Archives for the month of: June, 2019
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New Haven, Connecticut: Students Protest Teacher Layoffs

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
21

 

Students at Hill Regional Career High School conducted a peaceful protest because of layoffs of some of their teachers. 

During their last period, Career students stepped out onto the grassy field behind the school. They carried a wide pink banner with the names of four teachers who received notice last week that they would be involuntarily transferred out of the school. Others held up signs that said, “WTF: Where’s the funding?” “HISTORY has its EYES on YOU,” and “We need our AP classes.”

“Save our teachers!” they chanted. “Save our teachers!”

Many of the students said they wanted to stand up for the educators who had always stood up for them — sometimes in situations that were literally “between life and death,” said Nidia Luis-Moreno, a junior. They said that, so far, they had collected close to 1,000 signatures opposing the involuntary transfers…

After they walked onto the field, students confronted Principal Zakia Parrish about why she had decided to remove two social-studies teachers and a music teacher, who had all made close personal connections with students.

On the other side of town, black ministers rallied in opposition to the students, claiming that the student protest was an effort to preserve “white privilege,” although the photographs accompanying the story did not show many white students in the protest.

Categories Connecticut, Resistance, Students

California: About that $50 Million Charter School Heist

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
13

 

As reported earlier today, online charter operators in California with multiple shell corporations have been indicted for embezzling more than $50 million for their charters. 

Also indicted were the leaders of the tiny rural school districts that authorized their charters as a way to collect fat fees for doing nothing. This feature is a serious flaw in the state’s notoriously lax charter law.

A tiny district can authorize a charter in Los Angeles or San Diego, then sit back and collect commissions. Efforts are underway now to fix the law but the California Charter Schools Association has fought all efforts at accountability.

A3 Education recruited small public school districts to sponsor the charter schools in exchange for oversight fees. Prosecutors say A3 enrolled about 40,000 students throughout the state, none of whom received any services.

The company that operated a network of 19 online-only schools is accused of paying sports leagues as little as $25 a student for information used for enrollment. School districts are funded by the state based on the number of students.

The students didn’t know how their names were being used, said San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan, calling them victims…

The Dehesa Elementary School District, which has only about 150 students east of San Diego, authorized several charter schools with oversight for 20,000 students, Stephan said. The $2 million in oversight fees collected one year was more than the district’s annual payroll.

Nancy Hauer, Dehesa’s superintendent, was among 11 people charged in the case. Other defendants were employed by A3 and its charter schools.

The Dehesa school board said it couldn’t comment on the charges and vowed to fully cooperate with investigators. Hauer was not available to comment.

“The Board of Education was stunned to learn about the charges, and we have engaged legal counsel to review this matter and any possible implications for district operations,” the Dehesa district said.

The grand jury returned its indictment May 17 after hearing six weeks of testimony from more than 70 witnesses.

A spokesperson for the charter lobby insisted that it did not approve of “bad actors” but has used its vast resources to kill every legislative effort to amend the law.

The California Charter Schools Association said it raised concerns about A3 more than a year ago with the state education department and urged an investigation.

“To be clear, there is no room for bad actors and irresponsible authorizers in California’s charter public school movement,” said Myrna Castrejón, the group’s president.

As we say in Brooklyn, if you believe the lobbyists who have defeated all efforts to stop self-dealing, I have a bridge to sell you.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization

FairTest: Security of SAT Biology Exam Compromised

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
33

 

This just in from FairTest:

 

FairTest                                
National Center for Fair & Open Testing
for further information:
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
mobile  (239) 699-0468

for immediate release Thursday, June 6, 2019
GLOBAL SAT SUBJECT TEST SECURITY BREACH LAST WEEKEND;
SCORES COMPROMISED BY ADVANCE CIRCULATION OF EXAM;
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ALSO POSTED ON REDDIT WEB SITE
MANY HOURS BEFORE ADMINISTRATIONS BEGAN IN U.S.

      Last weekend’s SAT Biology Subject Test was in circulation more than half a day before the test’s administration, according to a watchdog group that received an advance copy of the exam. In addition, test questions and answers were posted on the website Reddit.com hours before U.S. testing started.

     Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), explained, “Early Friday evening, May 31, 2019, FairTest received a call from East Asia. The anonymous caller offered us an advance copy of the SAT Biology E/M Subject Test scheduled to be administered on Saturday, June 1. At 6:13pm EDT on Friday, May 31, we received an email copy of a complete Biology exam, apparently excerpted from the official booklet of SAT Subject Tests.”

     Schaeffer continued, “Early Saturday morning U.S. time, hours before test administration began in the Western Hemisphere, Biology Test questions and answers were posted on a Reddit message board (https://www.reddit.com/r/Sat/comments/bvi735/official_june_2019_biology_discussion/). The content was identical to the material FairTest had received the previous evening. The Reddit discussion site is open to the public and draws heavy traffic from test-takers.”

      FairTest received advance copies of SAT exams from sources in Asia four other times in recent years. For many other administrations, actual exam items were posted online before U.S. students entered test centers. Given this history, Schaeffer says the latest incident raises serious questions:

      –  How widely was the leaked June 1 Biology Subject Test circulated? In a world of instantaneous, global communication, if an exam is compromised anywhere, the items can be distributed everywhere.
– Which other Subject Tests were also compromised? The file FairTest received on Friday night included the introduction to the Chemistry Subject Test; content from that exam was also posted on Reddit before the test was administered in the U.S.
–  Will scores from students taking these compromised tests be reported as valid?

      –  How can any admissions office trust the integrity of the June 1, 2019 Subject Test results?

      –  When will the College Board admit that its test security programs have repeatedly failed?

 

      FairTest’s Schaeffer concluded, “Along with the ‘Varsity Blues’ scandal, the College Board’s security problems provide more evidence that SAT scores are not a reliable measure of readiness for college. That is one reason why more than 1,025 accredited, bachelor-degree granting colleges and universities now have test-optional admissions policies (http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional).

 

– –  3 0 – –

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Testing

California: Teachers in New Haven District on Strike

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
5

 

Teachers in New Haven, California, have been on strike since May 20. The superintendent is intransigent.

The strike has lasted longer than the Los Angeles or Oakland teachers’ strikes.

For more than two weeks, 585 brave New Haven teachers have been standing united for the schools their students deserve, on strike for as long as it takes to get a fair, student-centered agreement.

Since New Haven Teachers Association (NHTA) first walked off the job and onto picket lines on May 20, New Haven Unified School District’s (NHUSD) superintendent and managers have stomped out of negotiations numerous times and the New Haven School Board even walked out of a board meeting while a student was speaking.

In addition to this disrespectful and downright boorish behavior, NHUSD Superintendent Arlando Smith has refused to listen to reason and work toward a fair, student-centered settlement. Smith even suggested that Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond was not welcome in New Haven in his attempt to mediate an agreement between the two sides.

 

Categories California, Education Reform, Resistance, Teachers, Unions

Peter Greene: The Education Commissioner of New Hampshire Has an Unusually Pernicious Idea

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
22

Peter Greene writes here about one of the worst education ideas of the decade, an idea so bad that only Betsy DeVos and Jeb Bush could like it: He calls it “Learning Everywhere.” That translates into “Learning everywhere except in a public school.”

Here is the most important thing to know about the state commissioner of education: All of his children were home-schooled.

Frank Edelblut was a businessman, venture capitalist, and one-term NH state representative before he decided to run for the governor’s seat. He was beaten in the primary by Chris Sununu, son of former NH governor and Bush I White House Chief of Staff John Sununu (full disclosure: my grandmother was a NH GOP representative for decades, including under John Sununu, and she did not have a very high opinion of him). Edelblut gracefully conceded and publicly supported Sununu, who then appointed Edelblut to the top education job, despite Edelblut’s complete lack of anything remotely resembling education experience.

All of Edelblut’s children were home schooled. As a legislator, he backed vouchers and as a candidate he backed personalized [sic] learning. [Governor] Sununu said that the homeschooling was a plus because it meant Edelblut understood alternative methods of education.

What is “Learning Everywhere”?

Back in the 1960s, this approach was called “deschooling,” and it was associated with Ivan Illich. But now it is gussied up, and it is simply outsourcing.

Think of it as homeschooling on a statewide scale.

Learn Everywhere is a proposal to allow students to replace public school courses with coursework offered by private and nonprofit organizations. It is a mechanism for outsourcing public education…

The overall approach is similar to what we’ve seen with micro-credentials, but it keeps the framework of the public school credits. You attend a course or program that has been approved by the state DOE, and upon completion, you get a certificate that you present to your home school for course credit.

There are a variety of issues here, and the department, to its credit, anticipates most of them.

Time issues? You could duplicate classes, such as taking an outsourced drama class and also your school’s drama class, but if the outside class is cutting into homework time, drop the school course and take a study hall. The site does not address what happens is you take so many outside courses that your day is mostly study halls. Can you just stop attending public school entirely?

Funding and Equity? Part of what makes this saleable is that it doesn’t take a cent from public schools at this time; the families are responsible for paying for the outside courses. This in turn raises another question– Edelblut is selling this, hard, on the notion that it will solve the equity problems of public schools and help raise up struggling students, but if the families have to pay for the courses, that would seem to lock poor students out of Learn Everywhere, which would seem to be the opposite of what Edelblut is advertising. The website addresses this issue with a resounding, “Well, we don’t know.” Some of these programs might be free. Businesses might want to pay to send students to programs that would be useful for that business. Families that can’t afford full tuition at a Philips Exeter might be able to afford one course.

In other words, all of Edelblut’s talk about how this program will close the opportunity gap and increase equity in New Hampshire is pretty much bullshit.

Greene suggests that if you live in New Hampshire, you might consider calling a member of the state board of education, which will be considering this goofy proposal on June 13.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

Closing! Delaware Charter that Won $10 Million XQ Award

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
46

 

Kevin Ohlandt has the story: The Design Thinking Academy, a charter school that won Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ competition to “reinvent” the high school, is closing.  

Ohlandt has documents demonstrating that the school was done in by adult mismanagement and greed.

The school received a five-year grant of $10 million in 2016. It was supposed to be a “school of the future,” but it experienced high teacher turnover, administrative churn, and consequently.  declining enrollments. 

One parent said she started “having doubts about the school earlier in the year, when she noticed mass teacher turnover.

“When you start seeing a lot of people leaving all at once, you know what’s happening,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s a business.”

As Ohlandt shows, the problems of the school were even more serious than portrayed.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Innovation, Privatization

California: Online Charter Scam Cost Taxpayers More Than $50 Million, Says Indictment

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
16

 

With the encouragement of the super lobbyists of the California CharterSchoolAssociation, the California Legislature continues to block any meaningful reform of its lax charter law, even as the news breaks that online charter operators were charged with scamming more than $50 million from taxpayers.

Peter Greene calls this one “a spectacular charter scam.” He is right. We have seen plenty of garden-variety scams and multi-Million dollar charter frauds, but this one is the biggest yet!

Morgan Cook and Kristin Taketa report in the San Diego Union-Tribune (a newspaper that supports charters):

Using in-depth knowledge of California education funding, charter school regulations and deceptive business disclosures, an Australian citizen and his partner in Long Beach orchestrated a multi-year conspiracy to fleece taxpayers out of more than $50 million, prosecutors say.

Sean McManus, 46, an Australian who operated charter schools in California, and another charter school operator, Jason Schrock, 44, and nine others were named as defendants in a 67-count indictment announced this past week by the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutors say McManus, Schrock and others enrolled thousands of students into online charter schools, often without their knowledge, and collected millions in state funds using student information obtained from private schools and youth athletic groups.

This criminal enterprise funneled millions of taxpayer dollars into private bank accounts of the defendants,” said District Attorney Summer Stephan.

Eight of the 11 co-defendants have pleaded not guilty and denied the allegations. Two more are expected to be arraigned June 6….McManus is at large, possibly in Australia, prosecutors said. A San Diego Superior Court judge issued a $5-million bench warrant for his arrest and froze the accounts of charter schools, related companies and individuals related to the alleged conspiracy.

A reader who calls himself “Francisco” has commented recently that there are just as many frauds in public schools as in charter schools. Hey, Francisco, can you top this?

Peter Greene responds:

The twitterverse rebuttal has been, “Oh, yeah. You’re just focusing on charters. I’ll bet we could public school scams just as bad.” Maybe. But the oversight provided by a locally-elected board and mandated transparency of financial dealings would make it pretty damn hard. To pull off a scam of this magnitude, you need to wide-open barely-regulated low-oversight world of charters.

As Greene points out, in what world is it possible to buy and sell schools like franchises other than Charter World?

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Virtual Charter Schools

Jack Schneider: Why Are Americans Turning Against Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
22

 

Jack Schneider, a historian of education who often collaborates with Jennifer Berkshire, analyzes the fading allure of charter schools. After years of claims that they would “save” public schools and poor children, the public has given up on them. Why? They have not delivered, and the public gets it.

For most of the past thirty years, charters seemed unstoppable, especially because their expansion was backed by billions from people like the Waltons, Gates, and Broad, as well as the federal government. But they have not kept their promises.

Today, however, the grand promises of the charter movement remain unfulfilled, and so the costs of charters are being evaluated in a new light.

After three decades, charters enroll six percent of students. Despite bold predictions by their advocates that this number will grow fivefold, charters are increasingly in disrepute.

First, the promise of innovation was not met. Iron discipline is not exactly innovative.

Second, the promise that charters would be significantly better than public schools did not happen. In large part, that is because the introduction of charters simply creates an opportunity for choice; it does not ensure the quality of schools. Rigorous research, from groups like Mathematica Policy Research and Stanford University, has found that average charter performance is roughly equivalent to that of traditional public schools. A recent study in Ohio, for instance, concluded that some of the state’s charters perform worse than the state’s public schools, some perform better, and roughly half do not significantly differ.

Finally, charters have not produced the systemic improvement promised by their boosters.

Competition did not lift all boats. In fact, competition has weakened the public schools that enroll most students at the same time that charters do not necessarily provide a better alternative.

Schneider does not mention one other important reason for the diminishing reputation of charters: scandals, frauds, embezzlement, and other scams that appear daily in local and state media. A significant number of charters are launched and operated by non-educators and by entrepreneurs, which amplifies the reasons for charter instability and failure.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Competition, Corruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Innovation, Privatization, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Steve Lopez: Why Measure EE Lost and What It Means for the City’s Future—And America’s Future

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2019 //
16

 

Steve Lopez, a columnist for the L.A. Times, is outraged by the low and negative vote on Measure EE. He wrote that city gave a collective shrug.

On this, the last week of school before summer break in the Los Angeles Unified School District, voters have sent a loud and clear message to roughly 600,000 students:

Your schools may be crumbling, your libraries may be closed, your class sizes may be unmanageably large, about 90% of you live in poverty and thousands of you are homeless, but who cares?

The Measure EE parcel tax on Tuesday’s ballot needed two-thirds approval and didn’t even get 50%. It would have cost the average homeowner about 75 cents a day. As supporters pointed out, California is in the bottom tier of funding per pupil nationally, and New York City schools spend about $8,000 more per student than L.A. Unified spends.

The response from Los Angeles was a shrug…

As hopes for EE’s passage faded Tuesday night, an East L.A. grandmother told me she had voted yes, partly because she wants a nurse at her granddaughter’s school more than just once a week.

“This is a crisis,” said Maria Leon.

The principal of Telfair Elementary School in Pacoima, where nearly a quarter of the students were recently classified as homeless, told me he tried his best to counter social media attacks on Measure EE.

“Do I want to see my taxes go up? No,” said Jose Razo. “But I want to invest in the future of our kids, and $220 for me is a small price to pay to make class sizes smaller and bring back the things we so desperately need. I get it. It’s supposed to be the state that takes care of us. But until they get their act together, we have to do what we can for our kids.”

Glenn Sacks, a social studies teacher at James Monroe High School in North Hills, expressed his frustrated exhaustion as he watched the election news Tuesday night.

“I think as LAUSD has become so heavily minority, so heavily poor … the public feels it doesn’t have a stake in public education anymore, and they’re willing to let conditions deteriorate,” said Sacks, whose class sizes are as high as 41 students.

“People say don’t complain about class sizes, deport the illegals, you’re lousy teachers turning out a lousy product, and a lot of this is just nonsense. The kids I teach, I love them, and they learn, and I wouldn’t want to teach anyone else. But they start out so far behind the white middle-class kids they’re being compared to, inevitably they’re going to look like they’re not succeeding and we’re not succeeding, and I’m amazed that people can’t see through that.”

Sacks is framing the dark narrative here, the one that says a great deal about race and class in Los Angeles, and about practical and psychic distance between haves and have-nots. Most voters don’t send their kids to L.A. Unified schools, don’t venture into neighborhoods where the challenge for educators is greatest and never see firsthand the promise and possibility in the faces of those 600,000 children, 90% of whom are minorities.

Absent that connection, cynicism comes easily, and it’s more convenient to complain about the wording or burden of a ballot measure than to stand with children who could use a little more help.

It’s easier to shrug, to vote no, to skip the election altogether and say sorry, kids, have a nice summer.

My friends, we see the same phenomenon in district after district, state after state. The kids are black and brown, the legislators are white. They don’t want to pay to educate those kids.

Guess what? They are our kids. They are our future.

 

Categories California, Funding, Los Angeles

UTLA Reacts to Loss on Measure EE

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2019 //
5

Measure EE went down to defeat in Los Angeles yesterday. It was an effort to raise taxes mostly on commercial real estate to raise $500 million a year for the schools—to reduce class sizes, hire librarians, nurses, social workers, and psychologists and to expand classes in art and music. An election this important should appear during a general election, when most people vote.

 

For immediate release

CONTACT: Anna Bakalis
UTLA Communications Director
(213) 305-9654 (c)
(213) 368-6247 (o)
Abakalis@UTLA.net<mailto:Abakalis@UTLA.net>

To watch the live 1:30 PM press conference, click here<https://www.facebook.com/UTLAnow/videos/2390124311212283/>.

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl on Measure EE

We are proud of the work we poured into the Measure EE campaign. Our members participated in precinct walks, community events, and phone banks, talking to voters across the city. We know the community fundamentally trusts educators and supports the demands we are making for our schools, with UTLA’s strike in January being the historic case in point.

We faced a scorched-earth opposition, led by the LA Chamber of Commerce and aided by the Howard Jarvis Association and key Trump allies like Geoffrey Palmer. They had one purpose: to defend corporate profits at the expense of the students of our city.

The No on EE forces created lies about how the tax would work and fanned the flames of economic insecurity. They attacked not just LAUSD but the civic institution of public education and the educators who serve our students. They drove a destructive individualistic message that encouraged voters not to think about the needs of our students or the broader city.

Measure EE was just the beginning of the fight for funding sparked by our strike. It’s simply unsustainable for the richest state in the nation to rank 44th out of 50 in per-pupil funding. We are resolved to keep organizing for measures like Schools and Communities First on the November 2020 ballot, which would close commercial property tax loopholes and restore $11 billion for schools and community services.

There were ground-breaking elements to the Measure EE campaign that make us stronger for the work ahead. The City of LA is talking about the chronic underfunding of public schools in a way it never has. We partnered with community organizations focused on increasing voter participation in working-class communities and communities of color. In a district with 85% low-income students and 90% students of color, this is both righteous and necessary. We built a broad community/labor/elected coalition around addressing school funding that has not existed before in LA. That coalition, which includes some unlikely partners, has decidedly landed on the side of progressive taxation — taxation of business and corporations — as the pathway to improved school funding.

The agenda to starve our public schools will not win as long as we continue to build our movement.

Today is hard — but educators face and overcome obstacles every day. There is no other option. Like we do every day, we will continue to fight for our students.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Class size, Funding, Librarians, Los Angeles
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