Archives for category: Accountability
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Betsy DeVos Gives Multi-Millions to KIPP and IDEA Corporate Charter Chains

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2019 //
9

 

In the latest round of awards from the federal slush fund for charter schools, Betsy DeVos handed out plums to the corporate chains KIPP and IDEA. 

KIPP, the largest nonprofit charter network in the country, is slated to receive $86 million over five years to create 52 new schools across 20 states and D.C.
IDEA, a Texas-based charter network, won an expected $116 million over five years. The network’s application says it will use the money to add grades at 56 schools and create 38 new schools across Texas; in New Orleans and East Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and in Tampa Bay, Florida.
The grants, announced last week, underscore the substantial role the federal government plays in helping charter schools expand. But they come at a perilous time politically for the charter school movement, which has seen its growth and popularity ebb in recent years. These networks’ plans for rapid growth might both run into — and fuel — political opposition, particularly in places where that growth will strain school districts’ finances.
As Chalkbeat notes, DeVos is trying to pump new life into the flagging charter movement, as exposes of charter scandals escalate and as some states see a decline in the number of charters as more close than open.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization

Popular New York City Public Schools Have a Wait List of 155,000 Students

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2019 //
8

 

One of our daily readers, who signs as “New York City Public School Parent,” pointed out recently that the wait list for popular public high schools in New York City is far larger than the alleged wait list for charter schools.

I checked the sources, and by golly, NYC PSP is correct. More than 155,000 students applied for but did not win admission to the high school of their choice. Of course, NYC PSP points out that there are only 78,000 eighth-graders applying for multiple schools, but that is the nature of wait lists. There are always duplications, triplications, and students applying to multiple schools at the same time. A few years ago, a journalist in Boston told me that he reviewed the celebrated “wait list” and discovered that it not only included the same students applying to multiple charters, but students who had already been placed, and students who were registered in a public school that they liked, and even students who no longer lived in the city. So, when you hear about “wait lists,” don’t believe it until it has been audited by a reputable and independent source.

InsideSchools writes:

There is greater demand than ever for the large, popular high schools. For the fourth year in a row, Francis Lewis in Queens took the number one spot for the most applicants of any high school in New York City—a whopping 17,440 students applied to this huge neighborhood school, compared to 10,403 in 2018.

According to data released by the Department of Education (DOE), large high schools in Queens and Brooklyn and highly selective schools in Manhattan were the most popular. (This list does not include the specialized high schools, which students apply to separately.)

The other schools rounding out the top five—also large, neighborhood high schools—were at the top of the last year’s list too and all had big increases in applicants over 2018.

Brooklyn’s Midwood High School, which has a very selective medical science and humanities programs, came in second, with 14,137 applications compared to 9,927 in 2018. Bayside, Benjamin N. Cardozo and Forest Hills, three large neighborhood high schools in Queens, were third, fourth and fifth.

It is interesting that some of the schools in highest demand are the few remaining large schools. Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein closed most of the large high schools. The few that remain are very popular with students, who apparently like the wide variety of courses, programs, electives, foreign languages, advanced courses, and sports that they offer. Bloomberg and Klein bet on small schools as the wave of the future, but students are voting with their feet for schools like Francis Lewis High School, Midwood High School, and Edward R. Murrow, all with large enrollments and varied programs.

This is what NYC PSP wrote:

Here are links to info on public school “wait lists”. The Inside Schools website posted this article:

https://insideschools.org/news-&-views/top-20-selective-manhattan-high-schools-are-among-the-most-popular

It links to this recently released document that lists how many NYC public school students are on “wait lists” (as charters insist wait lists must be defined) for 20 of the 400 public high schools.

http://static.ow.ly/docs/top%2020%202019_8hzb.pdf

If you go to the above link, you can see that there are a total of 171,144 8th graders who “applied” to these 20 schools and 16,247 8th graders who got seats.

Leaving a grand total of 155,497 8th grade students on “wait lists” for NYC public high schools.

To repeat — according to the methodology that charters insist we must use, there are currently 155,497 8th grade students on “wait lists” for 20 public high schools and certainly tens of thousands more on “wait lists” for the other 380.

Of course, there are only about 78,000 8th grade students in NYC public schools! But there are 155,497 8th grade students on “wait lists” for just 20 of the 400 public high schools. Twice as many 8th graders on wait lists as there are actual 8th graders! Using false charter accounting methodology.

Does Meryl Tisch want to build more public high schools for those 155,497 NON-EXISTENT 8th graders that charter supporters would have to agree that by their methodology must be counted as being on “wait lists” for public high schools?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New York City

Waltons Fund “National Parents Union” to Advocate for Privatization

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2019 //
20

 

Maurice Cunningham, a dogged investigator of Dark Money, has discovered a shell operation funded by the multibillionaire Walton family. 

It is called the “National Patents Union,” and its goal is to defund public schools and transfer public money to private hands.

Its leader Keri Rodriguez led the effort in Massachusetts to raise the cap on charter schools in 2016. The referendum would have allowed a dozen new charters every year forever, located wherever they chose. The vote went overwhelmingly against the charter proposition.

But wherever there is money, there are people ready to pick up the banner of privatization. And the Waltons, whose fortune exceeds $150 Billion, have plenty to spend in their quest to destroy public schools.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Dark Money, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization, School Choice, Walton Foundation

Kentucky: High School Journalists Not Allowed to Cover Bevin DeVos Roundtable

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
37

 

The editorial board of the PLD Lamplighter (Paul Laurence Dunbar High School) in Lexington, Kentucky, wanted to confer the “Roundtable” that featured Governor Matt Bevin and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. They were turned away. What does their opinion matter? They are “only” students. 

Only one student was invited to join the Roundtable discussion about education in Kentucky. She attends a Roman Catholic girls’ school in Louisville.

“We are student journalists who wanted to cover an event in our community featuring the Secretary of Education, but ironically, we couldn’t get in without an invitation.

“We learned of this event on April 16, as others did, over social media and from our local news stations. At that point, we immediately began making plans to be there because as young journalists, we appreciate any opportunity received to demonstrate our professionalism. These types of events are where we learn, and chances like this do not come around often.

“It was heartbreaking to us, as young journalists fired up to cover an event regarding the future of education, to leave empty-handed.”

“Local news station Lex18 posted its first article regarding the event on April 16 at 10:43 a.m. It discussed how Ms. DeVos would be attending two events in Kentucky, one in Lexington, and the other in Marshall County. There was no mention of an invitation or RSVP needed to attend the event.

“Another local station, WKYT, posted its first article regarding this event at 10:44 a.m. There was no mention of an invitation or RSVP needed to attend the event in this article either.

“Why was this information only shared a little more than 24 hours before the event? When the Secretary of Education is visiting your city, you’d think you’d have a little more of a heads up.

“We can’t help but suspect that the intention was to prevent people from attending. Also, it was held at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday. What student or educator is free at that time?

“And as students, we are the ones who are going to be affected by the proposed changes discussed at the roundtable, yet we were not allowed inside. How odd is it that even though future generations of students’ experiences could be based on what was discussed, that we, actual students, were turned away?

“We expected the event to be intense. We expected there to be a lot of information to cover. But not being able to exercise our rights under the First Amendment was something we never thought would happen. We weren’t prepared for that.

“It was heartbreaking to us, as young journalists fired up to cover an event regarding the future of education, to leave empty-handed. But as we researched we learned that we were not the only ones who were disappointed and frustrated.

“There were social media posts that exhibited confusion from parents, students, and educators—especially because no public school representatives were participants in the event.

“We emailed FCPS Superintendent Manny Caulk to ask if he had been invited, and he answered that he had not.

“Of the 173 school districts in Kentucky that deal directly with students, none were represented at the table. Zero. This is interesting because the supposed intention of the event was to include stakeholders–educators, students, and parents.”

Hey, student journalists, don’t give up.

Your State Commissioner is a DeVos groupie.

Make your voices heard.

This guy is giving your futures away.

He doesn’t care about you.

He is sucking up to the Queen of Privatization.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Kentucky, Privatization, Students

Kansas: Students, Parents Rebel Against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
76

 

Today, the New York Times posted a story about a rebellion in Kansas against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning platform. 

They said NO to Facebook’s “personalized learning,” which replaces teachers with Chromebooks.

Good for the students of Kansas!

WELLINGTON, Kan. — The seed of rebellion was planted in classrooms. It grew in kitchens and living rooms, in conversations between students and their parents.

It culminated when Collin Winter, 14, an eighth grader in McPherson, Kan., joined a classroom walkout in January. In the nearby town of Wellington, high schoolers staged a sit-in. Their parents organized in living rooms, at churches and in the back of machine repair shops. They showed up en masse to school board meetings. In neighborhoods with no political yard signs, homemade signs with dark red slash marks suddenly popped up.

Silicon Valley had come to small-town Kansas schools — and it was not going well.

“I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore,” said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.

Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning. The Silicon Valley-based program promotes an educational approach called “personalized learning,” which uses online tools to customize education. The platform that Summit provides was developed by Facebook engineers. It is funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.

Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit’s program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately.

Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad’s hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone.

“We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son’s fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school.

In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform…

The resistance in Kansas is part of mounting nationwide opposition to Summit, which began trials of its system in public schools four years ago and is now in around 380 schools and used by 74,000 students. In Brooklyn, high school students walked out in November after their school started using Summit’s platform. In Indiana, Pa., after a survey by Indiana University of Pennsylvania found 70 percent of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional, the school board scaled it back and then voted this month to terminate it. And in Cheshire, Conn., the program was cut after protests in 2017.

Hello, Mark Zuckerberg! Students want teachers, not interfacing with computers!

“Personalized learning” means human interaction, not interfacing.

Summit, go away!

Categories Accountability, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Education Industry, Education Reform, Technology

Florida: The State That Welcomes Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
49

 

In most states and in the federal government, conflicts of interest are prohibited and even illegal. But not in Florida!

State legislators regularly vote on legislation that enriches themselves and family members, and NO ONE CARES!

Conflicts of interest are peachy keen. Doesn’t everyone line their pockets at the public trough?

This article in the Miami Herald describes a master at the game of doing what’s good for himself and his loved ones.

Fred Grimm of the Herald writes:

If Erik Fresen was … say … a county or city commissioner, a blatant conflict of interest would keep him from voting on charter school funding issues.

As my Herald colleagues Christina Veiga and Kristen Clark reported Sunday, laws governing ethical behavior would bar local officials from even discussing proposals at public meetings that have a direct or indirect financial impact on their interests. Or their families’ interests.

The Fresen clan has a lot riding on charter school construction funds. Erik Fresen earns $150,000-a-year as land consultant for Civica, an architecture firm that specializes in charter school construction. Civica has designed a number of schools for Academica, the largest charter school management company in Florida. Fresen’s sister and brother-in-law just happen to be Academica executives.

But state Rep. Fresen’s ethical deportment in the state Legislature is governed by such tepid regulations that the chairman of the House Education Budget Committee can get away with sponsoring legislation that would deliver a windfall to the family business.

The Miami Republican has fast-tracked a bill that would not only limit what school districts spend on their own capital projects, it would also force districts to share their construction money (even when that money was derived from local property taxes) with charters.

No worries. All that conflict-of-interest stuff only applies to local elected officials.

He has argued that his legislation was designed to rein in out-of-control construction spending by school districts (a characterization hotly disputed by the state’s school superintendents). Fresen, however, hasn’t had much to say about charter school building scandals. Last month, The Associated Press reported that since 2000, about $70 million in state money spent on charter school construction and building improvements had essentially disappeared when the schools failed. Out of that lost $70 million, the state Department of Education recovered only $133,000. The balance of those taxpayer-funded capital improvements now belongs to private interests.

See how easy it is to get rich in Florida? You just have to have the right political connections.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fred-grimm/article60512891.html#storylink=cpy
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization

Jan Resseger: Time to Close Down the Federal Charter Schools Program

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2019 //
17

 

Jan Resseger is a voice of moral clarity in a time of moral turpitude.she reflected on the NPE report “Asleep At the Wheel,” about the slipshod, failed federal program to pump money into the charter industry and concluded the program should be terminated, with the money transferred to high-needs schools. 

She writes:

“The Network for Public Education published its scathing report on the federal Charter Schools Program three weeks ago, but as time passes, I continue to reflect on its conclusions. The report, Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride, is packed with details about failed or closed or never-opened charter schools.  The Network for Public Education depicts a program driven by neoliberal politicians hoping to spark innovation in a marketplace of unregulated startups underwritten by the federal government. The record of this 25 year federal program is dismal.

“Here is what the Network for Public Education’s report shows us. The federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) has awarded $4 billion federal tax dollars to start or expand charter schools across 44 states and the District of Columbia, and has provided some of the funding for 40 percent of all the charter schools that have been started across the country. Begun when Bill Clinton was President, this neoliberal—publicly funded, privatized—program has been supported by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.  It has lacked oversight since the beginning, and during the Obama and Trump administrations—when the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General released a series of scathing critiques of the program—grants have been made based on the application alone with little attempt by officials in the Department of Education to verify the information provided by applicants.  Hundreds of millions of dollars have been awarded to schools that never opened or that were shut down: “We found that it is likely that as many as one third of all charter schools receiving CSP grants never opened, or opened and shut down.”  Many grants went to schools that illegally discriminated in some way to choose their students and served far fewer disabled students and English language learners than the local pubic schools.  Many of the CSP-funded charter schools were plagued by conflicts of interest profiteering, and mismanagement. The Department of Education has never investigated the scathing critiques of the program by the Department’s Office of Inspector Genera; neither has the Department of Education investigated the oversight practices of the state-by-state departments of education, called State Education Agencies by CSP, to which many of the grants were made. Oversight has declined under the Department’s leadership by Betsy DeVos.

“One of the shocking findings in the Asleep at the Wheel report is that a series of federal administrations—Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have treated this program as a kind of venture capital fund created and administered to stimulate social entrepreneurship—by individuals or big nonprofits or huge for-profits—as a substitute for public operation of the public schools. This use of the Charter Schools Program as a source for venture capital is especially shocking in the past decade under Presidents Obama and Trump, even as federal funding for essential public school programs has fallen. The Center on Budget and Policy priorities reports, for example, that public Title I formula funding dropped by 6.2 percent between 2008 and 2017.”

Betsy DeVos defended the high failure rate by saying that in the business world, some start-ups fail. Why is the federal government using education money to invest in start-ups? Why shouldn’t the federal government review the applications carefully before awarding millions of dollars? What bank will lend you money without carefully reviewing your proposal and financials? Since 1994, this program has been a giant cookie jar, filled with free money.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, U.S. Department of Education

Andre Perry: Betsy DeVos’s Support for Charters Makes Democratic Charter Supporters Uncomfortable

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2019 //
14

 

I have said it before and I will say it again. Betsy DeVos is the most effective weapon against corporate reform, because she activates resistance and personifies noblesse oblige.

Former New Orleans charter leader Andre Perry has become a thoughtful critic of charters, and he points out that DeVos has become a major cause of a widespread charter backlash. 

As Perry puts it, Betsy Devos’s support of charter schools “spells disaster for their Democrat backers.” How can charters be, as their billionaire supporters say, “the civil rights issue of our time” when DeVos and every Red State governor supports them?

The fact that she wanted to cut the Special Olympics by $18 million at the same time she proposed to increase charter school funding by $60 million sent a loud message about what matters to her. Choice above all else.

The teacher strikes in many states specifically protested the introduction or expansion of charters because they drain money from public schools. In Los Angeles, striking teachers demanded a moratorium on new charters, and the state is now considering legislation to rein in the voracious industry.

In Milwaukee, a slate backed by the Working Families Party and the teachers’ union swept to victory in a recent election.

The drumbeat of scandal and failure haunts the charter industry, and DeVos’s warm embrace is a flashing danger sign.

Perry notes that charter teachers tend to be less diverse than those in public schools.

The price of “reform,” he writes, is steep:

As a former charter leader in New Orleans myself, I’ve seen black and brown communities have to make trade-offs like losing political control, teaching positions, and funding in the name of educational reform. If people of color don’t realize direct economic, political, and educational benefits, then it’s not real reform. Consequently, we need reforms that empower people, districts, and students on the way to educational progress—and hiring and retaining people of color should be an explicit focus of reform.

Should communities of color be required to lose political control and teaching positions in exchange for charters, which may or may not survive, and may or may not get higher scores than the public schools they replaced?

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization

Indianapolis: The Purpose of School Choice is to Destroy Communities, Which Endangers Us All

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2019 //
28

 

Jim Scheurich is a professor at Indiana University and a public education activist. He writes here about how School Choice is intended to destroy community.

 

Folks, the philosophy that charter and innovation schools are built on is that your children’s school should be individualized parental choice.  This means parents individually search across the Indy area as to where to send their children, which often means leaving their neighborhood community.  Each family or individual parent is thus on her, his, or their own and not engaged with their neighborhood community.  Also, each family or individual parent is pitted against or in competition with other similar families and parents for the so-called “better” schools.

This individualistic orientation of charters and innovation schools undermines neighborhood communities and even the possibility of neighborhood communities.   Undermining neighborhood communities, according to sociological research, increases violence, including murder.  Other research shows that building community decreases violence, including murder.

This, therefore, means that charter and innovation schools are likely one of the causes of our high murder rate in Indianapolis as the individualized school choice model is broadly undermining neighborhood communities across our city. 

Of course, building community in low income areas is not easy, but not impossible.  However, many such communities have created positive community spaces.  Given the difficulty of creating such communities, we certainly do not need more policies, like charter and innovation schools, that are threats to community and community building.

If you study the neoliberal political and economic “philosophy” behind the choice school movement, you will find a strong focus on individualism over community.  If you want to understand this movement, which is driving the creation of individualistic “choice” schools, read Democracy in chains by Nancy MacLean, a Duke historian, and then read the award winningDark money by Jane Mayer, which analyzes who the Koch brothers are as they are primary supporters of neoliberalism.  Indeed, overwhelmingly, the financial supporters of neoliberalism, the people behind the curtain, the people funding Stand for Children and the Mind Trust, are conservative to rightwing billionaires.

If you don’t believe me or think I am just some conspiracy nut, I dare you to read Democracy in chainsby the highly respected Duke historian, Nancy MacLean. I dare you.

My point is that charter and innovation schools help destroy community, which according to sociological research can lead to increased violence.

 

Jim Scheurich, Indianapolis Public Schools Community Coalition, a multi-racial, multi-class, citywide group of Indianapolis citizens working to reverse the takeover of our school district by those funded by white, conservative or rightwing, billionaire neoliberals. Also, an activist professor of Urban Education Studies at Indiana University – Indianapolis

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Indiana, Indianapolis, Injustice, Innovation, Privatization, Safety, School Choice, Vouchers

What is the Point of PISA and the Race for Higher Scores It Inspires?

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2019 //
11

 

PISA—the international test, the Program in International Student Assessment—has set off an insane competition among nations to lift their ranking. Only one country can be #1, and the rankings have political consequences. Rich countries always get higher scores than poor ones. Nations with less poverty get higher scores than those with more poverty.

The US typically ranks in the middle, not because it is a poor country but because it has very high rates of child poverty. But the news media always report the results like a horse race and blame the schools because we are not number one. We have never been number one on international assessments because of the 20-25% of our children who live in poverty. Yet neither the federal nor state governments have adopted a goal of reducing child poverty.

The media simply refuse to acknowledge that the tests tell us that poverty matters. Instead, they produce raw meat for demagogues with simple solutions, like Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown, and Arne Duncan, now DeVos. When the PISA results are released, it is another opportunity to moan about “a Sputnik moment” and dreams of becoming more like South Korea or Shanghai.

Why don’t the media or the politicians say it is time to emulate Finland, which has high rankings, low child poverty, and no standardized testing?

William Stewart of the British TES (Times Educational Supplement) reports that teachers are feeling anxiety over national rankings. 

Why are the nations of the world bothering to participate? Maybe it is a matter of national pride, even though most are doomed to “fail.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if nations opted out?

Categories Accountability, International, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »