The Austin Independent School Board has recently been divided by the hard-driving actions of its Broad-trained superintendent.
Angered by the superintendent’s decision to hand a public school over to the IDEA charter chain earlier this year, community groups organized and elected four new members to the board.
The new members are pledged to listen to parents and communities before initiating new policies.
Robert Valiant has launched a website to gather information about who funded campaigns for charters and vouchers and against teachers, unions and public education.
If you have links to newspaper articles or other reliable sources, please post them to this website.
I hope that a law firm or investigative journalist will find out where Rhee collected money and which races she supported. She certainly influenced the legislature in Tennessee, where she helped Republucans gain a super-majority, enabling her ex-husband TFA State Commissioner Kevin Huffman to impose the full rightwing reform agenda.
Sharon Higgins of Oakland, California, is a hero of public education.
As a parent of children in the local public schools, Higgins was upset by the Broad Foundation’s takeover of her district. One Broad superintendent after another made decisions without consulting anyone who lived in the community.
Then, with the encouragement of the Broad superintendents, charter schools began opening, drawing students and funding away from the public schools.
Sharon Higgins did what she could. She started a website to report on what was happening. One part of her website is devoted to following the mis-steps of Broad superintendents. Another part of her website catalogues “charter school scandals.”
She has taken great interest in the Gulen charter movement.
She has no funding. She is a public school parent who wants the public to know what is happening and to know who is making decisions that affect their lives and their children without their knowledge or consent.
She is a hero of public education.
Anthony Cody has a stunning article this week about what is happening in Louisiana.
The expansion of vouchers and charters will facilitate the re-segregation of the schools, he predicts.
Governor Jindal eliminated all funding for public libraries in his new budget.
The TFA Commissioner has put a young and unqualified TFA alum in charge of teacher evaluation.
The freight train of reform (aka privatization) is running full blast in that unfortunate state.
Arne Duncan will be there any day now to congratulate Governor Jindal on the progress made in “reforming” the schools.
And lots of thanks to the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and Teach for America for turning the clock back to 1950 and calling it “reform.”
Parent Revolution, the organization handsomely funded by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation, has finally gotten a charter conversion in the state of California, nearly two years after the law was passed.
Some victory: In a school with 600 plus students and 400 families, only 286 parents voted for the charter; when some changed their mind and tried to rescind their vote, they were told by a judge that they could not take their signature off the petition.
Only those who supported the charter were allowed to vote on which charter operator would run the new charter. That reduced the number of eligible voters to180.
Of the 180 who were eligible, only 53 voted on which operator would win control of their public school.
The winning operator received a grand total of 50 votes. That is 1/8 of the parents in the school. That is less than 15% of the parents in the school.
In the linked article above, no mention is made of the fact that the Adelanto school district had a charter that was closed last year because its operators engaged in funny business with the public’s money.
There are few investigative writers in education journalism these days. It is disturbingly rare to find writers who look behind the press releases, the hype and spin.
One place that cries out for investigative journalism is Louisiana, the locus for the most extreme privatization schemes. The governor is now imposing the New Orleans model on the entire state, and many hold up New Orleans as a national model. That means wiping out public education.
So here is an excellent article that does what journalists are supposed to do: Matthew Cunningham follows the money. He looks closely at the money flowing into the state school board races. In 2007, the total spent was about a quarter million dollars. In 2011, it was multiplied by ten times, to $2.6 million. Read the article to see where the money came from.
An English teacher in Rhode Island writes:
I’m a great teacher. I’m waiting for the opportunity, at the ripe old age of 49, to switch careers. My heart is broken. I am deluged with PLC’s, SLO’s, dog and pony lesson plans that go nowhere, and impossible observations that require me to make my students lie through their teeth. I’m tired of the “idiocracy” that states things like “the SAT is an achievement test” and that “all children can learn” without providing qualifiers and quantifiers. I am waiting for the hammer to fall when I get caught not teaching the new Common Core Curriculum because I’m ignoring it and teaching to the curriculum I created that works VERY well. If I have to learn one new acronym I’m going to eat a bullet. Rhode Island is being run into the ground by a Broad Academy robot. Teachers in my district are running scared, the administrators are capos, the union has been neutered, and the school board couldn’t find it’s hiney with a flashlight. All of this “educational reform” is just making us chase our tails; it’s not letting us teach.
The new Broad leader in Dallas has hired a communications director and a PR team to craft a list of “power words” and “power phrases” that teachers and principals are supposed to use when communicating with the public.
Dallas principals and teachers: Please take care to say what you are told. Memorize your lines. If you say the wrong thing, you are in trouble. Let the superintendent and his PR team do your thinking for you. Just do as you are told.
Here is a sample:
If a parent asks about the new administration, a principal might reply, “District leaders are student-focused in their decision making.”
Or: “The superintendent’s plan brings stability and a clear direction to the district.”
Or perhaps: “Destination 2020 will take five to eight years to achieve, but we will make significant progress in one year.”
Or even: “We are all about improving student performance and the quality of instruction; that is the expectation.”
Michigan created an emergency district for schools with low test scores, administered by Broad Academy alum John Covington, who decamped from Kansas City after making no improvements there.
The emergency district is about to become the largest district in the state. By adding low-perming districts from across the state, the EAA will have 46,000 students.
The salient feature of the new district is that it is non-union. The assumption of the conservative Rick Snyder administration and the EAA is that unions are the major obstacle to improvement.
The US Department of Education just gave the district a grant to install performance pay in its schools. Never mind that performance pay promotes teaching to the test and has never worked. Why is the Obama administration encouraging an attack on unions?
The Broad-trained superintendent decided to go all-digital in Huntsville, Alabama.
So he purchased 22,000 laptops and a Pearson online curriculum.
The going has been rough.
Students, teachers and parents are complaining about glitches. A student says that it takes her longer to do her homework because the computer loads slowly. When she saves, her answers disappear. A father complains his son watches pornography, despite the filters. Teachers say the Pearson curriculum is the problem.
Maybe schools will one day be all-digital. But first fix the bugs.
