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Steven Singer: Rahm Emanuel Did Not Apologize for the Damage He Did as a Reformer

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2019 //
6

Steven Singer nails Rahm Emanuel’s false apology. Rahm claims he is no longer a Reformer yet continues to think he has to get tough on somebody to produce the test scores he wants. When I visited the Washington Post recently, I heard Rahm discuss his great education successes in Chicago, in conversation with the woman he appointed as superintendent of schools (talk about softball exchanges!). Not a word was said about his historic and vicious decision to close 50 public schools in one  day, all of them located in communities of color. The gossip was that he was trying out for the next Secretary of Education role. His name will live in education history and it will remind us of his terrible actions as a privatizer, a hater of public schools, and a man who holds teachers in contempt.

 

 

Rahm Emanuel’s recent op-ed in The Atlantic may be one of the dumbest things I have ever read.

 

The title “I Used to Preach the Gospel of Education Reform. Then I Became the Mayor” seems to imply Emanuel has finally seen the light.

 

The outgoing Chicago Mayor USED TO subscribe to the radical right view that public schools should be privatized, student success should be defined almost entirely by standardized testing, teachers should be stripped of union protections and autonomy and poor black and brown people have no right to elect their own school directors.

 

But far from divorcing any of this Reagan-Bush-Trump-Clinton-Obama crap, he renews his vows to it.

 

This isn’t an apologia. It’s rebranding.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Emanuel, Rahm, Privatization, Testing

Valerie Strauss: The Pushback Against Charters Is Getting Stronger

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2019 //
22

 

Valerie Strauss notes on her blog “The Answer Sheet” that charters are losing their luster. With the ascent of Choice Champion Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, Democrats are losing interest in charters. 

Almost 90% are non-union, and Democrats are not as keen about charters as they were when Obama was president. DeVos has made clear that her goal is privatization, and charter schools advance her goal. Today, Democrats running for office are backing away from charters.

The number of charters is not growing as it once did.

Most embarrassing are the escalating charter scandals. The public has begun to realize the absurdity of giving out public money without oversight or accountability.

There is most definitely a backlash. The NAACP call for a moratorium was part of the backlash. So was the referendum in Massachusetts in 2016, where voters overwhelmingly rejected an effort to lift the cap on charters.

Part of the backlash stems from the realization that more money for charters means less money for public schools. Another part is the public revulsion against the billionaires behind the charter movement, whether its DeVos or Bill Gates or the Waltons or the Koch brothers.

No matter what lies are spread, most Americans don’t want to abandon their community public schools to entrepreneurs and corporations.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization

Denver: Teachers Likely to Strike Due to Low Pay

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2019 //
20

Denver teachers are likely to go out on strike, CNN reports, due to absurdly low salaries. 

They can’t afford to live in the city where they teach.

A city and state that refuses to pay a decent middle-class wage to its teachers doesn’t care about its children or its future.

Of course, Denver is the city that Corporate Reformers admire because it has adopted the “portfolio model” of charters intermingled with public schools, instead of paying its teachers appropriately.

CNN reports:

For 14 months, teachers in Denver have been negotiating with Denver Public Schools for more pay. On Saturday, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association said talks had broken off and they’ll walk on Monday.

Yes, it’s about money, many have told CNN. But it’s also about the uncertainty of living paycheck to paycheck. It’s about the necessity of taking on a second or third job. It’s about the untenability of carrying on this way much longer.
Katie McOwen has had to make some tough decisions when it comes to money.
At the end of this month, she’s giving up her one-bedroom apartment and will move into a friend’s basement. The move sacrifices some of her independence, but it affords her some wiggle room with her finances.
The sixth-grade math teacher at Place Bridge Academy in Denver said she makes about $50,000 per year. After paying $1,050 in rent, plus student loan payments, bills and other expenses, there’s not much left over. She also nannies during the summers to supplement income.
“I really am living paycheck to paycheck right now,” McOwen said. “If my car broke down or anything, I would be really hurting.”
McOwen is lucky that she doesn’t have to make car payments. She drives a 2000 Honda Accord, which just hit 310,000 miles. It works now, but she worries about the future.
“I know if something really happens, I will be in big, big trouble,” she said.
Why? Because she wouldn’t be able to go to work.
The 35-year-old is originally from West Virginia, the state that launched a teacher strike and inspired similar movements across the United States last year. Her mother and sisters, who also live in Denver, have talked about moving back east, or somewhere near there, to find a more affordable life.
“My option was to either move there or I’ve been contemplating moving into a camper van,” she said with a laugh. “I knew something was going to have to change. It was either to move completely out of Denver or to bunk with my friend.”

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Denver, Education Industry, Portfolio District, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Teachers

A Parent in California: What’s Wrong with Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2019 //
12

In this post, a parent activist in Northern California succinctly described the case against charter schools.


Charter schools take resources away from the public schools, harming public schools and their students. All charter schools do this – whether they’re opportunistic and for-profit or presenting themselves as public, progressive and enlightened.

Charter schools are free to pick and choose and exclude or kick out any student they want. They’re not supposed to, but in real life there’s no enforcement. Many impose demanding application processes, or use mandatory “intake counseling,” or require work hours or financial donations from families – so that only the children of motivated, supportive, compliant families get in. Charter schools publicly deny this, but within many charter schools, the selectivity is well known and viewed as a benefit. Admittedly, families in those schools like that feature – with the more challenging students kept out of the charter – but it’s not fair or honest, and it harms public schools and their students.

Charter schools are often forced into school districts against the districts’ will. School boards’ ability to reject a charter application is limited by law; and if a school board rejects a charter application, the applicant can appeal to the county board of education and the California state board of education. Then the school district winds up with a charter forced upon it, taking resources from the existing public schools. Often this means the district must close a public school.

Anyone can apply to open and operate a charter school, and get public funding for it. The process is designed to work in their favor. They don’t have to have to be educators or show that they’re competent or honest. They may be well-meaning but unqualified and incompetent, or they may be crooks. Imagine allowing this with police stations, fire stations, public bus systems or parks.

Part of a school district’s job is to provide the right number of schools to serve the number of students in the district. When charter schools are forced into the district, that often requires existing public schools to close. Again, that harms the district and its students.

California law (Prop. 39) requires school districts to provide space for charter schools, even if the district didn’t want the charter. Charter schools are often forced into existing public schools (this is called co-location), taking space and amenities away from their students and creating conflict. This is a contentious issue in other states too.

Charter schools can be opened by almost anyone and get little oversight, so they’re ripe for corruption, looting, nepotism, fraud and self-dealing. Corruption happens in public school districts too, but charter schools offer an extra tempting opportunity for crooks, and the history of charters in California and nationwide shows that wrongdoers often grab that opportunity.

Charter schools, backed by billionaire-funded pro-privatization support and PR machinery, have positioned themselves as an enemy to school districts, public schools and teachers, sending their damaging message to politicians and the media. These charter backers pour millions into electing charter-friendly candidates. Tearing down our public school system and our teachers, as the charter sector does endlessly, harms our public schools and their students.

The charter sector tends to sort itself into two kinds of schools. Charter schools serving low-income students of color often impose military-style discipline and rigid rules – hands folded on the desk, eyes tracking the speaker, punishment for tiny dress code violations, a focus on public humiliation. By contrast, some charter schools serving children of privilege are designed to isolate the school from a district so that lower-income kids aren’t assigned to the school. Charter schools overall have been found to increase school segregation.

Charter schools overall serve far fewer children with disabilities and English-language learners than public schools. Even those designed to serve children with disabilities serve far fewer children with the types of disabilities that are most challenging and expensive to work with, such as children with severe autism or who are severely emotionally disturbed.

Despite the many advantages charter schools enjoy, they don’t do any better overall than public schools. The rallying cry for charter schools used to be that the “competition” would improve public schools, but that hasn’t happened. In charter schools’ more than 20 years of existence, they haven’t overall brought better education to impoverished communities.

*Note: This commentary applies to California charter schools and California charter laws. Many of the issues apply to charter schools in most or all other states where they exist.

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

Eric Blanc: Cory Booker Hates Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2019 //
28

Cory Booker has launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The stories in the mainstream media focus on his charm, his charisma, his theme of “love” and bipartisanship.

But they all miss one point, which Eric Blanc stresses: Cory Booker hates public schools.

Sen. Cory Booker (NJ–D) announced his presidential campaign last week. There’s plenty about Booker’s record worth examining, from his extremely cozy relationship with pharmaceutical companies to his bizarre public defense of Wall Street. But nothing in Booker’s past is as damning as his record on schools.

For close to two decades, Cory Booker has been at the forefront of a nationwide push to dismantle public education.

According to Booker, the education system is the main cause of our society’s fundamental problems, rather than, say, inequality and unchecked corporate power. As he explained in a 2011 speech, “disparities in income in America are not because of some ‘greedy capitalist’ — no! It’s because of a failing education system.”

Public schools, Booker continued, are also responsible for mass incarceration and racial injustice. To combat such evils, Booker has openly praised Republican leader Betsy DeVos’s organization American Federation for Children for fighting to win the final battle of the civil rights’ movement.

Scapegoating underfunded public schools for deeply rooted racial and economic problems makes little sense. But it’s been a ticket to the top for Cory Booker. In fact, it was by hitching his star to the corporate-backed “education reform” movement that Booker first rose to prominence.

The son of wealthy parents who were among IBM’s first black executives, Booker’s big political break came in September 2000, when he was tapped to give a keynote speech to the archconservative Manhattan Institute. Calling the Newark school system “repugnant,” Booker claimed there was “great evidence” that large groups of children “cannot succeed in the public school system.”

Yet rather than improving this system by increasing school funding or building public “community schools,” Booker made a hard case for charter schools as well as school vouchers, i.e., state funding for parents to pay for private schools. To give this pitch a social justice veneer, he quoted Frederick Douglas — “power concedes nothing without force” — and steeped his arguments in the language of racial justice.

Booker’s eloquent advocacy of corporate antiracism quickly caught the eye of wealthy hedge-fund investors interested in pushing privatization. In Dale Russakoff’s The Prize, a detailed account of philanthropic efforts to reform Newark’s public schools, Booker notes that though he “became a pariah in Democratic circles for taking on the Party orthodoxy on education,” his 2002 mayoral bid was boosted by “all these Republican donors and donors from outside Newark, many of them motivated because we have an African-American urban Democrat telling the truth about education.”

One of Booker’s main financial backers, Whitney Tilson, was honest about the profit motivations for large hedge-fund investors like himself. Charter schools, he explained to the New York Times, are the ideal philanthropic opportunity for such business leaders because “[h]edge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital.”

While the over $3 million in campaign contributions Booker received from his school reform sponsors was not quite enough to buy him the 2002 election, Booker’s 2006 mayoral bid was victorious. Due in large part to his zealous commitment to privatization, Newark has gone from having less than 10 percent of students in charters in 2008, to over 33 percent today; by 2022, 44 percent of the city’s students are set to be schooled in these publicly financed but privately run institutions.

If you blame public schools for all of the ills of our unjust society, Cory Booker is your guy.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

West Virginia Teachers Authorize a New Walkout If Legislature Passes Offfensive Bill

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2019 //
9

Teachers in West Virginia warned that they are still united and #55Strong and prepared to renew their walkout if the legislature passes a bill that contains obnoxious provisions that affect their working conditions and charter schools.

Last year every school in the state’s 55 counties closed down and teachers marched on the State Capitol to demand a 5% pay raise. The governor agreed he would not permit charter school legislation.

The legislature, however, passed a bill that authorized both charters and vouchers.

The announcement comes a day after the House Education Committee approved a stripped down strike-and-insert version of Senate Bill 451 — as compared to what was passed earlier this week in the Senate.

The House Education Committee’s version removes many of the provisions opposed by educators and the leaders of their unions, including provisions that would force members to sign off annually on the deduction of union dues, education savings accounts, and withholding pay during a strike. A non-severability clause — which would make the entire measure null and void should any of its provisions be struck down in a court challenge — was also pulled from the committee’s proposal.

Other provisions in the bill — including the establishment of charter schools — have been significantly altered through amendments in the committee.

While union leaders say they are happy with the bill being whittled away, nothing is final until the legislation is signed by Gov. Jim Justice. The House Education Committee’s strike-and-insert amendment is also merely formative until it is adopted on the chamber floor. If approved with any changes to the version passed by the Senate, the bill would be sent back to the upper chamber.

The teachers of West Virginia have the fighting spirit of the coal miners of that state.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Resistance, Teachers, Unions, Vouchers, West Virginia

California: Is Charter Accountability Possible?

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2019 //
16

 

California has one of the worst charter laws in  the nation. Anyone can open a charter.districts can authorize charters in other districts. Read Carol Burris report “Charters and Consequence” to learn just how bad things are. It is jaw-dropping.

There is hope for change, as Bill Raden reports in “Capital & Main.

 

“California’s charter school sector moved one step closer to accountability on Tuesday when Governor Gavin Newsomofficially asked State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond to assemble an expert panel to assess the effect on public school district finances by unregulated charter school expansion. Thurmond’s panel represents the first time California will have conducted any kind of in-depth analysis of charter impacts on public education since the state passed its original charter legislation in 1992. It has until July 1 to deliver its findings.

“Meanwhile, the race for L.A Unified’s March 5 school boardspecial election entered its final stretch this week as candidates vied to fill out the term of pro-charter Board District 5 member Ref Rodriguez, who resigned in July following a felony conviction for campaign money laundering. At stake is the political balance of a split board as L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutnerprepares to roll out a controversial portfolio district reorganization plan.

“Beutner’s biggest fear has to be an outright March 5 win by former two-time BD 5 representative Jackie Goldberg, a progressive L.A. icon who is fourth in campaign contributions but is expected to benefit from her broad name recognition and the pivotal endorsement (and financial might) of United Teachers Los Angeles. Nipping at her heels as far as labor support goes is money leader Heather Repenning, a former aide to Mayor Eric Garcetti. Repenning comes to the race with the backing of Service Employees International Union Local 99, which represents school cafeteria workers, janitors and teachers’ aides, and has already chipped in over $400K in independent expenditure money. The contest for the charter vote — and the endorsement of California Charter School Association Advocates, which announced it is waiting to see who makes it to a runoff — is between former charter school executive Allison Bajracharya and Huntington Park City Councilmember Graciela Ortiz, who are respectively number two and three in total campaign contributions.”

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

Mercedes Schneider: Louisiana Legislature Requires NOLA Charters to Add a Parent Member to Board

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2019 //
2

Well, here is a shocking story, as told by Mercedes Schneider. The Louisiana legislature has passed a law requiring all charter schools in New Orleans to have a parent of a child in the school or alumnus to be member of its board. Next year, the charters will have to have boards in which at least 60 percent are locals and reflect the gender and racial composition of the neighborhood.

This might cause panic at the Walton Family Foundation, which apparently thinks that charters must be governed by hedge fund managers.

The 2018-19 school year was the first in which New Orleans charter schools were required to include at least one parent or school alumnus on their boards. In 2019-20, all New Orleans charter schools (except those drawing from the entire state) must be comprised of boards in which both gender and racial makeup of the board must reflect that of the locality of the school– with at least 60 percent of board members being locals.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New Orleans

New York Magazine: Cory Booker Has a School Choice Problem

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2019 //
43

 

The Democratic party is discovering that unions–which have greatly shrunken due to the attacks by right-wingers like Scott Walker and Rick Snyder–are part of their base. They are also discovering that school privatization is not an issue that belongs in the Democratic toolkit.

The 2020 candidate with the biggest school choice problem, writes Ed Kilgore at New York magazine, is Cory Booker. 

Kilgore writes that Booker

might be able to explain away his reputation for being a reliable friend of Wall Street as a matter of virtual constituent services given the financial industry’s importance to New Jersey and to the city of Newark where he served as mayor for seven years. But a more concrete problem involves his long history of support for any and every kind of school choice, including not just the charter public schools the Clinton and Obama administrations supported, but the private-school vouchers that most Democrats stridently oppose. What makes this history a fresh concern is the fact that Booker was once a close ally of the DeVos family, the Michigan gazillionaires and education privatization champions who gave the world Donald Trump’s secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. Kara Voght has the story:

In 1999, when he was still a city councilman, Booker worked with a conservative financier and a New Jersey Republican mayor to co-found Excellent Education for Everyone, a group dedicated to establishing a school voucher program in the Garden State. The following year, Dick DeVos—the Republican megadonor, school choice evangelist, and husband to the nation’s 11th education secretary—invited the 31-year-old Newark councilman up to his home base of Grand Rapids, Michigan, to speak in defense of a ballot measure that would lift the state’s ban on school voucher programs …

Booker’s association with the DeVos couple continued as he progressed from City Council to Newark’s mayoral seat in 2006 to the US Senate in 2013. In the mid-2000s, Booker and DeVos served together on the board of directors of Alliance for School Choice (AFC), the precursor to the American Federation for Children, which DeVos eventually chaired. Booker twice spoke at the AFC’s annual School Choice Policy Summit: once in 2012 as a mayor and again in 2016 as a senator.

Let me be clear. If Booker is the Democratic candidate against Trump, I will vote for him. I will vote for anyone on the Democratic line against Trump. I will not vote for Booker in the Democratic primary. His support for charters and vouchers is unacceptable to me. I am an education voter. I am also a voter who wants to see higher taxes on the 1%, both a wealth tax (as Elizabeth Warren proposes) and a higher marginal tax rate for those who receive more than $10 million a year (as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez proposes). Booker is unacceptable to me because he will protect Wall Street and the billionaires while supporting school choice, like Trump, DeVos, the Waltons, and the Koch brothers.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Rachel Cohen: Charter Leaders in D.C. Make Big Bucks, Teachers Do Not

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2019 //
7

 

We have long known that some charters pay exorbitant salaries to their “CEOs.” Eve Moskowitz gets $600,000 or $700,000 a year, or more, with bonuses. Others get close to half a million.

Now Rachel Cohen reports in the Washington City Paper that some charter leaders there are raking in big salaries. 

Their teachers, not so much.

Cohen explains that teachers’s salaries are lower in the DC charter sector than in the DC public schools. Actually, no one knows what they are because the information is not collected or reported. Not even teachers in a charter know if there is a salary schedule. It’s a secret.

But there is information about the salaries of charter leaders.

She writes:

Though charter teachers earn much less than their DCPS counterparts, administrative pay in the charter sector has been rising at a fast clip, according to public records.

According to salary information posted each year on the DC Public Charter School Board’s website, between 2016 and 2018, staff working at the DC Public Charter School Board received raises averaging 12 percent annually. And in 2017, according to nonprofit tax filings, the average annual salary for the top leader at each D.C. charter was $146,000. Only three charter heads earned less than $100,000, and eight earned more than $200,000.

Summary statistics aside, the sector is replete with examples of steep salaries and quick raises. Allison Kokkoros, the head of Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School and the highest-paid charter official in D.C., received a 24 percent salary increase between 2015 and 2016, from $248,000 to $307,000. Then, in 2017, she received another 76 percent increase, bumping her compensation to $541,000. Patricia Brantley, head of Friendship Public Charter School, received a 33 percent raise between 2016 and 2017, increasing her pay from $231,000 to $308,000.

Outside of school heads, other high-ranking charter administrators also claimed significant salaries. In 2017, KIPP DC had four administrators making approximately $200,000 annually, and its president earned $257,000. The chair of Friendship, Donald Hense, earned over $355,000 annually between 2015 and 2017, and its CFO earned between $171,000 and $197,000 in each of those years. DC Prep’s Chief Academic Officer earned $203,000 in 2015, and $223,000 one year later. The board chair of AppleTree Early Learning earned over $231,000 annually each year since 2015, reaching $245,000 in 2017. 990 tax forms list another 110 charter administrators earning between $100,000 and $200,000 annually, although this list is likely not comprehensive, as schools are only required to disclose their top five highest-paid employees. 2018 figures are not yet available.

In one remarkable instance, Sonia Gutierrez, the founder and former CEO of Carlos Rosario, who now sits on the school’s board, earned $1,890,000 between 2015 and 2017. Board chair Patricia Sosa, when contacted about this large sum, says much of that had been awarded as deferred compensation from Gutierrez’s time working between July 2010 and December 2015. However, according to tax records, she was also paid an average of $326,000 annually during that period.

It’s all about “saving the children.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization
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