Archives for category: Charter Schools
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The Walton Family Makes $4 Million Every Hour

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2019 //
46

 

Bloomberg BusinessWeek posts this story about the rapidly escalating wealth divide: The Walton Family is the richest in the world. Its wealth grows by $4 million every hour of every day.

Twenty-five families in the world control $1.4 trillion.

In the magazine’s annual ranking of the world’s richest families, the Waltons are #1.

The numbers are mind-boggling: $70,000 per minute, $4 million per hour, $100 million per day.

That’s how quickly the fortune of the Waltons, the clan behind Walmart Inc., has been growing since last year’s Bloomberg ranking of the world’s richest families.

At that rate, their wealth would’ve expanded about $23,000 since you began reading this. A new Walmart associate in the U.S. would’ve made about 6 cents in that time, on the way to an $11 hourly minimum.

Even in this era of extreme wealth and brutal inequality, the contrast is jarring. The heirs of Sam Walton, Walmart’s notoriously frugal founder, are amassing wealth on a near-unprecedented scale — and they’re hardly alone.

The Walton fortune has swelled by $39 billion, to $191 billion, since topping the June 2018 ranking of the world’s richest families.

As educators know, the Waltons use a small part of their vast fortune to undermine public education and replace public schools with privately managed charter schools.

The least you can do is to avoid Walmart. Boycott Walmart. It may only cost them a few pennies, but do it.

In addition to their nefarious role as the single biggest founder of charters in the U.S., they are the biggest retailer of guns. Just another reason to boycott Walmart.

FYI, the founder of Walmart—Sam Walton—was a graduate of public schools. He graduated from David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Education Industry, Inequality, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Jan Resseger: Do Not Trust Superintendents from Jeb Bush’s “Chiefs for Change”

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2019 //
14

 

Jan Resseger writes here about the difference between Superintendents who understand the importance of collaborating with and respecting the community they serve, and the Superintendents connected to Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, who believe in state takeovers and imposing their views on their communities. She might have added the Brodie’s to the latter category, those who are “graduates” of the Broad Superintendents Academy. The BS Academy teaches Eli Broad’s corporate-style of Top-Down management.

She writes:

There is an ongoing battle of values and language that shapes the way we think about and talk about education.  The current threats across several states of state takeover of school districts are perhaps the best example of this conflict.  According to the Chiefs for Change model, the school district in Providence has recently been taken over by the state of Rhode Island.  Texas now threatens to take over the public schools in Houston. In Ohio, four years of state takeover has created chaos in Lorain and dissatisfaction in Youngstown.  East Cleveland is now in the process of being taken over, and the Legislature has instituted a one-year moratorium while lawmakers figure out whether to proceed with threatened takeovers of the public school districts in Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, Canton, Ashtabula, Lima, Mansfield, Painesville, Euclid, and North College Hill.

Among the most painful situations this summer is the threatened closure of the high school or the state takeover of the school district in Benton Harbor, Michigan, a segregated African American community and one of the poorest in the state.  Michigan has actively expanded school choice with charter schools and an inter-district open enrollment program in which students carry away their school funding. The statewide expansion of charters and inter-district school choice has undermined the most vulnerable school districts and triggered a number of state takeover actions.  Michigan State University’s David Arnsen explains: “In Michigan, all the money moves with the students. So it doesn’t take account of the impact on the districts and students who are not active choosers… When the child leaves, all the state and local funding moves with that student. The revenue moves immediately and that drops faster than the costs… In every case they (districts losing students to Schools of Choice) are districts that are predominantly African American and poor children and they suffered terrific losses of enrollment and revenue….”

Benton Harbor—heavily in debt and struggling academically—has been threatened with state intervention like Inkster, Buena Vista, Highland Park, and Muskegon Heights—whole school districts which were closed, charterized, or put under emergency manager control by former governor Rick Snyder.  Now the new Governor Gretchen Whitmer has threatened to close the high school in Benton Harbor or eventually close the district.

If your superintendent supports state takeovers, mass firings, replacing public schools with charter schools, or other corporate management strategies, he is not on the side of your community.

 

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Broad Foundation, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Education Reform

Mercedes Schneider On NOLA Charter Chaos

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2019 //
15

 

In this post, Mercedes Schneider tries to untangle the mess created by lack of oversight in all-charter New Orleans. 

She begins:

In all-charter New Orleans, New Beginnings Schools Foundation (NBSF) operates three charter schools in New Orleans, one of which is John F. Kennedy High School.

Kennedy is in the throes of an astounding fraud which resulted in almost 50 percent of its Class of 2019 being found to not have actually met state requirements for graduation. As a result, 87 out of 177 students who were allowed to participate in a graduation ceremony and who thought that they would receive diplomas discovered that they would not be receiving diplomas after all. In an effort to mop up this mess, the NBSF board offered post-haste summer school as an option that 53 of the affected seniors participated in. Mind you, this last-minute, thrown-together clean up effort put students who had been offered scholarships at a critical disadvantage because official, complete, state-approved high school transcripts were not available in May 2019, when the students supposedly/legitimately graduated.

It is now August 2019;  college/universty fall classes will soon begin, and the Kennedy seniors who participated in the alleged summer-school fixer still have not received copies of their transcripts. (For the extensive backstory and continuing saga, see here and here and here and here and here and here.)

On August 06, 2019, Nola.com reported on Kennedy student and parent efforts to require release of student transcripts via court order.

What is of particular importance in this all-charter arrangement is the fact that the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) (ironically renamed NOLA Public Schools) has no direct authority over those “public” schools to require the schools to release the transcripts. In this “portfolio model,” the school board is left out of any authority over ensuring school data integrity; the charter school deals directly with the state in delivering data, which is part of the problem since the state apparently had no controls in place to audit charter school grading practices.

The district was left out of Kennedy’s grading processes until a whistleblower brought the fraud to district attention, and then the district requested a state audit of all charter high school grading practices.

What comes through loud and clear is that any accountability depends of whistleblowers. The data mean nothing because they are generated by charter schools that are trying to create impressive records, even though fraudulent.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, High School Graduation, New Orleans, Privatization

Peter Greene Explains Reed Hastings’ Philosophy of Education

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2019 //
29

 

Reed Hastings is the billionaire founder of Netflix. He is also one of the biggest funders of charters schools.

Peter Greene found the phrase that explains Hastings’ philosophy of education: “Stars in every position.” 

Hastings has had his hand in many charter pies, from backing outfits like Rocketship and KIPP, as well as serving on the board of California Charter Academy, a chain that collapsed mid-year, leaving 6,000 students high and dry to helping shape charter law in California. Hastings has also had a hand in the launch NewSchools Venture Fund, an investment group that backs ed tech and other edupreneurs. So we’re not talking fringe player here.

So what do we discover in this quote?

First, the “pro sports team, not a kid’s recreation team” aspect. A pro sports teams picks and chooses its players. A public school does not. Nor can a public school “cut” students who don’t measure up.

“Stars in every position” is the same focus. In Hasting’s mind, that may apply only to the staff and administration of a school, but people who actually work in education know that part of what creates the atmosphere and culture of a school is, in fact, the students. Would a school that has nothing but star pupils be a great school? Probably. The job in public education is to educate everyone, but what we see repeatedly with the corporate charter movement is schools that “fire” students and their families.

This is educational gentrification. Gentrification says, “This neighborhood is problematic. But we’ll come in and replace the buildings with better buildings, the stores with better stores, the apartments with better apartments, and the residents with better residents.” Gentrification is about swapping out everything except the latitude and longitude of the neighborhood. In the end, you haven’t “improved” anything– you’ve replaced everything.

You don’t improve a school by replacing everything except the building (and maybe that as well)– you’ve just replaced it, and that’s no achievement.

I also wonder how far down the star system runs. Is everybody toiling away at minimum wage in the Netflix mail room a star? Or is Netflix just another tech firm like Amazon, built on the labor of anonymous overworked underpaid people who are beneath the notice of the big boys. And how could anyone possibly apply that approach to a school?

Greene notes that Netflix is about to be sorely tested as other big corporations enter its streaming space.

To my way of thinking, the starkest contradiction of Hastings’ worldview is implicit in one of its biggest worldwide hits, “Orange is the New Black,” a brutal, sexually explicit, 7-season show about women in prison. When the prison is privatized, the corporation takes over. The only thing that matters is the bottom line. The normally inhumane guards are replaced by even more vicious guards, the GED program is eliminated, the quality of the food deteriorates, and cost-cutting leads to an inmates’ death and a convict rebellion. Does Reed Hastings watch his own shows?

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

San Diego: Judge Orders Two Charter Schools to Close

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
14

 

A judge in San Diego ordered two charter schools in the district to close in response to the school district’s complaint that they were operating without local authorization and could not be supervised. About 40,000 students attend Learn4Life centers statewide.

The Learn4Life charters are appealing the decision.

Judge David Danielsen on Monday granted a motion by San Diego Unified School District to close the two Learn4Life locations operating in the district’s boundaries: Diego Hills Central, a charter school authorized by Dehesa School District, and a resource center for San Diego Workforce Innovation High, a school authorized by Borrego Springs Unified School District. Neither of those schools have active locations in the districts that authorized them.

As Carol Burris reported in Charters and Consequences, the Learn4Life charters are storefronts where students meet a teacher once every 20 days. Their graduation rates are abysmal. Typically, they are authorized by small rural districts to operate in urban districts hundreds of miles away, where they operate without oversight. The authorizing district gets a commission for every student who enrolls.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, San Diego, School Choice

California: “Inspire” Charter Chain Grows While Floundering

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
9

 

The San Diego Union-Tribune featured a front-page top-of-the-fold story by Kristin Taketa about the deepening troubles of the “Inspire” charter chain, which is growing across the state despite academic and financial woes.

The headline: “Inspire Charter Schools Grow As Results Lag.”

The Inspire network of 12 home charter schools is quickly spreading its reach across California as some are calling into question its educational, organizational and financial practices.

At the heart of the Inspire network is a corporation whose CEO makes about $380,000 a year and who helped create the Inspire schools, which now pay his corporation 15 percent of the taxpayer funds they collect.

Inspire has grown in part by advertising that parents can decide how to spend$2,600 or more a year toward their child’s education, with a teacher’s approval. Inspire operates on the idea that parents should have freedom to decide how their children are educated.

Inspire parents have been able to spend state-provided money on expenses they say are educational, from Disneyland annual passes to private ice skating coaching. The list of places where Inspire parents could spend school funds has included Costco, Amazon, Big Air Trampoline Park, Medieval Times, Guitar Center and the DNA testing company 23 and Me, according to Inspire’s list of approved vendors.

Meanwhile, Inspire students are required to meet with teachers and turn in assignments once a month.

The charter network is based in Duarte and enrolled 23,400 students last year.

State data show that Inspire schools underperformed academically. Last year, all Inspire schools performed below the state average in English and math test scores, with some schools showing as few as 16 percent of their students passing math and as few as 25 percent passing English. The state average is 39 percent for math and 50 percent for English.

Put together, Inspire schools had an average graduation rate of 69 percent last year and produced seven graduates — out of 209— who met California state college or university admission requirements.

Why does the State Education Department tolerate this waste of children’s lives and taxpayers’ money?

When will the Legislature crack down on these sham schools?

The good news is that a major newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, is assigning excellent reporters to cover these scandals, which are especially flagrant in California due to the state’s weak charter law, which assures that charters will be unregulated and unaccountable. In the past, the Union-Tribune was considered a conservative paper. It may still be. Conservatives should be outraged by this fraudulent education and blatant misuse of public funds.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Hoax, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: Does This Member of the Louisiana State Board of Education Live in Louisiana?

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
6

 

Mercedes Schneider has followed the fortunes of Kira Orange-Jones, executive director of Teach for America in Louisiana, who was elected to the State Board with a large infusion of campaign funds from out-of-state Reformers In 2011 and 2015. Schneider continues her scrutiny here. Schneider notes that Orange-Jones has failed to file required financial disclosures and that her actual physical residence is in doubt, especially since she married another TFA alum who served for a time as Acting Secretary of Education in New Me O’Connell. In addition, Orange-Jones has missed about one-third of school board meetings.

In both 2011 and 2015, corporate-reform-promoting millionaires and billionaires purchased the majority of seats on the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

One of their purchases is Teach for America (TFA) executive director, Kira Orange-Jones.

Even though Orange-Jones has been BESE District 2 representative for almost eight years, she has yet to file her annual disclosure reports for 2017 and 2018.

One critical bit of information on the annual disclosure is the representative’s physical address. On this point, Orange-Jones’ actual address becomes a bit cloudy.

On the last annual disclosure that Orange-Jones filed– for 2016— Orange-Jones identifies her address as on Laurel Street in New Orleans. On the same disclosure report, Orange-Jones also acknowledges her marriage to Christopher Ruszkowski, who was at the time deputy secretary of education in New Mexico. In 2018, Ruszkowski became “secretary designee” at the NM Department of Ed when he replaced Hanna Skandera. It seems that Ruszkowski exited by 2019.

On Ruszkowski’s 2017 and 2018 financial disclosure reports, he lists a NM address. Orange-Jones’ residence remains unclear. (One can search those forms here by looking up “ruszkowski” and selecting “2017” and “2018.”)

Since Orange-Jones has not filed the required financial disclosures for 2017 and 2018, the public does not know if Orange-Jones maintained a residence in her district, one of the qualifications for serving on BESE.

But there’s more.

Orange-Jones plans to run for re-election in October 2019. The Louisiana Secretary of State has her address as being on Philip Street in New Orleans. (One can view this info here by searching “parish candidates” on the side bar; selecting “BESE District 2,” and then clicking “view candidates for selected race(s).”)

Examination of property tax records for the Philip Street address shows that the owner is NJS Properties; according to details of the search, “NJS” stands for Norma J. Sabiston.

On Orange-Jones’ July 2019 campaign finance report for the upcoming, October 2019, BESE election, one of Orange-Jones’ expenditures is $15,000 to Sabaston Consultants, whose president is Norma Jane Sabiston.

Does Orange-Jones live at the Philip Street address, or has her consultant provided the address in an attempt to legitimize Orange-Jones as a District 2 resident? Has Orange-Jones forfeited a New Orleans address at any point since her last, 2016, annual filing?

There is more. Open the link and read on.

Reformers have a lot of gall.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Louisiana, Privatization, Teach for America

Shawgi Tell: Charter Lobbyists Are on the Defensive

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
11

 

The house of cards and propaganda that sustained the charter industry is beginning to crumble. Despite the Obama-Duncan promotion of charters through the disastrous Race to the Top program, no Democrat in the crowded presidential race will openly endorse charter schools. Not even Cory Booker will support charters, despite two decades of fighting for them.

Now, it is no longer cool for a Democrats to back charters.

Democrats support public schools, not charters, vouchers, or privatization. Thank you, Betsy DeVos, for clearing the air.

Shawgi Tell of Nazareth College in upstate New York describes what happened when Democratic Governor Tom Wolf stated the obvious: Charter Schools Are NOT public schools. 

Tell writes:

Calling a charter school public is mainly for the self-serving purpose of illegitimately funneling vast sums of public money from public schools to wealthy private interests who own-operate nonprofit and for-profit charter schools. Charter schools are essentially pay-the-rich schemes masquerading as “innovations” that “save public education” and “give parents choices.”

Charter school owners-operators would not be able to fleece public money from public schools if they were openly recognized as the privatized arrangements that they are. Most people understand that public money belongs solely to the public, not private interests. They understand that public wealth must be used only for public purposes and that private interests have no right to decide how to use public money.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Race to the Top, School Choice, Walton Foundation

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
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