Archives for category: Charter Schools
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Peter Greene: Governor Wolf of Pennsylvania Says Charter Schools Are NOT Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
17

The times they are a’changing.

PeterGreene reports what happened when Governor Tom Wolf really hurt the feelings of the charter lobby. He said that charter schools are NOT public schools. 

“When Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf trotted out his budget last month, he made it a point to note that he was raising money for public schools– and that he had some definite ideas about which schools are public and which schools are not.

“He wants to see more of those basic education dollars to school districts get distributed through the state’s fair funding formula. He also wants to address concerns related to cyber charter schools, which he referred to as “the growing cost of privatization of education in our public schools.”

“And just in case that wasn’t clear enough, a press release from the governor’s office was even more direct:

“Pennsylvania must help school districts struggling with the problem of increasing amounts of school funding siphoned by private cyber and charter schools. Funding reform would increase transparency so all schools that receive state dollars are accountable to the taxpayers.

“This made Ana Meyers sad.”

Awww.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Privatization

Bernie Sanders’ Thurgood Marshall Plan for K-12 Education

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
67

 

When I introduced Senator Sanders (virtually) at the UTLA Leadership Conference, I said that his K-12 education plan was the best one that any candidate had put forward.

Here is his Thurgood Marshall Plan.

Senator Sanders focuses on federal action to:

1. Reduce segregation.

2. Dramatically improve federal funding for the schools that enroll the neediest students.

3. Endorsed the NAACP call to ban for-profit charters and to implement a moratorium on public funding of private charter schools until charters become fully accountable and do no fiscal harm to public schools.

I have not endorsed any candidate. However, I would like to see every candidate spell out their K-12 education plan, as Senator Sanders has done.

To my knowledge, neither Senator Warren nor Senator Harris has released a plan for K-12 education. I will review them when and if they do.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Segregation, Supporting public schools

When I Introduced Senator Sanders At UTLA Leadership Conference

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
10

 

Senator Bernie Sanders addressed the United Teachers of Los Angeles Leadership Conference recently. I was invited to introduce him by video. I recorded a two-minute introduction on my iPhone, while in my home office.

I talked about his Thurgood Marshall plan for education. To date, it is the most far-reaching proposal that any candidate has offered. It should be a template for all Democratic candidates.

Here is Senator Sanders’ speech that day. It is worth watching to see what should be the true Democratic Party agenda for K-12 Education.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization, Testing

Tom Ultican: Beware of TNTP, a Core Element in the Destroy Public Education Movement

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
17

Tom Ultican has written a series of posts about the Destroy Public Education Movement.

His latest post analyzes the nefarious role of TNTP in that movement.

This movement exists solely to disrupt public education and the teaching profession.

TNTP is one of several organizations that only exist because billionaires have financed them. Wendy Kopp founded TNTP (originally called The New Teachers Project) in 1997. She assigned Michelle Rhee, who had recently finished a two year Teach For America (TFA) tour, to run TNTP. Along with TNTP and TFA there are also the uncertified Broad Superintendents Academy, the fake schoolfor professional educators, Relay Graduate School and others forming a significant part of the infrastructure instilling a privatization mindset into the education community.

TNTP says it mission is to partner with educational entities to:

  • “Increase the numbers of outstanding individuals who become public school teachers; and
  • “Create environments for all educators that maximize their impact on student achievement”

These are laudable goals but why would any school district or state education department turn to an organization with minimal academic background and experience to train teachers and school leaders? Michelle Rhee earned a B.A. in Government from Cornell and a master’s in public policy from Harvard with no education studies. In the Book Chronicle of Echoes, Mercedes Schneider observes that “Wendy Kopp was a child of privilege”. She left her exclusive Highland Park neighborhood in Dallas to study International Affairs at Princeton. Kopp had no education experience or training and Rhee had five weeks of training to go along with two years experience teaching elementary school in Baltimore…

Before the billionaire driven push to privatize public education a “non-profit” company like TNTP would have gotten no consideration for training teachers because they were unqualified. If policy makers in New York wanted to create and alternative teacher certification path, they would have turned to an established institution like Columbia University’s Teachers College to create and manage the program. If Washington DC schools wanted to develop a teacher professional development program, they would have likely looked to the University of Maryland. These are places with more than a century of experience studying education and training its leaders…

Working for these want-to-be oligarchs is lucrative. The last tax return from TNTP (Sep. 2017) listed the top 12 paid employees and all of them made more than $200,000 per year. “Thirty pieces of silver” is not worth undermining democratic rights and free universal public education.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, Teach for America

California: State AG Demands End to Sausalito Segregation

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2019 //
29
The Sausalito-Marin City school district is an outrage. Sausalito is a charming groovy traditionally bohemian (now ultra-wealthy) bayfront town. Unincorporated Marin City, adjacent to Sausalito, is largely public housing, built for WWII shipyard workers — traditionally almost all-black but now including some Latino and Pacific Islanders.. Sausalito right now has a lovely privileged darling adorable charter school serving those with social capital, and one struggling public school serving anyone else — known as the “project school” (meaning housing projects, not school projects).
The state Attorney General demanded an end to this segregation.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/School-district-in-Marin-County-agrees-to-14293740.php

School district in Marin County agrees to desegregate in settlement with state

The state settled a racial discrimination case Friday with a desegregation plan for a tiny Marin County school district whose nonwhite students were mostly enrolled in a struggling, underfunded elementary and middle school.

Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office announced the settlement with leaders of the Sausalito Marin City School District. The district said it was “an opportunity to openly and transparently acknowledge past failures” and to “put an end to inequitable education.”

The district had 528 students in 2018-19, about one-third of them white and the rest black, Latino, Asian-American or multiracial, according to district records. One of its two schools, Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in unincorporated Marin City, had 119 students, eight of them white.

Becerra said state investigators found that the district had intentionally created Bayside MLK Academy in 2013 as a racially and ethnically segregated school for grades kindergarten through eight. The district “cut critical classroom programming” at the school while providing stable funding for its other school, Willow Creek Academy, a publicly funded charter serving students in Sausalito, Becerra said.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Funding, Privatization, Segregation

Why I Do Not Support Cory Booker

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2019 //
19

Cory Booker has a long and well-documented record of disparaging public schools and enthusiastically supporting charters, even vouchers. Now, he says he will dedicate himself to public schools and stop privatization, as if he had not been one of the leading cheerleaders for both charters and vouchers for the past two decades.

Valerie Strauss wrote here about his deep ties over the years to Betsy DeVos. 

Booker began his advocacy for vouchers twenty years ago.

“In 1999, Booker was a member of the Municipal Council of Newark and worked with conservatives to form an organization that sought to create a voucher program and bring charter schools to New Jersey.”

He helped Dick and Betsy DeVos try to sell vouchers in Michigan in 2000. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful. As Jennifer Berkshire pointed out in her article about Booker’s help for the DeVos voucher campaign, the DeVos family spent millions, but the people of Michigan rejected vouchers by a vote of 69-31%.

When Booker ran for mayor of Newark in 2001, the DeVos family contributed $1,000 to his campaign. Cheapskates.

Veteran journalist Dale Russakoff wrote a book called The Prize about Cory Booker’s alliance with Republican Governor Chris Christie and their determination to turn Newark into the “New Orleans of the North” by privatizing as many public schools as possible. Booker was a favorite of Wall Street and philanthrocapitalists, and he and Christie persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to put up $100 million to spur privatization in Newark.

Regular readers of this blog have read the many posts by blogger Jersey Jazzman (Mark Weber) about the statistical legerdemain that Newark charters play, the cream-skimming they do to get the students they want and exclude those that might pull down their test scores..

If you open the link at NPE Action, you will see that Booker’s campaigns have drawn the campaign funding of the usual billionaires and Wall Street hedge funders who have done their best to undermine public education.

Booker was feted by rightwing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and named a “champion of charters” by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools in 2017.

But his support for vouchers was not long, long ago.

In 2012, he endorsed Governor Chris Christie’s voucher proposal.

In 2016, he addressed Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children to express his support for their mission of replacing public schools with charters and vouchers.

Due to his contempt for one of our most important public, democratic institutions, I cannot support Cory Booker.

If he is the Democratic candidate, which seems unlikely, I will hold my nose and vote for him, because any Democrat is better than Trump. Even Cory Booker.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Cory Booker Promises to Abandon His Past Support for Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2019 //
34

 

Cory Booker has been a devoted promoter of charters and vouchers for many years.

He worked closely with Republican Governor Chris Christie and together they persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to pony up $100 million to promote the charterization of Newark. He often boasts about what he accomplished by privatizing public schools.

But now that he wants to be president, he has suddenly decided that he will be a champion for public schools, not charters or vouchers. 

Could it be that he did the math and realized that 85-90% of students attend public schools. Only 6% attend charter schools. And he may have noticed that despite the efforts of his former dear friend Betsy DeVos, voters don’t like vouchers. They don’t want public dollars to underwrite religious schools.

Some of his allies are not at all happy about the new Cory.

It just goes to show where the wind is blowing: in  favor of public schools, not charters or vouchers.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, Vouchers

“Stand for Children” Folds in Massachusetts

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2019 //
10

Once upon a time, long ago, a man named Jonah Edelman founded a group called Stand for Children. Edelman had instant credibility because he was the son of civil rights leader Marion Wright Edelman.

Somewhere, somehow, around 2009, Stand for Children decided to change its focus. So it became a grantee of the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation,  and an advocate for charter schools, high-stakes testing and test-based teacher evaluation. Gates and other billionaires gave millions to Stand to act as a pass-through.

Stand was active in Illinois, fighting against the Chicago Teachers Union. It funded pro-charter candidates in local elections such as Nashville. It was active in Massachusetts, trying to pass a referendum in 2016 to lift the state limit on charter school expansion. That referendum failed.

But, reports U Mass professor Maurice Cunningham, the money people in Massachusetts shut off the spigot, and Stand for Children is leaving, perhaps for another assignment.

Cunningham is a specialist in tracking Dark Money and the ways that the elites are undermining democracy.

What we learn from this tale is that there is no “reform movement.” It has no grassroots. It is a phenomenon of wealthy elites trying to buy public policy.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Massachusetts, Stand for Children

Oklahoma: Officials Can’t Track “Ghost Students” in Online Charter School Scandal

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2019 //
13

 

How does a state determine whether students on a virtual school’s rolls exist?

Oklahoma can’t.

Oklahoma investigators believe Epic Charter Schools embezzled money by inflating its enrollment with homeschool and private school students. Because of the state’s dedication to privacy, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister says the alleged abuse would not have been preventable under current state law.

The Enrollment Loophole

Virtual charter schools are taxpayer-funded public schools. Like traditional public schools, they are free to families and receive funding from the state based on student enrollment. Unlike traditional public schools, they are run by private companies or non-profits, and student instruction and coursework happen online instead of in-person.  

With over 20,000 students on the books last year, Epic is the largest virtual charter school in Oklahoma, and it appears to be exploiting a loophole in state law. 

All virtual charters are under the purview of a separate agency, the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, but verifying enrollment falls to the State Dept. of Education.

The education department has the data to easily keeps tabs on kids enrolled in public schools, including Epic, but it cannot track private or homeschooled students because they aren’t required to register with the state government. That makes it nearly impossible to weed out these so-called “ghost students” who are dually or falsely enrolled in homeschool or private school as well as a virtual charter school during routine audits…

Epic Charter Schools touts many benefits, but one reason for its popularity is financial incentives. 

“For the homeschool community, the appeal has been the money,” explained Teresa Burnett, a homeschool parent from Shawnee. 

Epic teachers get bonuses for recruiting students and families receive up to one thousand dollars per child. That money is part of what Epic calls its “Learning Fund,” which can be used to purchase extra products and courses. 

Burnett regularly joins with other homeschool families in a co-op to do lessons and go on outings. While she has stuck exclusively with home education, many of those in the co-op she participated in last year have joined Epic. 

“By the time we got to October, November, I’m going to estimate approximately 50 percent of the families had all enrolled in Epic,” Burnett recalled. “They were still participating in the co-op and still enrolled at Epic. These moms were being told that they basically can have the best of both worlds. We can home educate, and then we get to also take advantage of the perks that Epic will provide. ‘Perks’ being the financial perks.”

State law enforcement describes these kids as “ghost students”— homeschool and private school students that are also enrolled at Epic but receive little to no instruction from the school. Epic’s founders allegedly used them to embezzle millions of taxpayer dollars.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Oklahoma, Privatization

Alert: Koch Brothers Are Paying Operatives to Sow Discord in NAACP

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2019 //
56

 

Rebecca Klein, education editor of Huffington Post, broke the story that rightwing groups have infiltrated NAACP chapters in California to create a fake rebellion against the organization’s 2016 call for a moratorium on new charters. The resolution passed by the National Civil Rights Group demands a halt until charters agree to be accountable, to cease diverting money from public schools, and to stop pushing out students they don’t want.

When three local NAACP branches in California passed April resolutions opposing the national group’s call for a charter school moratorium, school choice advocates greeted the news with glee. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVosvoiced her support in an interview. The Wall Street Journal published a flattering editorial about the move, describing it as a welcome “revolt.”

But leaders at the California state NAACP say this so-called “revolt” is fake news. They say the main member who pushed these actions ― a woman named Christina Laster ― is being paid by a right-wing group connected to the Koch brothers to infiltrate the organization and sow chaos. They also note that, despite the media attention, these resolutions were dead on arrival at the national organization for failure to follow proper submission protocol or rejection by higher committees.

In July, California leadership asked the national NAACP to initiate an investigation into the three branches ― Southwest Riverside, San Diego and San Bernardino ― and their leaders’ motivations.

“It’s definitely a funded and deliberate effort to try and do a hostile takeover,” said Rick Callender, the second vice president for the California Hawaii NAACP…

Laster works for the California Policy Center, a conservative think tank that’s an affiliate of the State Policy Network. According to a 2012 report from theCenter for Media and Democracy, the State Policy Network is a main driver of legislation created by the pro-business American Legislative Exchange Counsel and has deep ties to Charles and David Koch, the energy billionaires who spend vast sums of money to promote conservative causes and candidates. The California Policy Center is dedicated to pushing education reform causes, with a focus on beating back the state’s teachers union. The group has been behind a number of lawsuits designed to hurt unions’ bottom lines.

An officer of the San Diego branch of the NAACP is  employed by the California Charter Schools Association, the charter lobby.

“These are people on the payroll of charter school associations and payroll of organizations that are trying to attack the greatest civil rights organization in the U.S.,” said Callender.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fake, Koch Brothers, Privatization
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