Archives for category: Accountability
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Garry Rayno: Cost of New Hampshire Vouchers Explodes

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2023 //
4

The state commissioner of education in New Hampshire, Frank Edelblut, homeschooled his 10 children. He knows nothing about public schools and the role they play in communities. Appointed by Governor Chris Sununu, Edelblut has devoted his time in office to promoting anything but public schools.

He pushed voucher legislation and projected it would cost $3.3 million in its first two years. The actual cost was $22.7 million. The vast majority of children who use vouchers never attended public schools.

New Hampshire has about 160.000 students who attend public schools. In the first year of the voucher program, 90% of the students who claimed vouchers were already enrolled in religious and private schools. The proportion now remains over 80%. Vouchers are now claimed by about 2.6% of the state’s students. About 1/2 of 1% of the voucher users previously were enrolled in public schools.

Vouchers are a subsidy for private school students.

Garry Rayno of IndepthNH writes:

CONCORD — In three years, the enrollment in the Education Freedom Account program has grown 158 percent, while the cost has increased 174 percent in figures released this week by the Department of Education.

For the current school year, 4,211 students are in the program, up from 3,025 at the same point last year, and from 1,635 for the 2021-2022 school year.

The costs have grown from $8.1 million the first year, to $14.7 million the second year and $22.1 million this school year.

This year the financial threshold to participate in the program was raised from 300 percent of the federal poverty level to 350 percent.

That increases the threshold for the current school year from $59,160 for a family of two, to $69,020, and for a family of four from $90,000 to $105,000 annually.

Once a family qualifies for the program there are no future financial limits on earnings.

Department of Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, who championed the program before the legislature, was pleased more and more students are participating in the EFA program

“It has been three years since the launch of New Hampshire’s successful Education Freedom Account program, and it is apparent that New Hampshire families are taking advantage of this tremendous opportunity that provides them with different options and significant flexibility for learning,” said Edelblut. “With three years of data under our belt, we know that students are coming and going from the program, which is exactly how it was designed – to allow various options for personal learning needs that may fluctuate from year-to-year based on whatever path is appropriate in the moment.”

The program was sold by Edelblut and others as an opportunity for lower-income parents to find the best educational fit for their children if they have problems within the public school system.

However the vast majority of the money spent through the expansive voucher program has gone to pay the religious and private school tuition of students in those schools prior to the EFA program’s creation. [Emphasis added]…

A larger number of EFA students this year left public schools to go into private or parochial schools, 444 students, compared to 282 last school year, and 286 in the 2021-2022 school year.

Overall there are 1,577 new students to the EFA program this school year, while 109 students left the program due to graduation, 75 returned to public schools, and 524 students left the program for other reasons.

The 1,577 new students are 128 more students than the previous year.

When the program first began, the Department of Education projected its first two years would cost about $3.3 million and instead the state paid $22.71 million.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, New Hampshire, Vouchers

Bridge International Academies Embroiled in New Scandal

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2023 //
7

Bridge International Academies was created by two young American entrepreneurs to bring low-cost, for-profit standardized schooling to millions of children in Africa and Asia. It raised money from wealthy people like Bill Gates and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, also Pearson and the World Bank, but it faced many problems, including opposition from African teachers’ unions and sex abuse scandals.

Six years ago, veteran journalist Peg Tyre wrote about the ambitions of Bridge founders to create a company that might return as much as 20% on investment and eventually have a stock offering:

[Bridge] was founded in 2007 by [Shannon] May and her husband, Jay Kimmelman, along with a friend, Phil Frei. From early on, the founders’ plans for the world’s poor were audacious. ‘‘An aggressive start-up company that could figure out how to profitably deliver education at a high quality for less than $5 a month could radically disrupt the status quo in education for these 700 million children and ultimately create what could be a billion-dollar new global education company,’’ Kimmelman said in 2014. Just as titans in Silicon Valley were remaking communication and commerce, Bridge founders promised to revolutionize primary-school education. ‘‘It’s the Tesla of education companies,’’ says Whitney Tilson, a Bridge investor and hedge-fund manager in New York who helped found Teach for America and is a vocal supporter of charter schools.

The Bridge concept — low-cost private schools for the world’s poorest children — has galvanized many of the Western investors and Silicon Valley moguls who learn about the project. Bill Gates, the Omidyar Network, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the World Bank have all invested in the company; Pearson, the multinational textbook-and-assessment company, has done so through a venture-capital fund. Tilson talked about the company to Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager of Pershing Square, which ultimately invested $5.8 million through its foundation. By early 2015, Bridge had secured more than $100 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Just a few months ago, The Intercept called Bridge the Uber of education.

Ryan Grim of The Intercept just wrote a troubling update to the evolving story. As Bridge recently sought new funding from the World Bank, the company faced a new World Bank investigation and sought to foil it.

Ryan Grim reported:

FOR SHANNON MAY and her husband Jay Kimmelman, the conference call scheduled with the World Bank on September 12, 2020, was make or break. It had been just over 10 years since the Harvard graduates had launched Bridge International Academies, a chain of for-profit schools that had exploded in Africa and South Asia. With the backing of Silicon Valley’s elite and the support of international financial institutions like the World Bank, the founders were now in negotiations to raise fresh capital that would allow them to move into several new countries.

Rapid expansion was essential to the company’s business model. Bridge had figured out a way to slash the biggest cost drivers of a school budget — teachers’ salaries and traditional school houses — but the business was a low-margin enterprise that couldn’t slow down. The company was aiming for 10 million pupils, and it wasn’t as unreachable as it sounded: Bridge had already taught more than 1 million kids, backed by the for-profit investment arms of some of the world’s most famous philanthropists, including Bill Gates and eBay and Intercept founder Pierre Omidyar. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provided Bridge with $10 million in seed funding; its previous round of financing, the so-called Series E, which closed in 2017.

Bridge was now raising its next round, Series F. May and Kimmelman had a lot to lose: The couple had relocated from Cambridge to Kenya, and had done well enough to helicopter to their vacation home on the coast.

Just days before the call, in early September, May and Kimmelman had gotten bad news. In 2016, there had been a dozen or more cases of serial sexual assault at a Bridge school in Kenya. Several years later, at another Bridge location, a child on school grounds had been fatally electrocuted by a dangling live wire, while another had been badly injured. May and Kimmelman were already aware of the tragedies. Indeed, the company had internally documented many more cases of sexual abuse, but they had not been reported to the World Bank and stayed out of the local press. Now, a World Bank investigation threatened to bring them to light.

In February 2020, an internal World Bank entity that independently reviews bank projects, called the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, had sent an investigative team, led by veteran investigator Daniel Adler, to Nairobi to look into complaints filed by a local human rights organization about workers’ rights and health and safety issues at Bridge schools. The CAO team, while in Nairobi, learned of additional allegations from parents and community members, namely the serial assaults and the electrocution. Adler quickly filed a report recommending a deeper look and asked Bridge for more information.

Bridge spent several months gumming up the process, successfully negotiating a nondisclosure agreement with the World Bank that would make it difficult to publish in full any report that might be completed. The company also pressured the head of the CAO, Osvaldo Gratacós, to ease off. Gratacós was pushed out by the World Bank, but the effort ultimately backfired; before his tenure expired, he formally launched an investigation — known internally as a CAO compliance process — into the sex abuse allegations at Bridge in September 2020. May and Kimmelman were now meeting with the World Bank to discuss how to respond.

With the company actively soliciting Series F financing and close to securing a deal to expand in Rwanda, the timing couldn’t have been worse. So the group — which included William Sonneborn, the World Bank official who oversaw the investment in Bridge, and another World Bank staff member, Shannon Atkeson — hatched a plan to keep the allegations hidden.

With Gratacós already on his way out, the next step was to “neutralize Adler,” the CAO’s lead investigator. Bridge would file a complaint with a World Bank ethics office accusing Adler of violating CAO procedures and of impersonating a Bridge employee. It was right out of the Bridge playbook: The company had previously done the same to a Canadian graduate student writing a report on its schools in Uganda, going so far as to craft a bogus “Wanted” poster and place it in local newspapers. (A subsequent complaint Bridge filed with his university was dismissed.)

Next, Bridge would publish a consultant report favorably comparing its own record on student safety to that of Kenyan public schools — something to point to if the news leaked. The main objective, though, was to keep it quiet for as long as possible. The revelations would “spook investors” and undermine Bridge’s expansion plans in Rwanda. “Time matters,” as one person on the call put it. “Need to delay until Series F.”

There was only one problem: Someone on the call was taking notes.

Please open the link.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, International, Scandals

David Ignatius: What Comes Next in the Middle East?

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2023 //
10

David Ignatius is a regular columnist for the Washington Post. In this column, he tries to look beyond the current warfare in the Middle East.

He wrote:

A paradox of war is that it can open the way, after tragic suffering, to the kind of fundamental realignment that can bring a durable peace. That was apparent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at his January 1943 meeting in Casablanca to plan strategy for a conflict whose savage bloodletting was only beginning.


Roosevelt told British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that to eliminate the power of their adversaries, the Allies must seek their unconditional surrender. “It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy or Japan,” Roosevelt said, “but it does mean the destruction of [their] philosophies … based on conquest and subjugation.”


Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is at a similar moment as Israeli tanks roll toward Gaza. He has demanded, in effect, the unconditional surrender of Hamas and the end of its terrorist control of the crowded enclave. “We will crush and destroy it,” he told Israelis Wednesday night. He seeks to make it impossible for Hamas to carry out such horrors again.


But Netanyahu must be wise, as Roosevelt was, to wage war in a way that allows for a stable peace after his adversary’s defeat. If he waits until the conflict is over to think about “the day after,” it might be too late. And if he conducts a war that punishes Palestinian civilians, rather than Hamas, he might lose global support and undermine his mission.


Netanyahu has one wild card that, if he plays it well, could reorder the Middle East. That’s the growing willingness of Saudi Arabia, the dominant Arab power, to form an open partnership with Israel — so long as Israel seeks a stable and lasting peace with the Palestinians.

It’s a historical fact that opportunities for peace in the Middle East follow conflict. The 1973 Yom Kippur war, a strategic shock much like last Saturday’s Hamas attack, was followed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem and, eventually, the Camp David peace accords. The 1993 Oslo Accords that led eventually to creation of the Palestinian Authority were championed by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after the carnage of the First Intifada.


“Who will be the Sadat to take the Palestinians under his wing and lead them to peace? My candidate is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” said Martin Indyk, who served Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and might be the United States’ wisest veteran of the peace process. Indyk believes that MBS, as the crown prince is known, was working to build a security structure for his massive “Vision 2030” investment in Saudi Arabia based on a defense treaty with the United States and a strategic peace with Israel. “But Hamas, backed by Iran, punched a hole in Israeli deterrence, and it has resurrected the idea of defeating Israel by force,” Indyk said. He thinks this also threatens all the Arab leaders who have made peace with Israel.


Normal Saudi behavior would be to head for the sidelines, but Indyk thinks MBS might have too much at stake this time. He imagines that in the devastation that will follow the Gaza war, the crown prince, in coordination with other pro-Western Arabs, could invite Netanyahu and Palestinian leaders to Riyadh for a “peace summit” that would establish a new path to an Arab-Israeli accord.


This vision of a Saudi-Israeli compact might sound like an unrealistic dream, betting on a Saudi leader with a dark past. Along with my colleagues at The Post, I blame MBS for the murder of contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. But Saudis who know the crown prince well tell me that he is ready for transformative policy unless Israel pursues a reckless war that shatters any chance for reconciliation.

“We have an opportunity that we haven’t seen in 20 years to create something different,” said Abdulrahman al-Rashed, a Saudi columnist and chairman of the editorial board of Al Arabiya, the kingdom’s flagship television network, in an interview on Wednesday.


Al-Rashed elaborated on how change might evolve: “We have a frame in the Palestinian Authority, which was created by the Oslo Accords. It has legal institutions. The United States, the European Union and the Arab League all recognize the PA.” A revitalized authority, backed by the Saudis and other key Arab states, could purge the corruption and incompetence that have enfeebled it since birth. With Arab money and support — and new leadership — the PA could perhaps gradually rebuild Gaza.


“The Palestinian Authority needs to be restructured. It needs young, dynamic leadership. I believe Saudi Arabia and MBS would support that,” Ali Shihabi, a prominent supporter of MBS, told me during an interview. But he also warned: “If the Israelis want a Palestinian partner that can create a peaceful solution, then they have to empower that partner.”


Jordan’s King Abdullah II had been working closely with the United States since the summer to prepare the Palestinian Authority for the era that will follow President Mahmoud Abbas, who at 87 is widely seen as ineffective. The Jordanian monarch feared that Hamas was gaining ground in Gaza and in the West Bank and urged change, so that extremists wouldn’t exploit popular frustration. But it didn’t come in time. “Now, we have to think of ‘the day after,’ when the guns go silent,” said one senior Jordanian official.

The fear in the region is that, as Arabs watch civilian casualties, they will feel a rage similar to what Israelis felt last week after the slaughter of civilians by Hamas terrorists. “We need to turn this around,” said Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, in an interview on Thursday. “Any new thinking about the region must recognize that unless we solve the Palestinian problem, lasting peace is an illusion.”


Anwar Gargash, the former foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, is focusing on the need to minimize horrific casualties such as those of the past week. “The UAE has stressed that civilians should not be targeted on either side, no matter how you feel about historic rights or injustice,” he told me on Thursday.


The United States has so far managed the difficult trick of keeping faith with both Israel, whose pain President Biden seemed to share viscerally in his televised remarks this week, and with key Arab allies. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been shuttling through the region this week to meet top officials in Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt.


In Israel on Thursday, Blinken offered a shorthand of his vision of the Middle East, post-conflict: “A region that comes together, integrated, normalized relations among its countries, people working in common purpose to common benefit. More peaceful, more stable.”


Shihabi cites an Arab proverb to illustrate how much depends on good judgment by Israel and the United States in managing this darkening crisis: “The mistake of a smart person is equivalent to the mistakes of 10 idiots.”


As Israel pursues the destruction of Hamas, the coming days will bring more shattering scenes of violence and suffering. Many Arabs would like to see Hamas vanquished, too, but they hope Netanyahu will be wise in how he uses force — with an eye, always, on what will follow.

Categories Accountability, International

Illinois: Parent Groups Decry Governor Pritzker’s Decision to Endorse State Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2023 //
3

The advocacy group Illinois Families for Public Schools were shocked by Governor Pritzker’s decision to extend the state voucher program. They were shocked because of his campaign promises not to support schools that discriminate, and they were shocked by the data showing that discrimination against students with disabilities and LGBT students is widespread among voucher schools. Most voucher schools are religious, and they are free to exclude any student they don’t want.

Illinois Families for Public Schools’ Statement on Gov. Pritzker’s Vow to Sign an Extension of the Illinois Voucher Program

Friday October 20, 2023

Illinois Families for Public Schools is profoundly disappointed at Governor Pritzker’s statement yesterday that he is committed to signing any bill sent to him that would extend the Invest in Kids voucher program.

This commitment contradicts the statements he made when he ran for governor in 2018, including his response to our candidate questionnaire:

“I oppose Bruce Rauner’s backdoor voucher program that was inserted into the school funding reform bill last year. As governor, I will work to repeal that measure.”

Worse yet, it conflicts with the values Pritzker has espoused again and again in his time in office: That Illinois is a welcoming and inclusive state where it is unacceptable to treat individuals differently because of their identity, where justice and equity make Illinois a safe space for all, where we want our young people “to become critical thinkers, exposed to ideas that they disagree with, proud of what our nation has overcome, and thoughtful about what comes next”, where K-12 schools are “liberatory learning environments that welcome and affirm LGBTQ+ young people, especially those how are transgender, nonbinary, intersex, Black, Indigenous, people of color, people with disabilities, and all communities that experience marginalization.”

Since 2018, the Invest in Kids voucher program has diverted more than $250 million in state funds to private schools, 95% of which are religious. Religious schools, even those getting public dollars, can and do legally discriminate against nearly any protected category of student, family or staff:

  • At least 85 schools in the Invest in Kids program, nearly 1 in 5, have anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
  • Only 13% of private schools in the Invest in Kids program last year reported to the Illinois State Board of Education that they served any special education students. The majority of schools in the program are Catholic schools, and four of six Catholic dioceses in Illinois have policies that say schools may refuse to accommodate students with disabilities.
  • Policies that discriminate against pregnant and parenting students, students who have had an abortion, English-language learners, students with disabilities, undocumented students, and more are widespread in Illinois voucher schools as well.

Due to recent Supreme Court decisions, there is essentially no way to have a state voucher program that only funds non-religious schools or alternatively prohibits religious schools from discriminating based on religious belief. As such, there is no way to end discrimination in voucher schools in Illinois short of ending the program altogether.

Extending the voucher program is supported by anti-public good extremist groups, including Betsy DeVos-funded Illinois Federation for Children, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, Awake Illinois, and Moms for Liberty Lake County.

Access to a well-resourced public education is a fundamental right. Illinois public schools are still short billions of dollars in state funding needed to educate their students.

Public dollars must be for used public schools that welcome and educate all children, as well as protect their civil rights. Strong public schools are the foundation of a healthy, pluralistic democracy and are a public good that benefits everyone in Illinois.

It is unacceptable to continue the Invest in Kids program in any form.

Why is Governor Pritzker thinking so small when it comes to our public schools?

###

Contact: 

Cassie Creswell, 773-916-7794, info@ilfps.org

About Illinois Families for Public Schools

Illinois Families for Public Schools (IL-FPS) is a grassroots advocacy group that represents the interests of families who want to defend and improve Illinois public schools. Founded in 2016, IL-FPS’ efforts are key to giving public ed parents and families a real voice in Springfield on issues like standardized testing, student data privacy, school funding and more. IL-FPS connects families and public school supporters in more than 100 IL House districts. More at ilfps.org.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Illinois, Injustice, Vouchers

National Education Policy Center: What Does Research Say About Vouchers?

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2023 //
3

The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado invited scholar Chris Lubienski of Indiana University to review a recent publication of EdChoice (the new name of the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation), which summarizes what voucher advocates believe about the efficacy of vouchers. The publication is titled “The 123s of School Choice: What the Research Says About Private School Choice Programs, 2023 Edition.”

Not surprisingly, EdChoice concludes that vouchers are effective. Lubienski, however, is critical of the studies they include and those they exclude. In short, EdChoice engages in cherry-picking to bolster its cause.

While the report confidently asserts that school choice works, Lubienski says that the authors ignore recent studies that show the opposite to be true. For many students, vouchers are harmful.

If your district or state is under pressure to endorse vouchers, be sure to read this review.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Iowa’s Harsh Turn to the Right Puts Children at Risk

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2023 //
11

In this post, Jan Resseger discusses Marilyn Robinson’s essay about the new cruel politics in Iowa, which appeared in the New York Review of Books. Iowans are “free” to work for less. Their children are “free”to attend religious schools at public expense and “free” to work at dangerous jobs. This new definition of freedom risks a future of harm to children and general ignorance.

Resseger encourages everyone to learn about the Iowa regression:

In Dismantling Iowa, in the November 2, 2023 New York Review of Books, Marilynne Robinson examines Governor Kim Reynolds’ Iowa as the microcosm of the conservative Republican attack on the rights of children and on the promise of K-12 and university education. Robinson is a novelist and retired professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa; she has been an artist-in-residence at a number of other colleges. Her style contrasts with the writing of policy wonks, but she comes to the same conclusions. Her comments are about today’s politics in Iowa but at the same time reflect on the politics of other states like Florida and Wisconsin and Ohio.

Robinson begins with a bit of history—the sudden rightward turn of states once known for their progressivism. She defines a “liberal” education, the foundational principle of progressive colleges established in the nineteenth century by abolitionists across the Midwest: “American higher education is of the kind historically called liberal, that is, suited to free people, intended to make them independent thinkers and capable citizens. ‘Liberal’ comes from the Latin word liber, meaning ‘free.’ Aristotle, a theorist on this subject of incalculable influence until recently, considered education a natural human pleasure, essential to the perfecting of the self, which he says it is in our nature to desire. Obviously when he taught there was no thought of economic utility that would subordinate learning to the purposes of others, to the detriment of individual pleasure or self-perfection. Training in athletics, music, then philosophy were to be valued because they are liberating.” “(W)e are in a period when the value of education is disputed. Regrettably, it has become expensive enough to be regarded by some as a dubious investment of time and money. Its traditional form and substance do not produce workers suited to the present or the future economy—as these are understood and confidently imagined by its critics.”

At the K-12 level, Robinson prefers free public education to school privatization exemplified by Iowa’s new publicly funded private school tuition vouchers. She examines the provision of education through the lens of equality, one of the principles our society has historically endorsed, but which Robinson believes Governor Reynolds and her legislature have sacrificed: “The governor has been very intent on achieving equality as she understands it for Iowa students. She and her legislature have provided a grant of public money for every child who is approved by the state to attend a private school, the money to be released when the child is accepted there… It should be noted that ‘private’ in this context can mean religious in some—or any—sense of the word. The constitutional issues that might arise from this use of public money seem to be of no concern. As for the character of these schools… the implicit promise seems to be that contact with ideas and people some find problematic can be avoided, that they can be and will be excluded on what are called religious grounds. So public money will be used to deprive some children of the kind of education the governor deems beneficial while other children are deprived of the education that comes with encountering a world not yet structured around polarization.”

Will the state protect the rights of students receiving state support for private school? “State governments can intervene in public schools, hector, threaten, and substantially control them. Private schools are too disparate to be the objects of sweeping denunciation…Now that state money will come into such private schools as there are in Iowa—forty-one of the ninety-nine counties don’t have even one—it will be interesting to see if the governor and her like have a comparable interest in interfering with them. These schools can be selective, which is a positive word now, though the honor and glory of public education is that it does not select… An element in all this is the fact that we have let the word ‘public’ seem to mean something like ‘second-rate.’ This is very inimical to the open and generous impulses that make a society democratic.”

Robinson explores some other legislative actions Iowa has undertaken supposedly to provide freedom from regulation for Iowa’s parents and children: “Consistent with this current ‘conservative’ passion for dismantling things, including gun laws… the governor and the legislature of Iowa are stripping away legal limits on child labor… All this is being done in the name of freedom. It is always fair to ask when rights are being claimed whether they impinge on others’ rights. The question certainly arises here. We know that the employment of children does not reliably bring out the best in employers… Migrant children, unprotected or worse, work under sometimes intolerable conditions… (I)t is jarring that Iowa children will… do work previously prohibited as dangerous, at hours previously prohibited as incompatible with their schooling. They are making the most of a new opportunity, according to the governor, to ‘develop their skills in the workforce.’ Not incidentally, they will also be easing the labor shortage from which the state suffers. The minimum wage in Iowa is $7.25. In Illinois it is $13.00, in Missouri $12.00, in South Dakota $10.80. Surely these figures suggest another possible solution to the shortage of workers, a better way to compete with surrounding states than to expose children to the possibility of injury, or to the costly lack of a high school diploma. There is much talk about choice in Iowa, but many children will find that, for them, important possibilities have been precluded.”

What about the culture wars in public schools? “(T)he Iowa governor and her legislature have launched a campaign to embarrass the public grade schools. Of course there is now great perturbation about what can or cannot be included in their libraries. This intrusion of the state government on traditionally more or less autonomous communities has the tenor of a moral crackdown. New laws have been enacted to bring unruly librarians to heel. Educational standards for new librarians have been lowered. The governor says, of course, that the legislation ‘sets boundaries to protect Iowa’s children from woke indoctrination.’ It is as if parents zipping up their five-year-old’s jacket feel a qualm of fear because of potential classroom exposure to sinister ideas, not because their state now allows permitless concealed and open carry.”

Please open the link to finish the article.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Cruelty, Education Industry, Freedom, Ignorance, Iowa

Florida: Health Screenings Decline Sharply Due to Parental Rights Law

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2023 //
8

Florida is not a healthy place for children, thanks to Governor Ron DeSantis. In his zeal to show that he favors parents’ rights more than anyone else. Children in Florida used to be checked for vision, hearing, and other health issues as a matter of course, but no longer. Before they may be screened, a parent must provide written authorization.

Leslie Postal and Caroline Catherman write in The Orlando Sentinel:

Florida’s public schools historically have checked thousands of students a year for vision, hearing and growth problems, hoping to catch early health issues that can impede academic achievement.

But the number of students in Orange and Seminole public schools screened last year plummeted after Florida passed a new law that requires parents to give written permission for their children to take part in school-based health screenings, data from the state and the school districts show.

Orange County Public Schools, for example, screened nearly 55,000 students for vision problems during the 2021-22 school year but fewer than 14,000 students during the 2022-23 school year, a drop of nearly 75%.

Seminole County Public Schools screened about 7,100 students for vision problems last school year down from nearly 18,000 the prior year…

Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law — dubbed “don’t say gay” by critics because it limits instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity — was first adopted in 2021 and then expanded in 2022 and 2023.

It requires parents to provide written consent for medical procedures, including school health screenings and clinic treatments such as ice packs and bandages. It also means schools must request written parent permission for students to be called nicknames, attend school pep rallies or join after-school clubs.

DeSantis is a danger to public health.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Health, Parents

Oklahoma: Founders of Epic Charter Schools Charged with More Crimes

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2023 //
4

Oklahoma has a major charter scandal on its hands, which has not dampened the enthusiasm of the Republican Governor, legislators, and state superintendent for charters and vouchers.

EPIC Charter Schools opened in Oklahoma in 2011. It was the state’s first online school and was hailed for its innovative delivery of education. As early as 2013, authorities suspected financial irregularities. Not until 2019 did the public learned that EPIC was under state investigation for embezzling money and inflating its enrollment. The founders tried to block the investigation by insisting that they were a private business and could not be audited. The company collected tuition from the state and retained 10% of its revenues. The state auditor estimated that EPIC’s founders inappropriately diverted $22 million.

But now the founders face new charges of financial crimes.

Founders of Epic Charter Schools are facing new charges of money laundering and presenting false claims to the state, bringing the total number of charges to 15.

Epic co-founders David Chaney and Ben Harris and Chief Financial Officer Josh Brock, were arrested and charged with a list of felonies in June 2022. Charges included racketeering, embezzlement of state funds, and obtaining money by false pretense.

The amount of diverted money so far totals $30 million. Republicans complain about public schools, but no district superintendent or principal has ever been accused of massive crimes like those of EPIC. Let it be noted that virtual charter schools have been the source of the biggest financial crimes.

In Indiana, state officials sued two defunct virtual charters for defrauding the state of $154 million.

In California, the A3 online charter chain was charged with defrauding the state of $400 million.

Sean McManus of Australia, along with Jason Schrock of Long Beach, led a statewide charter school scheme from 2016 to 2019 in which they used a network of mostly online charter schools to defraud the state of approximately $400 million and used $50 million of that amount for personal use. They did so by falsely enrolling students and manipulating enrollment and attendance reporting across their schools to get more money per student than schools are supposed to, prosecutors said.

In Ohio, the state paid the owner of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) about $1 billion, despite its abysmal graduation rates and scores. When the state auditor demanded repayment of $60 million for phantom students, ECOT declared bankruptcy.

In Pennsylvania, the founder of the Pennsylvania CyberCharter School was sentenced to 20 months in prison for pocketing $8 million.

No matter how many frauds are committed by Cybercharters, they do not lose their luster. Why? Usually, they give generous political contributions.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Justice, Scandal, Virtual Charter Schools

Nancy Flanagan: Students Should Not Be Expected to Teach Themselves

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2023 //
24

On her blog called “Teacher in a Strange Land,” Nancy Flanagan describes the heartwarming story of a high school marching band that carried on after their teacher quit and explains why the story is not heartwarming after all.

She writes:

It’s a sad but kind of sweet story:a little rural school (282 students, total, K-12) in West Virginia has a small but mighty high school band, enthusiastically supporting the home team on Friday nights. Over the summer the band director leaves the district. First day of school, the principal shows up in the band room, offering the 38 band members the option of dropping out and taking another class. Ten of the students, however, decide to stay and teach themselves (with the principal’s permission, noting that he had already set money aside in the budget for a band program).

The rest of the story, in the Washington Post, praises the students for making their own rules, playing the fight song and chants at games, and generally keeping the ball rolling, with two bona fide teachers serving as advisors.

The story dedicates half a sentence– West Virginia is experiencing a certified teacher shortage like many states nationwide—to the real, underlying problem. The headline is particularly annoying: A high school band teacher quit. Now, the students teach, direct themselves.

Imagine a first-grade classroom, with a dozen adorable, willing children. Their teacher quits, in August. So the principal decides that a couple of adult wranglers can manage them, because she’s set aside money for new reading books and computers, and because they all learned their letters in kindergarten. Maybe a new teacher will turn up. In the meantime, they can be kept busy doing what they did last year.

Perhaps you’re thinking that the national shortage of teachers is limited to certain sub-specialties, or geographic regions, that no responsible school leader would leave a group of six-year-olds to “teach themselves.” If so, you ought to take a look at the percentages of students, especially in charter schools, with unqualified substitutes. There are uncertified subs everywhere, in all subjects, k-12, and unfilled jobs in prestigious private and suburban schools, two months after the start of the school year.

The loyal-to-band kids in West Virginia do not surprise me. Band students, in my thoroughly biased opinion, are THE BEST, and these kids appear to be like band kids everywhere—self-starters, and leaders. Good kids.There are, of course, good kids in all grades and disciplines, in every school, those who can be trusted to carry on when the chips are down.

But here’s the thing that doesn’t get mentioned in this feel-good story: the band kids in WV learned how to do the things they have done—writing rules, running rehearsals, playing tunes—from a teacher. By all indications, a pretty good teacher, someone who instilled a spirit of cooperation that led students to try to balance out the band sound by switching instruments.

Once football season is over, who will be moving their music education forward, teaching them the new skills and music they deserve? Who is preparing younger students there, who will take become the high school musicians when these amazing kids graduates? There is no building process, no pipeline of activities that lead to cycles of growth. Without a teacher, this program is headed toward a dead end.

Please open the link and finish the story.

Categories Accountability, Arts Education, Creativity, Disruption, Students, Teacher Shortage, West Virginia

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters Is a Shameless Liar

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2023 //
3

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, is appalled by the spread of a culture of lying. The state’s superintendent of schools is a textbook example of a man who lies openly, repeatedly, and without shame.

As the New York Times’ Peter Wehner wrote, “The first hours of the Trump presidency began with a demonstrable lie, when Mr. Trump, his press secretary and his closest advisers lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, photographic evidence to the contrary be damned.” Since then, state and federal officeholders, as well as Trump voters have become shockingly comfortable with “alt facts,” but as cases are heading to multiple courts, brazen falsehoods which have been portrayed as political narratives that are legal, even when they are lies, will become violations of law. Oklahoma’s State School Superintendent Ryan Walters is likely to become one case study in such transitions.

Walters is facing federal lawsuits for wrongly firing Department of Education employees. Another employee, the director of grant development, disproved Walters’ claim that, ‘We have applied for millions and millions of grants since I took office.’” She explained, “We have not applied for one single grant. That was a blatant lie.”

The Oklahoma Ethics Commission fined Walters $7,800 for filing late campaign reports 14 times. Most importantly, the state auditor alleged that $30 million of COVID-19 relief money was misspent by Walters’ department, and the “Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said he won’t rule out criminal charges against some state leaders after a report alleged misspending of COVID-19 relief money.”

Moreover, Walters’ promotion of lies (that presumably were not illegal) by Libs of TikTokand other rightwingers likely contributed to bomb threats to Tulsa-area public schools. As the top Democrat in the Oklahoma Senate said, she supports her House colleagues’ request for an impeachment investigation because, “These threats are a direct result of reckless rhetoric and must be addressed.”

Then, as KGOU reported, “Walters put TPS (Tulsa Public Schools) in the national spotlight for participating in the Chinese language program Confucius Classrooms, which has indirect ties to the Chinese government.

It’s hard to understand how anyone could believe Walter’s narratives, especially Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma City, who “is one of 18 members of the U.S. Senate who have called for an investigation into educational ‘funds from hostile foreign governments flowing into America’s K-12 schools.’” Lankford asserted “The CCP is the greatest threat to America’s security today,” and “The CCP’s involvement in the K-12 education system further demonstrates how far the Chinese government is willing go to expand its influence and promote its authoritarian agenda.”

But Walters’ recent stunt, testifying before Congress, should prove that he is willing to tell virtually any lie, defend it, and at least temporarily, convince some or many (or most?) Republican legislators to believe it. As the Oklahoman reports:

“Walters has often equated the nonprofit with the Chinese Communist Party and accused Confucius Classrooms of being part of a propaganda campaign by the party.

“He and the state Board of Education voted in August to require all Oklahoma school districts to report any foreign funding. Walters urged Congress and the state Legislature to prohibit schools from receiving funds from hostile foreign governments.”

Then, he testified to Congress, “We must protect our kids and not allow a hostile foreign government to indoctrinate them.”

In fact, as the Tulsa Public Schools replied:

All costs that related to the Confucius Classroom Coordination Office amounted to $6,240 over the 2022-23 school year. That included the price of the teacher’s training and travel, classroom supplies, cultural supplies and food for students.

The superintendent and founder of the Texas charter school which trained the Tulsa teacher, “Eddie Conger, drove to Oklahoma City to reiterate that to Walters and the Oklahoma State Board of Education during the board’s meeting Thursday. ‘I just want you to know that I’ve not sent any money to Tulsa Public Schools, not one dime,’ Conger said while speaking in public comment at the meeting. ‘I would have, but they said no.’”

Then, as reported by the Oklahoman, Walters testified to Congress on Sept. 19 that the ‘district maintains an active connection with the [Chinese government] through a program called the Confucius Classroom.’ But TPS says it ended its contract nearly a month before, on Aug. 25.”

It was reported by State Impact that according to:

Email correspondence obtained by State Impact between TPS and the State Department of Education, the district made the department aware of the contract termination the week before Walters testified otherwise, on Sept. 15. The department had asked for the information on Sept. 7.

Once upon a time we believed “A lie is a lie.” It’s been four decades since Ronald Reagan proclaimed, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Since then, the Rightwing has been extremely successful in undermining public services by telling big lies, arguing that what we now call “alt facts” may not be true but that’s just politics.

But as rightwingers ranging from hate mongers like Ryan Walters to Trump have been willing to speak any falsehood they want, they seem to be forgetting the legal danger of spinning their tales under oath. As long as they keep repeating false claims, it seems inevitable to me that their habits of repeating concrete and documented lies will backfire in court.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Character, Fake News, Lies, Oklahoma
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »