Now here is a nasty job, but someone has to do it (if the price is right.) Even “reformers” agree that virtual charters are a disaster, a sector with horrible results that is populated by entrepreneurs and grifters.
Peter Greene reviews an effort by “reformers” to salvage the rightly blemished record of this industry of scammers.
Can it be done? Not really.
First, he examines the connections of the writers of this report. Gold-plated reformers, for sure. Then he shows that their “insights” are either old hat, commonplace, or silly.
The report was written by Public Impact, whose staff has few actual educators.
Like most such groups, Public Impact likes to crank out “reports” that serve as slickly packaged advocacy for one reform thing or another. Two of their folk have just whipped together such a report for Bluum. Sigh. Yes, I know, but it’s important to mark all the wheels within wheels if for no other reason than A) it’s important to grasp just how many people are employed in the modern reformster biz and B) later, when these groups and people turn up again, you want to remember what they’ve been up to before.
What is Bluum?
So Bluum. This Idaho-based is a “non-profit organization committed to ensuring Idaho’s children reach their fullest potential by cultivating great leaders and innovative schools.” Its 2016 990 form lists that mission, though it includes some more specific work. “Bluum assists the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation determine where to make education investments that will result in the growth of high performing seats in Idaho.” (I will never not find the image of a high-performing seat” not funny.)Then they monitor the results. The Albertsons are Idaho grocery millionaires with an interest in education causes.
Blum’s CEO is Terry Ryan, who previously worked for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Ohio.
Bluum partners with Teach for America, NWEA. National School Choice Week, the PIE Network, and Education Cities, to name a few. And they are the project lead on the consortium that landed a big, juicy federal CSP grant to expand charters (that’s the program that turns out to have wasted at least a billion dollars).
Just so we’re clear– this report did not come from a place of unbiased inquiry. It came from a place of committed marketing.
Of “reform-style” mushrooms, the supply is endless, and the money is infinite. The results are consistently negative. Yet they keep trying.
The Albertson Foundation in Idaho is a rightwing foundation that shares the Betsy DeVos agenda.
There are soooooo many greedy, power-hungry Vampire Reformers, it makes me dizzy.
I want and/or we need a data base that lists them all with descriptions of their corruption and crimes with links.
Title: “The Encylopedia Data Base of Vampire Rheeformers”.
BREAKING (and off-topic)
Blogger and L.A. political gadfly Michael Kohlhaas shares confidential emails detailing how CCSA’s Cassy Horton was only one of two people who where provided with the text of (then-indicted-&-future-felon) LAUSD Board Member Ref Rodriguez’s LAUSD board resolution pertaining to charter school oversight, with Horton being provided that by none other than Ref himself.
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2019/07/12/in-march-2018-then-lausd-board-member-ref-rodriguez-shared-a-top-secret-confidential-copy-of-a-board-resolution-with-cassy-horton-of-the-california-charter-school-association-before-anyone-oth/#more-27507
Mind you, as detailed in Horton’s email, only two people were provided Ref’s board resolution:
Dr. Richard Vladovic, LAUSD Board Member
AND
Cassie Horton of CCSA (California Charter Schools Association lobbyist)
Not the five other board members
Not the LAUSD Charter Schools Division (CSD)
Not UTLA (Perish the thought!)
At this point, more private emails show that CCSA’s Cassie Horton then EXTENSIVELY RE-WROTE the board resolution so it would be more to CCSA’s / Horton’s liking, with Ref dutifully accepting and not challenging Horton’s extensive rewrite in any way. The rewrite, of course, gutted LAUSD’s ability to exercise oversight or properly regulate charter schools.
In essence, YOU HAVE DOCUMENTED PROOF (emails) showing a totally unelected charter school partisan and lobbyist effectively doing the work of, and exercising the effective power of an actual LAUSD Board Member … because one of those LAUSD Board Members, now-convicted-felon Ref Rodriguez was letting her to do.
Ref was basically Horton’s and the charter school industry’s cowardly (see parenthetical BELOW) ventriloquist mannequin.
(By the way, CCSA backer and Netflix billionaire Reed Hastings was, at the time, paying the full costs of Ref’s multi-million-dollar criminal defense lawyers, who ultimately got him what many consider was a sweet deal for pleading Guilty, but all of that probably didn’t influence Ref’s dealings with Ms. Horton in anyway. <—- SARCASM)
The mind boggles.
After Kohlhaas started tweeting about this, Horton jointed the Twitter thread, and incredibly tweeted that her doing all this was totally legal and proper:
(Hey, nothing wrong with Ref giving Horton a “heads up,” along with a request for Horton’s input? Right?)
https://twitter.com/Cassy_Horton/status/1145389749764419585
And no Kohlhaas blog article would be complete without a snarky cartoon one of the blog’s subjects:
(in this case, former LAUSD Board Member & convicted felon Ref Rodriguez)
I love how all of Horton’s emails in the story above include urgent instructions in the Subject Line:
DO NOT SHARE OR FORWARD
Woops! Somebody sure botched that directive.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t include Kohlhaas’ concluding paragraph of the story above, with the final sentence’s dire warning:
KOHLHAAS: “And yeah, it’s true that Ref Rodriguez is long gone, is a convicted felon, and so on. He’s off the table. But none of the other players here are gone. And the system that allowed the CCSA and the baby-sacrificers in the charter industry it serves to insinuate themselves this deeply into what’s meant to be a democratically controlled system, that allowed them to insert their wholly-controlled puppets into power and then to pull their strings so that they dance to the tunes called by their zillionaire masters, that system outlived Ref Rodriguez and will, unless these privatizers are specifically defanged, will outlive all of us.”
Again, read the whole thing at:
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2019/07/12/in-march-2018-then-lausd-board-member-ref-rodriguez-shared-a-top-secret-confidential-copy-of-a-board-resolution-with-cassy-horton-of-the-california-charter-school-association-before-anyone-oth/#more-27507
Trying to rehabilitate the reputations of virtual charters would be about as futile as trying to reform the reputations of Jeffrey Epstein and R. Kelly. Those reputations are beyond rehabilitation, and they are plain “bad to the bone.”
You are right. The stench of corruption that surrounds the virtual charter industry fills the air.
The stench of corruption that permeates the virtual charter (fake) school industry doesn’t fill the air, it replaces the air with a toxic brew that destroys everything it touches.
Especially the minds & futures of the children in these “learning programs.”
Education destroyed, with little chance of recovery.
This is like, “Reformers Try to Rehabilitate the Reputation of Bowel Cancer”
You would think Democrats,who brand themselves as fighting for high quality & equitable public education policies would have made cyber school scams illegal. We already know the Republicans are unified in privatizing & monetizing public education.Why are the Dems silent? There should be a black box warning label on all cyber charter advertising that says “Education Stops Here.”
In the Democratic debate, when Harris when after Biden on his stand against busing, she and other Dems could make a similar argument about cyber charters. Biden was Veep when Arne Duncan gave these scams a patina of legitimacy in the Democratic Party.
Biden NEEDS to RETIRE and just GO AWAY and take the DFERS with him.