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A Major Charter School Scandal

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2012 //
9

Over the past few years, the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, California, was celebrated again and again for its achievements.

Journalists, pundits, and television commentators fawned over its founder Ben Chavis. His school (he actually has three schools, but the middle school is the one that gets the plaudits) became the poster school for the charter movement in California and even a national model.

Chavis, said his admirers, had accomplished the impossible. His no-excuses school enrolled poor kids and they got very high test scores. The secret to his success, he claimed and his admirers agreed, was tough rules and harsh discipline.

True, the school has very few American Indian students; true, the largest group is Asian-American (86%, according to this article). But it was also true that its test scores made it one of the highest performing middle schools in the state, perhaps the highest performing in the state.

Conservative commentators saw the Chavis model as the antidote to the ills of a too-permissive public school system. It was the ultimate vindication of the no-frills, tough-minded approach to schooling. It was proof positive that a school that cracked down on students and teachers could overcome all obstacles to get high test scores, which after all, is the only measure of success these days.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 2009:

Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: “We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply.”

That, it turns out, is just the beginning of the ways in which American Indian Public Charter and its two sibling schools spit in the eye of mainstream education. These small, no-frills, independent public schools in the hardscrabble flats of Oakland sometimes seem like creations of television’s “Colbert Report.” They mock liberal orthodoxy with such zeal that it can seem like a parody.

School administrators take pride in their record of frequently firing teachers they consider to be underperforming. Unions are embraced with the same warmth accorded “self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best effort,” to quote the school’s website.

Students, almost all poor, wear uniforms and are subject to disciplinary procedures redolent of military school. One local school district official was horrified to learn that a girl was forced to clean the boys’ restroom as punishment.

But, whoa, everything came crashing down this week.

In response to whistle-blower complaints  by parents and former teachers, the Oakland school board launched an independent audit of the charter’s finances. The audit reported that $3.7 million dollars were wrongly spent on businesses owned by Chavis and his wife. The audit, reported here, was bad news for Chavis’ reputation and for all those who hailed the magic of unregulated charters. Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, “The founder and governing board of three controversial Oakland charter schools could face a criminal investigation into allegations of fraud, misappropriation of funds and other illegal activities outlined in an official audit report released Wednesday.”

With full knowledge that the audit was underway and was likely to raise questions about financial mismanagement, the Oakland Unified school board renewed Chavis’s charter only two months ago, by a vote of 4-3. The schools’ superintendent recommended against renewal, but the board majority decided that the ethical and financial issues of the school’s leaders should not prevent the school from getting a renewal, in light of its stellar test scores.

The preliminary findings reported:

— $350,000 to Chavis’ wife, who was paid wages as the school’s financial administrator as well as additional fees to her private accounting firm.

— $355,000 to Chavis for administering a summer school program, one that violated state law by requiring students to attend and pay the charter school $50 for each day missed.

— $348,000 in payments to companies owned by Chavis for unauthorized construction projects.

None of this was known to the many journalists and pundits who lionized Chavis and his school.

Chavis was interviewed by Jonathan Alter, then at Newsweek, on MSNBC, where Chavis recommended the elimination of school boards. Now we know why. School boards are responsible for oversight and audits. When I looked for the interview, it had been taken down by Youtube (the description remains, but the video was gone). But keep trying, you never know. (Addendum: A reader informs me that the interview is back, please watch.)

In another interview, Chavis said that he preferred the Ku Klux Klan to teachers’ unions. Now we know why. It’s easier to fire compliant teachers when they have no representation.

NBC, the home of Education Nation, featured the strict discipline of the school. It showed how quickly students were subject to harsh measures and kicked out if they did not conform.

The audit left a lot of journalists with egg on their collective faces.

With so many questions raised about the mismanagement of money, how could anyone trust the schools’ test scores?

Diane

Categories California, Charter Schools, Education Reform

Do Not Accept the New Normal

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2012 //
14

Since No Child Left Behind began its reign of error a decade ago, the American public has slowly but surely changed its understanding and expectations of schools.

We have come to think that every school must “make” every student proficient, and if it cannot, then the school is a “failing” school.

We have come to look on schools as “failing” if they enroll large numbers of students who don’t perform well on standardized tests, regardless of their personal circumstances, their language ability, or their disability.

We have come to believe that teachers alone can bring every student to high test scores. And if we don’t believe this is possible, we are accused of defending the status quo or not caring about students or not believing they can succeed.

In pursuit of impossible goals, goals that no nation in the world has reached, we have come to accept (with glee, if you are a corporate reformer, or with resignation, if you are informed by reality) that schools must close and staff must be fired en masse in pursuit of that evanescent goal of “turnaround” from failure to success.

And here is the latest small and barely noticed episode in the continuing assault on common sense and public education.

The Los Angeles Times reported that students and parents demonstrated to protest the planned layoff of at least of the staff at Manual Arts High School. This school has been run for four years by a private group called L.A.’s Promise.

It is no longer unusual to see students and parents protesting the mass dismissal of teachers, so they will be ignored. That’s the new normal.

What is odd here is that L.A.’s Promise laid off about 40% of the staff last year. 50% last year, 40% this year.

It seems that this organization will just keep firing teachers until they finally get a staff that knows how to raise test scores and graduation rates higher and higher.

Such punitive actions display a singular lack of capacity on the part of leadership to build and support a stable staff.

Such heavy-handed measures surely demoralize whoever is left.

We have become so accustomed to mass firings and school closings that we have lost our outrage, even our ability to care.

Another school reconstituted, another school closed, more teachers fired. Ho-hum.

That’s the new normal. That is what is called education reform today.

So normal are such crude and punitive measures that the events at Manual Arts High School didn’t even merit a real story in the Los Angeles Times. It was posted in a blog.

Destroying public schools is called reform. Mass firings of staff are called reform.

It’s the New Normal.

Don’t accept it. Don’t avert your eyes. It’s not supposed to be this way.

Schools need a stable staff. Schools need continuity. Schools need to be caring and supportive communities.

Schools need to be learning organizations, not a place with a turnstile for teachers, administrators and students.

Don’t lose your own values. What is happening today is wrong. It is not education reform. It is wrong.

It does not benefit children. It does not improve education. It is wrong.

Diane

Categories Accountability, California, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Unneeded Charters

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2012 //
2

Stories like this one from Nashville (http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120509/NEWS04/305090116), or this one from Los Altos, California (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-15/taxpayers-billed-for-millionaires-kids-at-charter-school.html) remind me how far the charter idea has strayed from its origins.

Parents in Nashville are fighting the Great Hearts charter because they know it is targeting children who are affluent and white; they know that it will cause their own public schools to become more segregated; they know it will drain needed resources from their public school to serve the most advantaged students.

The Bullis Charter is a school for the children of the rich and affluent in a high-end community. It is, in all but name, a private school funded by the taxpayers.

The original vision of charters was that they would serve the neediest, the unmotivated, the dropouts, the kids who had failed in public school. They would find innovative ways to reach those who were hardest to educate and would share what they learned with their colleagues in the public schools.

Now, as we see, there are charters who avoid the very students that charters were created to serve.
There is a reason that corporate reformers prefer charter authorizers who are insulated from the democratic process. By that, I mean that corporate reformers want authorizers who can ignore community protest, override the views of parents, and reject any grassroots opposition to their decisions. The reformers want to plant charters where they are not wanted or needed. And that’s what is happening in a growing number of communities today.

Diane

Categories California, Charter Schools, Tennessee

California: Two Democratic Party Groups Protest DFER Use of “Democrats”

By dianeravitch | Aside
May 17, 2012 //
0

Two Democratic party groups in California have publicly protested the use of the word “Democrats” by the hedge-fund managers’ charter advocacy group Democrats for Education Reform.

The Los Angeles Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of San Fernando Valley have complained that the Wall Street group–whose education policies are indistinguishable from those of the GOP–should cease and desist using the word “Democrats” in their name as it confuses voters. Here is the LA complaint: http://www.lacdp.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/LACDP-2012-DFER-Cease-Desist-Final.pdf.

The Democratic Party of San Fernando Valley distributed a flyer, but I don’t have a link for it.

The complaint is the same. DFER is supporting conservative candidates who are not the candidates of the Democratic party. DFER, of course, advocates for charter schools and for evaluation of teachers by test scores. The Democratic party has traditionally supported public education, not privately managed charters (of course, President Obama has broken new ground by endorsing GOP education policy).

But what is clear in these complaints is that the grassroots Democrats are not yet ready to embrace, as the President has, the Republican program of testing, accountability, and school choice.

Categories California, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform

Tenure Issue Doesn’t Belong in Courts

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2012 //
0

The usual group of corporate reformers, bankrolled by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the Broad Foundation, filed a lawsuit to invalidate teacher tenure and seniority in California. They claim that such protections impair the provision of quality education. Their claim is laughable on its face, since high-performing districts as well as low-performing districts have the same contractual requirements. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0516-lausd-teachers-20120516,0,6292585.story

This is part of an unending assault on any job protections or due process at all for public school teachers, as well as an effort to negate collective bargaining.

Quite remarkably, the Los Angeles Times–no softie for teachers’ unions–blasted the idea of taking the issue to court, as the corporate reformers have done. In its editorial, it says that job protections are too strong, that it should take longer to get tenure, and that there have to be safeguards to permit the dismissal of incompetent teachers. But the editorial smartly argues that these issues should be resolved through collective bargaining, not by a challenge in the courts. If this challenge is sustained, the editorial warns, then every policy issue affecting education will end up in the courts, which is not the appropriate place to reach agreement.

This is a smart editorial: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-tenure-teacher-california-lawsuit-20120516,0,5459914.story

Categories Broad Foundation, California, Teachers and Teaching

Bad News for TFA

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2012 //
1

Federal Court reaffirms ruling that alternate route teachers are not “highly qualified” and that it is wrong to concentrate them in districts with high-needs students.
Diane

Home › News & Comment › News › Press Releases & Kits
NINTH CIRCUIT REAFFIRMS RULING THAT TRAINEE TEACHERS NOT INTENDED AS “HIGHLY QUALIFIED” UNDER NCLB
Project: Renee v. Duncan
Date: May 11, 2012
But Judges Dismiss Case Because Congress Temporarily Classified Them So

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals panel yesterday re-affirmed its September 2010 ruling that the U.S. Department of Education unlawfully diluted the standard of teacher owed every student in the country under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) when it issued a 2002 regulation classifying teachers in training as “highly qualified.”

The court proceeded to dismiss the Renee v. Duncan case, however, on the grounds that Congress passed a measure in December 2010 temporarily qualifying the country’s approximately 100,000 teachers-in-training in alternate route programs as “highly qualified” through the 2012-13 school year. The court found that there was no relief presently owed to plaintiffs but held the issue was not moot and that, absent further Congressional action, alternate route trainees must once again be deemed not “highly qualified” after June of next year.

The decision is an acknowledgment that the Department wrongly allowed teachers in training to be concentrated in poor and minority schools across the country for the eight years between the Act’s passage and the temporary measure in 2010. It also makes clear that next year, absent additional Congressional action, these less-than-fully-prepared teachers must again be fairly spread across classrooms and that parents must be notified when their children receive instruction from these teachers.

“We think it was premature for the court to dismiss the case since the controlling law will render the Department’s regulation unlawful again in just a little over a year,” said plaintiffs’ lead counsel John Affeldt of civil rights law firm and advocacy organization Public Advocates Inc.. “Nonetheless, it’s very important to have the courts acknowledge that the Department acted unlawfully in treating these underprepared teachers as if they were fully prepared. We look forward to enforcing this precedent next year and to using it to inform the policy discussions in Congress going forward.”

Whether and how NCLB and its teacher quality provisions will be modified anytime soon is an open question. The Act was due to be revised by Congress in 2007 but the reauthorization process has been stalled. In the meantime, outrage over the December 2010 temporary measure — which was slipped into a midnight budget resolution with no public debate —led to formation of the nation’s largest teacher quality coalition, the Coalition for Teaching Quality (CTQ). Made up of 86 national and local civil rights, grassroots, educator and disability organizations, The CTQ is actively pursuing policies in the reauthorization to help ensure every child has a fully-prepared and effective teacher.

Evidence in the case shows that more than half of California’s interns are teaching in schools with 90-100% students of color compared to only 3% of interns in schools with the lowest population of students of color. Research also shows that graduates from alternative programs such as Teach For America and Troops To Teachers can be as effective as traditional route graduates, but that teachers still in training in those and other programs do not improve student achievement as much as fully prepared teachers who have completed their teacher training.

###

Press Kit
1renee_iii_9th_circuit_release_final_05.11.12.pdf
Releated Press Releases
Ninth Circuit Reaffirms Ruling That Trainee Teachers Not Intended as “Highly Qualified” Under NCLB
Diverse Coalition Draws Line On ESEA Teacher Quality
Dozens of Groups Protest Lowering of Teacher Standards
Parents & Students Blast Senate Deal To Call Trainee Teachers Highly Qualified
Intern Teachers Not “Highly Qualified,” Says 9th Circuit

Categories Alternate Route To Certification, California, Duncan, Arne, Teachers and Teaching

Why L.A. Teachers Are Boycotting the L.A. Times

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2012 //
3

A reader wrote to tell me that public school teachers in Los Angeles are continuing a boycott of the Los Angeles Times. This boycott stems from the Times decisions to create value-added evaluations for thousands of LA teachers and to publish them online in 2010. The accuracy of the evaluations were hotly contested by teachers and disputed by scholars who disagreed with the methodology; the reporters at the Times defended their findings and their methodology.

A month after the Times’ series was published, along with the public release of the names and ratings of teachers, Roberto Riguelas committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. He was a fifth grade teacher whose rating had been published. The family said he was depressed by the ratings; the Times did not accept responsibility. And of course it is impossible to know who was responsible and whether there was some other cause.

Two important comments on the LA Times release of its own value-added ratings. When it happened, Secretary Arne Duncan was very pleased, but very few scholars of testing agreed. John Ewing, a mathematician wrote an excellent article called “Mathematical Intimidation,” in which he excoriated the misuse of value-added as well as the reporters’ actions in browbeating a National Board Certified teacher, whom they said was a bad teacher. http://www.ams.org/notices/201105/rtx110500667p.pdf

I wrote about all this in the new last chapter of the paperback edition of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

An interesting footnote: When New York City followed LA’s example and released value-added ratings to the media (the media in NYC, unlike LA, did not create the ratings), Bill Gates wrote an opinion piece saying it was a bad idea; Secretary Duncan came out against the release, and so did Wendy Kopp. In fact, almost everyone came out against the public release of teacher ratings except Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

And the public school teachers of Los Angeles are still boycotting the Los Angeles Times. If Eli Broad should buy it, they will have good reason to continue their boycott.

Diane

Categories California, Duncan, Arne, Teachers and Teaching

How Far Will Some Authors Go to Get a Good Review?

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2012 //
3

I just read online that Eli Broad, the Los Angeles billionaire, might buy the Los Angeles Times. Broad’s book was published this week. My first thought, speaking just as an author, was: “Some people will do anything to get a good review in their hometown paper.” http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/02/local/la-me-broad-20120503

My second thought, after a slight period of reflection (five minutes), was that it would be unfortunate if this comes to pass. Eli Broad is not shy about using his billions to advance his political agenda. I don’t know where he stands on most issues, but in education, he has been a force for distorted priorities that are harming American education. He has used his fortune to train a generation of school leaders devoted to imposing the business model onto education. Business values belong in the business office of the schools, but they don’t belong on the instructional side. Broad once told me quite frankly that he knows nothing about education, but he knows the importance of good management. I am not so sure that the graduates of his Superintendents Academy are good managers. Many have been run out of town after alienating the public. Of course, he prefers mayoral control, where the public can be ignored.

His acolytes are known for the closing and demolition of public schools in district after district. He has had a large hand in Detroit, which is now on the verge of total collapse and/or privatization. In Louisiana, a Broad-trained superintendent is leading the charge for privatization via a vast expansion of vouchers and charters. It seems that wherever a Broad graduate goes, the district or state starts closing public schools and expanding opportunities for privatization and for-profit operators. Along with their emphasis on privatization comes a devotion to high-stakes testing. The combination is not only toxic to public education but results in an approach that betrays a naive faith in the value of standardized testing. These policies are ultimately anti-intellectual, anti-education, and anti-child.

I hope he decides not to buy the Los Angeles Times. It is one of the few remaining independent dailies. I hope it stays that way.

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, California, Corporate Reformers
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