Archives for the month of: July, 2019
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Rhode Island: State Commissioner Plans to Take Control of Providence Schools

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
59

 

Angelica Infante-Green, the new State Commissioner in Rhode Island, plans to take control of the Providence schools.

Providence has a mayor-appointed board. The mayor complained that the union contract made it too hard for him to fire teachers.

Infante-Green has never run a school district. She has never been a school principal. She entered education through Teach for America, then ran bilingual programs in Bloomberg’s Department of Education. She belongs to Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.

It will be instructive to see what she does to Providence.

State takeover in Rhode Island does not have a good record:

The state has never sought to reconstitute an entire school system, although it did take over Providence’s Hope High School in 2005. The school was split into three academies and showed modest improvements, but it is now back under city control and remains one of the district’s lowest-performing high schools.

The lowest performing district in the state is Central Falls, where the state stepped in and threatened to fire all the teachers.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Providence, Rhode Island

Did Betsy DeVos’s School Choice Zealotry Enable the Corruption Scandal in Puerto Rico?

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
3

 

Writer Christopher Rim asks a reasonable question in this article in Forbes: Did Betsy DeVos’ passion for school choice enable the corruption in administration of federal education funds in Puerto Rico? I was particularly pleased to read this article because Rim is a brilliant young man who does not usually write about education.

He begins:

Yesterday, the former education secretary of Puerto Rico, Julia Keleher, returned to the island to stand trial after being arrested by the FBI on July 10th on fraud charges. Specifically, she and a government official in the insurance sector have been charged with using their government positions and connections to misdirect federal funding and award bloated, fraudulent contracts to their personal connections (several of whom were also arrested on the 10th). Some see this as vindication for the Trump administration, which has cited potential misuse of funds as one of their reasons for repeatedly trying to hold back much-needed funds, most recently funding for food stamps. However, this alleged fraud actually has more to do with policies of reducing public school funding in favor of private and charter schools, a shift made popular by Education Secretary Betsy Devos. 

This scandal comes as a shock to many, but those who have been paying close attention to Keleher’s salary and budgeting, as well as the state of education in Puerto Rico during her two-year tenure, saw her arrest as a vindication of what they have been protesting throughout her time in office. Keleher assumed the responsibilities of Puerto Rico’s education secretary in early 2017. There was immediate controversy over her salary— at $250,000 annually, she was already Puerto Rico’s highest-paid public official, earning ten times more than the average Puerto Rican teacher, three times more than Puerto Rico governor Ricardo Roselló, and 25% more than Secretary DeVos. She maintained this salary even after Hurricane Maria—in fact, she attempted to use a foundation’s donation to the Puerto Rican education system to raise it to $400,000, the same salary as the US President. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, she had to spearhead the education-related relief efforts. Keleher used this tragedy as an opportunity to try her own plans to redesign Puerto Rico’s school system. She led wide-scale education reform efforts and referred to the island’s education system as a ‘laboratory’ to test the Devos model, as she pushed to adopt private school vouchers and charter schools while closing hundreds of public schools. While schools were struggling to recover from the hurricane, Kelleher worked to permanently close over 20% of them—263 public schools were shut down during her time as education secretary. Because of these closures, 5,000 teachers lost their jobs and 75,000 students were displaced. 

All of this led to protests on local, national and international scales. In March 2018, thousands of educators marched to the capitol in protest of the voucher and charter school program. On twitter, critics started the hashtag “#JuliaGoHome” in order to publicly decry her unjust policies. In April of 2019, after she had resigned, Keleher attended an education conference at Yale to speak about leadership. At the conference, a student circulated a letter about the shortcomings and negative repercussions of Keleher’s so-called “reform” efforts. After her arrest, both of the island’s teachers’ unions issued statements that theyfelt vindicated in their longstanding disagreements with and protests against Keleher and her policies. One of these unions, the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR) had filed a lawsuit in April of last year to protest Keleher’s reforms, arguing that “the new law and separate fiscal reforms will cost teachers jobs, hurt students, and dismember the island’s public education system.” By that point, 179 schools had already been closed, and 263 would soon face the same fate. 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Puerto Rico

Tim Slekar Interviews Carol Burris about Charter Scandals

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
3

 

Carol Burris is one of the best-informed observers of the charter industry. Tim Slekar interviewed her on his podcast #BustED Pencils.

New #BustEDPencils Episode 85: Charter School Scandal with @Network4pubEd and @carolburris https://bustedpencils.com/episode/episode-85-charter-school-scandal/
 

Feature Interview:

The Network for Public Education’s Executive Director Carol Burris talks about the lack of “accountability” at the Federal Department of Education regarding charter school funding.  After publishing Asleep at the Wheel the charter school industry felt dissed.  So they complained.  So Carol went back to check NPE’s facts and found out the Charter industry might even be more than just Asleep at the Wheel.

This was such an awesome interview so I asked Carol if she might be interested in doing a semi-regular interview to keep  #BustEDPencils listeners informed about the scandalous world of charter schools.!  Guess what she said?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Privatization

Michael Kohlhaas: Charter School Pays Consultant $850 for Every Student He Signs Up

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
17

Blogger Michael Kohlhaas continues to pore through the treasure trove of leaked emails that he received concerning the charter industry in Los Angeles. There apparently are thousands of them, and he reports them as he finds interesting ones.

One thing shines through his reports: The charter industry is greedy, self-interesting, and not at all interested in education, only in growing their market share.

He recently discovered that a charter founder in Los Angeles had hired a consultant to find students for her charter school. She offered to pay him $850 for every student he enrolled. 

Apparently there is no “waiting list” for the new Ganas Academy. There are not thousands of children lined up to enroll. Kind of knocks a hole in the charter marketing plan. The charter was not able to find enough students and it will not be opening.

The school wanted to open in a community that opposed it.

The community fought back.

The community celebrated its victory over a charter that had to pay a recruiter $850 a  head to find students.

Kohlhaas writes:

Somehow, even though it makes no freaking sense whatsoever, we are continually asked by innumerable mobs of kool-aid-drunken pro-charter ideologues to believe that somehow their damnable publicly funded private schools are more efficient1 than publicly run public schools. Thus, the argument goes, we are lucky to be able to funnel public money and other valuable assets to them for their supernaturally efficient use in the pursuit of what they’re pleased to present as public goods.

But just logically, theoretically, even without reference to facts, how could this possibly be true? Like how does it make sense to pay the supreme commander of some random charter school out in Northwest Zillionaireville a significant fraction of a zillion dollars in exchange for her skilled elite commandery when we’re already paying Austin Freaking Beutner an equally significant fraction of a zillion dollars for his equally elite equally skilled commanderistic talents? How many damn commanders do we even need?…

Like for instance, this link to a contract between Sakshi Jain, supreme commander and founding heroine of the lately placed-on-hiatus GANAS Academy, and some guy named Ed, whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as an educational consultant. The purpose of the contract is to engage Ed’s services to recruit students to attend Jain’s star-crossed but nevertheless self-proclaimedly world-class private school. And what is most amazing to me is that Ed is to be paid per piece. Not a joke. Eight Hundred And Fifty Freaking Dollars per student signed up.

And not only that but every student that signs up after the contract is signed is to be attributed to Ed. Is this normal? Does anyone out there know if this is how charter schools actually get students? Like they actually pay some guy named Ed $850 per student that signs up? This, obviously, is completely incompatible with any argument whatsoever that giving public money to private charter schools is more efficient than…well, than anything….

Also she hired Ed to do PR for her infernal school and to find them some other location so they wouldn’t have to co-locate on the campus of Catskill Elementary which is why everyone hated her in the first place and why she was rapidly lapsing into outright lunacy. Which he evidently was not able to do. He was also supposed to change the anti-charter narrative and find supporters in the community, which he really failed at. I don’t know yet whether Jain paid the guy any money, but we are certainly well-rid of these fools.

The “Ganas” charter school apparently is using the word associated with Jaime Escalante and the movie “Stand and Deliver,” where he told his students they needed “ganas,” desire, motivation, grit, to succeed.

The story doesn’t end here. Kohlhaas subsequently released the document that Ed-the-recruiter sent to the charter school founder to describe his plans to recruit students at a supermarket called “El Super.”

Kohlhaas seems to have a large supply of documents and emails. Everyone interested in Los Angeles education is waiting for the next shoe to drop, with the expectation that Kohlhaas has a whole closet full of them.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization, Propaganda

FBI Warns of Cyberattacks on Technology-Based Schools: The Downside of Digital Learning

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
21

 

As more and more schools adopt computer-based digital learning, the risk of cyberattacks on schools grows.

Recently a school in Avon, Connecticut, was targeted by hackers.

AVON, Conn. — Over six weeks, the vandals kept coming, knocking the school system’s network offline several times a day.

There was no breach of sensitive data files, but the attacks in which somebody deliberately overwhelmed the Avon Public Schools system in Connecticut still proved costly. Classroom lesson plans built around access to the internet had come to a halt.

“The first time I called the FBI, their first question was, ‘Well, what did it cost you?’” said Robert Vojtek, the district’s technology director. “It’s like, ‘Well, we were down for three-quarters of a day, we have 4,000 students, we have almost 500 adults, and teaching and learning stopped for an entire day.’ So how do you put a price tag on that?”

The kind of attacks more commonly reserved for banks and other institutions holding sensitive data are increasingly targeting school systems around the country. The widespread adoption of education technology, which generates data that officials say can make schools more of a target for hackers, also worsens an attack’s effects when instructional tools are rendered useless by internet outages.

Schools are attractive targets because they hold sensitive data and provide critical public services, according to the FBI, which said in a written statement that perpetrators include criminals motivated by profit, juvenile pranksters and possibly foreign governments. Attacks against schools have become common, the FBI said, but it is impossible to know how frequently they occur because many go unreported to law enforcement when data is not compromised.

Attacks often have forced districts to pull the plug on smart boards, student laptops and other internet-powered tools.

Schools in the Florida Keys took themselves offline for several days last September after a district employee discovered a malware attack. Monroe County schools Superintendent Mark Porter said teachers had to do things differently but adapted quickly…

The 2,000-student Coventry Local School District in Ohio had to close schools in May as staff worked to fight a virus of that had infected the network. The FBI helped to guide the district through the recovery and offered assistance on best practices…

In North Dakota, where a third of schools statewide were hit with a malware attack last year, it was traced to North Korea, although it’s unclear if that country was the origin of the attack or just the location of a device that was used as a stepping stone, according to Sean Wiese, the state’s chief information security officer.

Categories Education Reform, Technology, Computers

Teresa Hanafin: Trump Makes America Hate Again

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
111

 

Teresa Hanafin writes the Boston Globe’s Daily “Fast Forward” to start each day.

Today she wrote:

Trump is making America hate again.

At his North Carolina campaign rally last night, Trump lashed out at Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar — a US citizen who was a refugee from Somalia as a child. His supporters, predominantly white, started chanting and shouting, “SEND HER BACK!” Kaitlan Collins of CNN reported that Trump “paused a moment to let that chant grow some momentum.”

This is really ugly, folks.

As Tim Miller, former aide to Jeb Bush,tweeted: “Imagine how this video of the President leading a white mob in a ‘Send Her Back’ chant targeting a black refugee is going to look in your kids’ high school government/history classes.”

Former Obama speechwriter (and Mass. native) Jon Favreau wrote, “The crowd at Trump’s rally chanting “send her back” after the President viciously and dishonestly attacked Ilhan Omar is one of the most chilling and horrifying things I’ve ever seen in politics.”

Note the word “dishonestly.” It refers to the lies Trump told about Omar during his speech, lies that are widely circulating on the right. For example, Omar never said, “You say ‘al-Qaida,’ it makes you proud.” But this is Trumpville, where the truth goes to die.

Get ready for a 2020 campaign that is even more hate-filled and divisive than what Trump spewed in 2016.

Omar responded on Twitter with an excerpt from Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” poem:

   You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Is it just me or will Trump’s crowd soon start chanting: “Sig Heil!”????

Categories Bigotry, Freedom of Speech

Capital & Main: Who Gutted California’s Charter Reform Bill?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
20

 

Bill Raden of Capital & Main identifies the culprit who stripped charter reform bills of anything that offended the powerful charter lobby: Ann O’Leary, Governor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff.

O’Leary previously served as senior education Advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and made sure that the candidate stuck to the charter industry script (for-profit bad, nonprofit good). She has a long Association with the Center for AMERICAN Progress, the DC think tank that still adheres to the failed ideas of Race to the Top, including charter advocacy.

And so a bold effort to roll back the legal protections for an unregulated industry that is ridden with scandal and corruption  is blocked by faux progressive Democratic insiders.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Democrats, Disruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization

Tom Ultican: Is Reform of the Charter Law in California Still Possible?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
5

 

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced math and physics in San Diego, is a dogged investigator. In this post, he traces the ongoing efforts to reform the weak charter law in California.

California has more charter schools than any other state, with more than 1,300. The original law capped the number at 100. Since then, the money of the California Charter Schools Association has blown away the cap as well as all previous efforts to regulate charters. Billionaire Reed Hastings served as chair of the state board and demolished the meager limits that existed.

In this huge state, the law allows a district to authorize a charter in another district hundredsof miles away and collect a commission for every student who enrolls. It allows charter applicants to appeal all the way to the state board and ignore the needs and wishes of the local district. The law assures that charter schools will have little or no oversight, since the state education department does not have the staff to oversee them.

The current law is an invitation to fraud, embezzlement, and corruption. This is not to say that all charters are run by corrupt individuals, but the constant revelation of financial scandals in the charter industry demonstrates the need for revision of the law to protect the public interest. Only a few weeks ago, eleven people in the charter industry were indicted for stealing more than $50 million.

Yet, as Ultican shows, the road to charter reform has been rocky. Governor Jerry Brown, whose leadership was admirable in many other ways, adamantly refused to rein in the charter industry. Governor Newsom is indebted to powerful families in the charter industry, and his chief of staff is a charterista.

Yet Ultican holds out hope that some actual reform might yet survive. Anything, he says, is better than the complete deregulation that has currently allows unscrupulous grifters to feast on the money intended to pay for education.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization

FBI Raids Home of Charter School Leader and Seizes Records of Failed School

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
8

The FBI and other federal agencies raided the home of the former director of a Los Angeles charter school that was recently closed by the district due to fiscal mismanagement. The Los Angeles school board voted to close Community Preparatory Academy last April due to ongoing mismanagement.

Federal law enforcement agents have seized records from the home of the former director of Community Preparatory Academy, a Los Angeles charter school that recently closed amid allegations of fiscal mismanagement.

The raid was carried out Tuesday morning by several agencies working in conjunction, including the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Postal Service and the U.S. Secret Service with assistance from the FBI. Also taking part was the Los Angeles Unified School District through its inspector general….

The district repeatedly sent warning notices over issues such as minimally qualified teachers, inadequate teacher training, misassignment of teachers outside their subject area and a high ratio of substitutes, the report stated.

Some of the financial difficulties stemmed from a slow start. In the first year of its five-year run, school leaders recruited fewer than 80 students, throwing CPA into deficit spending from the get-go.

The school enrolled 338 students. The district accused it of padding its enrollment and other abuses. Questions were also raised about conflicts of interest and payments to the director’s husband. The director had previously run another charter that closed. (Culture and Language Academy of Sucess).

The closed school had received $575,00 from the federal Charter Schools Program, $433,000 from the state to pay rent, $338,000 from the state facilities fund for co-location fees, and $250,000 from the state Charter School Revolving Loan Fund. A grand total of $1.6 million wasted.

Despite the school’s multiple inadequacies and repeated warnings of violations, state law prevented closing it down until the charter came up for renewal.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization

Los Angeles: Board Member Shares Secret Information with Charter Lobbyists First

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
11

Jack Covey, a regular reader and contributor, posted the following comment about the latest revelation from blogger Michael Kohlhaas in Los Angeles. Kohlhaas (which may be a pseudonym) somehow gained access to a treasure trove of emails between the Green Dot charter chain and the California Charter Schools Association, as well as between these entities and public figures like school board members. He has published a small number of these emails, and he continues to drop them like bombs (think emails from Wikileaks). What we are learning from these data dumps (drip, drip, drip) is that certain school board members and public officials were more loyal to the charter industry than to the children and public schools of Los Angeles.

Covey writes:

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)
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/ref_rodriguez_ccsa_cartoon.png

Kohlhaas wrote:

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.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »