Two California teachers have created a rap video to exhort peope to vote “yes” on Proposition 30, which raises taxes on incomes over $250,000 to fund education, and to vote “no” on Proposition 32, which is intended to take away automatic contributions by members to their unions, a longtime goal of anti-union activists.
The video describes the “pre-school to prison pipeline.”
Pay now or pay later.
This is becoming an increasingly familiar–and alarming –story. Charter advocates are pouring large amounts of money–more than $200,000–into local school board races, in districts where few are residents. They are targeting candidates who dare to question the expansion of charters.
In Santa Clara County, incumbent Anna Song is under attack by the charter lobby, which is throwing large sums into a campaign to defeat her.
The article in the Mercury News says:
The most aggressive campaign appears to be aimed at Anna Song, who is running for her fourth term on the county Board of Education.
The Santa Clara County Schools Political Action Committee has raised nearly $200,000 from Jan. 1 through Oct. 20, and financed auto-dial calls plus four mailers slamming Song and three supporting her challenger, trustee David Neighbors.
“It’s an outrageous amount of money to take out one school board member,” said Song, who’s running for a seat that represents areas served by the Santa Clara, Milpitas and the Berryessa school districts.
Neighbors, who has benefited from $76,000 worth of PAC mailers and auto-calls for his candidacy and against Song, said about the PAC, “I don’t know much about it.”
Created at the suggestion of the California Charter Schools Association, the PAC is run by Santa Clara County political consultants Jay Rosenthal and Jude Barry.
Through Oct. 20, Neighbors raised $23,539.
The articles goes on to note that this PAC spending dwarfs the usual spending on local school board races:
The PAC is also sending mailers to re-elect Grace Mah, who’s running for the county school board to represent areas within the Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos and Sunnyvale school districts. Her opponent, Dave Cortright, is an outspoken opponent of Bullis Charter School in Los Altos.
The PAC dwarfs spending in county school board elections, where serious candidates typically have spent closer to $30,000. “What they’re doing could be very significant,” said Terry Christensen, professor emeritus at San Jose State and a specialist in state and local politics. Because so little is typically spent in a county school board race he said, “it wouldn’t take much to have an influence.”
Among the big donations to the PACs are $75,000 from the California Charter Schools Association Advocates; $50,000 from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; $50,000 from Gap heir John J. Fisher; $40,000 from Emerson Collective, the nonprofit run by Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs; and $10,000 from Rocketship charter schools board member Timothy Ranzetta.
Song had the audacity to vote against opening 20 Rocketship charters in her district, which would drain students and funding from the public schools. This is Rocketship’s answer: go along or get out of the way.
Cortright, who has raised $1,000, dared to oppose the Bullis charter school in Los Altos, which is known as the publicly funded private school for the children of the super-rich.
Jonathan Raymond, superintendent of the Sacramento City school district, has some lessons for New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
Friedman recently raved about the success of Race to the Top, claiming that it was preparing students for the high-skill jobs of the new economy.
Raymond says this is wrong. Race to the Top is divisive and subjects schools to derision.
It is top-down, heavy-handed and undermines the collaboration needed to make genuine improvement.
States that promise to comply with Duncan’s heavy handed mandates are “winners” while those making progress without Duncan’s script are losers.
He adds:
Meanwhile, school districts that are making real, tangible strides to increase student learning are left behind in this “race.” In Sacramento City Unified, we are turning around seven low-performing schools (called Priority Schools) through research-proven strategies for raising student achievement. Six of the seven schools have shown dramatic increases in student achievement and dramatic improvements in school culture and climate. These strategies include relevant professional development for principals and teachers; collaborative teacher planning time; data analysis and inquiry; and building strong family and community engagement. With federal funding, we could take this pilot program to scale statewide. California districts could build on each other’s successes and the gains of districts across the country. This is exactly what federal dollars should be spent on.
Yet Race to the Top’s scripted approach effectively discounts these reforms because they do not fit into the neat categories created by the prescriptive program. Moreover, forcing school districts to compete for badly needed resources is like offering a starving man food but only if he agrees to whatever strings may be attached. This is certainly the choice that school districts like ours face in California.
Experienced journalist Tom Toch visited a Rocketship charter school in San Jose, California, and came away impressed.
What impressed him most, however, was not the ubiquitous computer instruction, but the intensity of the human interactions.
He took away a lesson about the importance of parent involvement and support, as well as the intense engagement of teachers.
Conservative commentators see the Rocketship model as a way to reduce the number of teachers and to break the hold of teachers’ unions.
Toch is not so sure.
Rocketship charters are now expanding rapidly into other markets outside California.
What do you think?
The United Teachers of Los Angeles has steadfastly refused to allow its members to be evaluated by the test scores of their students. Unlike the district leadership, UTLA understands that scholars have found that value-added assessment is inaccurate, invalid and unstable. By this method, excellent teachers may be labeled “ineffective,” and poor teachers who teach to the test may be labeled “effective.”
Despite intense pressure by the Los Angeles Unified School District leadership and the federal government, UTLA has insisted that its members should be evaluated by evidence-based methods, not by “value-added assessment” that has not been proven to work anywhere.
UTLA refused to sign off on the district’s request for $40 million in Race to the Top funding, which would have subjected its members to value-added assessment.
UTLA recognizes that accepting $40 million for RTTT would eventually cost the district hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with the federal government’s mandates. This has been the experience of other districts, where teachers have been laid off and class sizes have increased solely because of compliance with RTTT requirements.
Because it has remained true to principle, because it insists on evidence-based evaluation, because it insists on honest accounting for the public’s dollars, UTLA is a hero of public education and joins the honor roll.
A charter school in Sacramento abruptly closed its doors, locked out the students, and called it quits.
The charter operator said the space could only handle 75 students, but he had enrolled 400.
The parents were not happy. They said the school had collected $2 million or so.
They were puzzled.
So am I.
Hey, that’s the free market. Stores come and go.
Stuff happens.
Go shop somewhere else, consumers.
It’s happening in local school board races around the nation.
Out-of-state money is pouring in to capture seats on local school boards.
The money comes from billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Reed Hastings, owner of Netflix, and Alice Walton of the Walmart family. They fund candidates who support privatization of public education. Their resources overwhelm local candidates.
The first high-profile race to attract big money was last year in Denver, when large amounts of money arrived from businessmen with no previous interest in school board races, targeted to defeat Emily Sirota, a Denver mom. Sirota threatened control by hard-line privatizers.
Earlier this year, millions of dollars were spent by out-of-state donors to hand control of the Louisiana state school board to Governor Jindal, so he could pursue his privatization plans.
In Washington State, the charter referendum is financed by a handful of billionaires, some local, like Bill Gates, some not, like Alice Walton of Arkansas.
In Georgia, the charter referendum is funded almost entirely by out-of-state donors like Walton of Arkansas.
Now in little Los Altos, California, out-of-state money is targeting a charter school critic with negative ads. The school board member had raised questions about a charter school serving some of the wealthiest residents of the district.
The privatization movement may not have a popular base, but it is adept at marshaling big money to buy support and elections. The only way to stop them is to build an informed public.
With all the national publicity about the world’s first parent trigger in Adelanto, California, you would think someone might have noticed that the new charter is not the first charter in this town.
Only a little more than a year ago, the Adelanto Charter Academy had to close because of multiple operational and fiscal problems. The biggest problem was that the operators of the charter were involved in questionable self-dealing.
As the local newspaper put it, “The Sentinel has learned that much of the academy’s academic imperative was suborned to the mercenary intent of those involved at the school, shortchanging the educational mission.
“While charter schools are by law non-profit entities, it appears that those involved with the school in some cases formed for-profit companies that were devoted to providing the charter academy with materials, ranging from furniture to computers to visual aids to books to writing materials that were sold at inflated prices.”
It gets worse. Read the article.
How soon we forget.
So now, with the votes of only 50 parents in a school enrolling more than 600 children, the charter idea gets another run in Adelanto.
This came from a retired California teacher:
“Won’t Back Down” is loosely based on the Parent Trigger Law in California, which has only been tried twice. Neither attempt was successful. The law was created on a drawing board and has no basis in prior experience or knowledge.
Would you support the Parent Trigger Law if:
• You discovered it was designed to hasten the destruction of public education and replace it with privatized for-profit corporations?
• You discovered privatization (i.e. handing over a school to privately run charter school entities) has already created a two-tiered educational system that has greatly increased racial and economic segregation?
• You discovered that the law first passed in California without any trial or pilot program to test the process and its possible outcomes?
• You discovered that this law therefore has no evidence of success?
• You discovered that Florida soundly defeated a similar law because parent groups rallied against it?
• You discovered that the Parent Trigger idea was hatched in Los Angeles by Parent Revolution, an organization created by the large charter group, Green Dot Schools?
• You discovered that Parent Revolution is led by an attorney, not an educator?
• You discovered that Parent Revolution’s paid solicitors go door to door targeting neighborhoods with high rates of immigrant/non-English speaking parents whom they barrage with publicity and promises?
• You discovered that the Parent Trigger Law is a model legislation being pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC), which promotes privatization and de-professionalizing the teaching profession?
• You discovered that charter and voucher schools, on average, underperform traditional public schools?
• You discovered that charter schools have been known to prevent low performers from applying, counsel them out during the school year, require large donations from parents, or cheat during standardized testing?
• You discovered that charter schools service a much lower percentage of special education and English language learners than traditional public schools?
• You discovered that a high percentage of students at charter schools require remediation when entering college?
• Last, you discovered that a large number of parents targeted in California’s first two Parent Trigger takeovers tried to rescind their signatures once they understood that they may ultimately have less control over their school?
Remember that the LA Times created a firestorm in 2010 when it created value added ratings for teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District and released the names and ratings of thousands of teachers. Arne Duncan said it was a good idea, but many researchers warned that the ratings were volatile, inaccurate, and unstable. And others saw a violation of confidentiality as well as ethical issues. In the aftermath, a teacher named Roberto Riguelas committed suicide, and his family said he was depressed to see what he thought was an unfair rating of his work.
New York City released the teacher ratings earlier this year, and again there were many complaints about inaccuracy. This time, Bill Gates published an op-Ed opposing the practice on grounds that it makes it impossible for supervisors to counsel teachers when their ratings are published.
Be all that as it may, the Los Angeles Times is now suing LAUSD for access to teachers’ names so they can release their ratings again.
I am still trying to understand what the newspaper thinks it is accomplishing, what purpose is served other than selling papers.
