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ProPublica: Will the Sackler Family Be Held Accountable for More Than 200,000 Opioid Deaths?

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2019 //
10

 

Those of us in the field of education know the billionaire Sackler family as major funders of charter schools. Jonathan Sackler funded ConnCAN, then 50CAN, and sits on the boards of other charter promotion corporations.

But in the wider world, the Sacklers are infamous for their ownership of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures and markets OxyContin, the drug believed to be responsible for the opioid addiction crisis and more than 200,000 deaths.

If Trump wanted to stop the flow of deadly drugs, he would build a wall around every Purdue factory, not the southern border.

ProPublica obtained and released a trove of documents that demonstrates that family members knew that their drug was twice as powerful as morphine, yet understated the risks.

“In May 1997, the year after Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin, its head of sales and marketing sought input on a key decision from Dr. Richard Sackler, a member of the billionaire family that founded and controls the company. Michael Friedman told Sackler that he didn’t want to correct the false impression among doctors that OxyContin was weaker than morphine, because the myth was boosting prescriptions — and sales.

“It would be extremely dangerous at this early stage in the life of the product,” Friedman wrote to Sackler, “to make physicians think the drug is stronger or equal to morphine….We are well aware of the view held by many physicians that oxycodone [the active ingredient in OxyContin] is weaker than morphine. I do not plan to do anything about that.”

“I agree with you,” Sackler responded. “Is there a general agreement, or are there some holdouts?”

“Ten years later, Purdue pleaded guilty in federal court to understating the risk of addiction to OxyContin, including failing to alert doctors that it was a stronger painkiller than morphine, and agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties. But Sackler’s support of the decision to conceal OxyContin’s strength from doctors — in email exchanges both with Friedman and another company executive — was not made public.

“The email threads were divulged in a sealed court document that ProPublica has obtained: an Aug. 28, 2015, deposition of Richard Sackler. Taken as part of a lawsuit by the state of Kentucky against Purdue, the deposition is believed to be the only time a member of the Sackler family has been questioned under oath about the illegal marketing of OxyContin and what family members knew about it. Purdue has fought a three-year legal battle to keep the deposition and hundreds of other documents secret, in a case brought by STAT, a Boston-based health and medicine news organization; the matter is currently before the Kentucky Supreme Court….

”Much of the questioning of Sackler in the 337-page deposition focused on Purdue’s marketing of OxyContin, especially in the first five years after the drug’s 1996 launch. Aggressive marketing of OxyContin is blamed by some analysts for fostering a national crisis that has resulted in 200,000 overdose deaths related to prescription opioids since 1999.

“Taken together with a Massachusetts complaint made public last month against Purdue and eight Sacklers, including Richard, the deposition underscores the family’s pivotal role in developing the business strategy for OxyContin and directing the hiring of an expanded sales force to implement a plan to sell the drug at ever-higher doses. Documents show that Richard Sackler was especially involved in the company’s efforts to market the drug, and that he pushed staff to pursue OxyContin’s deregulation in Germany. The son of a Purdue co-founder, he began working at Purdue in 1971 and has been at various times the company’s president and co-chairman of its board…

”The Kentucky deposition’s contents will likely fuel the growing protests against the Sacklers, including pressure to strip the family’s name from cultural and educational institutions to which it has donated. The family has been active in philanthropy for decades, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars. But the source of its wealth received little attention until recent years, in part due to a lack of public information about what the family knew about Purdue’s improper marketing of OxyContin and false claims about the drug’s addictive nature.”

The Sackler family has a net worth of some $14 billion.

Madeline Sackler, film-maker, produced a documentary lauding Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy called “The Lottery.”

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

Mark Simon: Can the Schools of D.C. Recover from More Than a Decade of Failed Reforms?

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2019 //
40

“

Mark Simon, a former teacher and current parent activist in D.C., is hopeful that the District is ready to reverse the failed policies launched by Michelle Rhee in 2007.

The district is under mayoral control, which itself is a failed structure that bears no relationship to improving schools. The mayor chose Lewis Ferebee as the new chancellor, who arrives with a reputation as a privatizer who aided in closing public schools in Induanapolis, which has been a target for the Disruption Movement.

Simon writes:

“The experiment of tying teachers’ evaluations and pay to student test scores is over. It captured the imagination of decision-makers in D.C., Denver and nationwide a decade ago. As Post columnist David Von Drehle pointed out, the demand to end the experiment motivated a citywide strike in Denver. An “innovation” when it began in 2006 has become what Von Drehle called “an anachronism.”…

“Acting D.C. Chancellor Lewis Ferebee, responding to questions at his nomination hearing before the D.C. Council this month, acknowledged he was brought to Indianapolis by reformers to be the disrupter of neighborhood schools. That’s not how he wants to be seen now. He’s spent the past two months listening to parents, principals, teachers and students, and he’s learned a lot.

“If policymakers pay close attention to what teachers, parents and students are saying, the District may stumble into insights to fix teacher turnover and tackle school instability. At public hearings, demoralized parents and teachers say teacher and school ratings over which they have little control feel inaccurate. Standardized test scores are driven by factors outside school, including the socioeconomic background of students and the quality of neighborhood assets, more than by what takes place in classrooms.

“Ferebee admitted that teacher turnover is a big problem in the District. He wants to take another look at the Impact evaluation system and the short-leash one-year contracts given principals. He’s heard there’s a culture of fear in schools. Teachers and principals are afraid to exercise their judgment or say what they think. He heard the District may, by design, have created a school system in which respectful relationships of trust have been undermined. In the rush to fix the outcome data on a few narrow indicators — test scores, graduation rates, attendance — we may have jeopardized the heart of what defines good teaching and what parents want from great schools.

“Listening to the questions D.C. Council members and the legions of public witnesses asked Ferebee, it’s clear that the tide has turned. There is a broad consensus that we need a correction in education reform in the District. Regardless of whether Ferebee gets confirmed as chancellor, the nominee, his overseers on the D.C. Council and teachers and parents who have lived through almost two years of scandals seem to have reached the same conclusions. The metrics used to judge schools and teachers have lost credibility. The voices of teachers and parents are starting to have newfound respect.

“I recently watched an amazing prekindergarten teacher, Liz Koenig, and her daughters, ages 2 and 4, at an EmpowerEd meeting. EmpowerEd was created two years ago by classroom teachers in D.C. Public Schools and the charter sector to elevate teacher voices and relational trust in each school and citywide. I watched Koenig as she allowed her daughters to make decisions while providing subtle feedback, building a sense of agency. It struck me that great teaching — the talent to nurture a child’s development — is personal, interactive and requires tremendous skill. I’ve seen the adoring letters from her students’ parents. She’s beloved. Teachers at her school voted her “best of staff.” So, it was a shock this week when we found out that the Bridges Public Charter School administrators have told her not to come back in the fall. It had nothing to do with the quality of her teaching, they said. The unspoken message was that charter operators are accountable only to the metrics that rate them as Tier 1, 2, or 3. There’s something wrong in DCPS and the charter sector when teachers are expendable.

“Teachers and public education have been subjected to one failed experiment after another over the past decade. It’s time to get back to measuring teachers and schools by the things that make them valuable and to admit that the past 10 years may have led us in some wrong directions. Schools are best measured by what parents, teachers and students say they’ve experienced: the learning culture.

“According to University of Massachusetts professor Jack Schneider, who spoke at a public Senior High Alliance of Principals, Parents and Educators meeting at the Columbia Heights Education Campus attended by the deputy mayor for education and other elected officials last month, there are excellent climate surveys of parents, teachers and students that should be on D.C.’s school report card, overseen by the state superintendent of schools on the My Schools DC website. Instead, most of the simplistic five-star rating is derived from the PARCC test.

“Teachers should be tapped and retained because they create a love of learning and change students’ lives — not just their standardized test scores. If we learn the lessons of this moment, and it looks as if there’s a good chance we are starting to, the District’s education future looks bright.”

Friends, the Corporate Reform Movement is dying.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Denver, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM

Help NPE-Action Keep Score on the 2020 Presidential Candidates

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2019 //
16

The Network for Public Education Action fund is developing a web-based score card for the 2020 presidential candidates.

We need YOUR help!

We want to keep score on where the candidates stand on issues that matter to students, teachers, parents, and public schools.

We want to know if they support public schools or if they support privatization.

We will keep the website updated based on the candidates’ public statements on television and at town halls.

We will check their funding reports to see if they are funded by the usual privatization-friendly billionaires and hedge-fund managers.

We urge you to attend their town halls and ask them questions about funding for public schools, about charters and vouchers, about testing, about federal policy requiring (unnecessary) annual testing, and about (unnecessary) federal funding for charter schools.

We need your help to keep our score care up to date once it is up and running.

We will not let education be forgotten in the 2020 race!

https://npeaction.org/npe-action-2020-presidential-candidates-project/

Climate change. Health care. Taxes. These are topics that 2020 Presidential hopefuls are happy to discuss.  But as important as these topics are, we cannot let our public schools be ignored.

That is why we started The NPE Action 2020 Candidates Project.

In cities across this nation, public schools are disappearing. The city of New Orleans is now a system of privately run charter schools. Vouchers and voucher “workarounds” send taxpayer money from public schools to private and religious schools. Religious schools are flipping themselves into charter schools in order to get public funds. The Koch Brothers have promised to target five states in which they will work to make public education disappear.

Private “choice” is trumping public voice. Test scores are the rationale to shut and shutter community schools even though charter school test scores are not better than those of public schools, and studies show that students who leave public schools with vouchers often do worse.

The Network for Public Education Action’s 2020 Candidates Project will make sure that the issue of school privatization is not ignored. We will grade candidates on their positions regarding charter schools, vouchers, and high-stakes testing. We will grade them by how much they take from the billionaires who believe in the privatization of public schools and score each candidate on the company they keep. They can run for office but they can’t hide from the hard questions we will ask about school privatization.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Politics, Portfolio District, Privatization, Supporting public schools, Testing

Stephen Dyer: No Matter How You Spin the Numbers, Ohio’s Charters are Failing (Link Repaired!)

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2019 //
8

 

 

Stephen Dyer, former legislator and current fellow at Progress Ohio, reviews the latest CREDO report on Ohio charters and agrees with the overall conclusion that the performance of these schools is stagnant. A remarkable number are failing.

The Fordham Institute, which gets a hefty rebate as an authorizer of charter schools in Ohio, executes statistical backflips to spin the CREDO report and renew its report for more state funding.

But as Dyer shows, the charter sector in Ohio has an astonishing number of low-performing schools. They are getting better faster because their performance is rock bottom.

If Ohio had wise leadership, it would pull the plug on this failed experiment and not listen to self-interested lobbyists who are paid to advocate for more charter funding. It is his job, so you can’t blame him for trying, but his employer gets a cut for every student who enrolls in one of its charters.

There is good news in Ohio. The number of charter schools is declining as is enrollment in charter schools.

 

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

Peter Greene on the Tragedy of Lorain, Ohio, and the War to Stamp Out Local Control and Democracy

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2019 //
50

Who knew that Republicans hate local control of public schools? Who knew that the root cause of low test scores was the input of parents and teachers?

Peter Greene tells a story in this post that should be required reading for every course in education and for every state legislator. It is an unbearably sad story, and if it doesn’t make you angry, you aren’t paying attention.

http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/02/oh-lorain-hb-70-and-reformy-attack.html

Greene began his teaching career in Lorain, Ohio. At the end of his year, he and many other teachers were laid off and he moved on to teach in Pennsylvania, where he enjoyed a career that spanned nearly four decades. He remembers Lorain as a factory town, a functioning, multi-ethnic district with three high schools, seven middle schools, and many elementary schools. It was a strong union town, where most people worked in steel mills or auto plants.

Lorain was hit hard by deindustrialization. It was a small city that lost jobs and population.

He writes:

In 2016, my wife and I made a cross country trip. I’d not been back to Lorain (no reason to– I’d made no lasting relationships in my year, mostly because I ate, slept and drank my job), even though its a mere three hours away. The rows of factories are now rubble. My half-a-house apartment is now in a row of boarded-up empty buildings. The strip mall where I bought  albums, my first luxury purchase with my own teacher-pay money is empty. My old high school is a vacant lot. Lorain’s population is now around 63,000, a loss of about a quarter of their population from the mid-70s.

The drop started quickly and continued relentlessly for years. The school district adjusted. The three high schools became two, then one. But the local economy was shrinking so severely that by 2013, the school district was the second-largest employer in town,  behind the hospital. By the 2010s, reportedly 90% of the student population was free and reduced lunch (the standard proxy for measuring poverty).

Lawmakers in Ohio responded to the collapse of Lorain’s economy by declaring that its faltering schools were in “academic distress.” Its test scores were not good enough.

In 2007, Ohio created a new piece of turnaround legislation. The law created an academic distress commission, appointed by the state superintendent, the president of the school board, and the mayor of the city. ADC’s were responsible for coming up with a plan. They could fire and hire administrators and create a budget for the district. Lorain fell under the control of an ADC in 2013, but despite the employment of snazzy consultants, things didn’t seem to be improving. Some scores had started to creep up, but then changes in the state test– and how harshly it would be assessed– destroyed any forward momentum the district had developed.

It was several decades of tough challenges in the community and in the schools– and then, in 2015, that state of Ohio stepped in again to make things even worse.

The state passed a harsh and punitive bill called HB 70, which allowed the state to take over the district and install a tsar. Somehow the legislators imagined that the reason for low test scores was that local citizens had some say over what happened to their schools. Democracy was the problem.

Ohio’s old law called for an academic distress commission, appointed by the state superintendent, the president of the school board, and the mayor of the city. ADC’s were responsible for coming up with a plan. They could fire and hire administrators and create a budget for the district. Under HB 70, that changed dramatically. HB 70 is a corporate reformster’s dream law.

Under the new law, the ADC was required to appoint a CEO to run the district. The list of “include but not limited to” duties of the CEO runs to seventeen items, and they include:

Replacing administration and central office staff
Assigning employees to schools
Allocating teacher class loads and class sizes
Job descriptions for employees
Setting the school calendar
Setting the district budget
Setting grade “configuration”
Determining the school curriculum
Selecting instructional materials and assessments
Making reductions in staff
Establishing employee compensation

The law is nuts; it establishes the CEO as an unchecked tsar of the district with all the powers of both the superintendent and the school board. The only job requirement under the law is “high-level management experience in the public or private sector.” So he could be an education amateur. 

The state took over Lorain and Youngstown, then East Cleveland.

What happened next in Lorain was eye-popping. It was the Corporate Reformers’ dream come true: All authority vested in one person who was thoroughly immersed in Reformy organizations and philosophy and jargon:

Immediately, there were questions. The duly-elected, but now essentially powerless (except for one thing, and we’ll come back to that later) school board demanded information about the search process, conducted by Chicago-based Atlantic Research Partners with little-to-no transparency. ARP was co-founded by Joseph Wise, after he was fired from the superintendent post in Duval County, Florida for “serious conduct” deemed “injurious” which included “not communicating or acting in good faith with board members during budget discussions.” Wise also owns Acceleration Academies.

Of the five finalists, ARP had connections to four. One of the four was connected by virtue of attending the National Superintendents Academy, another property that Wise bought up. The National Superintendents Academy was previously known as SUPES Academy– a name you may remember from the massive scandal involving Barbara Byrd-Bennett and her federal indictment for bribery in Chicago. The twisty background is laid out here, but it underlines another aspect of the reformster world– multiple connections and always failing upward.

The National Superintendents Academy graduate was David Hardy, Jr., and his resume is loaded with reform credentials.

Hardy grew up in West Chester PA, the son of a teacher. He studied business at Colgate, but says an internship changed his mind about that. After graduating from Colgate with a BS in Economics and a secondary concentration in education and English, Hardy headed out for– what else– a Teach for America gig in Miami-Dade schools teaching reading and writing to 6th and 7th graders. After two years of that, he became the Miami-Dade Madison Middle School Language Arts Chair, where he took credit for raising the school’s grade from F to C. He ran a TFA summer institute, worked as a curriculum support specialist, and then went to work for Achievement First as a Dean of Students, consulted for the Children First Network, and then became the founding principal of Achievement First East New York Middle School. Then Chris Cerf tagged him to become the executive director of one of the seven Regional Achievement Centers in Camden responsible for the turnaround of thirty schools. Then chief of academic supports in Philly, then Deputy Superintendent of Academics in St. Louis Public Schools (where they have problems of their own)– his longest time in a single job, at a whopping four years. Hardy graduated from Colgate in 2003.

Along the way he picked up a Masters degrees in education administration, plus a masters and doctorate from Columbia in urban education leadership. And he was selected as a Future Chief by Chiefs for Change. And he’s connected to the Pahara Institute, which is connected to Aspen.

You can read Peter’s description of the big plans of Hardy and the TFA team he brought to Lorain. It will sound familiar to you from the experiences of so many other cities.

Peter concludes:

I didn’t set out to do a hatchet job on David Hardy and his administration, and it would be wrong to ignore the fact that he does have some support in the city. Some residents see the opposition to Hardy as racist, and at least one school board member has said that upon reflection, she supports the embattled CEO. It’s a contentious mess. When the state took over, some folks were pushed out of positions of power, and it’s reasonable to assume that they would not have been impressed if Jesus Christ Himself had taken over the district.

Certain phrases keep coming up in connection with Hardy, like “in over his head.” He can talk a good game (watch this interview from his St. Louis days), but if leading in a city system like Lorain requires relationship-building, Hardy is coming up short. The latest bombshell is not only a slap in the face to staff, but was handled about as poorly as it possibly could have been.

But it’s important to ask if HB 70 set David Hardy up for failure.

It’s a bad law. It was slipped past the legislature as an amendment in a late-night smoke-filled room arrangement that guaranteed that it would not be publicly discussed. And it is most certainly a full-on assault on public education in the state.

Youngstown, Lorain and now East Cleveland have one thing in common– they are among the poorest school districts in the state. As such, it’s unsurprising that they would have low scores on the Big Standardized Test and therefor low grades for their schools. HB 70 targeted poor communities, and it didn’t target them for help. It targeted them to be taken over, dismantled, and handed off to charter operators. The Lorain I knew has taken such a beating over the years, and HB 70 is the legislative equivalent of taking a beaten puppy and saying, “Look, dammit– fetch now or I am going to give your food to a prettier dog.”

Lorain needs help and healing. It does not need to have its teachers beaten down, its parents kept in the dark, its community held at arms length, its elected officials stripped of power. There is no special mystery to why Lorain’s schools are struggling, but HB 70 doesn’t address any of the root issues of a struggling local economy and a loss of resources. It is a law that punishes poverty rather than trying to ameliorate it.

I am trying to imagine what kind of high-quality leadership would make it possible to sell, “Hi! I’m from the state and I’ve been appointed to strip you of local power and chop your community schools up for someone else’s investment opportunity. Also, all the bad things that are happening are your fault, because your town sucks.” No, David Hardy isn’t very good at his job– but who could be good at the job that HB 70 has created? How do you lead well when HB 70 is fundamentally a punishing act of disrespect toward a local district?

HB 70 sets a district up for every bad corporate reform idea in the book. Test Scores! Visionary CEO! Transformation! Disruption! Spank teachers! Test scores! Strip local control! Expectations!  Test Scores! Kids first (but not really)! A smart person with marketworld skills from outside will be so much better than career educators! The state knows more about fixing schools than anyone! Also, test scores!

When gubernatorial candidate Dennis Kucinich visited Lorain last year, he suggested suing the state over HB 70, but that process is already under way. Youngstown has been leading the charge, and Lorain parents have gotten involved— at least on the petition level. The law was challenged in court almost immediately, initially decided in favor of the state, and worked up to the state supreme court which agreed to hear it last October. It also creates some unique issues– Youngstown’s school CEO would not allow the Youngstown board to spend money on the appeal. Lorain teachers filed a “friend of the court” brief as a party directly affected by the outcome, and several districts ands the Ohio School Boards Association have joined the suit.

Meanwhile, new Ohio governor Mike DeWine is sympathetic to some of the issues involved:

“One of the concerns, one of the things that we have seen in Youngstown, Lorain, is the obvious loss of local control, and we’re seeing some of the dynamics that result from the loss of local control. We are a very local government state,” DeWine said. “We like it that way, most of us do. Most of us think that problems get solved locally, so I’ve got some people working on this and we are working with some legislators on this, actually, but I really can’t go into any more details at this point.”

So there is at least some small bit of hope for Lorain and Youngstown and East Cleveland and every other poor Ohio community that was going to fall under HB 70 sooner or later. But if HB 70 ever goes away, those communities will still be facing all the problems they were facing before the state stepped in to help plus all the wreckage left by HB 70. The future is not going to be all rainbows and unicorns any time soon.

And the bitter irony in all of this is that, by many accounts, Lorain was climbing when the state stepped in. We’ll never know how they would have done if the state had just left them alone.

I came to really like Lorain in my brief time there. If things had worked out differently, I would have been glad to stay in that big little town. It deserved better than to be used and discarded by industry; its solid blue collar citizens deserved better as well. And they deserve better treatment by the state than to be thrown under a reform-driven bus that gives them exactly all the wrong things, everything but the support, assistance and resources that they need. This is corporate ed reform at its worst, disenfranchising citizens, trashing communities, and not even coming close to delivering what it promised as an excuse for the power grab.

I’ve kept up with Lorain, watching them in the news over the years ever since I left town right ahead of the industrial collapse. I’ll keep watching the news, hoping for good news from that beautiful little big city on the lake.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization

District of Columbia: Broadies Take Control of All Top Leadership Positions

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2019 //
21

 

The Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation now owns complete control of the schoolsof the District of Columbia.

With the appointment of Lewis Ferebee, former superintendent of Indianapolis, where he collaborated with the Mind Trust to expand privatization, D.C. is now a Broadie district.

DCist.com reports:

“The top three educational leaders in the District of Columbia all have one thing in common: they’ve all studied under a wealthy philanthropist’s educational leadership program that promotes a business perspective in the management of public schools and the use of charters.

“The D.C. state superintendent Hanseul Kang, the deputy mayor of education Paul Kihn, and acting schools chancellor Lewis Ferebee have each been through training at the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, which houses both the Broad Academy and the Broad Residency in Urban Education.

“Those who support the training program say it offers a unique corporate-like training experience for school leaders and helps them form lasting friendships. Critics of the program say the teachings encourage school leaders to undermine democratic control of public education by making top-down reforms and promoting charter schools.

“There have been hundreds of school leaders that have gone through Broad training, including former DCPS chancellor Antwan Wilson. Kaya Henderson was also named a superintendent in residence at The Broad Center in 2017. But, if Ferebee is confirmed, this will be the first time all of D.C. Public Schools’ top public education leaders will be Broad scholars.”

Michelle Rhee started the Corporate Reform takeover of D.C. in 2007, imposing a harsh evaluation system that led to high turnover of teachers and principals. She was not a Broadie, however; she came out of Teach for America. But after she became a superstar, she joined the board ofthe unaccredited Broad Superintendents’ Academy.

Since 2007, the district has experienced major cheating scandals and, recently, a graduation rate scandal that cast doubt on many of the claims of success.

Despite it’s “reform” leadership, D.C. continues to havethe biggest achievement gaps of any district in the nation, about double the size of the black-white, Hispanic-white gaps in other urban districts.

There is something strangely satisfying about knowing that disciples of Eli Broad have taken complete control of D.C. They will have no one else to blame if they don’t turn the District into one of the nation’s top-performing  districts, as Rhee long ago promised.

 

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization

New Jersey: Dark Money Is Paying to Double Down on High-Stakes Testing

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2019 //
15

Wake up, parents and teachers in New Jersey! The billionaires and Dark Money are launching a sneak attack on your children and students.

When he ran for office, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy promised to scrap the Common Core-aligned PARCC and end the state’s high-stakes exit exams.

But billionaires and hedge fund managers don’t want to stop high-stakes testing. They love PARCC because it makes public schools look bad. Making public schools look bad helps the privatization movement.

Dark money and billionaires are dumping money into the bank accounts of key legislators to keep the testing machine alive. Find out which billionaire education reformers are behind the push to keep high-stakes standardized testing alive in New Jersey, and which legislators are doing their bidding. #HijackedByBillionaires

PARCC is a ridiculous exam whose standards were set so high that most students were certain to “fail” to reach proficiency. Half the states in the nation adopted it when it was unveiled in 2010, but almost all have abandoned it. Today only 5 or 6 states still use PARCC, and New Mexico recently announced it was dropping PARCC.
Legislator Theresa Ruiz is leading the fight to keep high-stakes testing. The Bill to save PARCC passed by one vote in the State Senate yesterday and goes to the Assembly for a vote on Monday.

“New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy campaigned on a promise to end PARCC and eliminate exit testing. Following his lead, the New Jersey Department of Education toured the state to get feedback on standardized assessments, wrote a report summarizing their findings, and proposed new regulations to replace ones passed during the Christie administration.

“But on September 12, 2018, before the Board’s discussion began, Senator Teresa Ruiz crashed the New Jersey State Board of Education meeting and suddenly regulations that seemed like a slam dunk were tabled.”

In Ruiz’s latest election, the largest contribution ($5,377) to her campaign came from Education Reform Now Advocacy (ERNA), a dark money 501(c)(4) advocacy organization associated with Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a PAC started by billionaire education reformers.
As a 501(c)(4), ERNA is not required to disclose their donors. This means the people of NJ have no right to know who the money behind Ruiz’s largest campaign contribution came from.Ruiz also received maximum contributions of $2,600 from New Jersey billionaires Alan Fournier and David Tepper, the founders of Better Education for Kids (B4K). They are hedge fund managers who meddle in New Jersey education on behalf of testing and privatization.

B4K, Inc. gave Ruiz a direct contribution of $1,000.

B4K has been the bullhorn for Tepper and Fournier’s reform agenda for close to a decade.

Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Ruiz ally, has fast tracked the bill to be voted on by the full Senate.

Sweeney is no stranger to education reform billionaires either. In fact, in his last election, millions of dollars were spent to support Sweeney and fend off an attempt by the New Jersey Education Association to unseat him.

The New Jerseyans for a Better Tomorrow PAC, which is run by a former Sweeney aide, received over 2 and a half million dollars from General Majority PAC which is “widely seen” as being controlled by New Jersey political boss, George Norcross.

General Majority PAC brought in contributions from three of the nation’s biggest education reform champions.

The largest contribution of $500,000 came from Walmart heiress Alice Walton, followed by $200,000 from Texas billionaire and former Enron trader John Arnold, and $100,000 from California billionaire and Netflix founder Reed Hastings.

ERNA, the dark money 501 (c)(4) that was Ruiz’s largest campaign contributor, contributed $25,000 to General Majority PAC.

Sweeney also received direct maximum contributions of $2,600 from Alan and Jennifer Fournier, David Tepper and B4K, Inc..

Here is an infographic that shows the reach of Dark Money, Wall Street, hedge funds, and assorted billionaires into the effortto preserve high-stakes testing in New Jersey.

 

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corruption, Dark Money, Education Reform, New Jersey, Testing

Tom Ultican: Elites in Dallas Impose Massive Disruption on Public Schools, with Charters Schools and TFA

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2019 //
2

Tom Ultican tells a sad story about the takeover of the Dallas school board by the Dallas Chamber of Commerce and other wealthy elites, who don’t send their children to the public schools.

After their failed experiment with Mike Miles, a Broadie who surrounded himself with young but very well-compensated aides from TFA, the elites decided to buy control of the school board. It became too expensive for an ordinary citizen to compete with the money that the elites were pouring in. One candidate, Lori Kilpatrick, almost upset an incumbent, even though her resources were meager. The corporate elites decided not to take any chances in the run off. Her opponent won by outspending her 34-1.

The business elites have an agenda. Hire as many TFA as possible and drive out experienced teachers. Close public schools and replace them with charter schools. So far, none of their plans has benefitted the children of Dallas.

It is a sad story and I hope you will take the time to read it.

Tom Ultican often refers to the “Destroy Public Education” movement.

Dallas elites are in the forefront of that movement. Shame on them. They belong on the Wall of Shame.

Categories Charter Schools, Dallas, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, Teach for America, Texas

Oakland: Day One of the Strike for Higher Pay, Student Services, and an End to Privatization

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2019 //
1

Just in from the Oakland Education Association:

 

 

Mike Myslinski

Headquarters Communications

California Teachers Association

1705 Murchison Drive

Burlingame, CA 94010

650-552-5324

408-921-5769 (cell)

www.cta.org

 

NEWS RELEASE 

February 21, 2019

 

Oakland Education Association

272 East 12th Street

Oakland, CA 94606

510-763-4020

www.oaklandea.org

 

Contacts:

–Jamie Horwitz at 202-549-4921, jhdcpr@starpower.net

–Mike Myslinski with CTA on cell at 408-921-5769, mmyslinski@cta.org

 

On Twitter: @oaklandea, #Unite4OaklandKids, #WeAreOEA, #RedForEd, #WeAreCTA

OEA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OaklandEA/

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Oakland Teachers STRIKE Today

Seek smaller classes, more nurses and counselors, an end to school closings—along with living wage for educators in rapidly gentrifying city

 

OAKLAND – This morning, joined by parents and other allies across the city of Oakland, the 3,000 members of the Oakland Education Association went on strike with picket lines at all 86 district schools and at the central administration building.

 

A noon solidarity rally drew thousands of supporters at Oakland City Hall on Frank Ogawa Plaza. The crowd of teachers, parents, students and other allies then marched to the nearby headquarters of the Oakland Unified School District. Watch for video of the rally on the OEA Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/OaklandEA/

 

In an op-ed Wednesday in the San Francisco Chronicle, in an interview with the Washington Post, and in remarks to media on the picket line at Manzanita Community School this morning, OEA President Keith Brown summed up why teachers are on the strike lines this way, “You can’t feed the minds of our students by starving their schools.”

 

The educators’ union sees this strike as a fight for a better future for Oakland’s 37,000 students, rather than the traditional give and take over wages and benefits for educators. Key issues on the bargaining table relate to demands for smaller class sizes and the resources students deserve, such as access to counselors, school nurses, librarians and school psychologists.  For example, there is currently only one counselor for every 600 students, and only one nurse for every 1,750 students.

 

Like the statewide teachers strike this week in West Virginia, charter schools are an issue. Oakland teachers question why the Oakland Unified School District has signed on to schemes promoted by wealthy politically connected outside donors, diverting $57 million annually to unaccountable charter schools while starving public schools in local communities and closing some schools.

 

The union has gained the support of parents from across the district, many of whom walk their children to school or are reliant on public transportation, who do not want to lose their neighborhood public school. The Oakland school board has proposed closing 24 of the district’s 86 schools. The schools targeted for closure are in predominantly African American and Latinx neighborhoods.

 

While wages have been an issue in other teacher strikes over the past year, the wage issue in Oakland is different from earlier strikes. The rapid gentrification of the city of Oakland, largely due to the tech boom in the Bay Area has driven up the cost-of-living and outpaced the increase in wages for educators. Rent for a basic one-bedroom apartment would take up 60 percent of a starting teacher’s paycheck. Zillow estimates a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland goes for $2,680 in rent per month.

 

The OEA is demanding a 12 percent wage increase spread over three years. Right now, Oakland educators are the lowest paid in Alameda County. Teachers have been working without a contract since July 2017.

 

The union and district negotiator are next scheduled to meet Friday morning. No contract talks are planned for today.

###

 

The Oakland Education Association represents 3,000 OUSD educators, including teachers, librarians, counselors, nurses, psychologists, psychiatric social workers, therapists, substitutes, and early childhood and adult teachers. OEA is affiliated with the 325,000-member California Teachers Association and the 3 million-member National Education Association.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Capitol & Main: Yes, West Virginia, There Is a Teachers Union, and It’s Angry!

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2019 //
5

Bill Raden and Eunice Park wrote today’s roundup of education news for the excellent California-based website “Capitol & Main.”

Everyone should subscribe to it, or for sure, read it regularly.

This is an astonishing post, as you will read. LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin ran as a “liberal,” but he cites ALEC model legislation! Austin Beutner was forced to release a contract with an organization best known for privatizing the public schools of Camden, New Jersey. And let us not forget the more than half a million dollars collected by former Newark superintendent Cami Anderson (appointed by former Governor Chris Christie) to consult on special education services. The tight connections between alleged Democrats and rightwing Republicans never ceases to amaze.

“Yes, West Virginia, there is a teachers union, and it’s still fighting mad.” That was the message for Mountain State lawmakers this week when thousands of West Virginia teachers and school workers walked off the job to kill a privatization bill reputedly written in retaliation for last year’s historic nine-day teachers strike. Only hours into the Tuesday-Wednesday walkout, the state’s House of Delegates voted 53 to 45 to indefinitely table Senate Bill 451, which had linked a teacher pay raise to the gutting of job security and a first-time legalization for West Virginia of charters and private school vouchers. “Instead of trying to treat a symptom with garbage legislation that isn’t even vetted or proven to work,” Logan County teacher Kristina Gore told New York magazine, “let’s brainstorm some legislation to fix the real problem — the social conditions in which our children live.”

All eyes now turn to the East Bay, where over 3,000 Oakland Unified educators walked off the job today, following the recommendations issued last Friday by a neutral fact-finding panel, which agreed with key union bargaining positions but was unable to break the deadlock. “Years of underfunding, the unregulated growth of the charter school industry and district neglect [have] starved our schools of the necessary resources,” OEA president Keith Browncharged at a Saturday press conference. In addition to a 12 percent raise over three years, the union is asking for class size reductions, more support staff and is opposing extreme austerity measures that could shutter up to 24 OUSD neighborhood schools.

That OUSD chopping block was the subject of Tuesday’s almost Dickensian Oakland school board meeting in which a procession of tearful parents, students, teachers, activists and education leaders pleaded with trustees to spare programs targeted for cuts. School libraries, the district’s restorative justice and foster youth programs, and its Asian Pacific Islander Student Achievement services have all been slated for deep reductions in the current, $21.75 million round of budget cuts. The final vote comes February 25.

A murky scheme to transform Los Angeles Unified into a“portfolio” or “network” school district became a little more transparent last week when LAUSD suddenly released a torrent of documents related to superintendent Austin Beutner’s “Re-Imagine LAUSD” reorganization plan. After months of stonewalling on California Public Records Act requests from news media and BD 3 school board member Scott Schmerelson, the office of LAUSD General Counsel David Holmquist released hundreds of pages of Re-Imagine contracts and memoranda after Schmerelson upped the ante by introducing a resolution reprimanding the superintendent for his “lack of transparency and responsiveness.” That measure passed in a 5-1 vote Tuesday after board members soundly rejected BD 4 member Nick Melvoin’s attempt to resurrect an old ALEC model law attack on teacher job security called “mutual consent.”

The most eye-popping of the PRAs is LAUSD’s 24-page, $765,000 contract with national portfolio district retrofitters Kitamba. The company, which also designed the portfolio transformation of Camden, New Jersey schools that has turned that district into a parent-versus-parent war zone, was engaged to implement a performance-based rating system that, under the portfolio system of governance, is used by district “network leaders” to justify closing and replacing low-testing public schools — usually with charters. Kitamba CEO Rajeev Bajaj, who may be best remembered in New Jersey for his connection to a conflict-of-interest scandal involving former Newark schools chief Christopher Cerf, is leading the LAUSD effort.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization, West Virginia
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