Archives for the month of: May, 2019
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Mercedes Schneider Investigates Joe Biden’s Brother and His Role in the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2019 //
19

 

Mercedes Schneider reports on her examination of Joe Biden’s brother Frank and his role in the charter industry in Florida. 

Let me begin by saying straight out that I don’t judge people by what their relatives do. I have seven brothers and sisters (five living) and I am not responsible for their decisions and activities, as they are not responsible for mine.

Having said that, I think the public needs to know where Joe Biden stands on charter schools such as the ones in which his brother was deeply involved, as we should know where every candidate stands on the privatization of education.

The facts that Schneider has assembled are vastly Important as they reflect on the shoddy oversight of for-profit charters in Florida. Forget the famous name involved. Read this fascinating account to see how children and taxpayers are being bilked by shady operators who know nothing about education. Lousy results have no impact on the bottom line.

An awful lot of people are cashing in on kids and on the infinite gullibility of the public and the cupidity and greed of politicians who enable these for-profit frauds.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

Florida House Passes Another Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2019 //
17

 

The Florida House of Representatives passed another voucher program, this time directly funded by taxpayers.

The Florida Senate already approved the program. They rejected all Democratic amendments, even one to stop people who had been previously convicted of fraud from opening a charter school!

The state constitution prohibits use of public funds for religious schools, and in the past lawmakers used a “work-around,” like tuition tax credits, to pretend that public funds were not going directly to religious schools. This bill avoids the pretense. Money to pay for religious schools will come out of the public fund for public schools. This will harm the public schools that enroll more than 80% of the state’s students.

In 2012, Florida voters opposed Jeb Bush’s effort to change the state constitution to permit the kind of bill that passed yesterday.

Recent studies agree that students who use vouchers do not make academic gains and are likely to suffer academic losses.

Voucher schools in Florida are unregulated, need not have certified teachers, and are not subject to state standards or tests. They are, as a series in the Orlando Sentinel said, “schools without rules.”

At the same time, the legislature tightly regulates public schools with burdensome mandates, and there is a statewide teacher shortage.

The decision yesterday in the Florida House was not conservative. Conservatives don’t destroy vital public goods. Conservatives conserve. The vote taken was a display of radical extremism, driven by money and ideology.

The vote was not about the best interests of children, most of whom will attend schools with an anti-science, anti-modern Biblical curriculum.

The Republican Party of Florida has no shame.

 

Categories Education Reform, Religion, Separation of church and state

Jonathan Rodrigues: When Segregation Is the Innovation

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2019 //
24

 

The privatizers got badly beaten in 2016, when they tried to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts. Funded by the Waltons and the usual coven of billionaires, they asked the public to endorse a proposal to launch 12 charter schools every year, wherever they wanted to open. The referendum was overwhelmingly defeated, much to the surprise of its sponsors.

Governor Charlie Baker is a Republican who has appointed a choice-friendly State Board, so the privatizers have not given up hope for undermining democracy.

Now they are back with a proposal for “innovation zones.” 

Jonathan Rodrigues writes:

In a world where we’re more and more accustomed to jargon inherited from corporate start up world like “disruption” and “big data”, “innovation” stands out as one of the most empty vessels in which we project meaning without much thought of it.

In the education world in particular, almost anything can be “innovative”. Even bringing back purposeful segregation and differential treatment under the guise of educational opportunity. Governor Baker’s latest “Innovation Partnership Zones” may be clever, but it’s certainly not very innovative.

If only segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace had known it would be this easy to fool people, he’d had changed his 1963 speech to “innovation today, innovation tomorrow, innovation forever!”.

So what are “Innovation Partnership Zones” (IPZs), and what would the governor’s bill do? It’s important to note here this idea has prominent Democratic support as well, it was only last year that Education Committee co-chair Alice Peisch (D-Wellesley) and Senator Eric Lesser (D-Longmeadow) sponsored very similar legislation.

The bill allows groups of 2 schools or more (or one school with more than 1,000 students) to create an IPZ which would allow an outside organization to manage these schools and give the “zone” autonomy over things like budget, hiring, curriculum, etc. Essentially third-partying away the public good, but doesn’t “partnership” sounds so much better than “takeover”?

The IPZ can be triggered in two main ways.

  1. Through local initiative of school committee members, a superintendent, a mayor, a teachers group or union, and parents. .
  2. Through the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Commissioner’s choice from schools determined to be “underperforming” by high stakes testing metrics.

The process would then call for proposals jointly with an outside entity that may include nonprofit charter operators and higher ed institutions….

If past is prologue, the results should look familiar. Brown University Annenberg Institute’s 2016 report “Whose Schools?” analyzed the board composition of charter schools in Massachusetts. 60% of charter schools in the Commonwealth had no parent representation at all. 31% of charter board members were from the corporate sector, heavily from finance.

We should all look forward to our IPZs filled with executives from places like TD Bank, who certainly might live in the “region,”, but have no respect for Boston’s biggest neighborhood.

It is especially worrisome that IPZs will be inevitably pushed on communities of color, continuing a nationwide trend of stripping away voice from families of color from Philadelphia to Chicago, Detroit to New Orleans.

A 2015 Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools “Out Of Control” report examined the disenfranchisement of black and brown families through mechanisms such as appointed school boards, and state and district turnovers. In their 2014–15 analysis, there were 113 state takeover districts nationwide. 96 were handed to charter operators. 98% of affected students were Black and/or Latinx. In New Orleans, parents had to navigate 44 different governing authorities; in Detroit, 45.

The most important innovation of all would be the full funding of schools in poor communities.

He concludes:

In no place where black and brown families are the majority in the school district is the innovation of a fully funded quality public school with adequate staffing, special education services, mental health supports, art and music, full-time librarians, and school nurses ever even attempted.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Inequity, Innovation, Massachusetts, New Orleans, Privatization, Segregation
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