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Nancy Flanagan: Just Who Is Trashing Public Education?

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2024 //
14

Veteran teacher Nancy Flanagan explores the question of who is trying to destroy our public schools. She nails some of the loudest critics, who have personally benefitted from public schools. She doesn’t explore why they are trying to annihilate the schools that educated them, but that may because we know what the privatization movement has to offer: money. There is a gravy train overloaded with munificent gifts from Betsy DeVos, the Waltons, Charles Koch, Michael Bloomberg, and a boatload of other billionaires. They can endlessly underwrite anti-public school organizations that offer well-paid jobs.

On the pro-public education side, it’s hard to find big spenders or highly compensated jobs. The two big unions have resources, all of which come from the dues of their members. They do not have the funds to support the numerous grassroots groups that are found in every state. Most, if not all of the state and local groups, operate on a shoestring; typically, their employees are volunteers. They do not have six-figure jobs for someone who tweets and writes statements. No one who works for a state “Save Our Schools” group makes big money.

The Network for Public Education is the biggest pro-public education groups; it has 350,000 people who have signed up to support it, but there is no membership fee. NPE has one full-time employee and a few part-timers.

So, Nancy Flanagan asks, just who is trashing public schools?

She writes:

Get ready for a big dump–a deliberately chosen word–of anti-public education blah-blah over the next five months. It’s about all the right wing’s got, for one thing–and it’s one of those issues that everybody has an opinion on, whether they went to public school. have children in public schools, or neither.

Public education is so big and so variable that there’s always something to get exercised over. There’s always one teacher who made your child miserable, one assigned book that raises hackles, one policy that feels flat-out wrongheaded. There’s also someone, somewhere, who admires that teacher, feels that book is a classic and stoutly defends whatever it is—Getting rid of recess? The faux science of phonics? Sex education that promotes abstinence? —that someone else finds ridiculous or reprehensible.

Not to mention—teaching is the largest profession in the country, So many teachers, so many public schools, so much opportunity to find fault.

In other words, public education is the low-hanging fruit of political calculation. Always has been, in fact.

A few years back, when folks were going gaga over Hillbilly Elegy, seeing it as the true story of how one could rise above one’s station (speaking of blahblah)—the main thing that irritated me about ol’ J.D. Vance was his nastiness about public education. Vance has since parlayed a best-seller that appealed to those who think a degree from Yale equates to arriving at the top, into a political career—and putting the screws to affirmative action, in case anyone of color tries to enjoy the same leg-up he did.

J.D. Vance’s education—K-12, the military, Ohio State—was entirely in public institutions until he got into Yale Law School. He doesn’t have anything good to say about public ed, but it was free and available to him, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. When I read Rick Hess’s nauseating interview with Corey DeAngelis in Education Week, I had a flashback to ol’ J.D., intimating that he achieved success entirely on his own, without help from that first grade teacher who taught him how to read and play nice with others.

DeAngelis says:

I went to government schools my entire K–12 education in San Antonio, Texas. However, I attended a magnet high school, which was a great opportunity. Other families should have education options as well, and those options shouldn’t be limited to schools run by the government. Education funding should follow students to the public, private, charter, or home school that best meets their needs. I later researched the effects of school choice initiatives during my Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform.

So—just to clarify—Corey DeAngelis went to public schools K-12, for his BA and MA degrees (University of Texas), as well as a stint in a PUBLICLY FUNDED program at the notoriously right-focused University of Arkansas. That’s approximately 22 years, give or take, of public education, the nation-building institution DeAngelis now openly seeks to destroy.

I’m not going to provide quotes from the EdWeek piece, because anyone reading this already knows the hyperbolic, insulting gist—lazy, dumb, unions, low bar, failing, yada yada. He takes particular aim at the unions—although it absolutely wasn’t the unions—shutting down schools during a global pandemic. He paints schools’ turn-on-a-dime efforts to hold classes on Zoom as an opportunity for clueless parents to see, first-hand, evidence of how bad instruction is. He never mentions, of course, the teachers, students and school staff who died from COVID exposure.

Enough of duplicitous public school critics. My point is this:

The people who trash public education—not a particular school, classroom or curricular issue, but the general idea of government-sponsored opportunity to learn how to be a good, productive American citizen—have a very specific, disruptive ax to grind:

I got what I needed. I don’t really care about anybody else.

This goes for your local Militant Moms 4 Whatever on a Mission, out there complaining about books and school playsand songs and health class. It’s not about parents’ “rights.” It’s about control. And never about the other families and kids, who may have very different values and needs.

It’s about taking the ‘public’ out of public education. And it’s 100% politically driven.

OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH READING THE ARTICLE!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Unions, Vouchers

Gary Rubinstein: Time to Investigate Success Academy’s SPRINT Program

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2024 //
28

Gary Rubinstein has been following the evolution of Success Academy in New York City for years. it’s the largest charter chain in the state, with the highest test scores. But Gary has documented its high attrition rates and teacher turnover. Others have written about its penchant for pushing out students it doesn’t want. Success Academy is often held up as a model for the accomplishments of charter schools. But other charter chains are dropping the harsh “no excuses” discipline of SA.

In this post, Gary writes about another SA practice that is problematic.

He writes:

About four months ago I received an unusual DM in my Twitter account. Though over the years several different Success Academy parents have reached out to me, this was from someone who claimed to be either a current employee or a former employee. They used an anonymous name and to this day, I have no idea who this person is. But they reached out to me because they had a story to tell and felt, I guess, that I was the best person to tell it to.

Over the months they have provided various internal Success Academy documents, screen shots from internal Success Academy message boards, and so much information about what is truly going on at Success Academy, that I have no reason to doubt their authenticity.

Much of the information was about chaos that is going on behind the scenes at Success Academy. Like how they are struggling to convince elementary students to remain at Success Academy for middle school and to convince middle school students to remain at Success Academy for high school. I even got to see an internal document with talking points to tell families in order to convince they to stay.

The document had the title “Grade 4 Teacher Selling & Persuading Talking Points” and began with the words: “Framing: Unfortunately, over the years we see that after all the hard work of our elementary school teachers and schools, some of our 4th graders leave us and end up attending failing middle schools. We cannot let this happen. And so for the first time really we want to invest our scholars in the “why” behind SA’s magical middle schools. We want our scholars and parents to make truly informed choices about the next leg of their educational journey.”

I had already known based on enrollment numbers that Success Academy was having trouble getting families to continue to trust them after all the years of shady practices, but my source says that things are very dire, especially in the Brooklyn high school, which nearly had to be shut down for low enrollment.

I got a lot of other good insider information from my source. Their description of the morale of the staffs at several of the schools and the extreme turnover definitely made me feel bad for the teachers there but even worse for the students who have to endure such instability. The picture was worse than I had expected. But still I didn’t get what I considered to be a ‘smoking gun’ — something that the school was doing that was illegal.

A topic that this insider kept returning to was something that, at first, I didn’t have much interest in. It is well known that Success Academy used to not have a very high percent of students requiring special education services. My sense was that Success Academy did not want many students requiring special education services because those students would require attention which could take away resources from their test prep gaming system. But my insider often returned to something that really seemed to bother them, and it is about the way that Success Academy identifies students for special education services. The program is called SPRINT.

The way most schools work, a special education referral is initiated by a parent or sometimes a teacher in consultation with a parent and the school administration which might include guidance counselors and social workers will start the process. As a parent of a student who was diagnosed with various learning issues, I know that this is a very difficult time for a parent when they learn that their child qualifies for special education services.

But the way it works at Success Academy is unlike anything I’ve ever heard of at any school before. And according to the insider, many people who work for SPRINT or who used to work for SPRINT feel that they are working for a corrupt division of a corrupt organization. Whether what the SPRINT team is doing is illegal or just immoral or neither will be up to state investigators to decide if they ever have the desire to check into this, but this is the little that I understand about it.

According to my insider, the SPRINT staff are given quotas of special education referrals that they have to meet each week. It is something like five referrals per week. I don’t have all the details, but this is a big numbers game where referrals are driven by these quotas. If this is true and this team is pressured to find students to refer, this would mean that some students and their families go through the arduous referral process unnecessarily.

I asked the insider why would Success Academy want to inflate their special education numbers. The insider wasn’t sure about the motive. They felt it might have had to do with finances as having more special education students enables them to hire more teachers for ICT classes. But they weren’t certain about the motive, just the fact that special education referrals are done to fulfill quotas and not driven by what parents or teachers are noticing.

I asked the insider what the harm is from over referring for evaluations. Isn’t it better to have too many referrals and some students are denied services than to have too few and have students who would qualify but who never get evaluated? The source admitted that it is hard to pinpoint exactly what the malicious intent is but made it seem like this whole SPRINT quota system was very shady. Like they were gaming the system to get some students to qualify for services even if they really didn’t need them. But even if getting supports for student who might not need, the issue is that Success Academy seems to be doing this from a business point of view and not to truly help struggling students.

I know all this is kind of vague and my insider is going to wonder why I didn’t include more of the specific details of the color coding for the different levels of referrals. But they made it clear that to meet these quotas the staffers on the SPRINT team have to be very aggressive. In order for a team to make five referrals a week, they have to hound the families and if the families are resistant they have to step up the pressure. The insider even says they were encouraged once to call ACS on a family that would not agree to go through the referral process.

For sure there is a lot more detail to be filled in on this story. If you are working for SPRINT right now and are having trouble sleeping at night because of it, feel free to reach out to me, I can help you out.

Here is a post on an internal Success Academy message board from an actual employee:

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Steve Suitts: The New Segregation Looks Like the Old Segregation

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2024 //
3

Steve Suitts wrote an important essay on the continuity between the “school choice” movement of today and its roots in the fight against the Brown decision in the 1950s.

Charter schools and vouchers are not innovative. Their most predictable outcome is not “better education,” but segregated schools.

Suitts’ essay delves into the issue, state by state. I encourage you to open the link and read it in full. I skipped over large and important sections. Read them.

He begins:

Overview

On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education—the US Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in the nation’s public schools—Steve Suitts reveals an emerging, seismic shift in how southern states in the United States are leading the nation in adopting universal private school vouchers. Suitts warns that this new “school choice” movement will reestablish a dual school system not unlike the racially separate, unequal schools which segregationists attempted to preserve in the 1960s using vouchers.

INTRODUCTION

On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools, the states of the southern US are pushing to reestablish publicly financed, dual school systems—one primarily for higher-income and white children and the other primarily for lower-income and minority children. This seismic shift in how states fund K–12 education through universal vouchers isn’t confined to the South. But it is centered among the states that once mandated racially separate, unequal schools and where segregationists in the 1960s attempted to use private school vouchers to evade the watershed US Supreme Court decision.

More than thirty-five states have created voucher programs to send public dollars to private schools. At least nineteen, including most in the South, have adopted or are on a path to enact legislation making state-funded “Educational Savings Accounts” (ESAs)—the newest type of voucher approach—available to all or most families who forego public schools. These families can use the funds to send their children to almost any K–12 private school, including home-schooling, or purchase a wide range of educational materials and services, such as tutoring, summer camps, and counseling. 

In recent times, private school vouchers were pitched to the public for the purpose of giving a targeted group of disadvantaged children new educational options, but legislatures are now expanding eligibility and funding for vouchers to include advantaged students. By adopting universal or near universal eligibility for ESAs, states will be obligating tens of billions of tax dollars to finance private schooling while creating a voucher system for use by affluent families with children already attending or planning to attend private school.

States are rushing to enact ESAs while they still have the last of huge federal COVID appropriations to distribute among public schools. This timing allows ESAs’ sponsors—Republican legislative leaders and governors—to entice once-reluctant, rural legislators to support vouchers. It also camouflages the severe fiscal impact this scheme will have on routinely underfunded public schools after the special federal funds run out.

The states adopting ESAs are also structuring this emerging, publicly funded, dual system so that private schools and homeschooling remain free of almost all regulations, academic standards, accountability, and oversight. These sorts of rules and regulations are always imposed by state legislatures on public schools and are understood as essential to protect students and to advance learning. Even as legislatures are adding restrictive laws on how local public schools teach topics involving race, sex, ethnicity, and gender they are providing new state funding for private schools and home-schooling that will enable racist, sexist, and other bigoted teaching.

If state legislatures succeed in establishing and broadening this dual, tax-funded system of schools, the tremors will transform the landscape of US elementary and secondary education for decades to come. Calling for “freedom of choice,” a battle cry first voiced by segregationists who fought to overturn the Brown decision,1 predominantly white Republicans will take states back to a future of separate and unequal education.

THE UNIVERSAL VOUCHER SYSTEM

By the seventieth anniversary of Brown, five states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) have enacted ESA programs that allow all or a vast majority of families with school-age children to send their children to private schools with state funds that equal or closely match the states’ per pupil expenditures for public schools. South Carolina adopted a “pilot” ESA last year, and a bill making its program permanent has already passed one chamber. The lower house of the Louisiana legislature passed a bill for a statewide universal ESA program to start next year, but the state senate is likely to delay adoption for another year to confirm estimated costs. Both states have governors who are likely to push adoption again next year.2

The Tennessee legislature adjourned in April without passing either of two pending universal ESA bills—only because Governor Bill Lee and legislative leaders failed to agree on which voucher bill to enact. They vow to pass legislation next session. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott used campaign funds from a Pennsylvania billionaire in the state’s Republican primary to defeat a handful of legislators who blocked his ESA bill last year. Abbott expects to defeat the two remaining state house members who failed to vote for his legislation—giving him the number he needs to pass his bill, while sending a political message that will keep his supporters in line…3

The historical context is shameful. Five of the southern states that now have universal vouchers also enacted open-ended vouchers in the 1960s—attempting to defeat Brown’s mandate for school desegregation. All but three of the states that have already embraced publicly financed ESAs were the only states authorizing segregated public schools on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision.9

The fiscal impact of this rush to fund private schooling will be devastating to public schools. In 2018, all fifty states allocated $2.6 billion to finance private school vouchers. In 2021, legislatures increased the total amount to $3.3 billion and more recently to over $6 billion. If the eleven southern states enact the bills currently adopted or pending in their legislatures, their total funding for vouchers will be as much as $6.8 billion in 2025–26 and, according to independent estimates, as much as $20 billion for private schooling in 2030. This sum would equal the total state funds to public schools among six southern states in 2021.10

In 1950, about 400,000 students in the South attended private schools. By 2021-22, the number of private school students was about 1.8 million.

In 2021-22, 38.9% of white students attended public schools, and 63% enrolled in private schools.

AS VOUCHERS SPREAD, BROWN’S PROMISE DIES

During the last seventy years, the nation’s public schools have struggled in meeting the promise of Brown, despite clear proof that racially integrated, well-funded schools improve outcomes for Black children.39 This promise has been especially important to the South, where the states’ first education laws prohibited Black persons from being taught to read or write; where racially segregated schools offered children of color an inferior education across more than a half century. Due to stubborn, racially defined housing patterns, increasing class disparities, adverse, even hostile Supreme Court decisions, a lack of local, interracial community support, and, as recent research confirms, the growth of school choice, public schools continue to face far too many hurdles in providing all children with a good education.40

Mural by Michael Young celebrating the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision, in the Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansa, May 23, 2019. Photograph by Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

The South’s new dual school system renounces and annuls the mandates and hopes of Brown v. Board of Education. As universal vouchers spread, Brown’s promise dies. By their design, vouchers are an abandonment of Brown’s goal of equality of educational opportunity.

Reestablishing a dual school system will damage the prospects of a good education for all who attend public schools—not just low-income and minority children. The southern states were not able to finance two separate school systems during the era of segregation, even though Black students received a pittance of funding. Today that inability remains. The South continues to be far behind the rest of the nation in state and local funding of public schools. The new schemes of universal Education Savings Account vouchers will exacerbate the lack of sufficient funds for all except those higher-income families whose school-age children can attend private schools or home-schools and enjoy the enhancements and enriching experience that vouchers will subsidize.

Parents, grandparents, and others who support public schools and the democratic promise of public education must raise our voices against this reactionary movement and in furtherance of the importance of public schools. Like democracy itself, public schools may be the worst system for delivering all children an equal opportunity for a good education—except for all the others. We must not betray or abandon public education if we are committed to the democratic goal of a more perfect union and a good society for all. 

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Funding, Racism, Segregation, Separation of church and state

Houston: Congressmember Calls for Federal Investigation of HISD under Miles

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2024 //
12

After Spectrum News reported that millions of dollars had been sent from Texas charter schools founded by Mike Miles to Colorado charter schools in the same chain, parents and students demanded Miles’ resignation as superintendent of Houston Independent School Disttrict. Elected officials have called for an investigation but recognize that neither the State Commissioner (Mike Morath) nor Governor Abbott are likely to criticize Miles, whom they appointed.

HOUSTON — U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia formally requested that the U.S. Department of Education investigate the issues at Houston ISD and the financing of schools in the area, according to a letter obtained by KHOU 11 News.

In the letter dated May 15, the Congresswoman refers to recent news stories that reported Ector ISD near Midland, Texas allegedly sent state funds from Texas to Third Future Schools, a charter school operated in Colorado. She requested that an audit be conducted on Ector ISD.

A Spectrum News Texas report highlighted a pair of million-dollar-plus checks allegedly sent from Third Future Schools in Texas to its campuses in Colorado. The report accused Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Milesof sending Texas tax dollars out of state.

Miles has issued a statement responding to the report, saying the report “either intentionally or through gross incompetence, mischaracterized commonplace financial arrangements between charter schools and the charter management organizations that support them.” 

RELATED: HISD Superintendent Mike Miles responds to report he funneled TX taxpayer money to Colorado | TEA commissioner, Third Future Schools also respond

Garcia expressed concerns over the financial stability of HISD following last year’s takeover by the state of Texas. This comes after widespread layoffs were announced leading to protests from those affected and HISD families.

RELATED: More Houston ISD parents protest over principals reportedly being forced out

RELATED: She was principal of the year in 2023. A year later, she said HISD forced her to resign

Texas Education Commissioner Mick Morath has confirmed that the TEA complaints team will look into allegations against Miles. 

The congresswoman also requested the issuance of federal funds by the state from the pandemic that were to be used to supplement public education at HISD be audited.

“It pains me that my home school district has been taken over and is seemingly being intentionally run into the ground and (I) request any additional assistance you can provide to protect our schools and our students,” Garcia said in the letter.

Garcia went on to claim that the state is punishing HISD.

“Houston is a vibrant and diverse community, and our state government is punishing us for that; we need your help,” she said in the letter.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Houston, Texas

Houston: Mike Miles Denies Transfer of Millions to His Colorado Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2024 //
22

Brett Shipp of Spectrum News posted a video asserting that the Texas charter schools in the network founded by Mike Miles sent millions of dollars to Miles’ Colorado charter schools. His report was amply documented.

Miles was imposed as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District after the state took control of HISD, based on the low performance of ONE school, Wheatley High School. Miles was selected by State Superintendent Mike Morath, who served on the Dallas school board when Miles was superintendent for three years and failed to meet any of his lofty goals. Neither Morath nor Miles is an educator. Morath was in the software business, and Miles was in the military before joining Eli Broad’s Superintendent Academy, which emphasized top-down management and disruption.

Ana Hernandez, a Houston legislator, wrote Mike Morath to call for an investigation of Miles. Morath is unlikely to conduct a serious probe since he chose Miles. The State Attorney General Ken Paxton is under indictment for corruption, so he’s not likely to dig deep into Morath’s choice; Morath was picked by Governor Gregg Abbott.

Sam Gonzalez Kelly of The Houston Chronicle reported that Miles denounced Shipp’s charges:

HISD’s appointed Superintendent Mike Miles is vehemently denying reports that his former charter network, Third Future Schools, illegally used money from its Texas campuses to subsidize its schools in Colorado. 

Miles, in a late night email to “friends, partners and board members,” wrote that the story by Spectrum News in Dallas “badly misunderstands, or worse, intentionally misrepresents the financial practices of Third Future Schools.” The story, by reporter Brett Shipp, who covered Miles during his tenure as Dallas ISD superintendent, accuses Third Future Schools of charging fees to its Texas network to subsidize one of its campuses in Colorado, and reported that Third Future Schools Texas had run a deficit due to debts to “other TFS network schools and to TFS corporate.”

The Spectrum report cites recordings of TFS corporate board and investor meetings, as well as the charter network’s financial records. The Houston Chronicle’s review of the documents confirmed that TFS Texas had sent funds to Colorado campuses, which a charter school finance expert said is generally permitted by state law.

“While I have not worked at the Third Future Schools network for more than a year, I find the piece irresponsibly inaccurate, and I cannot let this kind of misinformation go uncorrected,” Miles wrote. 

Miles wrote that Third Future Schools “was always a responsible steward of every public dollar received” and that school finances were approved by local school boards and partner districts. He acknowledged that Texas schools paid “administrative fees” to the central Third Future office, which is headquartered in Colorado, to provide network-wide supports in areas, including finance and human resources, but said that such payments are common practice for charter networks.

“Spectrum News either intentionally or, through gross incompetence, mischaracterized these common place financial arrangements between charter schools and the charter management organizations that support them,” Miles wrote. 

Neither Spectrum nor Shipp immediately responded to requests for comment. 

Spectrum’s story immediately prompted outrage among HISD community members and some elected officials, who are demanding the superintendent’s resignation and a federal investigation over the charter network’s use of Texas taxpayer money in Colorado schools. 

The Texas Education Agency said in a statement Tuesday that it was aware of Spectrum’s report and was reviewing the matter.

The “charter school finance expert” consulted by The Houston Chronicle worked for the state charter school association. It is not clear that state law allows charter schools in Texas to send Texas public funds to its offices or other charters in Colorado.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Texas

Scandal! Millions of $$ Flow from Texas to Colorado Charter Chain

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2024 //
18

Mike Miles, the Superintendent imposed on the Houston public schools by a state takeover, set up a chain of charter schools in Colorado. His charters are running a big deficit. They are also getting poor academic results. One of them closed.

Miles is still getting paid as a consultant to his charter chain.

Miles opened charter schools in Texas.

Investigative reporter Brett Shipp learned that millions of dollars are being transferred from Miles’s Texas charters to his Colorado charters, to pay down their debt.

When he asked the charter leaders about this transfer, he was told that all the charters are in the same chain, so no problem.

But Texas parents complain that their schools are underfunded. When Shipp interviewed them, they were shocked to hear that their tax dollars were being sent to underwrite the deficit of charters in Colorado.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Colorado, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Houston, Privatization, Texas

Where Do We Stand Today in the Struggle to Save Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2024 //
3

A few days ago, I joined a discussion with Dr. Tim Slekar and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci about the current state of public education. It was aired on their show “Busted Pencils,” which is dedicated to teachers, students, and public schools.

We talked about charters, vouchers, testing, and how to get involved. Everyone can stand up for what they believe.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Civics, Community Schools, Corporate Reform, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Resistance, Teachers, Vouchers

Samuel Abrams Is Stepping Down at the National Center on the Study of Privatization in Education

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2024 //
4

Educators and policymakers need unbiased analyses of the effects of privatization of education, and that is what the National Center on the Study of Privatizatuon in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University has provided since it was founded by noted economist Henry Levin in 2000. In 2015, Levin stepped down and was succeeded by Samuel Abrams, who wrote a superb study of The Edison Project called Education and the Commercial Mindset. For the best nine years, Abrams has run NCSPE with integrity. Privatization is rapidly spreading around the globe, and the public needs a reliable source to keep watch on it. I hope that TC can find someone as able and thoughtful to succeed him.

Samuel Abrams wrote this letter about his decision and the next chapter in his career:

After nine years as the director of NCPSE, I’m writing to share that I’m stepping down to become the director of the International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization (IPSEP).

IPSEP will be anchored at the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Partner institutions will include, to start, the Department of Economics at Stockholm University in Sweden; and the Turku University of Applied Sciences as well as the School of Education at the University of Turku in Finland. To receive IPSEP publications, please sign up here to join the NEPC mailing list (in case you’re not already a subscriber).

The idea for IPSEP derived from my time last year as a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Turku, where I studied the role of public-private partnerships central to apprenticeship programs at vocational secondary schools. Nearly 50 percent of secondary students in Finland attend vocational schools (in comparison to about 5 percent in the U.S.). Such public-private partnerships make such robust participation in vocational education possible and pave the way to impressive job training and placement.

The private sector has nevertheless failed to distinguish itself in other educational domains in Finland. For example, commercial firms are playing a growing role in managing preschools and running teacher professional development. In both cases, significant questions have been raised about quality. In addition, school districts have allowed tech companies to play a growing role in determining curricula, with iPads and tablets replacing books, which may explain to a significant degree the plunge in reading proficiency among Finnish youth. The mean score for reading for the Finns on PISA dropped from 520 in 2018 to 490 in 2022, which amounts to nearly a year of learning, generating alarmist headlines in newspapers across Finland. A country known since the publication of the first PISA results in 2001 as an education mecca for policymakers seeking pedagogical solutions had lost its shine.

The realm of preschools may be most telling. A company called Pilke is now running 227 preschools across Finland, up from 19 in 2013. Pilke, in turn, was acquired in 2020 by a Norwegian preschool operator called Læringsverkstedet. Both Pilke and Læringsverkstedet now operate as subsidiaries of a parent company called Dibber, which counts over 600 preschools in its portfolio across several countries, from Norway, Sweden, and Finland to Latvia, Poland, Germany, South Africa, the UAE, India, and Hong Kong. In the spring of 2023, workers at Pilke went on strike twice to protest low pay and poor working conditions.

Such outsourcing in Finland echoes what’s happening in its Nordic neighbors as well as countries around the world. Across the Gulf of Bothnia, after all, Sweden went much further in introducing vouchers in 1992, allowing parents to send their children to private schools with public funds and permitting commercial firms to run such schools. Three decades later, about 15 percent of students at the primary and lower-secondary level and 30 percent of students at the upper-secondary level employ vouchers to attend private schools, about 75 percent of which are managed by commercial firms. On top of substantial documentation of corner-cutting by such commercial firms in the name of profits, segregation, grade inflation, and poor academic outcomes overall have been attributed to this dramatic transformation of the Swedish system.

With educational privatization clearly now a multifaceted global phenomenon, there is a need for an international multi-institutional version of NCSPE involving scholars abroad to conduct comparative research and disseminate findings. The outsourcing of management of preschools as well as teacher professional development, the prominence of vouchers in countries like Sweden as well as Chile, and the encroachment of ed tech on classrooms represent merely a slice of this story. Educational privatization has taken many other forms around the world: low-fee private schooling has proliferated across Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Pakistan; “free schools” and “academies” in England (functioning much like charter schools in the U.S.) now enroll more than 50 percent of the nation’s primary and secondary students; and “shadow education” in the mold of after-school tutoring to aid students prepping for exams for admission to secondary schools as well as universities dominates the lives and strains the budgets of many families in many countries.

With NCSPE, Henry Levin laid the foundation for how a research center can address such issues in a dispassionate, rigorous way. While a professor at Stanford serving on an advisory board to assess the implementation of school vouchers in Cleveland in the mid-90s, Levin concluded that a glaring absence of reliable information on educational privatization precluded informed debate. To fill that void, Levin set to work on creating a research center that would provide impartial documentation, publish working papers, conduct research, and hold conferences. Lured in 1999 to Teachers College by then-President Arthur Levine to assume an endowed professorship and establish this center on Morningside Heights, Levin launched NCSPE the following year and ran it until 2015, when he asked me to take over.

It has been an honor to serve as the director of NCSPE. Following 18 years as a high school history teacher, I joined NCSPE as a visiting scholar in 2008 to work on a book on educational privatization. That book became Education and the Commercial Mindset (Harvard University Press, 2016), an exploration of the impact of market forces on public education in the U.S. and abroad. The last two chapters concern educational reform in Sweden and Finland, respectively. In doing the research for those two chapters, which involved school visits and interviews in Denmark and Norway as well as Finland and Sweden, I quickly learned the immense value of comparative analysis. To know one’s home, one must leave it.

In running NCSPE, I have had the privilege of collaborating with a range of gifted scholars in editing their working papers and contextualizing them in my announcements to the listserv. I have also had the privilege of getting to know a parade of visiting scholars from numerous countries and of working with a group of talented research associates who wrote book reviews and news commentaries for the NCSPE site. To all, I express my profound gratitude for all they have taught me. Finally, to Henry Levin, I am indebted for his faith in me to run this center and for his example of erudition, diligence, and openness. Levin has indeed been a role model for scholars everywhere and in all fields.

Going forward, I would like to thank Faith Boninger, Alex Molnar, and Kevin Welner, professors of education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and experts on privatization, for their warm welcome to NEPC. In addition, for making this partnership international, I would like to thank Jonas Vlachos, a professor of economics at Stockholm University and an expert on privatization; Vesa Taatila, the rector of the Turku University of Applied Sciences and an expert on public-private partnerships; and Mirjamaija Mikkilä-Erdmann and Anu Warinowski, professors of education at the University of Turku and experts on teacher education. A board of advisors for IPSEP will be posted on the NEPC site in due time.

NCSPE is slated to remain operating at Teachers College. An update about the center’s status should appear on this site before long.

As I have continued to serve as a visiting scholar at the University of Turku, you may reach me with any questions at samuel.abrams@utu.fi.

Samuel E. Abrams
NCSPE Director
May 6, 2024

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

D.C. Charter School Votes to Form a Union

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2024 //
9

One reason that big charter donors fund charter schools is to break the teachers’ union, whether it’s AFT or NEA. Big business has opposed labor unions since they were first organized. 90% of charters have no union affiliation, and the Waltons and DeVos-funders want to keep it that way. A few days ago, a charter school in D.C. voted to unionize. Why? Because the teachers think they need a union to bargain with the charter leadership and make sure they get due process, health benefits and a pension. They want what only unions can get.

For Immediate Release
May 2, 2024

Contact:
Kelley Ukhun
513/578-2646
kukhun@dcacts1927.com

Capital City Public Charter School in D.C. Votes for a Voice on the Job

All 200 Teachers and Other School Staff Will Be Members of 

DC Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, DC ACTS, AFT

WASHINGTON—Teachers and all other school staff at Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., voted tonight to unionize, joining the membership of the District of Columbia Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, DC ACTS, an affiliate of the AFT.

Capital City Public Charter School has 200 employees, including teachers, instructional assistants, counselors, librarians, secretarial staff and custodians, all of whom will be represented by DC ACTS. The school educates 1,000 pre-K through 12th-grade students. DC ACTS also represents all employees at both Mundo Verde Public Charter School campuses in D.C.

“Capital City educators and other employees want to have a voice when the school makes decisions about the education of their students. They are the folks who are in the classrooms every day and who work the closest with the kids and know best what’s needed for them to thrive and excel. Only through a union can this be accomplished,” said DC ACTS Acting President Kelley Ukhun, adding that she hopes to be able to negotiate a first contract in the coming months.

Besides having a voice in decisions made about their school, Capital City employees said they want to end a “right to work”-contingent atmosphere in which every staff member was subject to annual contract renewal, making it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain staff given the precarity. Educators and staff also indicated a collective desire for better retirement benefits, a more progressive and transparent discipline procedure (including a grievance and arbitration system) and a duty-free lunch period.

Guadalupe Campos, a Capital City high school Spanish teacher, strongly supports the union.

“I believe that all workers, regardless of rank or position, deserve the opportunity to participate in decisions that affect students, our families and ourselves. United, we can create a healthy, equitable and sustainable environment for all,” she said.

Kate Lenegan, an after-school teacher, said: “I support this union because our staff is what makes Capital City great, and our students deserve the best from us.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten said this labor victory reflects a growing trend of workers organizing across the country, growing the labor movement so that we can be a force that improves the lives of workers, their families and their communities.

“Whether it’s at a traditional public school or college, or whether it’s at a charter school or any other workplace, working people are seeing the value of a union as a vehicle to access a better life for themselves, their families, and the communities they serve,” Weingarten said. “That’s why the AFT has seen unprecedented organizing growth, organizing 146 new units across multiple sectors, including education, higher education, healthcare and public service since our last convention in July 2022.

Charter school educators see this, Weingarten said. The AFT represents about 7,500 educators and school staff across the country at more than 250 charter schools. More than 1,000 teachers and staff at more than 15 charter schools have organized with the AFT just since the start of the 2022-23 school year, and hundreds of those have already won strong first contracts at their schools. 

“Union membership can be transformative in the life of any working person. I am so glad the educators of Capital City have elected to join us. We are so happy to welcome them. We want working folks everywhere to know: The AFT is the home of the people who make a difference in other people’s lives. We fight for real solutions that make our workplaces and our communities safer, stronger, and more democratic, and we show up when it counts. Together, we can win the future,” Weingarten said.

The Washington Teachers’ Union, which represents educators at District of Columbia Public Schools, applauded the Capital City employees’ vote.

“All staff, whether in regular public schools or charter schools in the private sector, deserve the rights and respect afforded to them through union membership. We are all stronger together, and the WTU looks forward to working in partnership with DC ACTS as it grows with this exciting win at Capital City,” said WTU President Jacqueline Pogue Lyons.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Unions

Carol Burris: Vermont Senate Rejects Charter Official as State Superintendent

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2024 //
8

Carol Burris reports on an important decision in Vermont:

By a 19-9 vote, the Vermont Senate refused to approve Zoie Saunders, a former strategist for the for-profit Charter Schools USA, as the new Superintendent of Instruction in Vermont.

Saunders, a Florida resident, had worked briefly for a Florida public school district (3 months) even as she was applying for the Vermont position. She was Republican Governor Scott’s choice.According to a source in the state, “Senators in opposition spoke eloquently about her complete lack of vision (her best vision communication to a Senator in individual conversation was – schools in Middlebury should partner with Middlebury College) and her lack of relevant public education experience.”

The Governor is given great deference regarding his appointees. However, there was a groundswell of opposition to her appointment among Vermont citizens who feared she would bring charters to the state and expand the private school town tuition program. There was also great concern for her lack of experience in public schools. NPE Action stood in opposition to her appointment. 


You can read more about the controversy here: 

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/zoie-saunders-gov-scotts-pick-for-education-secretary-faces-questions-about-her-qualifications-40628713 “The Senate of Vermont took a courageous stand that will surely raise the ire of the Governor who last night tried to delay their vote. Hopefully, Governor Scott will come back with a candidate worthy to serve Vermont’s families.”

Unfortunately, Governor Scott did not come back with a better candidate. He appointed Ms. Saunders as “interim commissioner.”

The Vermont Senate is comprised of 22 Democrats and seven Republicans.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, For-Profit, Vermont
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