Archives for the month of: May, 2019
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Jan Resseger: Why Betsy DeVos is Clickbait

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2019 //
17

 

Jan Resseger was taken aback when she read that Betsy DeVos warnedthe Education Writers Association not to use her as “clickbait.” For one thing, she was surprised that DeVos knew the word. She assumes that someone on her staff wrote her speech. DeVos, as we know, is not exactly as courant.

Resseger takes this apercu as an opportunity to demonstrate why DeVos is clickbait. 

She is running a Cabinet agency that supplies and supposedly monitors billions of dollars for vulnerable children, yet she despises government. How strange is that?

She doesn’t believe that “society” exists, only families and individuals, all yearning to be free of any responsibility for anyone but themselves.

She repudiates any sense of civic duty or the common good. How bizarre is that?

She seeks to destroy the very function for which she is responsible.

Every word she utters appeals to selfishness and greed.

So long as she is in the public eye, so long as she uses her billions to undermine the government she serves and destroy the programs that others need, she will be clickbait, whether she likes it or not.

Categories Betsy DeVos

Washington Monthly: What Happens in 2020 If Trump Loses But Refuses to Give Up Power?

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2019 //
97

 

Now, here is a scary thought, raised by Daniel Block, as editor at Washington Monthly: What happens in 2020 if Trump loses the election but refuses to give up the office? What if he says the election was rigged, hundreds of thousands of illegals voted, and simply says he won’t give  up the presidency? What if the supine Republican party leaders agree with him? What if he challenges the election in court? What if he calls up the armed forces to keep him in office? What if he asks his “Second Amendment people” to barricade the White House?

when I first read this article, it read almost like a satire. Since then, Trump has tweeted that he should get an extra two years added to his first term because of the time “wasted” by the Mueller investigation. His aides say he was only joking. But his craziest ideas begin as jokes, then become reality. We know how little regard he has for the Constitution. He thinks he was elected to be dictator or emperor of president for life.

The scariest part of the questions is that we are even considering this to be a realistic possibility.

 

Categories Education Reform

How Andre Agassi and His Partner Are Profiting in the Charter Sector

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2019 //
6

 

Andre Agassi was once a famous tennis star. Several years ago, he decided to open a charter school in Las Vegas, with his name on it. It was going to be a national model for sending poor kids to elite colleges. But it failed and was eventually taken over by charter chain Democracy Prep. During the school’s first decade of operation, it went through six principals and multiple teachers. Former teachers said there was “a chaotic learning environment.”

Then Agassi went into partnership with an equity investor who put up $750 million for a new company that would build and lease charter schools. This is a very profitable venture.

Unfortunately, the charter schools it builds are forced into financial straits by the burden of the rent they must pay to Agassi and Turner.

In Detroit, a school built by their firm is closing, in part because of the crushing debt required to pay the landlords, Agassi and Turner.

A Detroit charter school is shutting down amid financial woes brought on by its lease agreement with an investment fund headed by tennis star Andre Agassi.

The closure of Southwest Detroit Community School, which was announced to teachers at an emergency meeting at the school Tuesday afternoon, caps a six-year existence marred by academic struggles and, more recently, dissatisfaction among parents and the teaching staff over the school’s direction. 

“I feel one part betrayed, but also, I think it was inevitable,” said Mitzy Tripp, who has two children at the K-8 school, including one who will soon graduate from eighth grade. “But I honestly didn’t think that they would do this to the families.”

When Michigan lawmakers lifted the cap on new charter schools in 2011, it sparked a spree of more than a dozen school openings within a few years. Several have since closed, including Delta Preparatory Academy for Social Justice, which shut down abruptly at the beginning of this school year.

It’s the latest upheaval for a city where the school landscape has become severely fractured, forcing schools to compete for teachers, students, and resources without some of the safeguards that bring order to charter school systems in cities like New Orleans and Washington. Efforts to put such controls in place in Michigan have been stopped by well-funded political opposition…

The closure means the families of 347 students, many of them Spanish-speaking, will have to find a new school for their children. School changes have been shown to hurt student learning and behavior at school…

In the end, though, any hope for the school’s future collapsed under the weight of its lease with Turner-Agassi, an investment fund connected to the retired tennis legend that helped open the school as well as 89 others across the country.

The lease was designed like a residential rent-to-buy plan. The school would pay rent for the first few years, then, once it had enough students, it would buy the building outright. Turner-Agassi would make roughly $1 million on the deal, according to the lease agreement.

These arrangements aren’t unheard of in the charter sector. Michigan charter schools get no money from the state for facilities, often forcing them to rent buildings. Traditional schools generally own their buildings, taking advantage of public bonds that aren’t available to charter schools.

When the school failed to amass the more than $8 million it needed to buy the building, it paid a steep price. The rent went up sharply, increasing by 57 percent between 2017 and 2018, per the lease.

The school’s inability to keep up with its lease payments set off alarm bells within the Michigan Treasury Department, which flagged it as a “potential fiscal distress school” and required it to submit regular reports.

The rent, which grew to $769,910 annually this year, was higher than what other schools in the neighborhood pay. The payments suck up 19 percent of what the school brings in from the state to educate children.

Agassi and Turner made a handsome profit.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

The Most Important Article You Will Read This Year: “Stop the Bleed”

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2019 //
8

 

The New Yorker magazine published this very informative and important article by journalist Paige Williams about training bystanders to save lives. 

Bystanders can and must be first responders, and they can learn the techniques to stop bleeding. These are crucial as a person can bleed to death in five to eight minutes.

It is a sad commentary on our society but it is reality: none of us knows when we will be the bystander whose fast thinking and action are required to save the life of a friend or a stranger.

The number of shootings and acts of terrorism has escalated and is now called an “Intentional Mass Casualty Event.”

Williams begins with a dramatic account of one of these events at a high school in Murrysville, Pennsylvania.

“One April morning in 2014, a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Franklin Regional Senior High, in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, stole two butcher knives from his parents’ kitchen, hid them in his backpack, and took them to school. He was wearing all black and, according to witnesses, had a “blank expression.” Just before first period, in the hall of the science wing, he stabbed several classmates. Then he pulled the fire alarm. As the corridor filled with people, the boy moved down the hallway, a knife in each hand, stabbing more students. He turned and raced back up the hall—an administrator remembered him “flailing the knives like he was swimming the backstroke.” One girl later testified, “I could feel that my lip wasn’t attached to my face anymore.” A boy, stabbed in the belly, recalled, “I was gushing blood.”

“The students at Franklin Regional, which is seventeen miles east of Pittsburgh, had been trained to lock themselves inside classrooms during a “code red” event. In one room, a home-economics teacher called 911 as she attended to an injured boy. A dispatcher asked where the “patient” had been hurt. “The lower abdomen,” the teacher said. “On the right side.”

“Do you have any way to control the bleeding?” the dispatcher asked.

“I’m putting pressure on it,” the teacher said. She was stanching the blood with paper towels. This was helpful, the dispatcher told her, saying, “If it starts soaking through, I don’t want you to lift it up at all. Find anything else you can to put on top of that.”

“The teacher had been applying pressure for about four minutes when the dispatcher said, “We have the actor in custody,” adding, “But I don’t want you to let any of your students leave that room.” As the teacher bore down on the wound, she talked with the injured boy, her voice tense but cheerful. They joked that he could use the experience in a college-application essay. When he predicted that his mother was going to “have a panic attack,” the teacher said, “I think she will.” Then she said, “I never thought I’d have to do this….”

“Twenty-one people had been knifed, several severely, yet everyone survived. (The attacker was later sentenced to a minimum of twenty-three and a half years in prison.) Law-enforcement and health-care professionals in the Pittsburgh area took note of the fortitude and the competence of many bystanders. Listening to a playback of the teacher’s 911 call, they marvelled at her calm and her effectiveness. Brad Orsini, an F.B.I. agent who worked the case, told me, “You’d have thought it was just another day for this woman.” At one point, the teacher had told the boy, “You know what? Sometimes when stuff happens, you go into a different state of mind. You surprise yourself at how you can handle things.”

Please read this article. You may be called upon to save a life one day.

Categories Safety
By dianeravitch | Link
May 9, 2019 //
13

 

Peter Greene has a rapier sharp wit, which he wields so deftly that the object of his attention has been beheaded without knowing what happened. If you want to see him at his best, read this mystery: Who is murdering Charter Schools? 

Teachers?

Unions?

Lobbyists?

If you live in the real world, the people fighting privatization are heroic defenders of the commonweal, protecting the public interest against the Waltons, the Koch brothers, DeVos, and other private interests.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Scandals, South Carolina, Teachers, Unions, West Virginia

Mercedes Schneider: The Utter Failure of Louisiana’s Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2019 //
8

 

Mercedes Schneider summarizes here the story of vouchers in Louisiana, which are now widely recognized as a train wreck.

New Orleans’ public radio station WWNO broadcast a detailed account of this policy failure, which steers students to D and F rated schools. State Superintendent John White, one of the voucher program’s most ardent advocates, refused to be interviewed for the program.

”Multiple local news outlets were involved in the investigation:

‘The Cost of Choice’ is the result of a reporting collaboration between NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, WVUE Fox 8 News, WWNO and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.”

When the program was launched in 2012, Then-Governor Bobby Jindal “beamed with pride” and voucher proponent Betsy DeVos lauded the new vouchers, and the cheerleaders said they

“would free countless lower-income children from the worst public schools by allowing them to use state tax dollars in the form of vouchers to pay tuition at private schools, where they would ostensibly receive a better education. …

“Seven years later, however, the $40-million-a-year Louisiana Scholarship Program has failed to live up to its billing. The nearly 6,900 students who’ve left public schools have instead been placed into a system with numerous failing private schools that receive little oversight, a months-long examination by a coalition of local and national media organizations has found. …

“Two-thirds of all students in the voucher system attended schools where they performed at a “D” or “F” level last school year….

“Bobby Jindal did not set up the Louisiana Scholarship Program for success. He set it up for low-performing schools to get subsidized and to stay open,” said Andre Perry, a fellow at The Brookings Institution….

“Not a single school in the voucher program received an A or B. Three received a C. Of the remaining schools, 19 got a D and 15 got an F, based on the Louisiana Department of Education rating system.”

Thousands of children were sent to low-performing schools on the false promise of a better education. Some of the voucher schools needed the voucher money to survive.

Now, Schneider notes, DeVos is distancing herself from the Louisiana failure.

The remaining ideologues insist that voucher schools should not be judged by their abysmal test scores, the same stick used to beat up public schools.

DeVos is now peddling the same failed model to the nation.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana

Oregon: Tens of Thousands of Teachers Walk Out, Closing 600 Schools, to Protest Working Conditions

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2019 //
3

 

Thousands of teachers in Oregon joined the Red4Ed Movement, walking out to protest overcrowded classes and a lack of support staff, including school nurses and mental health counselors. 

Nearly 45% of all reported classes in Oregon have 26 students or more,” said John Larson, a high school English teacher and president of the Oregon Education Association.
Some classes have 56 or more students, he said.
So instead of going to class, many teachers were taking unpaid days off work to flood at least six protest sites across the state.
The mass exodus of teachers has already forced 25 school districts to close 600 schools Wednesday, Larson said.
The biggest district to close, Portland Public Schools, has more than 46,000 students.
“This is historic,” Larson told a sea of red-shirted teachers, parents and students at a riverfront rally in downtown Portland. “This is what we came here for today — is to make sure that we fund our schools.”
It’s not just funding for smaller class sizes. Union members also want:
— More school counselors. Oregon has half the school counselors that national experts suggest. And the shortage of mental health counselors is a big concern across the country — especially after all the recent school shootings.
— More school librarians. Currently, there are only 158 school librarians in Oregon — less than one librarian per district.
— More school nurses. There’s only one nurse for every 5,481 students. That’s four times less than national recommendations, the OEA said.
— A restoration of art, music and physical education programs that have been cut by budget constraints.
— More funding for school supplies. The OEA said 94% of teachers spend their own money on classroom supplies “to make up the difference between what their students need and what districts can provide.”
— The passage of state House Bill 3427, dubbed the “Student Success Act.” The bill would increase funding for K-12 education by 18%.
Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Class size, Funding, Oregon, Resistance, Teachers

Teachers to DeVos: Please Resign

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2019 //
18

 

Betsy DeVos tweeted a thank you to teachers whose public schools she reviles.

Teachers responded: If you care about us, please resign.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Teachers

Valerie Strauss Reviews Betsy DeVos’ Performance at Education Writers Association Meeting

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2019 //
11

Betsy DeVos says there is no such thing as “public money.”

This was one of the things she told the nation’s education writers.

Valerie Strauss reports on her appearance here. 

What comes through in her answers is that she lives in an alternate reality.

She denies facts she doesn’t like.

She nimbly avoids answering difficult questions.

She lives in a rarefied billionaire bubble.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires

NY Times: Donald Trump: Flim-Flam Man

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2019 //
28

An expose in the New York Times revealed that Trump is a financial flop.

“The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years. It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.”

James Hohmann of the Washington Post writes about this Times’ story:

 

The most fascinating passage of the lengthy Times article, deep in the second half, focuses on the three years Trump spent “posing as a corporate raider” from 1986 through 1988. He had overleveraged himself by taking out huge loans at high interest rates and making questionable spending decisions. Two weeks before the stock market crashed in October 1987, for example, Trump bought a 282-foot yacht for $29 million.

The president recognized as a relatively young man – still in his early 40s – that he could profit off his celebrity and perceived business acumen. This was around the time that his book “The Art of the Deal” came out in 1987. He didn’t have the assets to purchase large publicly traded companies, but he knew that other people didn’t know that – especially after he successfully bamboozled Forbes Magazine into wildly overestimating his wealth. He expressed interest and spread rumors that he was looking to acquire companies he knew he couldn’t and wouldn’t.

“Trump made a total of $57 million by briefly presenting himself as a takeover threat to, among others, Hilton Hotels, the Gillette razor company and Federated Department Stores … In all, from 1986 through 1989, Mr. Trump declared $67.3 million in gains from stocks and other assets bought and sold within one year,” Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig report. “As with many things Trump, his adventures in the stock market were more image than substance, helped greatly by news reports quoting anonymous sources said to have knowledge of Mr. Trump’s actions. An occasional quote from an associate — including his stockbroker, Alan C. Greenberg — helped burnish the myth. ‘He has an appetite like a Rocky Mountain vulture,’ Mr. Greenberg, the legendary chairman of Bear Stearns, told the Wall Street Journal in 1987. ‘He’d like to own the world.’ In his actions, Mr. Trump was more like a peacock.”

Investors grew wise to Trump’s game – eventually – so it caught up with him and stopped working. In 1989, Trump bought up American Airlines stock and then announced he was thinking about buying the huge company. “I’m very skeptical of everything this man does,” Andrew Geller, then an airline analyst at Provident National Bank in Philadelphia, told the Associated Press.

 

Categories Education Reform
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