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Florida: The Graveyard of American Public Education

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2019 //
36

 

Florida has the worst education policies of any state in the nation, and it is about to get even more destructive, more ignorant, more backward.

Read this alarming article and remember that Betsy DeVos points to Florida as a model.

A model, yes. A model of how religious extremists, rightwing ideologues, and uneducated political hacks can destroy public education, drive away teachers, and fund “schools” that indoctrinate students in religious dogma.

The post was written by Kathleen Oropeza Parent Activist in Orlando.

Jeb Bush started the descent into the swamp of ignorance. Now the torch is carried by Ron DeSantis, who wants to arm teachers, expand the state’s voucher programs to include middle-class families with income up to $100,000 a year, reduce the power of local school boards so they can’t block new charter schools, and undercut public schools in every way their little minds can imagine.

Oropeza writes:

“Pay attention, because what happens in Florida usually shows up in the thirty or so other states under GOP control.

“Step one for DeSantis was to stock the State Supreme Court with three conservative judges. Next, DeSantis charged the Board of Education with appointing Richard Corcoran as State Commissioner of Education. As the immediate past Speaker of the Florida House, Corcoran was the architect of the “school choice” expansions logrolled into multi-subject, opaque omnibus bills that became law over the past several sessions.

“DeSantis, a known Trump ally, made it clear in his proposed education visionto legislators before the the start of the 2019 session that they should “send me a bill” for a new private school tax-funded voucher program. The DeSantis voucher became SB 7070/HB 7075, the radical Family Empowerment Scholarship Program. Funded through the Florida Education Finance Program from property taxes, this is a dangerous co-mingling of the already thin dollars designated for Florida’s district public schools.

“In a state that prizes high-stakes accountability for its public-school students, these vouchers go to unregulated private schools that maintain their right to discriminate against certain students, charge more than the voucher for tuition, teach extreme curriculums, and are not required to ensure student safety or hire certified teachers. This dramatic expansion of private religious school vouchers, once meant for low-income recipients, is morphing into a middle-class entitlement program for families of four making close to $100,000 a year….

”On teacher pay, DeSantis wants to double down on the awful policy of providing bonuses instead of raises via SB7070. Teacher pay in Florida ranks 45th in the nation: $47,858 on average. The state is struggling with a massive teacher shortage projected by the Florida Department of Education to reach 10,000 vacancies by the start of next school year.”

As Oropeza points out, no one ever bought a home with a one-time bonus (except on Wall Street).

”DeSantis supporter Representative Kim Daniels continues to insert religioninto public schools this session by sponsoring HB 195. This is model legislation from ALEC-like Christian Nationalist Project Blitz. Daniels, a Democrat, passed a 2018 law requiring “In God We Trust” to be displayed in public schools. This year Daniels is pushing Blitz legislation requiring public high schools to offer a religion class that teaches only Christianity.”

Another bill allows schools to withdraw any book that is “morally offensive,” such as Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes.” Expect to see demands to remove a lot of “morally offensive” classics by authors such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, and Mark Twain.

“Another bill, HB 330 by Senator Dennis Baxley, the original sponsor of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, seeks to revise curriculum standards and force public schools to teach “science” theories such as creationism and alternate views to subjects such as climate change.”

Florida is indeed a model: a model of kakistocracy.

Look it up.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

New Mexico: New Democratic Governor Eliminates A-F School Grades

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2019 //
56

One of Jeb Bush’s signature initiatives–and possibly the stupidest–was giving schools letter grades of A-F.

Schools are complex institutions with many individuals engaged in their work, some doing better jobs than others, some essential, some not. No complex institution should be graded A-F. No individual child should be graded with a single letter, A-F. Imagine if your child came home with a report card that held only one letter, A-F. As a parent, you would be outraged. You would know that she was good at this, not so good at that, that there were many ways of describing her efforts and abilities and skills and work. How dumb it is to grade an entire school with a single letter.

Yet the Florida model of testing, accountability, choice, punishments, and rewards goes wherever there are rightwing zealots who want to destroy public education.

New Mexico had the misfortune of electing a Republican governor who wanted to be just like Jeb. She hired a non-educator, Hannah Skandera, as the state’s commissioner of education (Skandera had worked for Jeb), and she tried to import the Florida model. After seven years, Skandera left, and New Mexico saw zero improvement in education by any metric.

Fortunately Susana Martinez was replaced by a Democratic governor, former Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham, who has been removing every trace of the Florida model. In January she eliminated the state’s disastrous teacher-evaluation system and the hated PARCC tests, which had been imposed by Martinez’s executive orders.

Yesterday, with the stroke of a pen, she repealed the state’s A-F grading system. The state’s Public Education Department must now devise a new accountability system to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. The bill now under consideration in the legislature calls for a “dashboard showing how each of the state’s public schools are faring in terms of graduation rates, student proficiency outcomes, reliance on federal Title I funds and the progress of English-language learners.”

Of course, this too appeals to the idea that parents are consumers, not citizens bound to work together for better public schools.

New Mexico has extremely high levels of child poverty, the second worst in the nation after Mississippi. Standards, accountability, and choice doesn’t cure that. It also ranks at the very bottom of NAEP, close to the other poor states. The Florida Model pretends that poverty doesn’t matter. Skandera’s failure proved that it does.

Here is the system that is being dropped:

The state currently grades schools on a complex range of measures, including graduation rates, student performance on standardized tests, student attendance and parental involvement in schools. Advocates believe these grades provide a clear picture of how schools are performing and encourage communities to help struggling schools. Critics say the formula is so confusing that the grades are of little use. They also complain that the system relies too much on standardized test scores.

Several years ago, a group of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists said even they struggled to make sense of the complicated grading system.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Common Core, Education Industry, Florida, New Mexico, Teacher Evaluations

John Thompson: Reformers Are Shifting Tactics, Not Goals

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2018 //
28

John Thompson, retired teacher in Oklahoma, reads the Reformer press closely. He notices a change in tactics, a stubborn refusal to acknowledge failure, and a determination to adhere to privatization of public schools by any means necessary. He appreciates the journalism of Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat for reporting what the Reformers say to one another. They have not backed away one iota from their rock-solid belief that private management is the sure cure for low test scores, despite the failure of the Tennessee Achievement School District and the Michigan Education Achievement Authority and every similar program that claimed to bring in “high-performing seats” (one of my favorite Reformer phrases, as though the seats themselves are magical).

Stop the presses!

Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd has listened and it is rethinking its entire campaign to privatize public schools! The corporate reform group that helped give us Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education is acknowledging the harm done by test-driven, competition-driven reform. ExcelinEd is rethinking standardized testing, rapid transformative change and even the Billionaires Boys Club’s new panacea – “personalized learning!” Maybe the next step will be apologies for pushing the mass firing of teachers and Common Core!

Oops! ExcelinEd isn’t facing up to the failure of its education agenda. It is merely shifting its public relations spin!

Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum is illuminating efforts by ExcelinEd, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and other corporate reformers’ new campaign to “drum up support.” He explains how a new “messaging document” offers “a revealing look at how some backers are trying to sell their approach.”

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/04/13/dont-just-talk-about-tech-how-personalized-learning-advocates-are-honing-their-messaging/

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/12/19/common-core-personalized-learning-backlash/
Although ExcelinEd and others refuse to listen to educators and researchers on why their education experiments failed, the authors of their new document, Karla Phillips and Amy Jenkins, “have read the angry op-eds and watched tension-filled board meetings.” So they are rebranding personalized learning and other reforms as things that patrons don’t need to fear.

For instance, Barnum explains, “the report suggests telling parents that ‘personalized learning provides opportunities for increased interaction with teachers and peers and encourages higher levels of student engagement.’” He then fact checks that new talking point:

If anything, though, existing research suggests that certain personalized learning programs reduce student engagement. In a 2015 study by RAND, commissioned by the Gates Foundation, students in schools that have embraced technology-based personalized learning were somewhat less likely to say they felt engaged in and enjoyed school work. A 2017 RAND study found that students were 9 percentage points less likely to say there was an adult at school who knew them well.

Follow the link to the messaging document and it is clear that these ideology-driven corporate reformers are not stepping back from bubble-in accountability and other top-down mandates. They warn their troops, however, that the mere mention of testing drives down interest in personalized learning.

Click to access Communicating-Personalized-Learning-to-Families-and-Stakeholders.pdf

Real world, personalized learning is producing questionable results. It is clear that personalized learning can benefit some students, as it harms others. Underfunded schools and overworked teachers can’t magically implement the rushed plans for online learning and offer real, meaningful, individualized lessons. Often digital instruction devolves into dummied-down efforts to “pass kids on.” The dangers of too much screen time and the gathering of individual data by corporations are well documented.

So, the spin consultants urge caution when “answering these questions without fueling opposition.” Corporate reformers are not necessarily backing off from their gamble in hurriedly imposing radical transformations. Instead, they realize that, “In attempting to generate excitement, we inadvertently scared the public,” So, reformers must “steer clear” of “talking up the potential for dramatic changes to the way school looks and feels.” They are also offering “preferred messaging” to district leaders for their staff and principals.

If anyone believes that the Billionaires Boys Club’s new messaging means they have really listened, they merely need to click on ExcelinEd’s web site. For instance, they haven’t even rejected the failed turnaround strategies that they and the federal government imposed on high-poverty schools. They still promote agendas like the mass replacement of staff in district schools. Then their new report, School Interventions Under ESSA: Harnessing High-Performing Charter Operators, emphasizes:

In districts where schools fail to turn around – or have already been failing for multiple years – states should consider the one option that can give students languishing in low-performing schools a higher quality option: bringing in high-performing charter schools.

https://www.excelined.org/edfly-blog/askexcelined-how-can-states-address-the-challenges-of-school-turnaround/

It must be emphasized that this new advice on a more personal message for personalized learning and the kinder and gentler presentation of reward and punish policies does not mean that corporate reformers have checked their hubris.

They still plan to “go big, be bold, and be impatient.”

http://pie-network.org/article/go-big-be-bold-be-impatient-reflections-from-2018-excelined-summit/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=GameChangers12.14.18

Barnum has been good at shining a light on the ways that reformers are reworking their message, but these social engineers are trying to improve their PR, and hiding their antagonism towards educators. The Fordham Institute has been especially open about their movement’s “internecine feud,” that some call “the end of education policy,” while not hiding their anger towards practitioners. For instance, Dale Chu wrote:

If 2018 marks the end of education policy, whatever comes next has gotten off to an inauspicious start for reformers and stand-patters alike.

Follow his second link to read Robin Lake’s full twitter statement which concludes:

There are certainly “stand-patters”: people who don’t believe any structural/policy changes are needed in public ed. I have little to discuss w them.

https://edexcellence.net/articles/an-internecine-feud-in-the-schoolyard

And please don’t forget the ways that Chu characterizes those of us who oppose their theories based on research and our classroom experiences. He labels us as “forces of resistance,” “their ilk,” those whose actions are inimical to improvement, and “hyperbolic at best.” He praises Howard Fuller’s “prescient warning” that “too many reformers had mistaken what was a street fight for a college debate.”

As the corporate reformers air their dirty laundry, the observations of conservative Little “r” reformer Rick Hess are especially illustrative. Hess spoofs the Big “R” Reformers’ new message, “we’re ready to listen.” He explains why this new tactic “feels like performance art.”

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2018/12/why_education_policys_big_listening_moment_doesnt_involve_much_listening.html

Hess explains, “If one is emotionally invested in a bold sweeping agenda to ‘fix’ American education, it’s tough to regard disagreement, dissent or skepticism as anything other than a moral failure.” He concludes, “for those invested in Big ‘R’ Reform, listening is mostly a stratagem.” It is a self-reinforcing insular dogma.” Changing their mindset is “quite a challenge when the mantra is ‘go big, be bold, and be impatient.’”

In Oklahoma, this pattern is being displayed by Epic Charter, as well as ExcelinEd, but the same story is being told across the nation.

Student needs matter more than school delivery model.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization

John Thompson: Oklahoma Republicans Long to Copy Florida’s Mediocrity

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2018 //
1

Betsy DeVos says that Florida is a national model.

She loves Florida because she invested millions of dollars imposing vouchers and charters, despite the provision of the State Constitution that requires a uniform system of common schools.

Actually, Florida’s performance on NAEP is mediocre. Its fourth grade scores are swell because low-scoring third-graders are not allowed to enter fourth grade. A really neat trick! Pay attention to eighth grade scores: In eighth grade math, students in Florida are well below the national average. In eighth grade reading, Florida is right at the national average. Nothing impressive about Florida, other than gaming the fourth grade scores by holding back third-graders with low scores. By eighth grade, the game is over, and the results are not impressive.

Thompson says that Oklahoma lawmakers are in love with a libertarian study claiming that spending less produces the best education! Is that why the elites spend $50,000 a year or more on tuition to get lower class sizes and experienced teachers? The only time that money doesn’t matter is if you have a lot of it.

Despite Florida being average on NAEP, Oklahoma legislators hope to be just like Florida!

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, brings us up to date:

Oklahoma edu-politics remains in the spotlight after the 2018 election and it illustrates plenty of national issues. Despite many electoral gains, educators must worry about the state’s inexperienced governor, Kevin Stitt. It sometimes seems like Jeb Bush’s “astroturf” think tank, ExcelinEd, has found a second home in our State Capitol. Will the governor believe their spin?

Even worse, as reported by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, Republicans are being pressured by their own party to even “‘abolish public education, which is not a proper role of government, and allow the free market to determine pay and funding, eliminating the annual heartache we experience over this subject.’” The claim is that the state can reduce “‘its dependence on the tax structure by funding it through such means as sponsorships, advertising, endowments, tuition fees, etc.’”

https://www.excelined.org/team/matthew-h-joseph-2/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/11/27/republican-party-an-oklahoma-county-makes-clear-its-opposition-public-education/?utm_term=.e7b666b89e01

More importantly, the Oklahoman newspaper recently editorialized that our state should learn from the Reason Foundation, and from Florida, which supposedly is “the state achieving the greatest efficacy in education spending.” The editorial mistakenly claimed that the reforms Oklahoma implemented in 2011 and 2012, but that have been watered down in our state, have worked in Florida. The newspaper concludes, “Instead of backing off, Reason’s education rankings indicate Oklahoma lawmakers should double down” on their accountability-driven, choice-driven reforms.

https://newsok.com/article/5616294/education-report-merits-review-in-spending-debate

In fact, Florida’s 3rd grade retention policy has not been shown to do more good than harm to students, although “if you hold back low-performing third graders, the fourth grade scores the next year will appear to jump.” Even charter supporters such as those at CREDO acknowledge that Florida’s charters have not increased student outcomes, largely resulting in a decline of student performance. And the state’s online for-profit charters have a three-year attrition rate of 99 percent, and have driven down student performance gains by as much as -.46 std, which is approaching the loss of a year of learning, per year.

Click to access TT_Mathis_BushEd.pdf

http://credo.stanford.edu/reading-state-charter-impacts/

Click to access Online%20Charter%20Study%20Final.pdf

Reason’s “Find Everything You Know about State Education Rankings Is Wrong,” by Stan J. Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly claims to be the antithesis of “the self-serving interests of education functionaries who only gain from higher spending.” If the tone of the article doesn’t set off alarms, a review of its methodology shows its conclusions were preordained by a journal devoted to “Free Markets.” These sorts of papers serve as props for advancing the claim that money doesn’t matter.

https://reason.com/archives/2018/10/07/everything-you-know-about-stat

As Rutgers’ Bruce Baker explains, Reason’s authors “confidently assert that the higher performing states are those with a) weaker teachers’ unions and b) more children in charter schools.” However, they overlook a vast body of research to the contrary. They also ignore economic status and weight racial groups as equal factors in a way that is “specious at best,” and produced findings that “would only mislead policymakers.”

https://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2018/11/rankings

Student performance is determined more by the kids’ zip code than by the classroom. So why didn’t Reason and its paper attempt to control for economic disadvantage?

https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-life-outside-of-a-school-affects-student-performance-in-school/

Reason uses race as a substitute for economic advantage and disadvantage in a manner that is not only methodologically indefensible; it is likely a tactic which predetermines the ideology-driven conclusion that Florida and other border states (that oppose unions and support choice) are more efficient. I will just cite Hispanic student data as one example why their analysis is invalid.

The term “Hispanic” includes a wide range of subgroups, longterm citizens who are more likely to be affluent than the recent immigrants to places like Oklahoma City; Cubans who came to Florida a half century ago, as well as new arrivals from Mexico and Central America; and high-performing “bilingual” students as well as more costly to educate English Language Learners.

Before trusting the use of racial categories as a proxy for economic status, We should remember that Hispanics in Florida earn a median income which is $1,200 per person more than their counterparts in Oklahoma. The poverty rate for Oklahoma Hispanics who are17 years and younger is about 20 percent higher than Florida’s. Oklahoma Hispanic families are more likely to lack health insurance, with the big difference being that the majority of foreign-born Oklahoma Hispanics lack coverage.

http://www.pewhispanic.org/states/state/fl/

http://www.pewhispanic.org/states/state/ok/

Similarly, the percentage of black Oklahoma children who live in poor households is about 17 percent higher than black children in Florida. Oklahoma youth also are first in the nation in surviving four Adverse Childhood Experiences, and they are growing up in a state that is near the bottom of most child welfare metrics. In other words, the use of race as a substitute for economic advantage and disadvantage is one example why the Reason methodology gives a misleading picture of what it would cost to educate all children.

I must emphasize – contrary to the Reason ideology – that the additional costs to achieve equity are worth it. Education is so important that advocates, conservative, moderate or liberal, should also invest in research that meets high scholarly standards.

New Oklahoma decision-makers should expect plenty of cheap and easy, evidence-free proposals by noneducators. For instance, the legislative interim session was briefed by the Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce’s Oklahoma Achieves. It said that high-challenge schools should learn from systems that have lower per student spending but higher student outcomes. So, the inner city OKCPS schools merely need to emulate the best practices of Deer Creek, Oakdale, and other small, rich, exurban systems!?!?

https://public.tableau.com/profile/okachieves#!/vizhome/OklahomaSchoolDistrictSpendingComparedtoStudentOutcomes/SDSpendingComparedtoStudentOutcomes
I would also urge our new legislators and governor to look deeply into the Rutgers Education Law Center’s estimates of what it would take to bring our students to the national average in student performance. Like Florida almost does, Oklahoma spends enough to bring our most affluent quintile of students to the national average, but we would need to invest an additional $6,600 per student to provide equity for our poorest kids. (Florida would only need an additional $4,489 to do so.)

https://public.tableau.com/views/NCMWebsite/NECM?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&publish=yes&:showVizHome=no

https://public.tableau.com/views/NCMWebsite/NECM?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&publish=yes&:showVizHome=no

I also hope they will read Bruce Baker’s new book, Educational Inequity and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students. The renowned scholar, Helen Ladd, writes that Baker “draws on his many years of research to destroy the myth that money in education doesn’t matter, and convincingly argues that equitable and adequate funding are prerequisites for an effective education system.”

http://hepg.org/hep-home/books/educational-inequality-and-school-finance

The new legislators and governor will face a steep learning curve, and the effort necessary to craft policies based on real science will be intimidating. But as new educators used to be taught, for every complex problem, there is a solution that is quick, simple, and wrong.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Florida, Funding, Oklahoma

Jeb Bush’s Ed Reform Summit: Where School Choice Reigns

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2018 //
14

Jeb Bush, the puppet-master of corporate reform, is convening his annual “summit” of people who support his love of charters and vouchers. The queen of school choice is the superstar of the event: Eva Moskowitz.

Peruse the agenda to see who supports Jeb Bush’s efforts to privatize public education.

The registration fee is $649, enough to keep out the riffraff.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Testing, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Letter Grades for Schools Are a Measure of the Families’ Income Level

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2018 //
9

Jeb Bush had this big idea about how to hold schools accountable: Give them a letter grade based mostly on their test scores. The schools with high grades can bask in their success, and the schools with low grades will get a warning, maybe some extra help, but if they fail to get higher grades, they can be closed and turned over to charter operators. Nice way to combine testing and privatization.

But, it turns out that the test scores mostly measure family income, so the letter grades measure family income. Instead of showing whether a school is high quality or low quality, the grades simply reflect the wealth or poverty of the community. But you knew that without giving a test.

Mercedes Schneider observes the same phenomenon in the latest letter grades in Louisiana. Then she looks around and finds that every state that uses letter grading of schools is getting the same results.

If you already know the income level of the community, you could just skip the tests and hand out the grades. Rich neighborhoods get an A, and poor neighborhoods get an F.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Louisiana

New Hampshire: Jeb Bush Promotes Vouchers But Too Late, ‘Cuz Democrats Swept the Legislature!

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2018 //
6

Jeb Bush wrote a congratulatory post to his buddy Chris Sununu (whose father was chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush). Chris Sununu just was re-elected Governor of New Hampshire. During his first term, he pushed for vouchers, but they got stalled when the Republican-controlled House voted them down.

Jeb urges Sununu to keep going with the fight for public funding of religious and private schools.

But, sorry, too late. The Democrats in New Hampshire swept both houses of the Legislature. No vouchers this year!

New Hampshire voters are independent. They don’t take marching orders from Betsy DeVos or Jeb Bush or the Koch brothers.

Categories Bush, Jeb, New Hampshire, Vouchers

Sue Legg: Twenty Years of School Choice in Florida, Part 3

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2018 //
6

Sue Legg recently retired as education director of the Florida League of Women Voters. She was assessment and evaluation contractor for the Fl. DOE for twenty years while on the faculty at the University of Florida. At my request, she wrote a four-part series reflecting on School Choice in Florida after 20 years.

Twenty years later: Who Benefits, Not Schools!

Florida’s Constitution mandates that the state shall make ‘adequate provision for all students to access a uniform, safe, secure, efficient and high-quality system of free public schools.

The strategies on how to implement or circumvent these values result in constant lawsuits…at least five in the last two years alone. The arguments are not new: civil rights, funding, local vs. state control, and accountability. One might ask: Who benefits in a system that generates so much conflict? Politicians and profiteers, but not the public may well be the answer.

Political Cronyism and Conflict of Interest.

Charter supporters use money and influence to affect policy outcomes. According to Integrity Florida, $2,651,639 was spent on committee and campaign contributions in 2016 alone. Major donors include John Kirtley, who heads Florida Federation for Children and is also chair of Step Up for Students (which distributes a billion dollars in corporate tax credit scholarships to private schools). All Children Matters, run by Betsy DeVos, gave over $4 million to Florida political committees between 2004 and 2010. The Walton family gave over $7 million between 2008 and 2016 to Florida’s All Children Matter. Large contributions by the Waltons, John Kirtley, CSUSA, Academica, Gary Chartrand (a member of the State Board of Education) and others were also made to Kirtley’s Florida Federation for Children. In addition, for profit charters have spent over $8 million in lobbying in Tallahassee. Former Governor Jeb Bush’s foundation ExcelinEd, supports the spread of pro-choice policies in 38 states.

Conflict of interest claims in the Florida legislature have been made against current and former legislators including Speaker of the House Richard Corcoran; legislators Manny Diaz, Eric Fresen (recently found guilty of tax evasion), Seth McKeel, House Education Chair Michael Bileca, Senators John Legg, Anitere Flores, Kelli Stargel, and Ralph Arza (who was forced to resign for other reasons). They have personal ties to the charter industry and held important education committee leadership roles.

Testing Companies.

The A.I.R. testing company received a six-year $220 million contract for the Florida state assessment exams. This contract does not include the mandatory End of Course exams required in high school subjects, the kindergarten readiness test, the English Language Learner test, or the 50 teacher certification tests and the principals’ leadership exam. Add to this cost was the technical debacle resulting from a law requiring all tests to be administered online. Districts did not have the bandwidth.

Private and Charter Schools Expansion.

The Florida tax credit scholarships (FTC) to private schools no longer serves only low-income families. Income eligibility has risen to $63,000 for partial stipends. Funding is increased by 25% per year, but the corporate tax revenue to support them runs afoul of the governor’s agenda to reduce taxes. As a compromise, in 2018 a sales tax ‘donation’ to private schools for new car owners was approved for students with approved claims of being bullied. Students with disabilities may qualify for MacKay scholarships to private schools which may have no qualified teachers to serve them. Parents whose children have severe disabilities are given a stipend and search on their own for assistance.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Privatization

Laura Chapman on Ohio’s Nonsensical and Destructive Report Cards for Schools

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2018 //
15

The idea of giving A-F grades to schools was a Jeb Bush invention. It is an almost perfect mirror of the poverty or affluence of the students in the school. Schools with high poverty levels will get low grades. This sets them up to be stigmatized as failures and to become juicy targets for tskeover and privatization. The privatizers keep the students they want and toss away those they don’t want. Meanwhile, the public money flows to private hands.

Laura Chapman here examines Ohio’s school report cards, which contain “multiple measures” to end up with the same result as a report card based only on test scores, which themselves measure family income and education.

She wrote this comment:

“The key components of the 2018 Ohio School Report Cards.

The six components are:

Achievement,
Gap Closing,
Improving At-Risk K-3 Readers,
Progress,
Graduation Rate,
Prepared for Success.

Districts and schools receive A-F grades on each of the six components and most of the individual measures for each component (e.g.a letter grade is assigned to Ohio’s EVASS metrics based on test scores. EVASS is a version of totally discredited VALUE-ADDED Metrics).

For the first time, districts and schools will be assigned overall letter grades. (e.g., Your school is D. Your school is an F.)

Here is the pitch for this ridicule-worthy scheme.

“Report cards are designed to give parents, communities, educators and policymakers information about the performance of districts and schools – to celebrate success and identify areas for improvement. This information identifies schools to receive intensive supports, drives local conversations on continuous improvement and provides transparent reporting on student performance. The goal is to ensure equitable outcomes and high expectations for all of Ohio’s students.”

One of these days I may count how many data points Ohio has shoved into the convoluted report card. Some are hardwired by the fools elected to the state house. Others are there in part from federal regulations. The rest are the product of a belief system that says, in effect measurement is an objective and infallible substitute for good judgment. Of course, the Report card grades track the relative affluence of the districts in Ohio and they are meaningless for Charter Schools. A recent conversation with a state school board member, running for re-election revealed total ignorance of problems with the value-added metric or the cost of the SAS contract for that misleading exercise.

reportcard.education.ohio.gov

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization, Testing

Jan Resseger: ECOT Made Charters an Election Year Issue in Ohio

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2018 //
4

For years, the politicians in Ohio took campaign contributions from the charter industry, let the charter lobbyists write the law regulating them, and ignored their frauds.

But the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow went bankrupt, and the frauds could no longer be ignored.

Jan Resseger writes here that the ECOT scandal has turned charters into an election issue. This is good news for anyone who cares about accountability and transparency for public funds.

The surprise really ought to be that the 17-year, billion dollar ripoff of tax dollars by the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) has remained among high profile election issues in this 2018 election season. After all, when USA Today profiled 28 American cities which have not yet recovered from the 2008 Recession, 9 of them were in Ohio: Warren, Youngstown, Mansfield, Marion, Lorain, Middletown, Sandusky, Akron and Dayton. Besides the economy, the opioid crisis is devastating parts of the state and healthcare more generally is an issue.

But the ECOT scandal hasn’t died as an issue on voters’ minds. Partly this is due to clever work by public education advocates and Democrats. When ECOT’s property was auctioned off, an anonymous purchaser paid $152 in taxes and fees to buy the costume of ECOT’s mascot, Eddy the Eagle. You can watch Eddy on twitter, @EddyEagleECOT, traveling to political events across the state carrying his “Ask Me About Mike DeWine” sign. DeWine, running as Ohio’s Republican candidate for governor, has been Ohio’s attorney general since 2010 but only filed a lawsuit to recover tax dollars lost to ECOT last winter as the school was being shut down.

Because of the way Ohio distributes state aid and the way its charter school law works, over its 17-year life, ECOT ate up local school operating levy dollars in addition to state aid. A tech-savvy opponent of Ohio’s entrenched Republican majority has now set up https://www.kidsnotcorruption.com/ , an interactive website which describes ECOT: “ECOT THE SCANDAL: Wondering just how bad is the ECOT scandal? Well, you should be angry because ECOT is the biggest taxpayer ripoff in Ohio history and Republicans are responsible. Sadly, it’s our kids who were hurt.” At this website it is possible to track how much each Ohio school district has lost to ECOT over the years: for example, from Cleveland’s schools, $ 39,405,981; from Columbus’ schools, $591,000,000; from Cincinnati’s schools, $ 14,648,988.

Several local school districts have now initiated legal action on their own against ECOT to recover lost funds, and three other school districts so far have filed in court to argue that they do not want Attorney General Mike DeWine, who earlier this year filed to recover funds from ECOT, representing them. The Dayton Daily News‘ Josh Sweigart reports: “Springfield City Schools is joining Dayton Public Schools and the Logan-Hocking School District in arguing in court that they don’t want the state representing them in getting money from ECOT. The school districts argue that Attorney General Mike DeWine—the Republican candidate for governor—is soft on charter schools and has received campaign donations from ECOT founder Bill Lager… DPS and Springfield are both working with the Cleveland-based law firm Cohen, Rosenthal and Kramer. The firm is working on a contingency fee, meaning it gets paid only if the districts succeed… (T)he districts are skeptical that DeWine would be as aggressive as their attorney.”

William Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, notes, in his October 11, Daily E-Mail, that Attorney General Mike DeWine has filed a memorandum opposing the intervention of local school districts in this case on their own because their interest is “substantively remote from the claims” in the Attorney General’s lawsuit. Phillis notes that William Lager, ECOT’s founder and operator has made “essentially the same arguments” to oppose the intervention by specific school districts on their own behalf. Phillis comments: “It is curious that both the Plaintiff and Defendant in this case are on the same page. That accord might validate the importance of intervention by the districts. If they agree on this matter, maybe they will agree on more substantial issues.”

On October 8, the Cleveland Plain Dealer endorsed Cleveland attorney, Steve Dettelbach for attorney general in the fall election over his opponent Dave Yost, the current Republican state auditor. Yost was elected to that post in November, 2010. He has been accused of moving too slowly against ECOT, and the Plain Dealer‘s endorsement reflects this concern: “There is a tiebreaker in this decision however, and it comes in the form of the long-running ECOT… scandal that has hung like a millstone around the neck of a number of Republicans on the Ohio ballot this year who took large campaign contributions from those connected to the now-shuttered online school. That includes Yost, who announced he’s given more than $29,000 in ECOT-related contributions to charity but denies the campaign donations impacted his actions… But the fact remains that the whistleblower’s warning came in 2014 and Yost’s office did not start investigating with gusto until 2016.”

Read it all.

The politicians eagerly accepted ECOT’s invitation to be its commencement speaker. Even Jeb Bush flew to Ohio to testify to ECOT’s awesomeness.

Every politician in Ohio who facilitated and ignored this massive rip-off of taxpayer’s dollars and waste of kids’s lives should be voted out.

Mike DeWine was State Attorney General abd ignored the ECOT fraud; he is now running for Governor.

Dave Yost was State Auditor and ignored the fraud until it blew up in his face; he is running for Attorney General.

They are responsible for the state’s failure to monitor ECOT and for the favorable treatment ECOT received. Voters should hold them accountable for this massive fraud.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools
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