Archives for category: Charter Schools
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Leonie Haimson: DeBlasio’s Hypocritical Embrace of Corporate Reform

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
18

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, is outraged that Mayor DeBlasio is handing schools over to Laurene Powell Jobs and the charter-promoting Robin Hood Foundation.

Powell Jobs has handed out $100 million to jumpstart “innovative” schools. Four of the 10 schools to which she gave $10 million each have already failed. Her closest associate is Arne Duncan, whose Race to the Top was a disaster.

Over the last decade or so, the Robin Hood Foundation has primarily supported charter schools in its education portfolio, as might be predicted considering it was founded by hedge funders and its board is still composed largely of corporate executives and financiers.  According to Wikipedia, its board chair, Larry Robbins, is also the board chair of KIPP NY charter schools, and board chair of the Relay Graduate School, that trains teachers in the charter school “no excuses” regimented style of instruction. Robbins is also a member of the NY Board of Teach for America.

DeBlasio, who claimed to be a charter critic, has invited Robin Hood to open 18 new charter schools. Astonishing!

 

Haimson writes:

Given that these two private funders will help select the winners, or as Robin Hood put it, “will partner with the Department of Education on a rigorous selection process”, that means DOE will be sacrificing control for the design of these public schools to these two organizations for a relative pittance, compared to what it will cost to operate them.

But an even greater concern, as I expressed it to the Daily News, is that every new school will likely take space and funding away from our existing public schools, which are already underfunded and in many cases squeezed for space. Every new school makes overcrowding worse by eating up classroom space with the need to carve out new, replicated administrative and cluster rooms. 

We already have seen how worse inequities have resulted from the expansion of co-located charter schools in our public school buildings, as well as how the Gates-funded small schools initiative led to many of the remaining large high schools becoming even more overcrowded with the high-needs students that the small schools refused to enroll.  Many of these disadvantaged students at the large schools ended up more likely to be discharged, enrolled in low-quality credit recovery programs, or graduating without a Regents diploma  — all of which served the purposes of the organizations running the show as their small schools graduation data appeared better in comparison.  Another piece of evidence that DOE is caught in an infinite feedback loop: the Senior adviserto the XQ Institute is Michele Cahill, who ran the small schools initiative when she was at DOE. 

It feels as though we are seeing a rerun of the Bloomberg-Klein regime.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, Privatization

Rhode Island: Governor Gina Raimondo’s Plan to Demolish Public Education in Providence

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
6

 

Andrew Stewart recounts the alarming plans that Governor Gina Raimondo has in store for Providence public schools. She is a former venture capitalist who seems to have an instinctive suspicion of the public sector. What she has in mind, he says, is the planned demolition of the public schools.

He writes:

Someday, after the operatic cycle of Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo’s political career has reached its concluding note, it will be a masterpiece of neoliberal assault upon the public sector, the commons, and the fabric of the welfare state in America to behold. It is absolutely essential, in order for the faculty and the students of Providence to fight back and win in this contest, to form a broad-based coalition that is centered on the success of students and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline.

Right now, a multi-year media narrative, assembled by allegedly-liberal local news outlets, is being utilized in order to justify the anti-democratic takeover of public education. (I will offer a further analysis of this narrative in a future report that time and space bars me from providing here.)

Motivation stems a number of reasons, including because the Providence Teachers Union is one of the largest white collar educator unions in the state and its majority composition is white women, meaning success would have a ripple effect for female workers statewide; the PTU benefits and salary package is one of the most robust offerings in the entire state economy and serves as a useful high watermark for all female service and public sector economy workers, especially with paid maternity leave. Whereas suburban teacher unions play a peripheral role in the respective municipal political debates, Providence Teachers Union is a major force in statewide politics. Simultaneously, another front of this attack can be found in the halls of the Community College of Rhode Island, where Raimondo seeks to crush the unionized faculty owing to its large membership, the subject of a future report….

Right now, Providence Public School Department is being taken over by the state and the state’s newly-appointed (by Raimondo) Education Commissioner Angélica M. Infante-Green, an alumnus of the Jeb Bush education privatization project Chiefs for Change, which has seen in the past decade a revolving door installed into various Ed offices in RI. Interim Superintendent Fran Gallo, who has a history in the district, seems to occupy a rubber-stamp position. Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has recently moved to defund all other charter schools in the city so to move the money into his own personal project, the Achievement First Mayoral Academy, not unlike several other patterns of funding we have seen locally over the years whereupon the independent charters serve the purpose of creating good PR until they are defunded to make room for the big-box corporate players. Achievement First has a national reputation for abominable student abuses and their opaque, unaccountable budgetary processes pertaining to per-pupil expenditures have a distinct and negative impact on special needs and English Language Learner students both inside their charters and outside in the remaining non-privatized schools.

He reminds us that Raimondo’s campaign was funded by the hedge fund industry, which loves charter schools.

Raimondo ascended to her political position by starting out as the first woman elected Treasurer of Rhode Island. With a heavy war chest funded by the hedge fund industry, particularly Paul Tudor Jones, as well as Enron alum John Arnold, she walked into Treasury and saw the writing on the wall.

The Rhode Island Democratic Party was influenced since World War II by the diktats of ethnic Catholicism, with attendant anti-Communism, corruption, and conservatism. Treasury for decades had been run as little more than a bail-out fund for the state and its multiple ridiculous schemes, including failed real estate deals and other pay-offs that clearly violated the responsibility of not just a fiduciary but probably every sane child with a piggy bank.

With this in mind, Raimondo invested the state pension fund (which includes public school teacher contributions) into the hedge funds that in turn finance charter schools (Paul Tudor Jones’s Robin Hood Foundation finances Achievement First) [4], meaning that Providence teachers still to this day see a payroll deduction on their pay stub that finances the literal busting of their own union!

She was aided in this by donor John Arnold, who foisted upon the public, via the Pew Charitable Trust, a phony pension crisis narrative in the media [5] that was picked up by perceived non-partisan outlets like PBS. Raimondo is a pro at manufacturing a crisis to attack organized labor and this recent stab at PTU and Providence public schools bears striking resemblance to the pension heist of 2011.

Privatized education in Providence, he predicts, will be a cash cow for the corporate entities that feed off the misery of inner-city communities and schools.

The untold story, to which Stewart alludes, is not about failing schools, but about racism, structural inequality, white flight, and unexamined white supremacy. Nothing in Governor Raimondo’s plans will address root causes.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Providence, Rhode Island

Mercedes Schneider: Billionaires Jim and Alice Walton Seek to Purchase Louisiana State Board

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2019 //
8

 

The Walton Family is collectively worth more than $150 billion, and their hobby is undermining and disrupting public schools across the nation. Since Louisiana has an election for the state board of education in a few days, you will not be surprised to learn that Jim and Alice Walton dropped $200,000 on candidates pledged to support charter schools, vouchers, and Teach for America.

Mercedes Schneider reports in this post that the Waltons waited until close to Election Day so that Louisianans would not have time to learn that out-of-State billionaires were trying to buy the state board elections.

The Waltons are determined to harm the public schools that educated their father Sam Walton and most of them.

The family belongs on the blog’s Wall of Shame for their ceaseless attacks on public schools, unions, experienced teachers, and communities.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Louisiana, Privatization, Teach for America, Vouchers, Wall of Shame, Walton Foundation

New York: Charter School Executives on Long Island Misused Credit Cards

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2019 //
11

 

Unlike many other states, New York has a State Comptroller who audits both public schools and charter schools. The latest audit of a fast-growing charter in Hempstead, New York, found that executives were charging large expenses to the school’s credit card without documentation. 

The Hempstead district is about 70% free & reduced-price lunch, overwhelmingly Hispanic and African American, only 2% white. It is a segregated and low-income district.

John Hildebrand of Newsday writes:

Five senior managers at one of Long Island’s fastest-growing public charter schools charged more than $60,000 in credit-card expenses without receipts or itemizations required by their school’s own rules, state auditors reported.

The state’s review of spending practices at the Academy Charter School in Hempstead found that 17% of credit-card transactions sampled, totaling $36,329, were approved for payment without supporting receipts, auditors said. Another 12% of sampled purchases, totaling $25,342, had receipts that were not itemized.

Overall, credit-card purchases made on behalf of the academy totaled $496,970 during the 2017-18 academic year, according to the state comptroller’s office, a watchdog agency that conducted the audit. The school’s total annual budget was $18.9 million…

The Academy’s written credit-card rules require that users explain the purpose of each transaction and provide a detailed receipt, not just a summary, according to the comptroller’s report.

This often did not happen, as in the case of one school official who charged $1,476 for a meal, describing it only as a “group lunch.” Academy leaders later said the event was a luncheon for teachers attending fall training.

Card purchases, auditors said, included $5,590 for furniture that did not have an itemized invoice attached, $1,576 to a party rental vendor for what was described only as a “school event,” and five gift cards for about $550 each. School officials listed gifts as teacher appreciation awards, without naming recipients or providing proof that the school’s board of trustees had approved the awards.

School managers also failed to adequately document travel expenses for out-of-town conferences, auditors said. They checked 119 card charges for travel expenses totaling $23,920 and found that 40% lacked receipts. This included 29 charges for lodging and air travel.    

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, New York, Privatization

Los Angeles: Michael Kohlhaas Explains How Charter Lobby Neutralized the LAUSD Inspector General

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2019 //
6

 

Working with his treasure trove of emails among charter operators, which he obtained via a public records request, blogger Michael Kohlhaas explains how the Charter Lobby managed to reduce the powers of the Office of Inspector General, whose investigations into corrupt charters had been a thorn in their side.

This is an important post. Read it in full. The charter lobby dedicates a lot of time and money to avoiding accountability and transparency.

He begins:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has a particularly powerful oversight office, the Office of the Inspector General, known in the trade jargon as OIG. And in 2018 the School Board failed to renew then-IG Ken Bramlett’s contract. According to LA Times education reporter Howard Blume, pro-charter board members Monica Garcia, Kelly Gonez, and Nick Melvoin voted against renewal, which was enough to deadlock the board and prevent Bramlett’s return. Blume also noted that Bramlett had aggressively investigated some charter schools, in some cases leading to criminal charges being filed, and that charter schools had been clamoring for limits on OIG’s ability to investigate them but he stopped short of saying that Bramlett’s fall from grace was due to charter school influence.

And later a bunch of overwhelmingly salacious details of a number of really appalling and quite serious hostile work environment complaints against some of Bramlett’s senior subordinates came out along with credible accusations that Bramlett had at best failed to take these complaints seriously. Regardless of the validity of the uproar, and it seems quite valid indeed to me, this had the effect of directing most of the media attention away from charter school involvement in Bramlett’s downfall. Not entirely, though. For instance, Kyle Stokes, education reporter with KPCC, did mention that charter schools had been seeking to limit OIG’s role in overseeing them, although in that same article noted that “sources who spoke to KPCC said that concern over charter oversight was not a factor in the board’s thinking”

But newly published internal documents from the Los Angeles Advocacy Council, a shadowy organization run by the California Charter School Association and about 20 local charter school leaders, paint a very different picture. In fact LAAC and the CCSA give themselves credit for taking advantage of the chaos at OIG in order to effectively remove oversight of charter schools from OIG’s purview.

Not only that but they claim to have kept quiet about the issue in order to protect their public image. In the same document they also claim that they were asked to do so by unnamed people in the District who promised CCSA and LAAC that “they would handle it, and they followed through” Given some statements in another document it’s not impossible that convicted felon and then Board member Ref Rodriguez was one of these unnamed people. The charterites were thrilled by the outcome of their work against OIG oversight, announcing that it “should be seen as a major win by and for the charter community.” Perhaps this media strategy underlay Stokes’s sources’ comment about charter involvement in Bramlett’s non-renewal.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization

Dallas: Charter School CEO Convicted of Taking Kickbacks on Contract

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2019 //
2

 

The Charter Industry has insisted that charter schools need no regulation, supervision, or oversight so they can have maximum flexibility. But where government money flows, accountability is imperative.

The importance of accountability was demonstrated again recently in Dallas, where the CEO of a charter school was convicted of steering a contract to a friend in exchange for a kickback.

Donna Houston-Woods, CEO of Nova Academy charter school, was convicted of all four counts against her: three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.

Houston-Woods, 65, the school’s longtime chief executive, approved the $337,951 federal contract for the firm by copying the bid of a competing company that was initially selected for the job, the government alleged.

ADI’s owner, Donatus Anyanwu, returned the favor by secretly paying Houston-Woods about $50,000 in kickbacks, prosecutors said.

Anyanwu, 61, pleaded guilty to his role in the scheme in July. He did not testify during the weeklong wire and mail fraud trial in downtown Dallas.

Houston-Woods and Anyanwu were indicted in December 2017. Houston-Woods was accused of using her position as head of Nova Academy to steer the federal contract to ADI in return for kickbacks. ADI botched the job and shouldn’t have gotten the contract in the first place, prosecutors said.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Dallas, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization

Nancy Flanagan: Why Are the Democratic Candidates Silent About Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2019 //
39

Nancy Flanagan is a retired teacher in Michigan with long experience in the classroom and one of our best education bloggers.

In this post, she wonders why the Democratic candidates are mostly mum about charters. At the last Democratic debate, when the question of charters was raised, Andrew Yang was the only one who openly expressed support for charters. The good news is that Andrew Yang will not be the eventual candidate. Even Cory Booker avoided the subject. Bernie Sanders, whose education policy is sharply critical of charters, did not take the opportunity to express his views. He should have.

Flanagan writes:

I believe charter schools have done untold damage to public education, and I’ve had twenty years to observe the public money/private management ideology establish itself in Michigan. First, a scattering of alternative-idea boutique schools, another ‘choice’ for picky parents. Then they go after the low-hanging fruit, the schools in deep poverty—and then the healthier districts.  There is now agreement with an idea once unthinkable in America: corporations have a “right” to advertise and sell education, using our tax dollars…So—no, I cannot be agnostic. In the end, I’d like to see charter schools go away, one at a time, forever, because mountains of evidence have proven that they’re ripe for fraud and malpractice, and because there are far better public-school options, in every city and neighborhood. I think that’s preferable to trying to extinguish or ban charter schools outright—although ending all federal financial support for charters is Step One. That will necessitate a new Secretary of Education. The rest will mean changing hearts and minds—a long, slow process.

She adds:

Education is my issue, but charters are a mere slice of a bigger pie. It was gratifying to simply hear candidates talk about education on the stage. Here’s what I would like to hear from a candidate:

Let’s invest more in fully public education—the kind that’s community-based and has elected oversight. Let’s acknowledge the places where it has crumbled and rebuild them, instead of abandoning them. Let’s work toward more economically and ethnically diverse schools, making them places where building an informed citizenry and developing individual talents—not test scores—are our highest goals.

Right on, Nancy!

Let’s keep pushing the candidates and demand them to speak out against privatization.

Real Democrats do not outsource public money to privately managed schools and religious schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democrats, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization

Gary Rubinstein: Nevada Closes Its Failed “Achievement School District”

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2019 //
30

Gary Rubinstein has followed the failure of the “portfolio model” more closely than anyone in the country. He watched the Tennessee “Achievement School District” as its leaders made bold promises,     then departed for lucrative reformy gigs as the ASD collapsed in failure.

In this post, he describes the failure of Nevada’s copycat ASD. ,which was modeled on Tennessee’s ASD, which was modeled on New Orleans’ low-achieving Recovery School District.

He notes that Michigan’s “Education Achievement Authority” failed and was shuttered.

All of which raises the question, why are Corporate Reformers incapable of learning from experience?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Michigan, Nevada, Privatization, Tennessee

New Orleans: A Charter School Finds Out That Making Bold Promises is Not Enough

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2019 //
27

This article in The Nation by Casey Parks tells the story of Sci Academy in New Orleans and the lessons it learned over time about making bold promises.

The school pledged that all its students would go to college and encouraged them to apply to four-year colleges that were outside their comfort zone (not close by and predominantly white).

In 2012, almost all of its graduates were accepted to colleges. By 2019, only 18% had graduated from college.

Parks describes what happened to some of Sci’s top students.

Only months after starting college, some students dropped out.

Most couldn’t point to just one reason for their decision. Some missed their families or needed to find jobs to pay for gaps remaining after their scholarships. Students who enrolled in a North Louisiana university found that the food was too bland. No other place in America is like New Orleans—not even North Louisiana—and it hurt too much to lose the city again after they’d been displaced by the hurricane. Others grew unfocused after they left Sci’s scaffolds.

Some earned their first Fs, and the failures depressed them. Eddie Barnes had been one of Sci’s most celebrated students. He finished with the fifth-highest GPA and won nearly every social accolade the school gave out. He went to Middlebury College, a selective school in Vermont, where only 4 percent of students are black.

His Russian intro class was tougher than advanced Spanish had been at Sci, and he couldn’t always bring himself to trudge through the snow to his 8 am psychology class. But he spoke up in his romantic literature course, and he helped other students with their African American religious history papers. Still, none of that mattered after his grades came back lower than he’d expected. By his second semester, he was on academic probation. He dropped out during his sophomore year.

Sci Academy tried to help students as they struggled. Its founder, Ben Marcovitz, realized that he needed a more diverse staff to connect with students. He also realized that some of his students were not equipped to succeed in the nation’s most competitive colleges. He even realized that college was not the right destination for everyone, and that some would find fulfilling careers and vocations without a bachelor’s degree.

Only six of Sci’s first graduates finished college within six years, the federal standard for on-time graduation. Three others earned degrees this year. Though eight, including Pierre, are still working toward a degree, 32 of the 49 who enrolled in college have dropped out.

Collegiate Academies is the only charter network in New Orleans that has publicly shared its college persistence results. Most of the city’s charter high schools don’t track the number of alumni who go on to earn bachelor’s degrees, and KIPP New Orleans, the one network that does, declined to share its data. KIPP’s first graduating class from New Orleans has been in college for only five years, shy of the federal cutoff for on-time graduation. But researchers at the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, a Tulane-based organization that studies post-Katrina education reforms, found last year that the new high schools have increased college graduation rates by 3 to 5 percentage points since Hurricane Katrina. None have come close to achieving the college for all they once promised…Over time, Marcovitz has hired a more diverse teaching corps. That first year, only one of seven teachers identified as a person of color. Today, more than half of the 140 teachers who work at his schools do.

This is not a story about charter failure, but a story about lessons learned.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New Orleans

Jan Resseger: The Racist, Disruptive Legacy of Arne and Rahm in Chicago

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2019 //
15

 

Jan Resseger reviews fifteen years of corporate education reform led by Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel and finds failure, disruption, and racism.

It started in 2004 when Arne launched his Renaissance 2010 initiative, pledging to close 100 “failing schools” and replace them, in large part with charter schools. Rahm continued it by closing 49 schools on a single day.

Resseger relies on the brilliant analysis of the school closings by Eve Ewing, where she showed the pain inflicted on black families and communities by the closings.

Corporate school reform in Chicago, while claiming to be neutral and based on data, has always operated with racist implications. Ewing provides the numbers: “Of the students who would be affected by the closures, 88 percent were black; 90 percent of the schools were majority black, and 71 percent had mostly black teachers—a big deal in a country where 84 percent of public school teachers are white.”(Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 5).

Resseger then turns to a new study by Stephanie Farmer of Roosevelt University, which found that the city’s school-based budgeting disadvantaged the poorest schools, where black children were concentrated.

A new report from Roosevelt University sociologist, Stephanie Farmer now documents that Student Based Budgeting Concentrates Low Budget Schools in Chicago’s Black Neighborhoods.

Farmer explains: “In 2014, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) adopted a system-wide Student Based Budgeting model for determining individual school budgets… Our findings show that CPS’ putatively color-blind Student Based Budgeting reproduces racial inequality by concentrating low-budget public schools almost exclusively in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods…  Since the 1990s, the Chicago Board of Education (CBOE) has adopted various reforms to make Chicago Public Schools work more like a business than a public good.  CBOE’s school choice reform of the early 2000s created a marketplace of schools by closing neighborhood public schools to make way for new types of schools, many of which were privatized charter schools.”

There is a rumor in Washington that Rahm wants to be Secretary of Education in the next Democratic Administration. Nothing in his record qualifies him for the job. He failed. Arne Duncan failed. The nation is living  with the consequences of their failed ideas, which were inherited from George W. Bush, Rod Paige, Sandy Kreisler, and Margaret Spellings.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing
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