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Bombshell Report: Congress Wastes Nearly $1 Billion on Defunct Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2019 //
23

 

The Network for Public Education released a shocking report about waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal charter school program. 

This year, Congress handed out $440 million to charter schools, many of which will never open or quickly close. Trump and DeVos want to increase the annual sum to $500 million.

The Washington Post covered the findings. Valerie Strauss writes:

”The U.S. government has wasted up to $1 billion on charter schools that never opened, or opened and then closed because of mismanagement and other reasons, according to a report from an education advocacy group. The study also says the U.S. Education Department does not adequately monitor how its grant money is spent.

“The report, titled “Asleep at the Wheel” and issued by the nonprofit advocacy group Network for Public Education, says:

  • More than 1,000 grants were given to schools that never opened, or later closed because of mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment or fraud. “Of the schools awarded grants directlyfrom the department between 2009 and 2016, nearly one in four either never opened or shut its doors,” it says.
  • Some grants in the 25-year-old federal Charter School Program (CSP) have been awarded to charters that set barriers to enrollment of certain students. Thirty-four California charter schools that received grants appear on an American Civil Liberties Union list of charters “that discriminate — in some cases illegally — in admissions.”
  • The department’s grant approval process for charters has been sorely lacking, with “no attempt to verify the information presented” by applicants.
  • The Education Department in Republican and Democratic administrations has “largely ignored or not sufficiently addressed” recommendations to improve the program made by its own inspector general.

“Our investigation finds the U.S. Department of Education has not been a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars in its management of the CSP,” it says.”

Carol Burris, executive director of NPE, is briefing key members of Congress today about this wasteful program.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education

Rhode Island: About the Charter School That Will Offer a Master’s Degree

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2019 //
40

 

How great is a Charter School that is given permission by the state to offer a master’s degree in education?

I decided to check out the Learning Community Charter School in Central Falls, which just got the go-ahead and $500,000 to train teachers and award master’s degrees.

Surely this must be an extraordinary school, or you would expect the Providence Journal to let you know whether it’s up to the task.

Turns out it’s not extraordinary at all. 

Its scores are below the state average.

Way below the state average.

In the state, 26% were proficient in math, but only 15% at this charter.

In the state, 37% were proficient in English, but only 28% at this charter.

Disadvantaged students are falling behind, and achievement gaps are not narrowing.

Scores for low-income students are below state averages.

Question: What makes this charter school exactly the right place to train teachers and award master’s degrees?

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Rhode Island, Testing

Philadelphia: It Takes Years and Millions to Close Failing Charter Schools and the Public Pays for Everything

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2019 //
16

 

Lisa Haver, Parent Activist in Philadelphia, writes here about how it takes years and millions of dollars to close failing charter schools. The public must pay the cost of challenging the charter and pay the cost of defending the charter. The charter operator gets a free ride for failing. Only the taxpayers and students lose.

Why is it easy to close a public school but hard to close a charter school? One guess: charter lobbyists wrote the state law.

Lisa Haver writes:

“This is an unbelievable story about what it takes to shut down a failing charter in Pennsylvania.
“Aspira charter operates 5 schools in Philadelphia, 2 of which are Renaissance charters–Olney High School and Stetson Middle school.  The Renaissance program is the one where the district hands over management of struggling district schools to people who are not educators in the belief that they can bring up test scores–which Aspira has not done. The Renaissance program has been a very expensive failure in Philadelphia.
“This Aspira renewal process is now in its 5th year–since 2014.  There have been numerous stories, including many in the Philadelphia Daily News–about misuse of taxpayer funds and other evidence of mismanagement.
“The District finally voted in 2017 not to renew these charters.
“For some reason, it took almost 18 months to begin the hearings.
“The District has to pay its own lawyer and hearing examiner AND for the charter schools’ lawyers.
“APPS members including me have attended the hearings every day for the first two weeks, and it is obvious that the charters’ lawyers are running up their own legal fees by asking the same questions over and over to a succession of witnesses.
“This is going to cost the District well over $150,000.  That is a lowball figure.
“When the district closed 24 schools in 2013, there were NO legal hearings at all.  The state requires a long legal process for revoking a charter that may have been around for 5 or 10 years, but none for neighborhood schools that have been around for decades–like Germantown high, which was closed one year before its 100th anniversary.
“A disgrace.”
From the article:

“One of the city’s charter-school operators has moved money from one account to another without explanation: no loan agreements, no signatures — “a shell game,” in the words of a Philadelphia School District auditor.

“Now the School District is shelling out money to try to pull two charters from Aspira — whose school bills are paid by the district — in a legal fight that could end up costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

“It’s really the district paying for both sides, which is kind of insane,” said Temple University law professor Susan DeJarnatt.

“Welcome to Pennsylvania charter school law,” said Auditor General Eugene DePasquale. “It’s unbelievable.”

Parent advocates have called on school officials for years to investigate these failing charters but were ignored. 

 

 

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

Stephen Dyer: Ohio’s Failing Charter Sector Wants a 22% Funding Increase

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2019 //
10

 

I remember when the charter idea was first launched, in 1988.

Al Shanker thought charters would be schools-within-schools, that they would be started by teachers, that they would be approved by the other teachers in the rest of the school and the local board, that they would be unionized, and that they would collaborate, not compete, with the existing schools. More than three decades later, we know that charters seldom meet any of these conditions. Ninety percent are non-union. They compete, not collaborate. They may be started by almost anyone without regard to prior experience.

Charter advocates on the right insisted they would cost less, be more accountable, and get better results. Typically, none of these conditions are met except when charters cherrypick the students they want and exclude those they don’t want. Typically, state charter associations lobby to block accountability.

In Ohio, most charter schools are graded either D or F by the state. This very low-performing sector costs Ohio taxpayers nearly $1 Billion per year.

Now the charters want a 22% increase in funding.

Stephen Dyer explains here why they should get no increase at all. 

Not only is their academic performance abysmal, but they are already paid more than the schools that educate 90% ofthe state’s students. And they have higher administrative costs.

A bad deal for students and taxpayers.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Ohio, Privatization

California: An Alert for Supporters of Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2019 //
5

 

A reader in California asks for help to fix one of the charter reform bill that has a big loophole.

He writes:

“Thank you for all you do for public education. In California right now are 4 assembly Bills – AB-1505 – AB-1508.

“AB-1508 in particular is intended to enable local school districts to consider the financial, program and facilities impacts when approving/denying new charter petitions. This leaves a huge gap for districts to have a say in renewing charters that were imposed on the districts by the California State Board of Education despite denial at the local and county levels.

“Would you be able to alert your readers in California to contact the bill’s authors before it goes to the floor for a vote to add language to AB-1508 to apply to charter renewals as well as new petitions?

“If enough Californians can respond, we may be able to make this proposed law even stronger to bring back local control over the 1323 charter schools in operation in the state.

“AB-1508 sponsors are CA Assembly Members Kalra (author), Bonta, McCarty, O’Donnell, Smith and CA Senators Beall and Skinner.”

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization

Billionaire Charter Founder Michael Steinhardt Accused of Sexual Harassment

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2019 //
29

 

 

Billionaire Michael Steinhardt, founder of a charter school chain called “Hebrew Language Academies,” was accused by multiple women of sexual harassment. 

A story in the New York Times began:

“Sheila Katz was a young executive at Hillel International, the Jewish college outreach organization, when she was sent to visit the philanthropist Michael H. Steinhardt, a New York billionaire. He had once been a major donor, and her goal was to persuade him to increase his support. But in their first encounter, he asked her repeatedly if she wanted to have sex with him, she said.

“Deborah Mohile Goldberg worked for Birthright Israel, a nonprofit co-founded by Mr. Steinhardt, when he asked her if she and a female colleague would like to join him in a threesome, she said.

“Natalie Goldfein, who was an officer at a small nonprofit that Mr. Steinhardt had helped establish, said he suggested in a meeting that they have babies together.

“Mr. Steinhardt, 78, a retired hedge fund founder, is among an elite cadre of donors who bankroll some of the country’s most prestigious Jewish nonprofits. His foundations have given at least $127 million to charitable causes since 2003, public filings show.

“But for more than two decades, that generosity has come at a price. Six women said in interviews with The New York Times and ProPublica, and one said in a lawsuit, that Mr. Steinhardt asked them to have sex with him, or made sexual requests of them, while they were relying on or seeking his support. He also regularly made comments to women about their bodies and their fertility, according to the seven women and 16 other people who said they were present when Mr. Steinhardt made such comments.

“Institutions in the Jewish world have long known about his behavior, and they have looked the other way,” said Ms. Katz, 35, a vice president at Hillel International. “No one was surprised when I shared that this happened.”

“Mr. Steinhardt declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement, he said he regretted that he had made comments in professional settings through the years “that were boorish, disrespectful, and just plain dumb.” Those comments, he said, were always meant humorously.”

Steinhardt insisted he was joking. The women who spoke up did not get the humor.

Is there something about billionaires that makes them believe they are irresistible and invincible?

Steinhardt’s Hebrew language charter schools are part of a growing chain that operates in several cities. Its students are ethnically diverse but classes are taught in English and Hebrew. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Education awarded $5 million to the chain, though it was never in need of external funding.

Michael Steinhardt’s daughter Sara Berman is chair of the chain’s board.

Since Hebrew is a spoken language only in Israel, it is not clear what the value of Hebrew is to Black and Hispanic students.

Steinhardt endowed the New York University School of Education, which bears his name, as well as the conservatory at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the SteinhardtGallery at the Metropoitan Museum of Art.

Steinhardt made his fortune as a hedge fund manager. He overcame inauspicious origins. According to Wikipedia, Steinhardt’s father Sol was a compulsive gambler and a notorious “fence” for stolen jewelry. He hung out with “underworld crime bosses Meyer Lansky, Vincent Alo (aka “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo), and Albert Anastasia (he was out gambling with Anastasia the night before he was killed). Sol, aka “Red McGee,” was later convicted on charges of buying and selling stolen jewelry and sentenced to five to ten years in prison.”

A gambler and criminal in one generation produces a successful hedge fund manager in the next. Hmmm. Food for thought.

 

 

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

Tony Thurmond: “Without Public Schools, I Might Not Be State Superintendent Today”

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2019 //
44

 

TonyThurmond, elected as California’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction last fall, spoke out strongly on behalf of public schools at a recent public event. He also insisted that the state must fund its pension promises and invest more in education. Competition doesn’t work in education, he said.

The goal of education must be to help every student must develop his talents, not to spur competition that creates winners and losers.

”In a conversation with CALmatters’ education reporter Ricardo Cano at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Thurmond talked about how his mother, an immigrant from Panama, died when he was 6, leaving him to be raised by a cousin he never met. He says his family benefited from many government programs to get by, but that “a great public education” was the most vital.

“If it were not for the education, my cousin who took me in, countless mentors, I would easily have ended up in California state prison instead of serving as California’s superintendent of public instruction,” he said. “We owe this to all the students in our state.”

“That philosophy, he said, informs his fairly dim view of charter schools, which he characterized as benefiting certain students as the possible expense of others.

“I think there’s a role for all schools,” Thurmond said, including charters—publicly funded but privately managed schools that supporters say offer valuable educational alternatives to children, but which critics say undermine traditional public education. “But I do not believe that the state should ever open new schools without providing resources for those schools. I do not believe that education is an environment for competition.

“Here’s my concern: you cannot open charter schools and new schools to serve every single student in our state,” he continued. “If you take the competition approach, that means some students, a lot of students, will be left behind. And again, I don’t believe that that’s what our mission is. I believe that the promise that we make to each other in society is to provide opportunity to get an education, to live a better life, to be able to acquire what you want through your hard work for yourself and your family. So for me that means that competition is OK in some environments, but when it comes to education we’ve got a responsibility to make sure that every single student gets an education.”

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

Stuart Egan: Sanders’ EVASS Has Lost in Court, But NC Won’t Let It Go

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2019 //
14

 

 

William Sanders was an agricultural statistician who developed a secret, patented formula for measuring teacher effectiveness. It’s call EVASS. It was tossed out by a Houston judge who said it was wrong to judge teachers by a secret algorithm that they could neither examine nor question.

As Stuart Egan reports, North Carolina clings to EVASS, no matter how many times it has been discredited (by scholars such as Audrey Amerein-Beardsley) or by courts that findit arbitrary and inscrutable.

Want to understand how teachers in North Carolina are evaluated?

Egan writes:

“Actually, the chain is from a .gov to a .org to a .com.”

Categories Accountability, North Carolina, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

SomeDAM Poet on the Rallying Cry of the California Charter Schools Association

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2019 //
27

 

The California Charter School Association recently held a rally in front of the State Capitol and declared that its motto was “Stand for All Children.” Only 10% of children in California are enrolled in charter schools.

Our blog poet, SomeDAM Poet, wrote a poem to go with the CCSA slogan:

 

“Stand for All (10% of) Students” (SAP)

Stand for ten percent
Stand for self-dealt rent
Stand for charter scam
Stand for Gulen man

Stand for puffing cheeks
Stand for quiet halls
Stand for hedge fund checks
Stand for Wall Street calls

Stand for standard test
Stand for testing prep
Stand for testing best
Stand for booting rest

Stand for cherry pick
Stand for hyped up claims
Stand for grad rate trick
Stand for PR games

Stand for wild west
Stand for lack of laws
Stand for what is Best
Stand for charter cause

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Arizona Republic Wins Prestigious George Polk Award for Education Reporting for Expose of Charter School Corruption

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2019 //
4

A crack investigative team at the Arizona Republic won the prestigious George Polk Award for their fearless expose of charter school corruption in the state.

Now we might wonder where are the think tanks like the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution, which never utter a critical word about charter school corruption and malfeasance. CAP and Brookings are supposedly “liberal” think tanks, but for some reason they are unwilling and unable to say anything about the scams in charter world. My guess is that they are still protecting Obama’s education legacy, unwilling to admit that they are also protecting George W. Bush’s education legacy, which was identical.

Through their investigative work, reporters Craig Harris, Anne Ryman, Alden Woods and Justin Price revealed how Arizona’s school funding system and permissive legal structure allow charter-school operators to make huge profits off public education dollars. The team, led by investigative editor Michael Squires, published the five-part series “The Charter Gamble,” which examined how Arizona committed 25 years ago to the then-untested concept of charter schools and what the program has meant for the state.

The George Polk Awards in Journalism were established in 1949 by Long Island University to commemorate CBS correspondent George Polk, who was murdered while covering the Greek civil war, and are presented annually to honor special achievement in journalism, especially investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and achieves results. The Republic’s team was recognized at the 70th annual Polk Awards announcement ceremony for “initially disclosing insider deals, no-bid contracts and political chicanery that provided windfall profits for investors in a number of prominent Arizona charter schools, often at the expense of underfunded public schools.” 

Greg Burton, executive editor of The Republic and azcentral.com, said the reporting team “unspooled miles of red tape to reveal what had been hidden during a decades-long push to funnel public money to privately run public charter schools — oftentimes with noble intent. But, where regulators and politicians fail as watchdogs, local reporters are vital. In this case, politicians and businessmen who could have pushed for reform made millions by ignoring warning signs. This is where Republic reporters worked to protect the public’s trust.”

In response to the reporting by the Arizona Republic, the legislature is considering charter reforms but none of those reforms will affect the worst abusers, some of whom are members of the legislature.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud
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