Archives for category: Accountability
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Mercedes Schneider: Do Teachers Make a “Reasonable” Salary?

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2019 //
54

Mercedes Schneider wrote a post about the abysmal failure of Measure EE in Los Angeles, which needed a 2/3 vote to pass but did not receive a majority. The turnout was shockingly low. Probably the measure should have been added to a general election. Special one-issue elections always have low turnout. That could cut either way but in this case it cut against the needs of children to have a quality education.

She zeroes in on the issue of teacher salary. The average pay for teachers in Los Angeles is $74,000. She notes that Rick Hess of the rightwing think tank American Enterprise Institute sees that number as “reasonable,” and that sets Mercedes off.

In his June 06, 2019, Forbes piece about the failure of Measure EE, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) career think-tanker Frederick Hess does not address the issue of low voter turnout. Instead, he focuses mostly on the teacher salary component.

Hess implies that the average LAUSD teacher salary of $74,000 a year “strikes a lot of Americans as pretty reasonable.”

Let us take a moment to contextualize AEI and Hess.

The mission of AEI as listed on its tax forms is as follows:

The American Enterprise Institute is a community of scholars and supporters committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise. AEI pursues these ideals through independent thinking and the highest standards of research and exposition.

It should be noted that in 2018, Hess drew a comfortable $235K (up from $197K in 2013) as an AEI “resident scholar,” which has our armchair educator hovering nowhere near that “pretty reasonable” $74K he mentions. Furthermore, AEI president Arthur Brooks garnered an amazing salary boost from 2017 to 2018, doubled from $1.1M to $2.2M, and executive VP David Gerson also doubling his salary, from $526K to $1.1M.

At the end of 2018, AEI listed total net assets of $321M.

Hess pens his think-tankery about education from a plush perch.

Is $74,000 a “reasonable” salary for a professional in Los Angeles (or for those professionals who make less)?

Mercedes says she makes $60,000 after many years of teaching in Louisiana. Is that reasonable? It would be unreasonable in Los Angeles or D.C. or New York City.

Well, read it. It’s Mercedes doing what she does best: using her razor-sharp intellect to dissect condescension.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Louisiana, Teacher Pay

Rochester, NY: State Takeover Is Not the Answer

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2019 //
12

 

Civil rights icon Jitu Brown and Rochester activist Rosemary Rivera write that state takeover of the Rochester public schools is a bad idea. 

They write:


We know that Rochester residents want the same thing: excellent public schools where it is a joy to teach and learn. The fact that this vision hasn’t been realized on a district-wide basis is painful, and there’s a growing sentiment that something has to be done, anything, to turn the tide. However, dissolving a democratically elected school board takes Rochester further from its goal and disempowers the very community it should be lifting up….

To pin the problems in the RCSD on the school board is misguided. There is no quick fix for school performance when large numbers of children are struggling with poverty, hunger, and housing insecurity….

We have failed to fully contend with the role of structural racism in education outcomes. Students of color face disproportionately high rates of suspension and excessive discipline. When students are suspended for weeks at a time, they fall behind and their academic performance suffers.

Schools like Enrico Fermi School 17 have emphasized restorative practices to repair school relationships and keep students engaged in the classroom… The strides made by School 17 should serve as a model for the rest of the Rochester City School District.

Enrico Fermi is a community school that provides wraparound services, including an on-site recreation center with after-school programs and meals for children. The board is strongly in favor of expanding the community school model and restorative practices, but these programs require investment. Addressing the problems faced by students and families in poverty takes a “whole student” approach.

Moments of crisis can lead us to take rash actions. The Chamber of Commerce and pro-business groups will use this crisis as an opportunity to push privatization and charter expansion – an approach we’ve already seen fail in New Orleans, Newark, and Detroit. These are the same groups that have worsened the crisis through the shameless promotion of austerity budgets and anti-worker policies that keep people trapped in poverty.

A recent study by the Education Justice Network shows that countries that invest in public education with a focus on equity outperform countries that have privatized their education systems. Canada outperforms the United States, Cuba outperforms Chile, and Finland outperforms Sweden. What children in New York and other urban communities across the United States need is equity.

Progress in our schools has been slow and uneven, but we know what works. Our focus should be on expanding the successful programs we see at Enrico Fermi School 17, Francis Parker School 23, World of Inquiry School 58, and many other outstanding schools in the district. Taking away the voice of voters and community members isn’t the answer.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Equity, Justice, New York, Poverty, Racism

Surprise! Texas State Board of Education Rejects Gulen School!

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2019 //
15

 

In a nail-biter, the Texas State Board of Education turned down a request to authorize a Gulen-affiliated charter school by a vote of 8-5.

The applicant was Soner Tarim, who is leader of the Harmony Charter chain and applicant for a charter school called Woodlands Hills Charter School in rural Washington County in Alabama.

Gulen charter schools always deny that they are Gulen charter schools but they are typically led by Turkish men and have a board dominated by Turkish men and a large number of Turkish teachers who have visas.

Soner Tarim was hoping to start a new charter chain called Royal. After the state board turned down his request, he promised to appeal the rejection.

The Gulen charter chain is the second largest in the nation, after KIPP.

It is odd, don’t you think, to outsource community public schools to a foreign entity?

To learn more about the Gulen schools, see Mark Hall’s documentary “Killing Ed.”

To See a list of Gulen schools, see Oakland parent activist Sharon Higgins’ website.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gulen Charter Schools, Privatization

SPLC: Black Students, Students With Disabilities Most Likely to Be Victims of Corporal Punishment

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2019 //
15

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
June 11, 2019
Contact: Owen Kilmer, SPLC
Owen.Kilmer@splcenter.org // (334) 956-8209
John McDonald, UCLA
JMcDonald@gseis.ucla.edu // (310) 206-0513

 

Report: Black students, students with disabilities among

most likely to be struck in schools practicing corporal punishment

 

Civil rights groups offer new insight into practice banned in majority of states

 

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Children attending the small percentage of the nation’s public schools that allow corporal punishment face a much greater likelihood of being struck than previously understood, with black students and students with disabilities among the most likely groups to be struck, according to a report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles’ Civil Rights Project.

 

The report – The Striking Outlier: The Persistent, Painful and Problematic Practice of Corporal Punishment in Schools – provides the clearest look yet at a practice outlawed in a majority of states and, even within states that legally permit the practice in schools, ban it in a host of other public settings for children and adults. The report includes a foreword by Derrick Johnson, president and chief executive of the NAACP.

 

The report found that at least one in every 20 children attending schools that practice corporal punishment were struck in 2013-14 and 2015-16. Black girls were more than three times as likely to be struck as white girls (5.2 percent vs.1.7 percent) during the 2013-14 school year. Black boys were nearly twice as likely as to be struck as white boys (14 percent vs. 7.5 percent).

 

Such racial disparities are trou­bling, because other research shows that black students do not misbehave more than white students. The report also found that in more than half of the schools practicing corporal punishment, students with disabilities were struck at higher rates than those without disabilities, raisingconcerns that they may have been struck for behaviors arising from their dis­ability.

 

“These findings show that corporal punishment disproportionately affects the nation’s most vulnerable students,” said Zoe Savitsky, SPLC deputy legal director. “It also destroys a child’s trust in educators, which damages learning relationships. Quite simply, corporal punishment doesn’t belong in schools, and states should bring schools in line with the many other institutions, from foster care to juvenile detention, that already ban the practice.”

 

The report recommends that states ban the practice in schools and that schools use evidenced-based discipline programs as alternatives to corporal punishment rather than punitive disciplinary measures, such as out-of-school suspension. 

 

“If an adult hit someone with a weapon, it’s considered aggravated assault. An educator using violence to discipline students, however, is considered corporal punishment, and we found it’s still happening over 100,000 times every year in public schools,” said report co-author Amir Whitaker, researcher with the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA. “Like other forms of discipline and state-supported violence, it’s disproportionately used on black students. The legacy of slavery and racial terror continues through its use, and decades of research finds the practice is extremely harmful to students.”

 

The report’s methodology differs from previous studies, which typically examine student populations at the state or school district level where corporal punishment was practiced – even when corporal punishment was only used in a small fraction of schools in those jurisdictions. That approach skews corporal punishment rates downward. This report only examined data from schools where corporal punishment was used, relying primarily on data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection from the 2013-14 school year.

 

Within the schools that practice corpo­ral punishment, the report found about 5.6 percent of stu­dents were struck during the 2013-14 school year. The rates in individual states, however, were as high as 9.3 percent (Mississippi), 7.5 percent (Arkansas) and 5.9 percent (Alabama).

 

What emerges is a picture of a practice that remains deeply entrenched in the South. Ten Southern states account for more than three-quar­ters of all corporal punishment in public schools. Just four of those states – Mis­sissippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas – account for more than 70 percent.

 

“There are far more effective and safer ways to manage a classroom,” said report co-author Dan Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA. “That is why most public schools in the United States ban the practice.

 

“This report demonstrates how in most states that still allow corporal punishment of children of color and those with disabilities are frequently struck. They bear the brunt of this outdated and ineffective practice compared to their white and nondisabled peers. Our documentation of the uneven and heavy-handed practice suggests that the use of corporal punishment is likely violating the civil rights of public school children throughout the South.”

 

Mis­sissippi alone is responsible for almost one-quarter of all corporal punishment. And nearly half (43.8 percent) of all black girls receiving corporal punishment in U.S. public schools in 2013-14 were in Mis­sissippi (4,716 black girls). No other state came close to eclipsing Mississippi’s corporal punishment rate of black girls.

 

Despite corporal punishment’s ubiquity in the South, a review of the law in five Southern states that allow the practice in schools (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi) found that these states not only prohibit adults from striking children in most other settings – such as child care centers, foster care settings and juvenile detention centers – but often describe corporal punishment as inappro­priate, abusive and unethical in such settings, the report found.

 

“This data should shock our conscience,” the NAACP’s Johnson writes in the report’s foreword. He adds: “[T]he impact of corporal punishment can be devastating on a student’s ability to learn and succeed. There are much more effective ways to promote positive behavior, ways that keep students safe and in the classroom.”

 

Thirty-one states have banned corporal punishment in schools, according to the report. In the remaining 19 states, there are nearly 8,000 schools within dis­tricts that practice it. Of those schools, how­ever, almost 45 percent do not use corporal punishment. This means that children attending different schools in the same district can have vastly different experiences when it comes to discipline. One school may use evidence-based practices that provide pos­itive, corrective consequences for students. But, at a nearby school, children engaging in the same mis­behavior may be struck despite research showing the practice to be ineffective and unsound for education.

 

###

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, visit www.splcenter.org.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Discipline, Education Reform, Racism, Special Education

Colorado: State Turns Over School District to Private Management Corporation

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2019 //
20

 

Colorado turned a school district over to a Florida-based management corporation.

Adams 14 officials have signed an $8.3 million, four-year contract with Florida-based MGT Consulting, officially becoming the first district in the state to hand over management to a company.

The state Board of Education in November ordered the Commerce City-based district of Adams 14 to hire an external manager for at least four-years, to handle much of the district’s operations in an attempt to improve the achievement of its approximately 7,000 students.

Count this as an admission of failure by the Colorado Department of Education, which clearly considers itsel incompetent to help the district.

What next? Outsourcing districts to China, Turkey, Chile?

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Education Reform

West Sacramento’s Charter Schools Have a Segregation Problem

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2019 //
6

 

Bill Raden of Capital & Main writes here about racial segregation in West Sacramento’s charter schools. 

Capital & Main has done an outstanding job covering the charter industry in California.

Raden writes:

Representing the newest form of green line in West Sacramento are charter schools — publicly funded but privately operated academies that are free from many of the regulations governing public schools. Although that freedom was once supposed to encourage innovation, the door it has opened has also made charters the latest flavor of school segregation. For a state like California, which enshrines diversity in a statutory balancing test that requires charter schools to “achieve a racial and ethnic balance among its pupils that is reflective of the general population” of their districts, unregulated school choice can be like putting out a fire with gasoline.

West Sacramento is hardly alone when it comes to racially isolating charter schools. A 2017 Associated Press study was the latest to find rampant self-segregation in the national charter sector, reporting that charters are “vastly overrepresented” among so-called apartheid schools — those with at least 99 percent minority enrollments. Even in majority-minority California, which scores higher on charter school integration than other states, black students have been shown to typically move from a traditional public school that is 39 percent black to a charter that is 51 percent black.

“The problem with charters is their fundamental premise that if something’s not public it’s going to be better,” says Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project (CRP) and a research professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education. “We learned in the civil rights period that you had to have requirements on [school] choice if you’re going to get a positive outcome. But a lot of these charter schools are set up in a way that explicitly [segregate]. They don’t reach out for other groups of kids and have no integration policies at all, which raises big constitutional issues…”

The tendency of charters to isolate students by race and class is baked in by what education researchers call selection biases — features that attract certain kinds of families at the expense of others. Because California doesn’t fund transportation for charter schools, for example, simply by being a charter in the Golden State is to select out the most disadvantaged, single-parent families that live the furthest away from the campus. Impose a complicated application process, or require pricey uniforms or “voluntary” parent labor, and that effect is magnified.

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

National Education Policy Center: Phony Voucher Report

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2019 //
20

 

The National Education Policy Center published a review of an annual report by EdChoice, an advocacy organization for vouchers.

KEY TAKEAWAY:

Questionable methodology and misrepresentation of the research result in a misleading report not useful for decision-making or research purposes.

 

BOULDER, CO (June 11, 2019) – A recent report from EdChoice presents itself as a yearly updated list and synthesis of empirical studies exploring the impacts of school vouchers across a set of outcomes. But a new review of the report finds that it fails to provide a robust summary of the research literature on vouchers and their full range of positive and negative impacts.

T. Jameson Brewer, of the University of North Georgia, reviewed The 123s of School Choice: What the Research Says About Private School Choice: 2019 Edition.

EdChoice’s report attempts to convince readers that a solid body of research evidence shows voucher benefits such as an increase in test scores, parental satisfaction, increased civic values, improvements in racial segregation, and fiscal benefits through governmental cost savings.

What Dr. Brewer found instead was a limited collection of cherry-picked studies, largely from non-peer-reviewed sources, and primarily authored by voucher advocates. The report’s misrepresentation of the existing research, combined with its use of the questionable methodology of simply counting up results categorized as positive or negative, results in an overall appearance of stacking the deck to create an illusory compilation of studies that profess to bolster EdChoice’s predetermined commitment to cheerleading school vouchers.

Find the review, by T. Jameson Brewer, at:

http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/school-choice

Find The 123s of School Choice: What the Research Says About Private School Choice: 2019 Edition, written by Andrew Catt, Paul DiPerna, Martin Lueken, Michael McShane, and Michael Shaw, and published by EdChoice, at:

https://www.edchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/123s-of-School-Choice.pdf

NEPC Reviews (http://thinktankreview.org) provide the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC Reviews are made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: http://www.greatlakescenter.org

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu
Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Ohio’s State Senate Sabotages Repeal of Disastrous State Takeover Bill HB 70

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2019 //
5

 

Jan Resseger reports here on the uncertain status of legislation intended to repeal Ohio’s state takeover law, which was shoved through without deliberation or debate. 

She writes:

You will remember that on May 1, 2019, the Ohio House passed HB 154 to repeal Ohio state school takeovers, which have been catastrophic failures in Lorain and Youngstown under HB 70—the law that set up the state seizure of so-called failing school districts. HB70 was fast tracked through the Legislature in 2015 without hearings. Youngstown and Lorain have been operating under state appointed CEOs for four years now; East Cleveland has been undergoing state takeover this year.

Not only did the Ohio House pass HB 154 six weeks ago to undo HB 70, but its members did so in spectacular fashion, by a margin of 83/12.  The House was so intent on ridding the state of top-down state takeovers that its members also included the repeal of HB 70 in the House version of the state budget—HB 166.

Yesterday afternoon, the Ohio Senate released an amended, substitute HB166—the Senate’s proposal for the state budget.  In the Senate version, there is a detailed 54 page School Transformation Proposal to replace the House’s simple action to undo HB 70.  (The Senate’s School Transformation Proposal begins on p. 14 in the linked section of the Senate Budget.)

The three districts Ohio has already seized with HB 70—and 10 others slated to be taken over in the next two years—are all school districts that serve Ohio’s very poorest children. Last evening, as I plodded through the statutory language in the Senate Budget Proposal, I found myself wondering if the people envisioning this laborious, top-down, state takeover plan—a plan that pretends not to be a state takeover—have spent time trying to transform a complex institution like a school in the kind of community where many children arrive in Kindergarten far behind their peers in more affluent communities.  And I wondered why the Senate’s plan relies on so many of the failed “turnaround” strategies of No Child Left Behind—the federal law that imposed imposed a rigid plan for raising test scores and that left an increasing number of American schools with “failing” ratings every year until the law was scrapped when it was itself deemed a failure. No Child Left Behind was a test-and-punish law; the Ohio Senate’s School Transformation Proposal is also very much a test-and-punish law—at a time when extensive academic research demonstrates that standardized tests are a flawed yardstick for measuring the quality of a school.

We can only hope the Ohio House will determinedly oppose the Senate’s plan and stop it in the Senate-House Conference Committee.

She goes on to explain how the Senate’s new plan for state takeover is supposed to work.

And she adds:

What is clear from this very brief summary of the Senate’s School Transformation Proposal is that, although the Senate has proposed a state school district takeover plan with more local control over the members of the local School Improvement Commission, and while district and individual school improvement plans would have the input of community stakeholders, this is still a plan that puts all the power in a district School Improvement Director—a czar who can fire the principals and the teachers, charterize the schools, privatize the schools, abrogate collective bargaining agreements, and even shut down schools.  And the district’s School Improvement Director’s power grows in later years if the district fails to show progress.  In the fourth year of no progress, “A new board of education shall be appointed… However, the Director shall retain complete operational, managerial, and instructional control of the district.”

Make no mistake. This is a Republican plan to end local control of public schools in poor districts.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ohio

Puerto Rico: Which Hedge Funds Are Profiting from the Island’s Misery?

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2019 //
21

 

The Public Accountability Initiative is the place to go to follow the money. The team that produces these reports is called “Little Sis,” the opposite of Big Brother. Little Sis recently posted an eye-opening analysis of the funders of Teach for America.

This post identifies the Hedge funders who hold large amounts of Puerto Rico’s debt and are demanding a reduction in pensions and public services (especially public schools). It also details how people can fight back.

Time is running out for retirees in Puerto Rico in the struggle to preserve their pensions: the Financial Oversight and Management Board has proposed cuts that would take effect July 1, 2019.1 If those cuts go through, around 167,000 families will be affected immediately in this new attack against Puerto Ricans’ living conditions.2 Vulture funds, on the other hand, stand to rake in millions in profits at the expense of the suffering of thousands.

Rather than helping retirees take care of their families, the pension cuts will instead channel the money to hedge fund billionaires to pay for their extravagant lifestyles.

But retirees can still fight back by mobilizing against the upcoming debt deal, pressing the legislature to vote against the bill allowing the restructuring, voting against the debt adjustment plan, and pressuring judge Laura Taylor Swain to not approve the plan.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Reform, Pensions, Puerto Rico, Resistance

Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools on the State and City’s Floundering Charters

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2019 //
6

Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools

 

June 5, 2019

For immediate release: Statement of APPS Re CREDO study

 

The CREDO study released today presents more evidence that the charter experiment foisted upon the state’s children has been a resounding failure, especially considering the enormous amount of taxpayer dollars that have been spent on charter schools.  

 

For many reasons, comparing charters to district schools is not an apples-to-apples exercise. Charter schools receive outside funding from private donors, including significant amounts every year from the Philadelphia School Partnership.  PSP identifies as a non-profit funder of schools, but they have been strong financial and political advocates for privatization and charter expansion. The bulk of their corporate funding goes to non-district schools. 

 

Charter schools have been cited over the years for unfair practices such as presenting barriers to enrollment, failure to inform students and parents of their due process rights when facing disciplinary action, and expelling students for trivial offenses including being out of uniform and lateness.  Thus, many charters are able to exclude students with special needs, both behavioral and academic.  

Studies done by both Philadelphia City Controller’s Office and the State Attorney General’s Office have documented fraud and questionable spending in some of the city’s largest charter organizations.   Organizations including PCCY and the Education 

Law Center have conducted in-depth studies that show charters do not outperform district schools in most categories. ELC’s recent report shows: 1) the population of economically disadvantaged students is much lower in Philadelphia’s charter schools—70% in the District, 56% in charters; 2) the percentage of English learners is nearly three times higher—11% in District, 4% in charters; 3) few of the special education students in the traditional charters are from the low-incidence disability categories, such as autism and intellectual disability, that are most expensive to serve.

The diversion of public funds to privately managed charters has made it more difficult for public schools to fund essential programs, but public schools still manage to outperform charters in most categories.  Lack of oversight, both on the state and local level, has resulted in a lack of accountability in the charter sector. 

The CREDO study confirms that the claim of charter investors and operators that charter schools are a better choice has never been true.  Harrisburg must reform the PA Charter Law so that the voters in each district can have the means to fully fund and strengthen their public school systems.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Privatization
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