Archives for the month of: April, 2019
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Bob Braun: The Political Machine That Is Taking Over Newark’s School Board

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
4

 

Bob Braun is one of the keenest investigative reporters in the nation, who worked for New Jersey’s leading newspaper—the Star-Ledger—for half a century. Now, retired, he keeps watch over the corporate privatization of New Jersey’s public schools, especially those in Newark. That city, it’s schools, and it’s children have been in a Reformer Petri dish for decades.

The schools were taken over by the states in the 1990s. At last, the state has restored an elected board, but the politicians are maneuvering to gain control of the board.

Sadly, Mayor Ras Baraka is leading the effort for a takeover by the charter industry, after running as the anti-charter candidate for mayor.

There is a school board election in Newark on Tuesday.

Read the latest story here. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

I Am Speaking At Penn State in Harrisburg on April 25

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
4

 

I will be speaking at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg on April 25 at 7 pm.

I am speaking at Mukund S. Kulkarni Theatre, Penn State Harrisburg.  The address is 777 West Harrisburg Pike, Harrisburg, PA  17057.

Here is the link for the event on the campus website:  https://harrisburg2.vmhost.psu.edu/calendar/event/diane-ravitch

if you are nearby, I hope you will come and learn about the issues facing Pennsylvania and my new book, which won’t be published until next January.

 

 

 

Categories Pennsylvania, Personal

The New York Times Magazine Interviews Melinda Gates

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
104

I wish that the New York Times were not behind a paywall. I wish you could read this article in full. It is an interview with Melinda Gates.

You would get a sense of a very rich and very privileged woman who doesn’t realize how out of touch she is with the lives of ordinary people.

The interviewer wants to know how she feels about her privilege, given the rise of tide of anger against elites and the super-rich.

Here are a few snippets:

One of the recurring criticisms of large-scale philanthropists is that they aren’t interested in any redress of the economic systems that create inequality. But in order to rectify inequalities, doesn’t a radical rethinking need to happen? Bill and I are both on the record saying that we believe in more progressive taxes. We believe in an estate tax. We don’t believe in enormous inherited wealth.  

There are certain places where Bill and I sit where that is not a popular idea. Bill will be the first person to tell you, and Warren Buffett will be the second, that they could not have done what they did without having grown up in the United States, benefiting from the United States education system, benefiting from the infrastructure that exists here to build a business. If they had grown up in — pick your favorite place — Senegal, they couldn’t have started their businesses. There’s no way. So they have benefited. But we do need to think about how we right some of these inequities. How do we open our networks of power for women and people of color? We have to think about our privilege. I have to think about my privilege every day.

Yet, they choose to live in the lowest-taxed state in the nation, where there is no income tax and no corporate tax. With all of Gates’ power and influence, he has not lobbied the Washington State legislature to pass a progressive income tax. The schools of Washington State have been underfunded for years, and it took a long-running court case to get the legislature to allocate more money to them. Meanwhile, Bill used his influence to fight for a charter school law, enabling about 3,500 students to attend charter schools in a state with a student enrollment of one million.  Warren Buffett and Bill Gates had very different experiences in “the United States education system.” Bill went to private school in Seattle, with small classes, lavish facilities, and experienced teachers; his own children attended the same elite private school. Warren Buffett went to public school in Omaha, sent his own children to public school in Omaha, and they sent their children to public school.

What’s a recent epiphany you’ve had about your privilege? That it’s not enough to read about it. You have to be in the community with people who don’t look like you. When I read about a shooting, maybe in the south side of Seattle, I’m not living the experience. Whereas if I have a friend who’s a person of color, they most likely are living that experience or know somebody who was part of that community. And so my youngest daughter and I — she has a lot of friends whom I’m meeting, and they’re of very mixed races, I love that — have this motto that we go by: Every single person who walks through our door should feel comfortable in our house, despite how large it is and that it has nice art. And, believe me, there are people who show up at my front door who are not that comfortable. So sometimes that means sitting down inside the front door with our dog — and I’m in my yoga pants, no makeup on — and petting the dog until they’re comfortable being there. And only if we’ve made them comfortable can we be in real community. I have to do more to break down those barriers. It is very hard for almost anybody to show up at my front door….

To get back to philanthropy: What about the notion that the foundation’s work on an issue like public education is inherently antidemocratic? You’ve spent money in that area in a way that maybe seems like it’s crowding out people’s actual wants in that area. What’s your counter to that criticism? Bill and I always go back to “What is philanthropy’s role?” It is to be catalytic. It’s to try and put new ideas forward and test them and see if they work. If you can convince government to scale up, that is how you have success. But philanthropic dollars are a tiny slice of the United States education budget. Even if we put a billion dollars in the State of California, that’s not going to do that much. So we experiment with things. (Including funding small-population schools, bonuses for high-performing teachers and supporting the development and implementation of the Common Core educational standards.)

 If we had been successful, David, you’d see a lot more charter schools. I’d love to see 20 percent charter schools in every state. But we haven’t been successful. I’d love to say we had outsize influence. We don’t.

Certainly you have more influence than, say, a group of parents. Not necessarily. I went and met with a group of three dozen parents in Memphis. We thought we had a good idea for them. They were having none of it. So we didn’t move forward. A group of parents, a group of teachers, they can have a very large influence.

Well, Melinda is wrong about the influence of the foundation and the Gates’. After all, they singlehandedly (or four-handedly) funded the Common Core standards and paid out millions to every organization they could think of advocate for them. More than anyone else, the Gates Foundation imposed the Common Core standards on the nation, and they flopped by any measure one could think of. All of their “experiments” on the American educational system have failed. But she is right that the charter movement has stalled. In some states where the Gates’ have been most active, only 3-5% of the students are in charter schools. Now that scandals appear daily in the charter industry, this investment is blowing up too. And as she said, “a group of parents, a group of teachers, they can have a very large influence.” Yup. Parents and teachers can beat big money. They can beat the Gates’ money and protect their public schools from being one of Bill & Melinda’s “experiments.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Questions for Ann O’Leary: Why Are You Protecting California’s Corrupt, Wasteful Charter Industry?

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
39

Ann O’Leary is Chief of Staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom. Previously she was education advisor to Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She is a lawyer and a very accomplished person, with a long history in Democratic politics. She was leading the Clinton transition team right before the election of 2016. For several years, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which strongly defends charter schools and Obama’s failed Race to the Top program.

During the 2016 campaign, when it was clear Hillary would be the nominee, Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education and I went to see O’Leary at the Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn. We tried to persuade her that Hillary should oppose charters. After all, school choice is a Republican priority. It is supported by the Waltons, the Koch brothers, ALEC, the DeVos family, and every Red State Governor. Democrats should support public schools, we argued, not privatization. We failed. We went back again, after the convention. O’Leary was unmovable. The best we could get from her was a promise that Hillary would oppose for-profit charters.

We knew that was a meaningless offer, because large numbers of nonprofit charters hire for-profit management companies.

We were thrilled when Gavin Newsom and Tony Thurmond were elected, because the charter industry placed its bets on Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor, who ran third, and on Marshall Tuck for Secretary of Education. Tuck’s campaign spent twice as much as Thurmond’s and vilified him with false advertising. Thurmond barely beat Tuck, the charter industry’s favorite and former leader of a charter chain.

Newsom promised to create a task force to advise on reforming the state’s notoriously weak charter law, which has enabled fraud, embezzlement, and grifters to cash in. Thurmond would chair the task force.

But then the task force was named, and it was clear that the charter industry was running the show. Of the 11 members, seven are connected to the charter industry. Two appointees are directly employed by the charter lobby.

Here are the members:

The task force members are:

  • Cristina de Jesus, president and chief executive officer, Green Dot Public Schools California (charter chain);
  • Dolores Duran, California School Employees Association;
  • Margaret Fortune, California Charter Schools Association board chair; Fortune School of Education, president & CEO (charter lobby);
  • Lester Garcia, political director, SEIU Local 99 (Local 99 took $100,000 from Eli Broad to oppose Jackie Goldberg, a critic of charters, and its former national president, Andy Stern, is CEO of the Eli Broad Center);
  • Alia Griffing, political director, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 57;
  • Beth Hunkapiller, educator and administrator, Aspire Public Schools (charter chain);
  • Erika Jones, board of directors, California Teachers Association;
  • Ed Manansala, superintendent, El Dorado County; the El Dorado County Office set up a Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) specifically to service students with disabilities in charter schools and wooed charter students away from their local districts, even students who live hundreds of miles away; 
  • Cindy Marten,  superintendent, San Diego Unified School District;
  • Gina Plate, vice president of special education, California Charter Schools Association (charter lobby);
  • Edgar Zazueta, senior director, policy & governmental relations, Association of California School Administrators (ACSA endorsed Marshall Tuck against Tony Thurmond). 

Only four members of the task force are not connected, politically or financially, to the charter industry: Cindy Marten; Dolores Duran; Alia Griffing; and Erika Jones.

Who selected this skewed task force?

A tip came from someone with a direct line to the Governor’s Office.

Ann O’Leary.

Ann, I hope you read this because I want you to know that you are protecting an industry that tolerates corruption and malfeasance.

Please read this report, “Charters and Consequences,” written by Carol Burris, which begins with a description of charter operators in California who hire family members, run multiple charters with appallingly low graduation rates and continues to describe a state law that is sorely in need of real reform.

Why does California have a law that ignores graft and corruption? The California Charter Schools Association fought any reform. Yet you put the chair of the board of this lobby on the task force to reform the charter law! And to make it worse, you added another employee of CCSA! This is the lobby that fought any reform of the law, that fought previous efforts to ban nepotism and conflicts of interest, that fought accountability and transparency.

And now the Network for Public Education has documented how charter operators in California have wasted millions of federal dollars. 

Nationally, about one-third of federally-funded charter schools either never opened or closed soon after getting the money. In California alone, the state with the most charter schools, the failure rate for federally funded charters is 39%.

California charters won almost $326 million from the federal Charter School Program between 2006-2014. To be exact: $325,812,827. Of that amount, $108,518,463 went to 306 charter schools that either never opened or soon shut down. Of that 306, 75 never opened at all. But the charter operator kept the money.

In addition, the ACLU of Southern California in its 2016 report, ”Unequal Access,” identified 253 charters in the state that engage in discriminatory—often illegal—practices. That number, they said, was the tip of the iceberg, because these were the charters that put their discriminatory policies on their website! Thirty-four California charter schools that received federal CSP grants appear on the ACLU of Southern California’s updated list of charters that discriminate—in some cases illegally—in admissions.

One can only imagine how much the waste has grown since 2014, with the Obama and Trump administrations adding even more millions to expand charters that divert resources from public schools.

So, this is on you, Ann.

Will the task force protect the charter industry? Will it come up with meaningless “reforms” that do nothing to rein in waste, fraud, and abuse?

Will it protect the power of districts to authorize charters in other districts, far away, without the permission of the receiving district, so the authorizers gets a fee and the charter has no oversight?

Will it continue to allow charters to open with no consideration of the fiscal impact on the district where it chooses to open?

Will it continue to allow endless appeals when the host district rejects a new charter?

Will it continue to allow corporate chains to Walmartize what were once public schools? Will it continue to allow non-educators to open and operate charter schools?

Will it ignore the expansion of Gulen schools, schools run by a Turkish imam who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania, schools which import Turkish teachers and relies on Turkish boards?

Is it possible for a task force to regulate an industry when industry insiders are a majority of the task force?

I know you are very busy, but I hope you will take the time to think about these questions and respond.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, For-Profit, Fraud

Former President of Milwaukee School Board Charged with Taking Kickbacks from Charter Chain

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
3

 

 

Michael Bonds, former president of the Milwaukee Public Schools’ Board, was charged in federal court for taking kickbacks from a charter chain. 

“Bonds is accused of conspiracy and violations of the Travel Act for allegedly accepting kickbacks from executives of the Philadelphia-based Universal Companies in return for votes beneficial to the company between 2014 and 2016. Two unnamed executives of the Philadelphia-based company were implicated in the scheme but not charged.

“According to the charging document, the executives used fake invoices to make payments totaling $6,000 to African-American Books and Gifts, a company purportedly created by Bonds. Efforts to locate a Wisconsin company by that name were not immediately successful.

“The document says Bonds also received “things of value” but did not elaborate. It is seeking $18,000 in forfeitures from Bonds.

“The document identifies the executives only as Universal’s president and chief executive officer, and its chief financial officer. The Philadelphia Inquirer used tax records to identify those individuals as former CEO Rahim Islam and current CFO Shahied Dawan.

“The charges come five months after the FBI raided Universal’s offices and Islam’s home.

“Universal was chartered by MPS to operate the Universal Academy for the College Bound in three Milwaukee school buildings from 2013 until it abruptly left the district in 2017, leaving hundreds of children stranded in the middle of the school year.

“The school received at least $11 million in taxpayer funds in its first two years, according to the court document, yet it struggled academically and financially from the beginning.”

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Fraud, Milwaukee, Philadelphia

Why Does Betsy DeVos Tolerate Fraud in the Charter Sector?

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
14

 

That is an easy question. Betsy DeVos believes that parents can choose really dreadful ”schools,” where their children won’t learn anything about the modern world and it’s okay.

But Betsy’s not a pundit on FOX News. She is Secretary of Education. People listen to her incoherent babbling and try to make sense of it.

As the AP reports, Betsy has decided to ignore evidence that her own Department—during the Obama Administration, wasted nearly $1 billion on failed charter schools. She can’t defend this outrage. Where are the other charter cheerleaders?

Why is it okay to fund charters that never open or close within a year?

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

New York City: Public School Parents Tell Mayor DeBlasio to Stop Giving their Children’s Names and Addresses to Charters for Recruitment

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2019 //
11

This is a link to an article on Leonie Haimson’s blog that describes the public school parents’ rally on the steps of City Hall.

You will see a photo of a parent holding up a handmade sign: “MY CHILD IS NOT YOUR CUSTOMER.”

There is a post and a video. The post begins:

This afternoon, in front of the NYC Department of Education headquarters, NYC public school parents told Mayor de Blasio to stop bowing to the charter school lobby and halt the practice of giving charters access to student personal information to market their schools.  Instead, they said, he should listen to parents’ concerns, stop violating their children’s privacy, and cease this practice, which by helping charters expand, causes the loss of funding and space from our public schools.

In recent weeks, Chancellor Carranza has repeatedly promised parent leaders, both publicly and privately, that this practice would be discontinued, but the Mayor has yet to make a commitment to do so, and in the last few days he has said that he has not yet made a decision.  

Said Johanna Garcia, public school parent and President of Community Education Council in District 6 in Upper Manhattan:  “It is unconscionable that this practice continues. For more than a decade, parents and advocates have complained to DOE about the privacy violations incurred by allowing charters to access our children’s personal information without our consent.  I filed a FERPA complaint to the US Department of Education about this practice in November 2017.  Moreover, I am not aware of another school district in the country that voluntarily makes this information available to charter schools and undermines our public schools in the process.”

NeQuan McLean, co- chair of the Education Council Consortium and the President of Community Education Council in District 16 Brooklyn said: “My mailbox is continually flooded with deceptive promotional materials from charter schools.  As a result of expensive marketing campaigns and the damaging co-location policies of the DOE, my district has been overrun by charters.  The Mayor repeatedly says he listens to parents; we are saying loudly and clearly that he should end this practice now.”

“Not only is personal student information unnecessary for appropriate marketing, providing access to it is an unacceptable violation of student privacy,” said Mark Cannizzaro, president of the Counselor of School Supervisors and Administrators.

Shino Tanikawa, the co-chair of the ECC and a member of NYC Kids PAC, agreed: “For years, DOE has ignored parents’ complaints about this practice, which started in 2006 when Joel Klein agreed to help Success Academy charter schools expand their “market share” as Eva Moskowitz put it in an email.  The result is that this year, more than two billion dollars has been diverted from our public schools. Why should our supposedly progressive Mayor continue this practice, when he promised parents he would defend our public schools in the face of charter encroachment? “

Please note that the parents were not wearing matching T-shirts. Their children were not let out of school for the rally. They paid their own way to the rally.

 

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Charter Schools, Education Industry, New York City, Parents, Privatization

Ohio: School Districts Sue Facebook for Helping to Defraud Them

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2019 //
2

Eight school districts in Ohio are suing Facebook for recruiting students for the failing online charter school ECOT (Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow). Real public schools that enroll and educate real students lost money to the for-profit virtual charter school, whose owner pocketed millions and ultimately went bankrupt rather than pay back any of the millions it collected from the state. Over the nearly 20 years that ECOT operated, it received close to a billion dollars that did not go to public schools where students actually showed up and were counted.

Ohio School Districts Sue Facebook Over Failed Online Charter School

By Doug Livingston, The Akron Beacon Journal Education Week April 14, 2019

Cuyahoga Falls, Woodridge and six other Ohio school districts are suing Facebook for about $250,000 in public education funding lost when the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow imploded last year.

The districts, which may never be made whole for state funding they lost when ECOT inflated attendance, are alleging that Facebook knew the online charter school was financially failing when it sold ads to help ECOT boost enrollment. That, under Ohio law, would be an illegal and “fraudulent transfer.”

Founded in 2000, ECOT grew to be the largest charter school in Ohio, claiming 15,239 students enrolled in 2016 when the Ohio Department of Education ran an attendance audit.

The virtual headcount found students spending as little as an hour a day on home computers. But the state was funding the charter school, using tax dollars diverted from local school districts, as if kids were attending full time.

Related

The attendance scandal forced ECOT founder Bill Lager, who had donated $2.1 million to school choice supporters, to return $2.5 million monthly until taxpayers got back the $80 million the school overbilled the state in just 2016 and 2017.

ECOT folded in January 2018 before making the first repayment.

Now, every public school district in Ohio that lost students and state funding to ECOT is in line for what’s left. Governor and then-Attorney General Mike DeWine announced in August a lawsuit to hold Lager, his companies and top ECOT executives personally liable for the lost public funds.

 

From Bill Phillis, unofficial ombudsman for school funding in Ohio:

School Bus
Facebook ‌ Twitter ‌ LinkedIn ‌
Districts that are attempting to intervene in the Attorney General’s lawsuit against the ECOT gang have added Facebook to their pursuit for recovery of funds
Attorney General DeWine brought suit against ECOT, ECOT companies and some employees of ECOT. Eight school districts are attempting to intervene in the suit. Additionally, the districts are pursuing claims against three companies with which ECOT did business. Most recently the districts added Facebook to the list. They are alleging Facebook knew ECOT was financially failing when it sold ads to help ECOT enroll students.
A lot of individuals and companies were attracted to ECOT for the purpose of making easy money. Taxpayers were the losers.
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| www.ohiocoalition.org
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Glenn Branch: “Anti-Indoctrination” Bills Are Attacks on Science

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2019 //
77

 

Glenn Branch writes here about four states that introduced bills to prohibit teachers from “indoctrinating” their students: Arizona,  Maine, South Dakota, and Virginia.

This is a solution in search of a problem, he says.

Despite efforts to pretend otherwise, the real targets here are evolution and climate change.

Any state that passes a law requiring teachers to present “both sides” would be compelling them to teach in defiance of the state’s science standards.

Among scientists, these are not controversial issues.

 

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Anthony Cody Dissects Alexander Russo’s Defense of Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2019 //
19

 

Anthony Cody was taken aback when he saw that pundit Alexander Russo was critical of the media for ganging up against Betsy DeVos when she explained at a budget hearing why she was defunding the Special Olympics. Russo seemed to think that the media critique of DeVos may have been the work of “advocates and trolls,” special interests blowing up a story that was a Nothingburger. Russo treated the hearing as a ho-hum event, nothing new.

But Cody, who sat behind DeVos throughout the hearing, saw plenty that was new.

First, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro grilled DeVos about the new report by the Network for Public Education which documented that the federal Charter Schools Program had wasted nearly $1 billion on charter schools that either never opened or closed soon after opening. The basic issue was that the Department of Education was handing out millions of dollars without fact-checking the applications. Yet DeVos was seeking a $60 million increase for this slipshod, wasteful program while asking to cut or eliminate many other programs. Russo didn’t find that newsworthy.

There was another important story that Russo found to be not newsworthy. Anthony Cody became part of that story because of the expression on his face as he sat directly behind DeVos.

He writes:

“In fact, I wound up being a part of a whole OTHER viral story that Russo doesn’t even mention – the moment when Lucille Roybal-Allard asks DeVos to explain her absurd belief that larger class sizes may benefit students. And although I am indeed an advocate (if not a troll) I had very little to do with this clip going viral — 8.4 million views at last count.”

Cody complains that Russo has tried to set himself up as the “ethical minder” of education journalism. But anyone with an ethical barometer should be appalled every day by the unethical actions of DeVos, as she rolls back civil rights protections, undercuts students who were defrauded by for-profit “colleges,” and campaigns against the nation’s public schools. She is a novelty: the first person to lead either the Department of Education (established in 1980) or the U.S. Office of Education (established in 1867) who was actively opposed to public schools. That should be a daily story, kind of like having an Environmental Protection Agency head who doesn’t believe in protecting the environment.

I have my own beef with Russo.

In the spring of 2010, I published The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

It got a lot of attention because I had been deeply embedded in prominent rightwing think tanks (the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute), and in the book  I renounced policies and a worldview I had espoused for years. It became a national bestseller. The very fact that anyone had changed her mind was a big deal.

Many months later, I was contacted by Russo. He invited me to meet with him at a cafe near my home in Brooklyn. We had a nice getting-to-know-you chat. I told him that I had cast the deciding vote in his favor as a judge of the Spencer Fellowships, and he thanked me. Towards the end of our meeting, he asked if I would be willing to read his book about the Green Dot charter chain and write a blurb for the jacket. I agreed to do so. I found the book informative and I wrote a blurb.

Some weeks later, a friend sent me Russo’s latest article, in which he criticized me and said I could not be trusted because I changed my mind and could do it again. I am paraphrasing here. Basically, he implied that I was an intellectual or political whore, lacking in sincerity or conviction.

I was stunned. As soon as I got over the shock of being attacked by someone I thought was a friend, I called his publisher and asked to speak to his editor. When I reached her, I said I wanted my blurb off his book. She explained that the jacket was in production, and it was too late. I read to her what Alexander Russo had written about me, and there was a long pause. She said, “I agree with you. We will take your blurb off the jacket.”

I have never mentioned his name since then, and hope I never again have reason to do so.

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Class size, Education Reform, Ethics, Media
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