

The state education department says Teach For America told the department it recruited all five of those teachers this year. The department is currently drafting a $270,000 contract to pay the organization.

A budget document from the Kansas Legislative Research Department dated Oct. 10 states, “Teachers will be paid a salary of $36,000.” But that money actually goes just to recruiting, training and placing each teacher.

That totals $180,000 from the state for recruiting five teachers, plus $80,000 to pay for the salary, benefits and travel expenses of a recruiter and $10,000 for one day of professional development. The rest of the money appropriated during the legislative session, totaling $250,000, will go back to the state’s general fund to be appropriated for the next fiscal year.

Categories Education Reform, Kansas, Kansas City, Teach for America

Los Angeles: Austin Beutner’s Plan to Disrupt the Schools and Impose the Portfolio Model

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2018 //
30

The Los Angeles Times exposed school superintendent Austin Beurner’s no-longer secret plan to reorganize the district by downsizing the central office and decentralizing authority to 32 “networks.” You May recall that the Gates Foundation set aside money to support “networks,” so this may be an effort to get Gates money or simply jumping on the latest fad. It is not as if this is a new idea. Joel Klein created networks about 10 years, as one of four different reorganizations during his time as chancellor of the NYC schools. Beutner seems to think that decentralization to networks will raise test scores. Uh-huh. What part of reorganization raises test scores?

Capitol & Main explains the logic (or illogic) behind the plan.

Times education writers Howard Blume and Anna Phillips say highlights [of the plan] include a purge of “discretionary” staff at the district’s Beaudry Avenue headquarters. Budgeting, hiring and curriculum authority would be transferred to LAUSD’s 988 district-managed schools, which will be organized into 32 geographic “networks” under the oversight of regional offices. The theory is that cost savings and “charter-like” autonomy will improve student outcomes. Beutner is expected to unveil details next month.

Reimagining’s actual reimagineers are outside consultants who carried out a similar reorganization of Newark, New Jersey schools using a highly controversial approach borrowed from Wall Street. Called the “portfolio model,” it means each of the 32 L.A. networks would be overseen like a stock portfolio. A portfolio manager would keep the “good” schools and dump the “bad” by turning them over to a charter or shutting them down much like a bum stock. Why that should fare any better than a short-lived LAUSD reform in the 1990s that also divided the district into small, semi-autonomous clusters but failed to budge academic performance remains unclear. The changes in Newark included neighborhood school closures, mass firings of teachers and principals, a spike in new charters and a revolt by parents that drove out former Newark supe — and current L.A. consultant — Cami Anderson.

One wrinkle in LAUSD going portfolio is the March 5 special election to fill the District 5 seat left vacant by the August resignation of disgraced board member Ref Rodriguez. District 5 veteran Jackie Goldberg’s October 26 announcement that she is running for a third term in her old board seat could effectively make the contest a local referendum on the Beutner plan. The progressive, twice-elected L.A. City Councilmember and two-term California Assemblymember has never lost a race in her political career. The pro-charter forces on the current one-vote board majority might consider having a kinder, gentler-to-public school families Plan B waiting in the wings.

If Beutner seems clueless, it is understandable. He has no experience in education, and he doesn’t know anything about the past. His ideas are based on his experience in corporate America. The people he brings in are reformers who believe in disruption.

The race to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of charter founder Ref Rodriguez after his conviction on various felony charges may well determine the future of Austin Beutner’s plan and Austin Beutner.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles

The Secret to Being Recognized by Forbes as an “Edupreneur”

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2018 //
21

Valerie Strauss posts an analysis of who wins recognition as a leader of the “30 under 30” award by Forbes magazine.

It turns out that the winners of this competition are not the best classroom teachers but the people who are part of the judges’ social network. Who are the judges? You will not be surprised to learn that they are part of the TFA-Charter-DeVos privatization network.

Winning depends on connections, not your contributions to students, communities, or knowledge.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Teach for America

California: Tony Thurmond’s Lead over Marshall Tuck Just Grew to 160,000

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
18

The vote totals have been growing.

The last report, published by the Secretary of State at 4:59 pm PST, shows a big increase for Tony Thurmond. His total is now nearly 160,000 more than Tuck’s.

https://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/superintendent-of-public-instruction

This is nearly a two-point lead.

The charter billionaires spent twice as much on Tuck’s campaign as Thurmond received, mostly from teachers and unions.

Passion beats money. Not always. But maybe in this race.

Wow!!

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

“Dear Mr. Zuckerberg.” Students Take Their Grievances about Summit Platform to Mark Z.

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
33

Students at the Secondary School for Journalism walked out to protest the Chan-Zuckerberg Summit depersonalized learning program, but thought Mark Zuckerberg might not have noticed. So they wrote him a letter to explain why they don’t like interacting for hours a day with a computer. They wrote and told him that they were learning little or nothing, and they complained about the collection of their personally identifiable data. They asked why Summit (and CZI) was collecting all this data without their knowledge or consent. Great points!

The article appears in EdSurge, a tech journal that is partially underwritten by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. I bet Mark and Priscilla see it.

They had tried before to address their concerns with the program, says Kelly Hernandez, one of the organizers of the protest. But no matter how many times they talked to their principal, or how many calls their parents made to the school to complain, nothing changed.

“We wanted to fight back with a walkout,” Hernandez, a 17-year-old senior, tells EdSurge, “because when we tried to voice our concerns, they just disregarded us.”

The Secondary School for Journalism is one of about 380 schools nationwide using Summit Learning, a personalized learning program that involves the use of an online instructional software, called the Summit Platform. This program grew out of Summit Public Schools, a network of 11 charter schools based in California and Washington, and soon caught the eye of Facebook, which lent engineers to help build the software. The platform was later supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Earlier this year, Summit Public Schools announced it would be spinning the program out as an independent nonprofit in the 2019-2020 school year.

This is not the first time that the Summit software has attracted questions and protests. Around this time last year, a Connecticut school suspended its use of the software just months after implementing it.

For Hernandez and her classmates, the breaking point came the week of Halloween, when students got their report cards, she says. Some weren’t showing any credit for the courses they’d taken and passed—courses that were necessary to graduate. Others had significant scheduling errors. “It was just so disorganized,” Hernandez recalls.

So she and her friend, senior Akila Robinson, began asking around to see who might participate in a walkout. A few days later, on Nov. 5, nearly 100 students left the school to protest Summit.

“We didn’t necessarily want attention,” Hernandez says, even though they got plenty from the media. “We wanted the changes we felt we needed.”

Some changes have come. The school dropped the learning program for 11th and 12th grade students, because teachers of those grades didn’t receive any professional development for Summit. It is still using it with 9th and 10th graders, which Hernandez wants to change.

She believes a lot of the problems with Summit fall on her teachers and administrators, who were not properly trained in using it. Summit Learning officials, in an email to Education Week, also attributed the problems described by the students to poor implementation and a lack of professional development for teachers.

But fundamental issues with the learning system, as well as concerns over the data Summit collects and shares about its students, must be addressed with the people behind Summit, Hernandez feels. That’s why she and Robinson drafted and sent a letter to Zuckerberg on Thursday.

Below is the full text of the email the students sent to Facebook’s chief executive. Diane Tavenner, CEO of Summit Public Schools, is also copied on the note.

[Please open the link to read the students’ letter.]

Disclosure: EdSurge has received grant support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Categories Accountability, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privacy, Students, Technology

New Bedford, Massachusetts, Doesn’t Need or Want More Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
12

The public schools of New Bedford, Massachusetts, have gone through a remarkable turnaround in recent years. They are getting better and better. In 2016, nearly 60% of the voters of New Bedford opposed any increase in the number of charters in the state. But now the state—in the hands of charter zealots—wants to expand the number of charter seats in New Bedford. These two citizens of New Bedford explain why this is a terrible idea that will do irreparable damage to the public schools.

The authors of this article are Joshua Amaral, a member of the New Bedford School Committee and the chair of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees Division IX (urban districts), and Bruce Rose, president of the New Bedford NAACP. “Ignore the Charter School Think Tank Crowd,” they say, and they are right. Why sink the ship for the benefit of a leaky rowboat?

They begin like this:


YOU ARE AN EDUCATION RESEARCHER sent to discover best practices in urban schools so that you can replicate them to create results for more kids—kids who you believe are trapped in mediocre schools. You look at three exemplar schools to scale up:

School A has 336 students and rates in the state’s 85th accountability percentile, a measure now used to aggregate a school’s performance on MCAS relative to other schools in the state. This school made 95 percent improvement toward its own goals, such as increasing the percentage of students who score advanced or proficient on statewide exams, or improving attendance rates. Remarkably, 46 percent of this school’s students have a first language other than English, and 75 percent are considered economically disadvantaged. The school has been named a School of Recognition by the state, among only 50 others.

School B has 730 students and rates in the state’s 59th accountability percentile and made 83 percent improvement toward its targets. The school is home to specialized classrooms designed to serve students with severe behavioral and developmental delays, and 27 percent of the school’s students have disabilities, 44 percent are economically disadvantaged, and 21 percent have a first language other than English.

School C has 413 students and rates in the state’s 38th accountability percentile and made 47 percent improvement toward its targets. At the school, 23 percent of the students have a first language other than English, and 58 percent come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

If you had to make the call on which school to expand by 300 percent – to double- or triple-down on – I suspect you would favor schools A and B, New Bedford district public schools Congdon and Pulaski, respectively, over School C, Alma del Mar Charter School, the school actually proposing such an extraordinary expansion.

The New Bedford district public schools have a plethora of higher performing schools. Not just Pulaski and Congdon, but 10 of New Bedford’s elementary schools finished higher in accountability ranking than Alma del Mar, more than half of the city’s primary schools. On improvement toward targets, 18 of the district’s 23 schools exceed Alma’s 47 percent improvement rate. And among those performing worse than Alma? The city’s other two charters: Global Learning and City on a Hill. The district educates a higher percentage of English language learners, students with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students and has schools soaring past Alma nonetheless.

Why siphon from the most successful of New Bedford’s schools, which outperform charters with a more challenging student population, just to increase charter seats? With a concerted and well-funded public relations strategy unmatched by cash-strapped district schools, it seems the only advantage charters have over traditional public schools is in the marketing department. It’s a credit to the public relations efforts of charters that the success of the New Bedford district public schools relative to its charters comes as a surprise.

The New Bedford district public schools have undergone a marked turnaround over the last six years, stemming the tide of mediocrity and ineffectiveness that branded the district poorly across the state. The wave of accountability that rolled in post-ed reform hit New Bedford hard. Systems were put in place, issues were corrected, difficult decisions were made. The road to improvement has not always been smooth, but focused leadership and putting students first has left the district primed for takeoff, not takeover.

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

Colorado: Governor-Elect Jared Polis Packs His Education Transition Team with Privatizers

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
36

Coloradans should not be surprised to learn that Governor-Elect Jared Polis has packed his transition team on K-12 education with people who have a history of preferring charters and vouchers over public schools.

Polis himself founded two charter schools and is a fierce advocate for privately managed charter schools. He was one of the wealthiest members of Congress.

So of course he appointed Jen Walmer from DFER, the notorious organization of hedge fund managers who advocate for charter schools, never for public schools, and who are anti-union, pro-merit pay and pro-high-stakes testing. DFER is the face of corporate reform, using its ample resources to undermine public education. Walmer, according to the article, is an unregistered lobbyist for DFER. The Democratic party of Colorado (and California) both passed resolutions calling on DFER to stop calling itself “Democrats for Education Reform” because its idea of “reform” is to turn public schools over to private management. Its political action arm, Education Reform Now Advocacy, bundles hedge fund money to candidates in state and local races across the nation without releasing the names of the donors. The linked article says that ERN gave out $1.8 million in Colorado races, “almost all of it on behalf of Polis and Democrats running for the General Assembly. Education Reform Now Advocacy is a dark money group that doesn’t disclose its donors.”

It gets worse. Polis invited former Republican Congressman Bob Schaeffer to join his transition team on K-12 education. Schaeffer supports vouchers. Not only that, he directs the “Leadership Program of the Rockies,” an organization that prepares candidates to run for local school boards and to become active in local politics on behalf of vouchers and other conservative principles. Schaeffer’s group was active in leading the effort to turn Douglas County into the first district in the nation to vote for vouchers. The DougCo School Board supported by Schaeffer paid former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett $50,000 to speak to local civic leaders and praise its voucher plans. After a bitter, divisive fight, the entire pro-voucher board members were ousted by popular vote in 2017.

Schaffer also is chairman of the board of the Leadership Program of the Rockies (LPR) a Republican-leaning organization that provides training on conservative principles and leadership. Its graduates include three of the former members of the Douglas County Board of Education who approved a controversial private-school voucher program in 2011. Schaffer advocated for the state board of education to endorse the voucher program.

The Dougco program led to lawsuits, including a trip all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It was dismantled last year after voters elected an anti-voucher school board.

Another member of Polis’ transition group is Michael Johnston, who ran for governor against Polis and lost. Johnston is a graduate of Teach for America and author of what is possibly the most punitive teacher evaluation law in the nation, known as SB-191. Johnston, of course, favors privately managed charters. I was in Denver in 2010 on the day the SB-191 passed. I was scheduled to debate Johnston, who arrived at the event the minute I finished speaking. He proclaimed that as a result of SB-191, which based 50% of the evaluation of teachers and principals on student test scores, Colorado would soon have great teachers, great principals, and great schools, because the bad teachers and principals would be fired. Reformers across the country hailed Johnston and his law as the dawning of a new day. Last year, one of Colorado’s reform leaders, Van Schoales, lamented the failure of Michael Johnston’s law. Most teachers were not teaching the tested subjects, so could not be judged by student test scores. All of Colorado’s 238 charter schools waived out of this wonderful system designed by one of their champions. The new evaluation system failed: less than 1% of the state’s teachers were found to be “ineffective,” about the same as before the law. As Van Schoales put it, we “not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.”

So what Governor-Elect Polis has pulled together is a transition team devoted to charter schools, vouchers, the discredited VAM method of evaluating educators, and high-stakes testing.

I had a brief and unpleasant personal experience with Polis in 2010, when I was invited to meet with the Democratic members of the House Education Committee to talk about my reasons for abandoning school choice and standardized testing. We met in a Congressional conference room. I explained that charter schools and vouchers were harming public schools and were part of a national effort to turn public education into a free market (this predated my awareness of Betsy Devos, who makes no bones about her desire to do exactly what I predicted). At the end of my talk, Polis took the floor, announced that my book (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education) was “the worst book he had ever read.” He then threw the book across the table at me, and said, “I want my $20 back.” Another member of the committee reached into his wallet, pulled out a $20 bill, and bought the book from Polis. To say he was rude would be an understatement.

Parents of Colorado: Prepare to protect your public schools from your new Governor. He doesn’t like public education.

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Dark Money, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Vouchers

Restore Reason: What Happens When Government Services Are Privatized

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
21

Thanks to Guy Brandenburg for directing me to this fascinating post about what happens when private corporations take over government services, in this case, reporting the weather.

Restore Reason writes about the commercialization of weather reporting and draws a parallel with charter schools and vouchers. Please open the link and read the entire post.

I just listened to “The Coming Storm”, by Michael Lewis. I didn’t carefully read the description before diving in, and thought it would inform me about the increasing violence of weather. Rather, I learned about the privatization of weather, or at least the reporting of it, and the Department of Commerce.

Turns out, the Department of Commerce has little to do with commerce and is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business. Rather, it runs the U.S. Census, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Over half of its $9B budget though, is spent by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to figure out the weather. And figuring out the weather, is largely about collecting data. “Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.” One senior policy adviser from the George W. Bush administration, said the Department of Commerce should really be called the Department of Science and Technology. When he mentioned this to Wilbur Ross, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department, Ross said, “Yeah, I don’t think I want to be focusing on that.” Unfortunately for all of us, Ross also wasn’t interested in finding someone who would do it for him.

In October 2017, Barry Myers, a lawyer who founded and ran AccuWeather, was nominated to serve as the head of the NOAA. This is a guy who in the 1990s, argued the NWS should be forbidden (except in cases where human life and property was at stake) from delivering any weather-related knowledge to Americans who might be a consumer of AccuWeather products. “The National Weather Service” Myers said, “does not need to have the final say on warnings…the government should get out of the forecasting business.”

Then in 2005, Senator Rick Santorum (a recipient of Myers family contributions) introduced a bill to basically eliminate the National Weather Service’s ability to communicate with the public. Lewis asks his readers to “consider the audacity of that manuever. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.”

It was at this point in my listening that I began to think how this privatization story was paralleling that of education’s. In both cases, those in the public sector are in it for the mission, not the money. In both cases, the private sector only “wins” if the public sector “loses”. In both cases, it is in the interest of the private sector to facilitate the failure of the public sector or make it look like it is failing.

Just as private and charter schools profit when district schools are perceived to be of lower quality, Barry Myers has worked hard to make government provided weather services look inferior to that which the private sector can provide. As Lewis points out, “The more spectacular and expensive the disasters, the more people will pay for warning of them. The more people stand to lose, the more money they will be inclined to pay. The more they pay, the more the weather industry can afford to donate to elected officials, and the more influence it will gain over the political process.”

This is the beginning of a thoughtful post. Please read it.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

Jan Resseger on the Debate About Who Governs Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
10

Jan Resseger always comments thoughtfully about important issues. In this post, she weighs in on the debate about whether it matters who controls public schools by reviewing a much-discussed article by David Labaree, historian of education at Stanford. Open her posts to see the links.

She begins:


There has recently been a debate among guest writers in Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” column in the Washington Post. The Network for Public Education’s Carol Burris and Diane Ravitch published a defense of public governance of public schools, a column which critiqued a new report from the Learning Policy Institute. The Learning Policy Institute’s Linda Darling-Hammond responded with a defense of the Learning Policy Institute’s report, which defends school choice including privately governed and operated charter schools. Finally Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris responded to Darling-Hammond’s response. This blog weighed in here last week.

As it happens, Stanford University emeritus professor of education, David Labaree enhances this conversation with a new column on the public purpose of public education at Phi Delta Kappan: “We Americans tend to talk about public schooling as though we know what that term means. But in the complex educational landscape of the 21st century… it’s becoming less and less obvious….”

A spoiler: There is no equivocation in Labaree’s analysis. He is a strong supporter of public education, and he worries that by prizing the personal and individualistic benefit of education, our society may have lost sight of our schools’ public purpose: “A public good is one that benefits all members of the community, whether or not they contribute to its upkeep or make use of it personally. In contrast, private goods benefit individuals, serving only those people who take advantage of them. Thus, schooling is a public good to the extent that it helps everyone (including people who don’t have children in school). And schooling is a private good to the extent that it provides individuals with knowledge, skills, and credentials they can use to distinguish themselves from other people and get ahead in life.”

Labaree traces the history of public education through the 19th and early 20th centuries, but he believes more recently: “Over the subsequent decades… growing numbers of Americans came to view schooling mainly as a private good, producing credentials that allow individuals to get ahead, or stay ahead, in the competition for money and social status. All but gone is the assumption that the purpose of schooling is to benefit the community at large. Less and less often do Americans conceive of education as a cooperative effort in nation-building or collective investment in workforce development.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization
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