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Paul Peterson: “No, Al Shanker Did Not Invent the Charter School”

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2020 //
35

This is a fascinating article written by Paul Peterson of Harvard University about the origin of the charter school idea.

Many people credit the idea to Al Shanker and Ray Budde of the University of Massachusetts, but Peterson sets them straight.

Peterson is the foremost proponent of school choice, charters and vouchers, in the academic world. He has trained many of the other prominent academics who support school choice, such as Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf, both at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Educational Reform (sic).

Peterson writes about the original proposals by Budde and Shanker but then notes that their ideas were fundamentally transformed by Minnesota reformers Ted Kolderie and Joe Nathan. Budde and Shanker wanted the charters to be district-controlled and friendly to unions.

Peterson writes:

Even though it is fashionable enough to credit Shanker for jump-starting the charter movement that even the Wall Street Journal is joining in, there is only a glimmer of truth to that urban legend. In actuality, Shanker did more to block charters than to advance the idea.

When putting together an account of the origins of charter schools for my book, Saving Schools From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, I had the opportunity to sort out what Shanker did and did not do for charters.  It’s true that Shanker, when first teaching in East Harlem, came to despise administrators who he felt were crushing the spirits of young teachers. So when he first encountered the charter idea advanced by Roy Budde, an unknown professor of education from upstate New York, Shanker, recalling life in East Harlem, gave charters his endorsement: “One of the things that discourages people from bringing about change in schools is the experience of having that effort stopped for no good reason,” he opined. So the Wall Street Journal story is not technically in error.

But charters only took off because others radicalized the charter concept Budde had devised. Reading Shanker’s column, Joe Nathan and Ted Kolderie, at work on educational reform in Minnesota, saw potential in the charter idea. Delighted that the powerful Al Shanker had given it his blessing, they invited him to the Twin Cities to help peddle it to Governor Rudy Perpich and the state’s legislature.

But as they worked on the legislation that was eventually passed in 1991, Nathan and Kolderie fundamentally altered the charter concept.  According to the Budde model, charters were to be authorized by school districts and run by teachers. Central office administrators were to be pushed aside, but charter schools would still operate within collective bargaining arrangements negotiated between districts and unions.

Nathan and Kolderie instead proposed that schools be authorized by statewide agencies that were separate and apart from local district control. That opened charter doors not only to teachers but also to outside entrepreneurs. Competition between charters and districts was to be encouraged.  All of a sudden, charter schools were free of the constraints imposed by collective bargaining contracts districts negotiated with unions.

At this point, Shanker signed off, calling charters a “gimmick,” and teacher unions ever since have done their best to slow the movement down, insisting that charters be authorized only if local districts agree, as well as burdening charters with numerous regulations, including a requirement that they be subject to collective bargaining.  For Shanker and his heirs, the collective bargaining agreement always came first.

Thanks to Kolderie and Nathan, the charter idea was immediately embraced by rightwing foundations who really wanted vouchers, but realized that charters were an easier sell.

Thanks to them, more than 90% of charters today are non-union, are under-regulated, and have virtually no oversight.

Thanks to them, charters have drawn the support of not only right-wingers like Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch as a battering ram to use against public schools, but are a magnet for entrepreneurs, real estate speculators, corporate charter chains, and grifters.

Of course, they are some mom-and-pop or teacher-led charters trying to revive the original idea. But the industry far outweighs their efforts.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Unions

Wall Street Journal: Time for Trump to Concede

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2020 //
27

The Wall Street Journal is one of the most conservative editorial voices in the nation. Today its editorial says that the Electoral College has decided the election. Biden won. Trump lost. Trump should concede.

The Electoral College meets Monday to cast its votes for President, officially marking Joe Biden as the election winner. President Trump’s legal challenges have run their course, and he and the rest of the Republican Party can help the country and themselves by acknowledging the result and moving on.

Mr. Trump’s last legal gasp came Friday evening when the Supreme Court declined to hear the Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. As we predicted, the Court cited Texas’s lack of legal standing to challenge how another state manages its elections. 

Some on the right claim that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, but this is wrong. The Justices said they would have taken the Texas case as a “bill of complaint” when states sue other states. 

This is a technical point that concerns the Court’s case management, and the two Justices have a long-time view that the Court should hear more of these direct state appeals. We happen to agree, but in this case the Texas claim was outside constitutional bounds. Justice Alito (joined by Justice Thomas) added that he would “not grant other relief.” This was not a dissent on the merits of the Texas claim.

Mr. Trump and his camp are attacking the Court, and the President is deriding the “standing” point as a dodge. It is much more than that. Limits on standing are fundamental to a conservative understanding of the proper judicial role under Article III of the Constitution. If anyone can sue without a cognizable injury and the possibility of remedy, the courts would be overwhelmed with frivolous claims.

There is more to the editorial but I don’t subscribe and this is the free content available to me. Note: Even if Alito and Thomas had dissented, which they did not, the vote would have been a decisive 7-2 against Trump’s frivolous claim. It was 9-0 against Trump’s frivolous claim. At what point do courts begin to fine and punish lawyers for repeatedly filing frivolous claims?

Categories Accountability, Elections, Trump

Bob Shepherd: How “Reform” Ruined Teaching

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2020 //
118

Bob Shepherd returned to teaching after many years in the education publishing industry, where he developed curriculum and assessments. He writes about what changed while he was away. Thanks to State and federal mandates, he found himself ensnared by stand

I taught at the beginning of my career, had a successful career in educational publishing, and then returned to teaching at the end of my career. What a difference these years made!!!!

At the beginning of my career, I had English Department Chairpeople who were highly experienced teachers. The general attitude of administrators was that English teachers were the experts on English, History teachers the experts on History and the teaching of History, etc., and they pretty much stayed out of stuff that wasn’t their business. We in the English Department would hold regular meetings and discuss what was and wasn’t working in our classes, choose curricula, share tips and lesson plans and materials (many of which we had developed), and set policies and procedures. Once a year, the English Department chairperson would do evaluations of the teachers in his or her department. We made our own tests. There was enormous opportunity for innovation because we could actually discuss with one another various pedagogical approaches and curricular materials and make our own decisions. Our discussions/debates about pedagogy and curricula were vigorous and spirited. Many of the teachers were older women who had been doing the job for years. They were, almost to a person, scholarly and highly knowledgeable. The kids learned a lot.

I loved teaching. The only reason I left was that the pay wasn’t great. I started a family, and the year I left, I almost tripled my salary.

Flash forward 25 years. When I returned to teaching, everything was micromanaged. We still had department meetings, but these had devolved into sessions in which the Department chairperson read to us the latest mandates from our administration or from the state. Curriculum materials were chosen for us and were HORRIBLE, test-preppy crap. We were expected to follow a day-by-day script from the state. Formal evaluations were done four times a year by APs or the Principal, using mandated checklists, and in addition, there were four other informal evaluations and a system of demerits for not completing an enormous list of requirements (if, for example, an AP came into one’s classroom and the standard, bellwork, essential question, daily vocabulary, and homework for the hour’s lesson weren’t posted on the board; if one’s Data Wall or lesson plan book (each class had to have a two-page lesson plan in a folder) were not completed and up to date; and so on (there were hundreds of such requirements–far too many for anyone to keep track of them). In short, the Department Chairperson and the teachers had lost all autonomy. We were expected to do enormous amounts of test prep because what mattered–to the evaluations of the students, of us, of the administrators, and the school–were the scores on the invalid, sloppy, ridiculous state tests. My pay depended upon the school’s state rating based upon those demonstrably invalid tests.

And the teachers had changed. They were mostly young. They were not scholarly and not knowledgeable. “What’s a gerund?” the 26-year-old English Department Chairperson asked me, looking at the month’s required grammar topics. “Oh, what’s that book?” a fellow English teacher asked me about a volume I was carrying. Never heard of this guy. YEETS?”

“Yeats,” I said. “His collected poems.”

“Oh, I don’t read poetry,” she said.

The Reading Coordinator informed us that our 9th graders had to read ALL of the Odyssey, in her words, “the ENTIRE NOVEL.” She freaking thought that The Odyssey was a novel!!! When we met to discuss a classical literature unit, she had no idea that the term referred to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome.

And there was enormous churn. Between a quarter and a third of the teaching staff every year.

To teach at all sanely, I had to pretend to be following the rules while secretly making my own curricular materials in the form of handouts.

I spent most of my time carrying out required tasks that were of ZERO value to my students, most of the related, in one way or another, to supposed “accountability.”

The profession had been utterly ruined in the name of “reform.”

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching

Thomas Ultican: The EdTech Foxes Are Inside the Biden Henhouse!

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2020 //
68

Thomas Ultican has written a series of posts about attacks on public schools and their federal, state, and local funding streams. During this awful pandemic, most parents, teachers, and students have recognized that depersonalized remote learning is no substitute for real teachers. Nonetheless, the edtech industry continues to promote its products, which in most cases are intended to substitute for live teachers.

Especially concerning to Ultican is that the edtech industry has gained a strong foothold within the inner circle of the Biden campaign. A committee appointed by the campaign to advise the incoming administration was packed with edtech privateers and profiteers. The last thing that educators, parents and students want or need right now is a re-emphasis on digital learning.

Ultican is especially concerned about a corporation called digiLEARN, launched by former North Carolina Governor Bev Purdue, which was funded by…who else?…the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

To do the heavy lifting at digiLEARN, Purdue brought in her advisor on e-learning and innovation, Myra Best. Prior to joining the Governor’s office, Best served as Director of the Business Education Technology Alliance (BETA) which established North Carolina’s first statewide Virtual Public School. BETA was a committee of 27 business, political and education leaders established by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2002. The chair of the committee was Lieutenant Governor Bev Perdue...

digiLEARN lined up heavy hitters in the edtech industry:

In 1997, the vice chair, Jim Geringer, was one of the governors who established the non-profit Western Governors University in Salt Lake City. It was an early adopter of cyber education and competency based education. In a lengthy interview for the Wyoming State archives, Geringer spoke glowingly about the school and its methods.

The membership of the first digiLEARN board of governors made it clear that it was politically connected and aligned with the goals of the edtech industry. In addition to Geringer and Perdue former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise became a founding director on the board.

In 2010, Jeb Bush and Bob Wise launched the Digital Learning Council which promoted cyber schooling and “personalized learning.” In 2015, North Carolina State University honored Wise at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation’s Friday Medal presentation. The institute notes, “The Friday Medal is awarded annually in honor of William C. Friday to recognize significant, distinguished and enduring contributions to education and beyond through advocating innovation, advancing education and imparting inspiration.”

Besides the three ex-governors, two North Carolina State Representatives – Craig Horn and Joe Tolson – were on the original board. Also on the board was one of edtech industries most widely published advocates, Tom Vander Ark…

Billionaires like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Laurene Jobs Powell have spent lavishly to create an education publishing group to get out their message of school choice and edtech. Both Perdue and Vander Ark are regular contributors to The 74 Million and Perdue is featured at The Education Post. One of her early posts for Education Post was “A Nation At Risk 2.0.” In it Perdue echoed the calamity rhetoric of 1983’s “A Nation At Risk” declaring, “Right now, alarm bells should be clanging all over America louder than they were for President Reagan and business leaders more than 30 years ago.” She was decrying the slow implementation of edtech in schools...

Prompted by an article I had written about North Carolina being ravaged with edtech spending, a profoundly shaken person contacted me to share their experience on Biden’s Education Policy Commission. As the new administration prepares to take charge, many groups are meeting to develop an agenda to move America forward.  

In the Education Policy Commission, there was a tech sub-committee chaired by Bev Perdue. Reportedly the sub-committee had a large North Carolina contingent including Myra Best. There were twenty members on the committee and at least seventeen of them were edtech supporters. Many members were people with backgrounds like former Amazon web-services director.

The committees attitude toward student privacy was unacceptable especially their positions on sharing data. My source described the sub-committee as the proverbial “foxes in the hen house.”

Edtech can be a wonderful thing for students and educators, but if the point is to make large profits off data and replace teachers with digital screens, edtech becomes a great evil. Unfortunately, Bev Perdue and digiLEARN are promoting the evil brand of edtech. Let’s hope the incoming administration can successfully filter out this tainted input.

Given what America’s parents, teachers, and students have learned about edtech during the pandemic, the Biden team should be wary about taking the advice of its leading lobbyists.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Disruption, For-Profit, North Carolina, Technology

FAIR: Why Is the New York Times Cheerleading to Reopen Schools?

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2020 //
31

The organization Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting writes that the New York Times has become a “cheerleader” for reopening the schools as the COVID surges to new heights.

it is strange indeed because there is evidence to support reopening and equally impressive evidence against reopening schools. Yet the New York Times consistently lands on one side: reopen the schools.

Ari Paul of FAIR writes:

We’re still dealing with a pandemic of biblical proportions, and the scientific community is still conflicted about how schools reopening fits into the crisis. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts, favors school reopening (Business Insider, 11/29/20)—as does the American Academy of Pediatrics, though it notes that “the current widespread circulation of the virus will not permit in-person learning to be safely accomplished in many jurisdictions.”

But the idea that children are not vectors, or are merely low-risk vectors, for spread of the coronavirus is in dispute (Healthline, 9/24/20; AP, 9/22/20). The Journal of the American Medical Association (7/29/20) reported “a temporal association between statewide school closure and lower Covid-19 incidence and mortality,” saying that school closures between March 9 and May 7 were associated with a 62% relative decline in Covid incidence per week and a 58% decline in deaths per week.

Nature (11/16/20) cited JAMA’s finding to bolster its comprehensive statistical review of governmental “non-pharmaceutical interventions” against Covid, which found that school closures were one of “the most effective NPIs” in curbing the spread of the disease. A report in US News and World Report (12/2/20) based on data compiled by the Covid Monitorproject on the coronavirus in K–12 schools  concluded that “the data suggests schools are NOT safe and DO contribute to the spread of the virus—both within schools and within their surrounding communities.”

And that’s partially why parents and teachers are so worried about de Blasio’s plan. Individual schools in the city have to deal with budget shortfalls, deteriorating buildings and lack of supplies in the best of times, and now they suddenly must rapidly and safely implement in-person teaching. And as many New York schools advocates, like one-time gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, have argued, reopening schools tends to benefit whiter communities, as whiter, more affluent schools tend to have more resources to adapt to the current environment.

Paul identifies Times’ reporter Eliza Shapiro as purveyor of a consistent anti-union, anti-teacher perspective, who consistently supports reopening and ignores the voices of teachers who complain about the lack of funding for protective measures for both students and teachers.

Paul concludes that the New York Times, the newspaper of record, “should be playing a much more balanced and compassionate role.”

Categories Accountability, Health, Media, New York City, Science

Andy Hargreaves: After the Pandemic, Austerity or Prosperity?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2020 //
40

Noted education scholar Andy Hargreaves questions the alternatives that are likely to follow the end of the pandemic: Will government impose deep cuts and austerity, or will they recognize the importance of funding better education for all students?

He poses the choice in this abstract of his paper:

One looming possibility is an onrush of austerity, deep cuts to public education, financial hardship for the working and middle classes, and a range of private sector, including online answers to public problems in education, leading to more inequity, and an even wider digital divide. The pandemic, it is argued, is already being used as a strategy to bring about educational privatization by stealth by mismanaging return-to-school strategies and by overselling the effectiveness of online and private school alternatives. The alternative is public education investment to pursue prosperity and better quality of life for everyone. This will reduce inequality instead of increasing it, close the digital divide that COVID-19 has exposed, and encourage balanced technology use to enhance good teaching rather than hybrid or blended technology delivery that may increasingly replace such teaching.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Class size, Education Reform, Funding

Jeff Bryant: What Is Worse Than DeVos?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2020 //
30

Jeff Bryant writes that while we were all celebrating the pending departure of Betsy DeVos, the usual suspects were buying control of local school board elections. We are all aware of her efforts to direct federal funding to private schools and charter schools. But, he warns, we should pay attention to the “threat to democratically governed schools that preceded DeVos and will continue when she is long gone.”

In midsized metropolitan areas like Indianapolis and Stockton, California, parents, teachers, and public school advocates warn of huge sums of money coming from outside their communities to influence local politics and bankroll school board candidates who support school privatization. In phone conversations, emails, and texts, they point to a national agenda, backed by deep-pocketed organizations and individuals who intend to disrupt local school governance in order to impose forms of schools that operate like private contractors rather than public agencies—an agenda not dissimilar from that of DeVos.

In the 2020 school board election in Indianapolis, local teachers and grassroots groups the Indiana Coalition for Public Education and the IPS Community Coalition backed four candidates against a slate of opponents whom locals accuse of representing outside interests. At stake, according to WFYI, was “an ideological tilt” over whether the district would continue to “collaborate with outside groups and charter organizations” or “return to more traditional methods of improving struggling schools.”

Both sides raise the banner of “improving struggling schools,” but locals say what’s really at stake is whether voters retain democratic control of their public schools or see them turned over to private, unelected boards and their corporate supporters and funders.

Similarly, in Stockton, the clash between opposing slates of candidates in the 2020 school board election included controversies over charter school expansion and the influence of outside money in the district.

The controversy broke into public view in July 2020 when 209 Times reportedthat “[p]aid operatives” connected to Stockton’s outgoing mayor Michael Tubbs and three school board members were engaged in “a coordinated campaign of undue influence from outside of the city whose aim is… charter school expansion” into the district.

In both elections, candidates backed by outside organizations and individuals massively outspent candidates supported by local teachers and public school advocates.

In Indianapolis, WFYI reported that political action committees supporting the candidates aligned with charter school interests had contributed more than $200,000 into the election by October 9, while the “[f]our candidates backed by the IPS Community Coalition… [had by then] raised less than $20,000 in total.”

In Stockton, 209 Politics reported independent expenditure committees supporting candidates favoring charter school expansion outspent their opponents 25 to 1.

While the language used by these outside organizations and their benefactors is different from the rhetoric DeVos wields—substituting a message of rescuing struggling schools for DeVos’s calls for libertarian autonomy—the result is much the same: local citizens see democratic governance of their schools being swept aside as private actors get more control to do what they want.

This effort to squelch local democracy is funded by the usual billionaires:  the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the Walton Family Foundation, of Walmart fame; Arnold Ventures, the private foundation of former hedge fund manager and Enron trader John Arnold; and the City Fund, a nationwide organization providing financial support for city-level charter school expansions.

The City Fund is a relatively new organization of experienced charter school promoters that started on day one with $200 million from billionaires John Arnold and Reed Hastings. Its mission: to use the money to undermine democratic control of local school boards and to see that charter-friendly candidates are elected.

The other organization used by the billionaires to funnel money into the Indianapolis school board election was the notorious Stand for Children, which has played the same role in other districts. “Stand” worked closely with the Mind Trust, a local cheerleader for privatization, also funded by billionaires who don’t like local control or democracy.

Bryant reports that another PAC, aligned with Stand for Children, entered the race on behalf of the Alice Walton and Michael Bloomberg, neither of whom lives in Indianapolis or in Indiana.

Bryant relies on the careful research of Thomas Ultican, who has been documenting the billionaires’ determination to take control of urban districts. Their strategy is to promote the “portfolio model” of schools. This is basically a rightwing business agenda that aligns with a corporate model of governance. Outsource management and control. Close low-performing schools, open new schools; repeat.

In the Indianapolis contest, the billionaire-backed candidates outspent the teacher union-backed candidates by a margin of 11-1. All four of the charter-friendly candidates won.

In Stockton, the teacher- and community-backed candidates won.

Please read the article. There is much to learn from it as a cautionary tale.

Here’s the question that lingers: Charter schools are no longer an innovation. The first charter school opened in 1992, almost three decades ago. There is no evidence that charters as such have produced miraculous improvement. Some get high test scores, but typically because they can choose their students and kick out the ones they don’t want. Some are far worse than the public schools they replaced. Some close mid-year, either for financial or academic reasons or low enrollment.

Why are these billionaires so devoted to imposing their ideas on local communities without regard to results? Is it because they disdain democracy?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Disruption, Failure

The CEO of Dominion Voting Systems Answers Trump Campaign Claims

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2020 //
32

John Poulos, the founder, president, and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems responded to allegations of fraud by the Trump campaign in this article in the Wall Street Journal. Various spokespeople for the Trump campaign have asserted that the Dominion voting machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden, that the machines were designed by someone in the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela, that Dominion was tied to a worldwide Communist plot to oust Trump, and that the Dominion machines were hooked up to the Internet to facilitate counting votes to favor Biden.

He wrote:

Accurate, transparent and accessible elections—this is the objective that motivated me to create Dominion Voting Systems 18 years ago in Canada. From the start, the company was focused on improving paper-based voting, and it continues to pursue vote-tabulation solutions that enhance accuracy and transparency through audits and reviews, as well as by allowing voters to create, verify and privately cast a marked paper ballot. But if you’ve heard about our role in the U.S. election on Twitter,it’s likely you’ve heard something different.

The allegations against Dominion are bizarre, but I’ll set the record straight. Dominion is an American company, now headquartered in Denver. Dominion is not and has never been a front for communists. It has no ties to Hugo Chávez, the late dictator of Venezuela. It has never been involved in Venezuelan elections. None of Dominion’s systems use the Smartmatic software that has come under attack, as any state certification lab could verify.

There is no secret “vote flipping” algorithm. Third-party test labs, chosen by the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accredited by a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, perform complete source-code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system. States replicate this process for their own certifications. Postelection canvassing and auditing also exist to provide additional assurance of the vote totals’ accuracy.

The part of the election process on which Dominion focuses is highly regulated and certified. The company doesn’t work in noncertified areas such as voter-registration systems, poll books or signature-verification software, and it doesn’t provide vote-by-mail printing. Dominion voting machines do one thing: accurately tabulate votes from county-verified voters using a durable paper ballot controlled and secured by local elections officials.

Some of the main counties where results have been contested, like Philadelphia and Allegheny (Pittsburgh), don’t even use Dominion voting systems. In fact, across the 14 Pennsylvania counties that use Dominion systems, President Trump received 52.2% of the vote.

Despite the company’s limited role in elections, it has been the target of a stream of outrageous statements since Election Day—increasingly reckless and defamatory allegations that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Dominion is never able to affect the outcome of an election. The entire certification process makes sure of that. Regardless, the company’s focus has always been to be nonpartisan and respectful of all views. Dominion’s customers are election officials from both parties in the 28 states where it operates.

Unlike its critics, Dominion has had to attest to every part of its business ownership and operations to governmental agencies and in courts—under oath and penalty of perjury. We believe it is important to welcome the highest degree of scrutiny and transparency in the election process. This builds trust and leads to more resilient and robust elections. The widespread disinformation campaign America currently faces, however, does the opposite. Baseless and ludicrous smears are presented without evidence and amplified across social media. 

These attacks undermine the tens of thousands of state and local officials who run our elections. When it comes to counting ballots, officials have established a distributed, multilayered system with checks and balances, in which robust safeguards ensure that no one needs to trust blindly any person, company or technology. Here are some of the safeguards in place in Georgia, where the Trump campaign has contested the result:

• Tabulation machines are tested publicly, before bipartisan witnesses, before and right after Election Day.


• On Election Day, poll workers—not Dominion systems—verify voters’ identities, including a signature check. 

• Voters mark a paper ballot to vote. Absentee voters use pens, while in-person voters use “ballot marking devices,” which display a digital ballot for voters to make a selection and then print a paper record. In both cases, voters verify the marked paper ballot before casting it in a secure ballot box through an air-gapped scanning tabulator.

• After polls close, results are tallied by local officials. Paper ballots are safeguarded by thousands of poll workers distributed across 2,656 precincts.

• The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office certified election results after hand-auditing five million ballots, which showed that the paper-ballot voting system counted and reported results accurately. The small change to the final tally was due entirely to the addition of ballots that had been uncounted due to human process errors.

• The state also enlisted Pro V&V, a certified third-party testing laboratory, to audit a random sample of Dominion machines. No tampering was found.

The wild allegations of recent weeks have fueled the harassment of election officials and Dominion employees across the country—including stalking and death threats. The lies and smears have no basis in fact, but they do real damage to our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process. The false allegations should be retracted immediately. 

Citizens should know that America’s rigorous, layered and transparent electoral process—in which Dominion is proud to participate—ensures its elections are secure, accurate and credible.

Mr. Poulos is president and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies

More than Half the Funds in CARES PPP Went to 5% of Recipients

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2020 //
33

The Treasury Department administered the CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program, which was supposed to hand out more than $600 billion to small businesses. Stephen Mnuchin kept much of the information secret but had to release the full list of recipients in response to media Freedom of Information Act suits. We know that charter schools, private schools, and religious schools collected huge sums, slipping in as “nonprofits.”

Here is an account from the Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON – More than half of the money from the Treasury Department’s coronavirus emergency fund for small businesses went to just 5 percent of the recipients, according to data on more than 5 million loans released by the government Tuesday evening in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit.

According to data on the government’s Paycheck Protection Program, about 600 mostly larger companies, including dozens of national chains, received the maximum amount allowed under the program of $10 million.

Officials from the Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration have argued that the program primarily benefited smaller business because a vast majority of the loans ― more than 87 percent ― were for less than $150,000, as of August. But the new data show that more than half of the $522 billion in the same time frame had gone to bigger businesses, and only 28 percent of the money was distributed in amounts of under $150,000.

The newly released data comes after a federal lawsuit filed by The Washington Post and 10 other news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act challenging the SBA’s refusal to release records on borrowers and loan amounts. A federal judge ordered release of the data by Tuesday and the agency did not appeal.

Devised as a way to temporarily pay small companies to keep their employees on staff for eight weeks, PPP is widely credited with helping millions of businesses make payroll during the early months of the pandemic, benefiting tens of millions of employees. A bipartisan group of senators unveiled plans Tuesday for another $908 billion in stimulus, including nearly $300 billion in new funding for PPP and other SBA programs...

The data released Tuesday disclosed for the first time the exact dollar figures received by some of the top recipients, showing that a number of restaurant chains received the maximum $10 million, among them the parent companies of Uno Pizzeria & Grill, Legal Seafoods, Boston Market and Cava Mezze Grill. Law firms, churches and professional staffing services were also among recipients of $10 million loans…

Many companies were reported to have “retained” far more workers than they employ. Likewise, in some cases the agency’s jobs claim for entire industries surpassed the total number of workers in those sectors. For more than 875,000 borrowers, the data showed that zero jobs were supported or no information is listed at all, according to the analysis.

Religious organizations received billions in PPP aid. One of the largest grants went to Joyce Meyer’s Ministry in Fenton, Missouri, which received between $7-10 million.

Categories Accountability, Funding

Tennessee: Why Do Failed Reforms Survive, Only to Fail Again?

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2020 //
19

In 2012, Tennessee created the “Achievement School District” (ASD) and promised that it would catapult the state’s lowest performing schools into high-performing schools. So confident were state leaders that they hired Chris Barbic, who ran a celebrated charter chain in Houston, and he was confident that the state’s weakest schools could be transformed within five years by handing them over to charter operators. Other states were excited by the idea and created their own state takeover districts.

The ASD failed, even though it was funded by $100 million in Race to the Top money. But Tennessee refuses to accept that taking over struggling schools and giving them to charter operators is a bad idea.

The North Carolina Policy Watch reported on Tennessee’s insistence on protecting failure. North Carolina created an “Innovative School District,” modeled on the ASD.

Greg Childress writes:

The state-run school district in Tennessee, the one on which this state’s Innovative School District (ISD) is modeled, has failed.

According to reports out of Tennessee, the Achievement School District (ASD), is working on a plan to return 30 ASD schools in Memphis and Nashville to their local districts by 2022.

State officials in Tennessee contend the district, which was established in 2012 to improve achievement in low-performing schools, “grew too quickly” and that “demand outpaced supply and capacity.”

Still, Tennessee officials aren’t giving up on the ASD. They’re billing the new proposal as a “reset” of the district, which has fallen short of its goals to move low-performing schools from the bottom 5 percent and into the top 25 percent.

Most ASD schools were handed over to charter school operators after being pulled from local districts.

“The Achievement School District remains a necessary intervention in Tennessee’s school framework when other local interventions have proven to be unsuccessful in improving outcomes for students,” officials said in a presentation obtained by Chalkbeat.

“The Commercial Appeal” in Memphis reports that most of the schools remain in the bottom 5 percent and that several have closed due to low enrollment. Teacher retention has also been a major challenge, the paper reports.

Tennessee school officials plan to stand by their Big Idea, even though its failure is clear even to them.

North Carolina’s “Innovative School District” has not fared any better. Although the state wanted the ISD to be a major reform effort, like the ASD, only one school entered the new district. NC had other low-performing schools, but whenever one was told to join the ISD, its leaders ran to their elected officials and got exempted.

To put it mildly, NC’s ISD has “struggled to get off the ground.”

Childress writes:

After only one year, state officials made wholesale leadership changes at ISD. The ISD got a new superintendent, the lone ISD school got a new principal and a new president was hired to lead the private firm that manages the school.

James Ellerbe, the ISD superintendent hired in July, reported this week that there are 69 schools on the state’s 2019 qualifying list, meaning the low-performing schools are at risk of being swept into the ISD.

The ISD will bring only one school into the state-run district next year. The school with the lowest performance score among Title I schools in the bottom 5 percent will be brought into the ISD.

The ISD was approved in 2016 by state lawmakers even though the ASD had showed little signs of success after being in business four years.

Not only is the NC ISD based on a failed model, its one school has both a principal and a superintendent!

All of which leaves unanswered question, why do failed reforms never die?


Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, North Carolina, Race to the Top, Tennessee
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