Archives for the month of: April, 2019
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

DeVos Funnels $116 Million to Open 20 Charter Schools in El Paso, Which Will Devastate Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2019 //
84

 

 

Should Amy O’Rourke, Beto’s wife, send a thank-you note to Betsy DeVos?

Betsy DeVos has awarded a huge grant of $116,755,848 to the IDEA charter chain to open 20 new schools in El Paso. IDEA opened its first El Paso charter last fall.

In 2017,  DeVos gave $67 million to IDEA.

IDEA has received a grand total of $225 million from the federal Charter Schools Program.

The size of this grant is unprecedented, so far as I know.

Congress should ask DeVos why she gave such a staggering amount of money to the IDEA charter chain.

This rapid charter expansion is likely to swamp the underfunded El Paso public schools, if not eliminate them.

The grant will be funneled through CREED, where Amy O’Rourke plays a leading role. Amy is Beto O’Rourke’s wife.

CREED’s charter program, which is part of a larger gentrification project, has previously been supported by the Dell Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Hunt foundation, and the Gates Foundation.

https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/education/2018/09/10/idea-opens-its-first-two-el-paso-charter-schools-plans-more-2023/1157132002/

https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/education/2017/10/09/creeed-has-raised-20-m-least-half-go-charters/710557001/

https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/opinion/2018/09/22/charter-schools-offer-choice-but-public-must-know-impact-column/1385283002/

The superintendent of a neighboring district, Jose Espinosa, warned parents to be wary of charter schools like IDEA that boast of a 100% college acceptance rate; what they don’t tell parents is that you can’t graduate until you have been accepted by a four-year college, some of which are open admissions colleges that accept all applicants.

 

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

Betsy DeVos Gives Multi-Millions to KIPP and IDEA Corporate Charter Chains

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2019 //
9

 

In the latest round of awards from the federal slush fund for charter schools, Betsy DeVos handed out plums to the corporate chains KIPP and IDEA. 

KIPP, the largest nonprofit charter network in the country, is slated to receive $86 million over five years to create 52 new schools across 20 states and D.C.
IDEA, a Texas-based charter network, won an expected $116 million over five years. The network’s application says it will use the money to add grades at 56 schools and create 38 new schools across Texas; in New Orleans and East Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and in Tampa Bay, Florida.
The grants, announced last week, underscore the substantial role the federal government plays in helping charter schools expand. But they come at a perilous time politically for the charter school movement, which has seen its growth and popularity ebb in recent years. These networks’ plans for rapid growth might both run into — and fuel — political opposition, particularly in places where that growth will strain school districts’ finances.
As Chalkbeat notes, DeVos is trying to pump new life into the flagging charter movement, as exposes of charter scandals escalate and as some states see a decline in the number of charters as more close than open.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization

Popular New York City Public Schools Have a Wait List of 155,000 Students

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2019 //
8

 

One of our daily readers, who signs as “New York City Public School Parent,” pointed out recently that the wait list for popular public high schools in New York City is far larger than the alleged wait list for charter schools.

I checked the sources, and by golly, NYC PSP is correct. More than 155,000 students applied for but did not win admission to the high school of their choice. Of course, NYC PSP points out that there are only 78,000 eighth-graders applying for multiple schools, but that is the nature of wait lists. There are always duplications, triplications, and students applying to multiple schools at the same time. A few years ago, a journalist in Boston told me that he reviewed the celebrated “wait list” and discovered that it not only included the same students applying to multiple charters, but students who had already been placed, and students who were registered in a public school that they liked, and even students who no longer lived in the city. So, when you hear about “wait lists,” don’t believe it until it has been audited by a reputable and independent source.

InsideSchools writes:

There is greater demand than ever for the large, popular high schools. For the fourth year in a row, Francis Lewis in Queens took the number one spot for the most applicants of any high school in New York City—a whopping 17,440 students applied to this huge neighborhood school, compared to 10,403 in 2018.

According to data released by the Department of Education (DOE), large high schools in Queens and Brooklyn and highly selective schools in Manhattan were the most popular. (This list does not include the specialized high schools, which students apply to separately.)

The other schools rounding out the top five—also large, neighborhood high schools—were at the top of the last year’s list too and all had big increases in applicants over 2018.

Brooklyn’s Midwood High School, which has a very selective medical science and humanities programs, came in second, with 14,137 applications compared to 9,927 in 2018. Bayside, Benjamin N. Cardozo and Forest Hills, three large neighborhood high schools in Queens, were third, fourth and fifth.

It is interesting that some of the schools in highest demand are the few remaining large schools. Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein closed most of the large high schools. The few that remain are very popular with students, who apparently like the wide variety of courses, programs, electives, foreign languages, advanced courses, and sports that they offer. Bloomberg and Klein bet on small schools as the wave of the future, but students are voting with their feet for schools like Francis Lewis High School, Midwood High School, and Edward R. Murrow, all with large enrollments and varied programs.

This is what NYC PSP wrote:

Here are links to info on public school “wait lists”. The Inside Schools website posted this article:

https://insideschools.org/news-&-views/top-20-selective-manhattan-high-schools-are-among-the-most-popular

It links to this recently released document that lists how many NYC public school students are on “wait lists” (as charters insist wait lists must be defined) for 20 of the 400 public high schools.

http://static.ow.ly/docs/top%2020%202019_8hzb.pdf

If you go to the above link, you can see that there are a total of 171,144 8th graders who “applied” to these 20 schools and 16,247 8th graders who got seats.

Leaving a grand total of 155,497 8th grade students on “wait lists” for NYC public high schools.

To repeat — according to the methodology that charters insist we must use, there are currently 155,497 8th grade students on “wait lists” for 20 public high schools and certainly tens of thousands more on “wait lists” for the other 380.

Of course, there are only about 78,000 8th grade students in NYC public schools! But there are 155,497 8th grade students on “wait lists” for just 20 of the 400 public high schools. Twice as many 8th graders on wait lists as there are actual 8th graders! Using false charter accounting methodology.

Does Meryl Tisch want to build more public high schools for those 155,497 NON-EXISTENT 8th graders that charter supporters would have to agree that by their methodology must be counted as being on “wait lists” for public high schools?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New York City

Waltons Fund “National Parents Union” to Advocate for Privatization

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2019 //
20

 

Maurice Cunningham, a dogged investigator of Dark Money, has discovered a shell operation funded by the multibillionaire Walton family. 

It is called the “National Patents Union,” and its goal is to defund public schools and transfer public money to private hands.

Its leader Keri Rodriguez led the effort in Massachusetts to raise the cap on charter schools in 2016. The referendum would have allowed a dozen new charters every year forever, located wherever they chose. The vote went overwhelmingly against the charter proposition.

But wherever there is money, there are people ready to pick up the banner of privatization. And the Waltons, whose fortune exceeds $150 Billion, have plenty to spend in their quest to destroy public schools.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Dark Money, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization, School Choice, Walton Foundation

Kentucky: High School Journalists Not Allowed to Cover Bevin DeVos Roundtable

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
37

 

The editorial board of the PLD Lamplighter (Paul Laurence Dunbar High School) in Lexington, Kentucky, wanted to confer the “Roundtable” that featured Governor Matt Bevin and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. They were turned away. What does their opinion matter? They are “only” students. 

Only one student was invited to join the Roundtable discussion about education in Kentucky. She attends a Roman Catholic girls’ school in Louisville.

“We are student journalists who wanted to cover an event in our community featuring the Secretary of Education, but ironically, we couldn’t get in without an invitation.

“We learned of this event on April 16, as others did, over social media and from our local news stations. At that point, we immediately began making plans to be there because as young journalists, we appreciate any opportunity received to demonstrate our professionalism. These types of events are where we learn, and chances like this do not come around often.

“It was heartbreaking to us, as young journalists fired up to cover an event regarding the future of education, to leave empty-handed.”

“Local news station Lex18 posted its first article regarding the event on April 16 at 10:43 a.m. It discussed how Ms. DeVos would be attending two events in Kentucky, one in Lexington, and the other in Marshall County. There was no mention of an invitation or RSVP needed to attend the event.

“Another local station, WKYT, posted its first article regarding this event at 10:44 a.m. There was no mention of an invitation or RSVP needed to attend the event in this article either.

“Why was this information only shared a little more than 24 hours before the event? When the Secretary of Education is visiting your city, you’d think you’d have a little more of a heads up.

“We can’t help but suspect that the intention was to prevent people from attending. Also, it was held at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday. What student or educator is free at that time?

“And as students, we are the ones who are going to be affected by the proposed changes discussed at the roundtable, yet we were not allowed inside. How odd is it that even though future generations of students’ experiences could be based on what was discussed, that we, actual students, were turned away?

“We expected the event to be intense. We expected there to be a lot of information to cover. But not being able to exercise our rights under the First Amendment was something we never thought would happen. We weren’t prepared for that.

“It was heartbreaking to us, as young journalists fired up to cover an event regarding the future of education, to leave empty-handed. But as we researched we learned that we were not the only ones who were disappointed and frustrated.

“There were social media posts that exhibited confusion from parents, students, and educators—especially because no public school representatives were participants in the event.

“We emailed FCPS Superintendent Manny Caulk to ask if he had been invited, and he answered that he had not.

“Of the 173 school districts in Kentucky that deal directly with students, none were represented at the table. Zero. This is interesting because the supposed intention of the event was to include stakeholders–educators, students, and parents.”

Hey, student journalists, don’t give up.

Your State Commissioner is a DeVos groupie.

Make your voices heard.

This guy is giving your futures away.

He doesn’t care about you.

He is sucking up to the Queen of Privatization.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Kentucky, Privatization, Students

New York Times Editorial: The Mueller Report and the Danger to Democracy

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
94

This editorial appeared on April 19 in the New York Times.

It leaves no doubt that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump, the most unqualified president in our nation’s history.

It begins like this:

The report of the special counsel Robert Mueller leaves considerable space for partisan warfare over the role of President Trump and his political campaign in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. But one conclusion is categorical: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

That may sound like old news. The Justice Department’s indictment of 13 Russians and three companies in February 2018 laid bare much of the sophisticated Russian campaign to blacken the American democratic process and support the Trump campaign, including the theft of American identities and creation of phony political organizations to fan division on immigration, religion or race. The extensive hacks of Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails and a host of other dirty tricks have likewise been exhaustively chronicled.

But Russia’s interference in the campaign was the core issue that Mr. Mueller was appointed to investigate, and if he stopped short of accusing the Trump campaign of overtly cooperating with the Russians — the report mercifully rejects speaking of “collusion,” a term that has no meaning in American law — he was unequivocal on Russia’s culpability: “First, the Office determined that Russia’s two principal interference operations in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — the social media campaign and the hacking-and-dumping operations — violated U.S. criminal law.”

The first part of the report, which describes these crimes, is worthy of a close read. Despite a thick patchwork of redactions, it details serious and dangerous actions against the United States that Mr. Trump, for all his endless tweeting and grousing about the special counsel’s investigation, has never overtly confronted, acknowledged, condemned or comprehended. Culpable or not, he must be made to understand that a foreign power that interferes in American elections is, in fact, trying to distort American foreign policy and national security.

The earliest interference described in the report was a social media campaign intended to fan social rifts in the United States, carried out by an outfit funded by an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” for the feasts he catered. Called the Internet Research Agency, the unit actually sent agents to the United States to gather information at one point. What the unit called “information warfare” evolved by 2016 into an operation targeted at favoring Mr. Trump and disparaging Mrs. Clinton. This included posing as American people or grass-roots organizations such as the Tea Party, anti-immigration groups, Black Lives Matter and others to buy political ads or organize political rallies.

At the same time, the report said, the cyberwarfare arm of the Russian army’s intelligence service opened another front, hacking the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and releasing reams of damaging materials through the front groups DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, and later through WikiLeaks. The releases were carefully timed for impact — emails stolen from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, for example, were released less than an hour after the “Access Hollywood” tape damaging to Mr. Trump came out.

All this activity, the report said, was accompanied by the well documented efforts to contact the Trump campaign through business connections, offers of assistance to the campaign, invitations for Mr. Trump to meet Mr. Putin and plans for improved American-Russian relations. Both sides saw potential gains, the report said — Russia in a Trump presidency, the campaign from the stolen information. The Times documented 140 contacts between Mr. Trump and his associates and Russian nationals and WikiLeaks or their intermediaries. But the Mueller investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities….”

The real danger that the Mueller report reveals is not of a president who knowingly or unknowingly let a hostile power do dirty tricks on his behalf, but of a president who refuses to see that he has been used to damage American democracy and national security.

To minimize this danger is to ignore that Russia has the tools to choose our president, in 2016 and in the next election.

 

Categories Education Reform

Kansas: Students, Parents Rebel Against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
76

 

Today, the New York Times posted a story about a rebellion in Kansas against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning platform. 

They said NO to Facebook’s “personalized learning,” which replaces teachers with Chromebooks.

Good for the students of Kansas!

WELLINGTON, Kan. — The seed of rebellion was planted in classrooms. It grew in kitchens and living rooms, in conversations between students and their parents.

It culminated when Collin Winter, 14, an eighth grader in McPherson, Kan., joined a classroom walkout in January. In the nearby town of Wellington, high schoolers staged a sit-in. Their parents organized in living rooms, at churches and in the back of machine repair shops. They showed up en masse to school board meetings. In neighborhoods with no political yard signs, homemade signs with dark red slash marks suddenly popped up.

Silicon Valley had come to small-town Kansas schools — and it was not going well.

“I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore,” said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.

Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning. The Silicon Valley-based program promotes an educational approach called “personalized learning,” which uses online tools to customize education. The platform that Summit provides was developed by Facebook engineers. It is funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.

Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit’s program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately.

Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad’s hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone.

“We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son’s fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school.

In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform…

The resistance in Kansas is part of mounting nationwide opposition to Summit, which began trials of its system in public schools four years ago and is now in around 380 schools and used by 74,000 students. In Brooklyn, high school students walked out in November after their school started using Summit’s platform. In Indiana, Pa., after a survey by Indiana University of Pennsylvania found 70 percent of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional, the school board scaled it back and then voted this month to terminate it. And in Cheshire, Conn., the program was cut after protests in 2017.

Hello, Mark Zuckerberg! Students want teachers, not interfacing with computers!

“Personalized learning” means human interaction, not interfacing.

Summit, go away!

Categories Accountability, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Education Industry, Education Reform, Technology

Johannes Stotter’s Amazing Art: A Treat for You!

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
9

This is an amazing and eye-popping form of art, one I never saw before.

I think you will like it too.

Hey, we all need a break!

Categories Art, Education Reform

Kathryn Berger: A Teacher in Wonderland

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
5

Kathryn Berger knows something that legislators don’t know. Students are hungry for real literature and art but we feed them standardized tests.

They crave authenticity, but our policymakers impose standardization, which is inauthentic.

See this video she made.

Categories Art, Creativity, Real Education

Florida: The State That Welcomes Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
49

 

In most states and in the federal government, conflicts of interest are prohibited and even illegal. But not in Florida!

State legislators regularly vote on legislation that enriches themselves and family members, and NO ONE CARES!

Conflicts of interest are peachy keen. Doesn’t everyone line their pockets at the public trough?

This article in the Miami Herald describes a master at the game of doing what’s good for himself and his loved ones.

Fred Grimm of the Herald writes:

If Erik Fresen was … say … a county or city commissioner, a blatant conflict of interest would keep him from voting on charter school funding issues.

As my Herald colleagues Christina Veiga and Kristen Clark reported Sunday, laws governing ethical behavior would bar local officials from even discussing proposals at public meetings that have a direct or indirect financial impact on their interests. Or their families’ interests.

The Fresen clan has a lot riding on charter school construction funds. Erik Fresen earns $150,000-a-year as land consultant for Civica, an architecture firm that specializes in charter school construction. Civica has designed a number of schools for Academica, the largest charter school management company in Florida. Fresen’s sister and brother-in-law just happen to be Academica executives.

But state Rep. Fresen’s ethical deportment in the state Legislature is governed by such tepid regulations that the chairman of the House Education Budget Committee can get away with sponsoring legislation that would deliver a windfall to the family business.

The Miami Republican has fast-tracked a bill that would not only limit what school districts spend on their own capital projects, it would also force districts to share their construction money (even when that money was derived from local property taxes) with charters.

No worries. All that conflict-of-interest stuff only applies to local elected officials.

He has argued that his legislation was designed to rein in out-of-control construction spending by school districts (a characterization hotly disputed by the state’s school superintendents). Fresen, however, hasn’t had much to say about charter school building scandals. Last month, The Associated Press reported that since 2000, about $70 million in state money spent on charter school construction and building improvements had essentially disappeared when the schools failed. Out of that lost $70 million, the state Department of Education recovered only $133,000. The balance of those taxpayer-funded capital improvements now belongs to private interests.

See how easy it is to get rich in Florida? You just have to have the right political connections.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fred-grimm/article60512891.html#storylink=cpy
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »