Archives for the month of: July, 2019
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Ex-Governor Rick Snyder Will Not Teach at Harvard, as Backlash Grows Against Him

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2019 //
47

 

Michigan Ex-Governor Rick Snyder will not teach at Harvard,The outcry over Snyder’s role in the Flint water crisis made his position at Harvard untenable.

Former Gov. Rick Snyder has pulled out of a prestigious fellowship at Harvard University after the Ivy League school faced immense criticism for the governor’s track record in the Flint water crisis.

Snyder announced midday Wednesday his decision to withdraw from a senior research fellow position at Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government.

“It would have been exciting to share my experiences, both positive and negative,” Snyder wrote on Twitter. “Our current political environment and its lack of civility makes this too disruptive.”

Harvard’s appointment of the former two-term Republican governor and businessman sparked backlash on social media and reportedly caused friction this week on the university’s Cambridge, Mass., campus.

Snyder has shouldered public blame for the Flint water crisis after his emergency managers switched the city’s water source in April 2014 to Flint River water without corrosion control chemicals to prevent toxic lead from leaching into the city’s drinking water supply.

The Snyder administration’s Department of Environmental Quality oversaw Flint’s switch from Detroit’s Lake Huron water to the Flint River water using a water treatment plant in Flint that hadn’t been used full-time since the 1960s.

Douglas Elmendorf, dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, said students would have learned from questioning Snyder over Flint and other issues, but “we and he now believe that having him on campus would not enhance education here in the ways we intended.”

Snyder’s appointment began June 1 and was to include teaching, studying and writing about issues affecting state and local government in the country.

In a statement issued last Friday, the head of the Taubman Center said the university welcomed Snyder’s “significant expertise in management, public policy and promoting civility.”

He could have lectured on his decision to poison the people of Flint to save money. Or he might have taught about the failure of his “Educational Achievement Authority.” Or he might have reviewed how the expansion of charters contributed to the collapse of Michigan’s standing on NAEP.

But to do any of that requires reflection and critical thinking, qualities Snyder never exhibited.

The ethical standards at the Taubman Center may be flexible, however. It was established with funding by businessman A. Alfred Taubman, who was convicted in a criminal price-fixing scheme that involved two prominent auction houses. He served several months in prison. Taubman, like Snyder, was born in Michigan.

Categories Education Reform, Failure

Pennsylvania’s Expensive, Ineffective Cyber Charters

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2019 //
5

From the Keystone State Coalition, administered by Lawrence Feinberg:

Started in November 2010, daily postings from the Keystone State Education Coalition now reach more than 4050 Pennsylvania education policymakers – school directors, administrators, legislators, legislative and congressional staffers, Governor’s staff, current/former PA Secretaries of Education, Wolf education transition team members, superintendents, school solicitors, principals, charter school leaders, PTO/PTA officers, parent advocates, teacher leaders, business leaders, faith-based organizations, labor organizations, education professors, members of the press and a broad array of P-16 regulatory agencies, professional associations and education advocacy organizations via emails, website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

 

These daily emails are archived and searchable at http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.org

Visit us on Facebook at KeystoneStateEducationCoalition

Follow us on Twitter at @lfeinberg

 

Reprise Aug. 2017: Pa. charter schools spend millions of public dollars in advertising to attract students

Public Source By Stephanie Hacke and Mary Niederberger AUG. 29, 2017

PART OF THE SERIES The Charter Effect|

If you’re a parent, it’s likely Facebook knows it.

If you’re not happy with your child’s current school, Facebook probably knows that, too. And you are likely to be hit with paid, highly targeted ads offering alternatives. That’s why when you scroll through your news feed on Facebook you may see a sponsored photo of a wide-eyed child and parent thrilled about their tuition-free, personalized education at a Pennsylvania cyber charter school. If you pay property taxes, you likely paid for this ad campaign. See the ad on the side of the Port Authority bus that shows happy students and a message that Propel Montour High School has spaces available in grades 9 and 10. Your property taxes paid for that, too. Television ads, radio promotions, social media ads and billboards promoting cyber and brick-and-mortar charter schools are everywhere. Some charter operators pay for online keyword searches that prompt their school’s websites to show up first when a parent searches for certain terms related to charter schools or a student’s need for an alternative education setting. In the last three school years, 12 of the state’s 14 cyber charter schools spent more than $21 million combined in taxpayer dollars promoting their schools, PublicSource found through Right-to-Know requests. The Commonwealth Charter Academy spent the most of the cyber charters on advertising; it spent $3.2 million in 2015-16 and $4.4 million in 2016-17.

https://projects.publicsource.org/chartereffect/stories/pennsylvania-charter-schools-spend-millions-of-public-dollars-in-advertising-to-attract-students.html

 

Blogger note: Total cyber charter tuition paid by PA taxpayers from 500 school districts for 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 was over $1.6 billion; $393.5 million, $398.8 million, $436.1 million and $454.7 million respectively.

In 2016-17, taxpayers in Senate Education Cmte Majority Chairman .@SenLangerholc’s districts had to send over $10.5.3 million to chronically underperforming cybers that their locally elected school boards never authorized. . #SB34 (Schwank) or #HB526 (Sonney) could change that. 

Data source: PDE via PSBA

 

Bedford Area SD $195,903.70
Blacklick Valley SD $172,928.49
Cambria Heights SD $171,102.13
Central Cambria SD $147,481.76
Chestnut Ridge SD $334,862.00
Claysburg-Kimmel SD $108,164.64
Clearfield Area SD $847,317.65
Conemaugh Valley SD $277,810.82
Curwensville Area SD $165,465.87
Dubois Area SD $781,498.59
Everett Area SD $352,172.57
Ferndale Area SD $231,971.23
Forest Hills SD $248,609.94
Glendale SD $157,426.86
Greater Johnstown SD $2,532,971.00
Harmony Area SD $127,540.41
Moshannon Valley SD $200,674.93
Northern Bedford County SD $225,181.66
Northern Cambria SD $251,658.09
Penn Cambria SD $428,637.20
Philipsburg-Osceola Area SD $697,580.57
Portage Area SD $182,599.03
Purchase Line SD $358,211.18
Richland SD $264,415.85
Tussey Mountain SD $253,595.93
West Branch Area SD $323,061.45
Westmont Hilltop SD $0.00
Windber Area SD $467,326.78
  $10,506,170.33

 

 

Has your state senator cosponsored bipartisan SB34?

https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/bill_history.cfm?syear=2019&sind=0&body=S&type=B&bn=34

 

Is your state representative one of the over 70 bipartisan cosponsors of HB526?

https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/bill_history.cfm?syear=2019&sind=0&body=H&type=B&bn=526

 

WHYY Radio Times: Cyber charter schools

Air Date: Friday June 21, 2019 10:00 am; Runtime 49:15

Guests: Margaret Raymond, Susan Spicka, David Hardy

A new study shows that many students enrolled in Pennsylvania’s cyber charter schools are not getting a quality education. A quarter of Pennsylvania’s charter school students use these virtual learning programs as an alternative to attending brick-and-mortar schools. Today, we’ll hear about the damning report, the pros and cons of digital classrooms, and what the future holds for these types of programs. Joining us will be MARGARET RAYMOND, founding director of the organization, CREDO, that released the report, as well as SUSAN SPICKA of Education Voters of PA, and DAVID HARDY, executive director of Excellent Schools Pa, a school choice advocacy organization.

https://whyy.org/episodes/cyber-charter-schools-are-they-working/

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Michigan: Gov. Whitmer Wants to Impose Deformers on Benton Harbor

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2019 //
10

 

Thomas Pedroni of Wayne State University writes that Governor Gretchen Whitmer wants to impose corporate reform organizations on Benton Harbor to “save” the underfunded district. A cruel hoax. She is carrying forward the foul legacy of Republican Governor Rick Snyder.

 

Michigan Gov Whitmer Grants Benton Harbor Schools a Trojan Horse-load of School Privatizers 
 
Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, propelled to the state’s highest office just eight months ago by Black, Latino, and other progressive voters, is coming out to her electorate— not as a progressive, but as a third term retread of former Republican Governor and Flint Poisoner-in-Chief Rick Snyder.
 
Not only has Whitmer continued Snyder’s penchant for strong-arming and dismantling predominately Black school districts (he gutted Inkster, Buena Vista, Muskegon Heights, Highland Park, and Detroit; she’s “offered” to close Benton Harbor’s only high school in exchange for not immediately dissolving the entire district), but she also shares her predecessor’s fascination with the disruptive possibilities of some of our nation’s foremost corporate education reform companies.
 
While the Governor has responded to statewide outrage over her indecent proposal for Benton Harbor High School by grabbing her political life preserver and offering to consider alternative suggestions by the elected board (which returns to power after five years of state supervision on July 1), her rhetorical softening comes with a new “proposal”— Benton Harbor trustees must now agree to onboard a “turnaround expert” to guide their return to autonomy.
 
As the Benton Harbor trustees learned on Wednesday, June 26, just days before their restoration, the Governor has given them a choice— they must work with one of the four whole district “turnaround” companies she has laid on the table: AUSL (Academy for Urban School Leadership), TNTP (the New Teacher Project), TfC (Turnaround for Children), or ERC (Educational Resource Strategies).
 
AUSL, of course, has consistently failed to reach its promised benchmarks in the schools it’s taken over in Chicago and, remarkably, has underperformed non-AUSL Chicago schools despite receiving large resource infusions from the Gates Foundation. A recent Chicago Teachers Union analysis of AUSL teacher firing and replacement in Chicago found that the largest impact of AUSL takeover may be on the racial composition and experience level of the teaching workforce— fired teachers were disproportionately more experienced and of color.
 
TNTP, which traces its founding to the teacher-bashing Michelle Rhee and TFA’s Wendy Kopp, has been described by Peter Greene as the “big boys and girls” version of Teach for America, in that its objective is to transform people with established non-teaching careers into teachers. TNTP believes in using computer-administered multiple choice questions to identify better teachers.
 
The final two organizations, Turnaround for Children and Educational Resource Strategies, similarly partner with and are funded by a who’s who of the corporate education reform world— TfC by the Bezos Family Foundation, the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Kipp DC, and America’s Promise Alliance, among others; and ERS by the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, TNTP, and the New Schools Venture Fund.
 
How Governor Whitmer’s staff came up with this short list of corporate education reform organizations for Benton Harbor Schools is unclear; but one thing is clear— the Governor is passing over the insights and recommendations she might garner from the Benton Harbor community; from educational researchers and teacher educators; from officials and researchers at the Michigan Department of Education; from rank and file teachers and their unions. Instead she is laser-focused on whoever it is from the corporate education reform world who is whispering in her ear.
 
Benton Harbor Area Schools, its children, and the people who elected Whitmer deserve much better than this, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t get it. But this can only happen if Whitmer chooses to disavow the corporate education Koolaid and actually listen to the people she claims to value.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Michigan, Privatization

Washington State: “Bold Experiment” with Charters Is Flunking

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2019 //
55

 

Give Bill Gates credit for persistence. He wanted charter schools in Washington State and he wouldn’t give up. The state held four referendums about whether to authorize private charter schools, and the idea was defeated time after time after time. Until 2012. Gates and his billionaire buddies raised a multimillion dollar war chest that completely overwhelmed the opposition of the PTAs, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, the Washington Education Association, and a long list of civil rights and good government groups.

And in 2012, the referendum passed by less than 1%, bought and paid for by Gates and friends. The opposition sued, and the state’s highest court ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they do not meet the State Constitution’s definition of a “common school,” which is governed by an elected board.

Gates then put up money to try to defeat the judges who ruled against his beloved charters, but they were re-elected.

Then he went to the Legislature and through his surrogates, persuaded the lawmakers to pass a bill to use lottery money to fund Bill Gates’ charters. He could have easily paid for them himself, but he wanted the public to pay.

A dozen or so were quickly set up, some of which were recruited by Gates and given seed money.

And so the bold experiment began.

Things went badly quickly. First, the Walton-funded CREDO from Stanford University evaluated the charters and found that overall they did not get better results from public schools.

Recently, some of the fledgling charters folded because of low enrollments.

Read this equivocal editorial in the Tacoma News Tribune, which alternates between acknowledging the disappointing performance of Tacoma charters, the closure of two of them, the good performance of one, blaming the Legislature for failing to provide facilities funding (why not blame Bill Gates?), reminding readers that “the voters” approved charters, but not reminding them that Gates for the vote and it passed by a hair.

This editorial board once called charter schools a “bold experiment,” but even we need to remember that kids aren’t lab rats; when we experiment with schools, we experiment with kids’ futures. The stakes are high.

Joe Hailey, board chairman of Green Dot Public Schools Washington, the nonprofit charter that ran Destiny Middle School, told the News Tribune that lack of access to local levy funding meant a “permanent structural deficit for our schools.” In other words, with a large funding gap, Destiny Middle School was destined to fail.

Hailey is right. Without levy funding, charters compete with one hand tied behind their backs. If the paramount duty of the state is to educate every child, that’s not happening. Instead of being all-in on charter schools, we’re only half-in, and guess who suffers?

Why didn’t Bill Gates warn voters that they would have to pay facilities funding? Come to think of it, why doesn’t he buy a building for each of the charters, since he wanted them so badly? This would be only crumbs off his table.

Due to the opposition of the teachers’ union and lack of facilities funding, Tacoma’s charters are doing poorly:

Opponents — the Washington Education Association being one of the loudest — have launched lawsuits and a hostile public relations campaign against these voter-approved schools. To counter their claims, charters have to prove themselves by meeting higher benchmarks for success, and at least in Tacoma, that didn’t happen.

Third graders In Tacoma’s SOAR Academy had reading and math scores 28 to 34 percentage points lower than their Tacoma Public School cohorts, and now, due to the school’s closure, some of those students will have to go back into the local district and compete with students who may be miles ahead in terms of academic performance.

With results like that, the WEA needs no PR campaign.

Why was anyone so gullible as to believe that entrepreneurs would be better at running schools than professional educators?

Ask Bill Gates.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Washington State

Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel”

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2019 //
17

 

Last March, the Network for Public Education released a report written and researched by Carol Burris and Jeff Bryant, titled Asleep At the Wheel. It reviewed grants awarded by the federal Charter Schools Program and found that about a third of the grants went to charters that either never opened or closed soon after opening. It also reported that the CSP administrators did not conduct due diligence reviews and were basically handing out money without careful review. The report was cited by members of Congress when questioning Betsy DeVos. Burris has continued to release state reports on federal CSP awards, and she has found several states where the failure rate was 40%.

As you can imagine, the rightwing charter supporters were not happy. They responded not by calling for greater accountability and transparency by the charters, but by attacking the report! The critique was written by an employee of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. This is the organization that just honored Fernando Zulueta, who runs a highly political for-Profit Charter empire in Florida and amassed a real estate portfolio of more than $100 million.

Carol Burris responds here. 

All the links are included.

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform

Border Patrol Agents: Their Secret Commications

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
55

 

ProPublica posted excerpts from what had been a secret Facebook page where 9,500 border patrol agents exchanged messages. Their contents are disgusting: racist, sexist, cruel, crude.

The article begins:

Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.

In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, “Oh well.” Another responded with an image and the words “If he dies, he dies….”

Perhaps the most disturbing posts target Ocasio-Cortez. One includes a photo illustration of her engaged in oral sex at an immigrant detention center. Text accompanying the image reads, “Lucky Illegal Immigrant Glory Hole Special Starring AOC.”

Another is a photo illustration of a smiling President Donald Trump forcing Ocasio-Cortez’s head toward his crotch. The agent who posted the image commented: “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won.”

The posts about Escobar and Ocasio-Cortez are “vile and sexist,” said a staffer for Escobar. “Furthermore, the comments made by Border Patrol agents towards immigrants, especially those that have lost their lives, are disgusting and show a complete disregard for human life and dignity.”

A screenshot from the Facebook group.

The head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Joaquin Castro, reviewed the Facebook discussions and was incensed. “It confirms some of the worst criticisms of Customs and Border Protection,” said Castro, a Democrat who represents San Antonio. “These are clearly agents who are desensitized to the point of being dangerous to migrants and their co-workers.” He added that the agents who made the vulgar comments “don’t deserve to wear any uniform representing the United States of America.”

Categories Evil

Larry Lee: What Does Texas Know, But Alabama Does Not Know?

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
2

 

Larry Lee has been following the saga of the Gulen charter that plans to open in a rural county in Alabama.

In this post, he notes that the Texas State Board of Education turned down the same charter leader that Alabama’s charter commission approved.

He wonders what led a bipartisan majority in Texas to reject the charter application.

Texas has many Gulen charters. Why did they reject this one?

Categories Alabama, Charter Schools, Gulen Charter Schools, Texas

Peter Greene: On Reading “Winners Take All,” a Morality Tale for Our Times

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
57

Peter Greene read and loved Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

So did I, which is why it is on my short list of books I recommend for summer reading.

Peter writes:

Every so often you come across a book that unpacks and reframes a part of the universe in a way that you can never unsee. Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas has been a book like that for me.

Giridharadas is writing about “the elite charade of changing the world,” and while he is taking a broad look at the way the Betters are trying to influence our country and our world, the connections to education reform are unmistakable. I’m about to go ahead and give my grossly oversimplified take on his work and its intersection with public education; as a general guide, assume everything smart came from his book and everything wrong is my fault. There’s a lot to pack into a blog post, and I will cut corners like crazy; there are so many pull quotes from this book that I have put up an entire supplemental blog post just of quotes from the work. My best recommendation if you find any of this striking is to buy the book…

The elite assumption is that the system that put them on top, the game that they are the winners of, is fair and just and unrigged and not in need of being changed in any major ways. They are not part of the problem, and they are hurt that you would even suggest that was true; they are simply the just winners in a meritocratic system.

So the solutions they will propose meet a couple of standards:

1) It will include no challenge to the fundamentals of the current system.
2) The elites will be in charge (because their eliteness is proof of their fitness to run the show).
3) It will harness entrepreneurial energy (i.e. someone’s going to make money from it).
4) It will hand most of the blame responsibility to the people on the bottom who are being “rescued….”

The fingerprints of this mindset are all over education reform.

* The very notion, popular and bipartisan among the Betters, that education is the fix for everything. All the socio-economic inequity in the country can be solved, not by looking at the system that created that inequity– in fact, we’re not even going to admit that the system had any hand in creating inequity. No the system is swell, and the winners are people who are at the top got there by hard work and wisdom and meritocratic excellence. So, no, we don’t need to look at that system– we just need these people on the bottom to get themselves better educations (including things like grit) so that they can win at the game, too.

* Think Bill Gates, deciding that he needs to rewrite and standardize public education, and will have to circumvent, subvert and co-op the actual government to do it. Nobody elected him Grand Poobah of US Education, but he is perfectly comfortable appointing himself to the job.

* Think the deification of business standards in ed reform, and the notion that the free market will fix the system, that we will know which ideas are working best because they will succeed in the market. Think Eli Broad’s assertion that schools don’t have an education problem, but a business management problem.

* Think the repeated notion that democracy is a problem in education. We need to get rid of elected school boards and we need to give school leaders the kind of freedom that an all-powerful CEO has to create his vision. In ed reform, local control and the democratic process are to be avoided.

* Think the constant rejection of expertise. Reformsters don’t need to talk to teachers. What do teachers know? (If they are really such great shakes, why aren’t they rich?) I’ve succeeded at the game, and the same wisdom that made me a winner at that game will apply to fixing education. No other sorts of wisdom are necessary.

The huge irony of this book, which excoriates the elites and the billionaires who pretend to “save” the world by privatizing it, is that one of the blurbs was written by Bill Gates. He (or more likely, someone in his office) wrote:

In Anand’s thought-provoking book his fresh perspective on solving complex societal problems is admirable. I appreciate his commitment and dedication to spreading social justice.

This is a book that lambastes the likes of Gates. Why did he endorse it?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Hoax, Privatization

Jersey Jazzman: Do Test Scores Go Up When Tests Are Harder?

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
18

 

Jersey Jazzman untangles a simpleminded assertion by New Jersey Reformers: Harder Tests Make kids smarterand Cause scores to go up.

We have been hearing this claim since NCLB was enacted.

And we must ask, what’s the connection between scores going up and learning more?

Test prep can drive scores higher too.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Privatization, Testing

Oklahoma: Teachers Accuse For-Profit Charter Chain of Fraud

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
8

 

Former teachers at for-profit Epic charter chain claim they were compelled to inflate enrollment. Charter spokesperson denies it.

Administrators at Epic Charter Schools have been allowing, encouraging or pressuring teachers to manipulate students’ enrollment for years in order to improve employees’ bonus pay, according to at least seven former teachers.

Four of the teachers allege the practices in legal notices stating they intend to sue Epic after being terminated last year. Three others made similar claims in interviews with Oklahoma Watch.

Teacher bonuses were dangled like “a carrot” and used to push for withdrawals of low-performing students, the teachers said.

If those students rejoined the virtual school’s rolls, they were still considered a part-year student and weren’t included in accountability measures like the school report cards released in February. Students who enroll late are also part-year.

Categories Education Reform
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