Archives for category: Charter Schools
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Some L.A. Charter Teachers May Strike

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2019 //
5

Most charters schools are non-union. Nationally, about 90% of charters are non-union. That’s what the Waltons, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and other supporters of privatization want. They oppose unions. That’s why they support charter schools and vouchers.


Media Contact:
Ed Gutierrez, UTLA
213-595-7949 (m)
egutierrez@utla.net

Charter school teachers at The Accelerated Schools to announce possible strike

Teachers represented by UTLA at three Los Angeles charter schools operated by The Accelerated Schools (TAS) will announce on Wednesday a date for a potential upcoming strike. Educators have voted 99% to authorize a strike at the three schools.

The announcement comes on the heels of the release this week of a report by a state-appointed arbitrator and fact finding panel, which provides recommendations for resolving nearly all the outstanding contract issues at TAS. Teachers are demanding TAS decision-makers get back to the bargaining table and work to resolve these issues or face a strike.

Educators began negotiations with the urgent goal of fixing the problem of high teacher turnover and have been in contract negotiations with The Accelerated Schools for more than twenty months. The union and TAS are at impasse with disagreement on a small number of key issues. These include improvements in provisions that will ensure teachers are better able to exercise rights under their contract and provide for the same basic job protections currently enjoyed by nearly 90% of public school educators in Los Angeles. Teachers are also asking for TAS to offer more competitive health benefits and to take up an increased share of the cost for healthcare benefits.

TAS is not claiming an inability to pay for health benefit improvements. Teachers are fighting for a contract that will address skyrocketing teacher turnover at TAS and help bring increased stability for students and improvements in learning conditions.

“Last year, the teacher turnover rate was 40%,” said Wallace Annenberg High School teacher Kurt Belbin. “We know that this negatively impacts students and their educational experience. We were, and remain, resolved to fight for the schools that our students deserve.”

TAS teachers’ announcement comes at the same time that more than 30,000 UTLA members are poised to walk off the job at more than 900 school sites across LAUSD. A strike at TAS would be only the second charter school strike in the country following the walkout of 500 charter educators in Chicago last month.

JANUARY 9 – TAS TEACHER POTENTIAL STRIKE ANNOUCEMENT

Media site

Accelerated Charter Elementary School
3914 S. Main St., Los Angeles CA, 90011

What: Press Conference with TAS Teachers

Time: 3:45pm

Spanish-speaking parents and educators available

UTLA, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union local, represents more than 35,000 teachers and health & human services professionals who work in the Los Angeles Unified School District and in charter schools.
http://www.utla.net

Top 6 Nhà Cái Uy Tín & Sòng PhẳngNhất Việt Nam 2024

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform

Florida Education Association Responds to Governor DeSantis on Quality Education

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2019 //
4

This just came in from the Florida Education Association. Ten percent of Florida’s 3 million students attend charter schools. Three percent attend voucher schools, most of which are religious. Another eight percent attendprivate schools without vouchers. Seventy-nine percent attend public schools. Governor DeSantis and the Legislature should not ignore the seventy-nine percent while catering to the wants, needs, and desires of the twenty-one percent.

FEA statement on Gov. DeSantis and education

TALLAHASSEE — Florida Education Association (FEA) President Fedrick Ingram released this statement today following the inauguration of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“Gov. DeSantis has said he is focused on giving every child the opportunity for a world-class education. So are the members of the Florida Education Association, and we hope to work with him toward that goal. We want a great education available to every child, and we want every student to be successful.

“Our state can do the most good for the greatest number of students by investing in the neighborhood public schools that educate the large majority of Florida’s kids. ‘Choice,’ on the other hand, is a code word for draining tax dollars from our neighborhood public schools to fund charter and voucher programs that serve only a small percentage of children.

“Florida’s neighborhood public schools need this administration’s support. Our state ranks 44th nationally in education spending. We are 45th in the nation in teacher pay and 47th in pay for our education staff professionals, and we are facing an unprecedented and growing teacher shortage. An investment in our neighborhood public schools and our educators is an investment in Florida’s future.”

PS: I updated the statistics to include those students enrolled in private schools that do not accept vouchers.

Thanks to Sue Legg of the League of Women Voters.

Click to access Private-School-Report-2016-17.pdf

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, Privatization, Vouchers

Nevada: Internecine Charter Battle Over Accountability

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2019 //
3

There is so much loose money sloshing around charter world, so naturally there are squabbles over the money. Mine! No, mine! Whenever online schools are involved, you can count on the presence of lobbyists and fake parent groups created by K12 Inc. or Pearson’s Connections Academy.


Personal cash payments. Drinks and airfare. Government contracts.

Those are the ingredients of a good scandal. But in the case of Nevada’s State Public Charter School Authority, there’s more behind allegations of inappropriate conduct than meets the eye.

Authority staff members are accused of accepting payments and other perks from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. The membership organization guides charter authorizers nationwide on best practices, but it also landed a contract with the Nevada charter authority in 2016. Now, the attorney general’s office is being asked to investigate.

That request came from the National Coalition for Public School Options (PSO). And it’s an action that the group has taken in another state where regulators were moving to hold charter school operators more accountable.

The group claims to fight for a parent’s right to choose the best education for their child. It has pushed back against stronger accountability for online charter schools under its overarching motto: “I trust parents.”

PSO declines to share its financial backers, but it’s commonly believed in the charter world that it receives funding from K12 Inc., one of the biggest operators of online schools nationwide. An IRS filing shows PSO spent over $2 million in 2016.

PSO’s spokeswoman, Susan Hepworth, also works for Woodberry Associates, a firm that has lobbied for K12 Inc.

In an email, Hepworth suggested that the NACSA group is trying to deflect attention from its wrongdoing, writing that “NACSA’s actions are their actions and they cannot blame it on anyone but themselves.”

The South Carolina Public Charter School District is aiming to set the record straight on what it calls “inaccurate and misleading” statements that PSO made about it to the Nevada attorney general.
In that state, the inspector general’s office investigated a PSO allegation that a charter district employee influenced the awarding of a contract to NACSA while simultaneously working as an independent contractor for the group.

But while the investigation found other issues, it concluded there was no evidence that the employee used an official position for financial gain.

“Notably, the South Carolina complaint was filed during a contentious period during which some charter schools sought to escape the (district’s) accountability policies by moving to a newly formed authorizer in a phenomenon known nationally as ‘authorizer shopping,’” attorneys for the district wrote in a letter to Nevada’s attorney general on Dec. 13.

Meanwhile, Nevada’s charter authority has been struggling to hold its own underperforming online schools — Nevada Connections Academy and Nevada Virtual Academy — accountable.

Perhaps not coincidentally, similar conflict-of-interest accusations against the agency’s former executive director, Patrick Gavin, surfaced around the same time that Nevada Virtual Academy’s charter was up for renewal. PSO has denied the timing was intentional.

Now, the group is leveling another accusation that Mark Modrcin, the charter authority’s director of authorizing, accepted “personal cash payments” from NACSA. The authority responded that Modrcin complied with all rules and requirements for state employees in a consulting contract he had with the organization.

Meantime, the Nevada Parents for Online Education — the local PSO chapter — claims it was retaliated against by Pat Hickey, executive director of the Charter School Association, who disinvited them from a recent stakeholder meeting.

They say it’s because they highlighted “unethical and potentially illegal behavior.” Hickey said they were not invited after launching a smear campaign against charter authority Chairman Jason Guinasso.

To be fair, it’s clear there were issues between Gavin and some authority board members regarding transparency and communication. And perhaps it would have been more prudent for him to recuse himself from the request-for-proposals process that resulted in NACSA winning a state contract.

Sign up for our free Morning Update newsletter.

By signing up you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Unsubscribe at any time.
SIGN UP

But there’s a larger issue at play here — a charter-school civil war between those who take a hard line on virtual schools, and those who fight for those schools to stay open. Expect more skirmishes if state regulators continue their accountability campaign.
Contact Amelia Pak-Harvey at apak-harvey@reviewjournal.com or 702-

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

John Thompson: Oklahoma and the Same Tired Privatization Agenda, Part 3

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2019 //
8

This is the third in a series about education politics in Oklahoma by John Thompson, historian and retired teacher.

The Oklahoman no longer dominates Oklahoma politics as it did for generations, but it is still the biggest bear in our woods. Now that legislators and governor-elect are more inexperienced than ever, the corporate school reform-loving newspaper is aggressively pushing its privatization agenda. Since our state government is almost completely lacking in knowledge of how and why the state implemented the entire accountability-driven, charter-driven experiment at the beginning of the decade, who knows who will win the hearts and minds of newly-elected officials?

One of the most worrisome of the Oklahoman’s recent editorials praised Reason magazine’s prescription for school improvement. Reason’s diagnosis was virtually indistinguishable from that of Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd, which said that underfunded high-poverty urban schools don’t need more money as much as they need to learn from high-performing schools in the rich exurbs.

The Oklahoman then editorialized:

In 2011 and 2012, Oklahoma implemented reforms that have proven effective in Florida, including a third-grade reading law that required retention of students who were two years below grade level, and an A-F school grading system. Lawmakers have since watered down some of those reforms. Instead of backing off, Reason’s education rankings indicate Oklahoma lawmakers should double down.

https://newsok.com/article/5616294/education-report-merits-review-in-spending-debate

The Oklahoman is still angry that moderate Republican State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister led a bipartisan effort that allowed schools to use more discretion when deciding whether to retain 3rd graders who don’t pass their reading test. For years, it has led the chorus for adopting an under-funded replica of the full Florida agenda. Fortunately, the Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer has researched the facts about our Reading Sufficiency Act (RSA) law.

Oklahoma Nearly Tops Nation in Holding Back Early-Grade Students

Palmer reports that 3rd grade is:

the only year educators are required by law to retain students who aren’t reading-proficient — it’s not the most common year for students to be retained. A review of federal data from 2011-12 to 2015-16, the latest available, found that repeating a grade is actually more common in kindergarten and first grade.

Palmer reveals “nearly 10,000 students in kindergarten through second grade were retained in the 2015-16 school year, compared to just over 2,500 in third grade.” That represents 6 percent of those three grades, and “only Mississippi retained a higher proportion of students in those early grades.”

Moreover, she finds that “the high-stakes third-grade test appears to drive many of the early retentions.”

Even sadder for poor children of color, the retention rates are worse in urban schools than in their suburbs. Palmer writes, “Oklahoma City Public Schools and Tulsa Public Schools reported similar numbers for kindergarten through second grade: 833 and 823, respectively. Moore Public Schools, on the other hand, which is about half the size of Oklahoma City and Tulsa, reported just 59 students retained.”

The Oklahoma Watch also chronicled the financial and human costs of the high stakes testing. It explains that, “In some cases, retaining a student is warranted and even beneficial, especially if their struggles are related to age or maturity, educators say. But Oklahoma’s extraordinarily high rate suggests something is out of whack.”

And “one extra year of schooling at Oklahoma’s average of $8,091 per student costs the state $80 million. Advocates say that money would be better spent on extra support for the student within their normal grade progression.”

Palmer then cites Texas A&M University research that followed nearly 800 children for 14 years. Elementary students who were held back “were almost three times more likely to drop out of high school than their peers. In that study, the most common year repeated was first grade.”

She cited another study on Florida students who were retained in third grade, and that being old for their grade didn’t reduce the likelihood the student would receive a diploma. But in contrast to the ExcelinEd lobbyists ubiquitous spin, she added “critics note the researcher in that study and others on retention works for a Harvard research center chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who came up with the retention policy and has been pushing it nationwide.”

Moreover, Florida held back 50 percent fewer students below third grade. And Florida invests more than $130 million per year for supports to improve student literacy, while Oklahoma only provided $6 million for 78,000 at-risk students in the last fiscal year.

It must be stressed that the original 3rd grade high stakes reading test, is one of two policies that were clearly repudiated by almost all Oklahoma stakeholders. I had believed it had mostly been mended, despite not being ended, and there is evidence that retentions have slowed during the Hofmeister administration. I’ve talked with many former students angered that their kids were taught by a string of temporary teachers and subs as their kids tried to avoid being retained. But that was attributable to the combination of extreme budget cuts and the overall reform package that drove teachers out of the system.

The second threat, the expansion of charter schools, has garnered pushback. Even many or most of the choice true believers have realized that it would be impossible to find more charters willing to retain more poor children of color. About the only markets left, small towns and gentrifying neighborhoods, are clearly the new targets. I don’t expect reformers to willingly back off of high stakes reading tests, but clearly their main priority will be blaming the system for failed reforms and, creating portfolios of charters in gentrifying areas, leaving district schools and pushing online charters like Epic CMO as alternative schools to the charter systems.

We’ve been winning, but we can’t back off from the battle to reclaim public education.

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

John Thompson: What Mike Petrilli Doesn’t Know About Oklahoma, Part 2

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2019 //
35

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wrote a three part series on education “Reform” and politics in his state.

This is part 2.

The Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli seemed to be whistling through the graveyard in “The End of Education Policy.” The corporate reformer argued that “Our own Cold War pitted reformers against traditional education groups; we have fought each other to a draw, and reached something approaching homeostasis. Resistance to education reform has not collapsed like the Soviet Union did. Far from it. But there have been major changes that are now institutionalized and won’t be easily undone, at least for the next decade.”

https://edexcellence.net/articles/the-end-of-education-policy

In fact, the failed school “reform” experiment is losing politically as the public rejects test-driven, competition-driven reform. The Billionaires Boys Club and federal and state governments have wasted billions of dollars on their theories. Now their political campaign is stumbling.

Not surprisingly, the attempt to use the stresses of high stakes testing and nonstop competition between schools to remedy the stresses of poverty and trauma, created a fiasco. They used increased segregation by charter schools to counter the stress of racial segregation. They even used untested and unreliable value-added models, that are biased against teachers in high-challenge schools, in order to recruit more talent to those schools!?!?!

The Obama administration and edu-philanthropists tried to entice charters into serving more high-poverty students with hundreds of millions of dollars of grants. As the reliable Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay explains, only 18 percent on the era’s innovations produced “any positive impact on student achievement,” and “some of these positive impacts were very tiny.” And even in many charters that initially claimed to produce big test scores gains, the result was “‘quiet churn’ of students from year to year, which slows achievement for both students who change schools and those who stay.”

The ‘dirty secret’ about educational innovation

High student mobility in Milwaukee stalls achievement, despite well-planned school reforms

The Hechinger Report’s Caroline Preston describes a state-authorized charter school in Seminole, Ok. as a test case as to “whether these privately operated, publicly funded schools can open in small communities without eroding public education.” The article’s title, “A rural Charter School Splits an Oklahoma Town.” The subtitle is: A businessman makes an end run around community opponents. Now, he wants to expand others like it,” should serve as a warning.

A rural charter school splits an Oklahoma town

Even though it seems inexplicable, especially in a state that has too many rural school systems, Oklahoma allows charters in small towns like Seminole that only has around 1,600 students. If the charter school could meet its goal of serving as many as 700 students, the public school system would be wrecked.

Even more illogical is a law that allows the state Board of Education to override local decisions on granting charters. And due to one of the “reforms” in the full corporate reform agenda which was adopted at the beginning of the decade, the board is dominated in true believers by choice and the edu-politics of destruction for blowing up the “status quo.” It’s unlikely that the board will ever meet a charter application that it doesn’t love. Even if the charter isn’t capable of helping kids, it hurts the privatizers’ opponents.

Preston explains that the charter founder, Paul Campbell, runs a company, Enviro Systems, that wants graduates who could staff his business. She notes that Campbell lacked knowledge about schools, but his “can-do, pro-business attitude fits in with the ethos of this working class, Trump-supporting town.”

However, many patrons believed:

It could inappropriately blur the lines between schools and the workplace. Opponents also felt that Campbell, who had no background in education, had put together a proposal pockmarked with problems, one that didn’t offer students any opportunities they couldn’t already get from existing programs. Church services grew tense. Friendships soured.

At first glance, it might seem like Seminole is lucky that the charter’s goal was 60 students in the first year, and it only served 29. But the overall threat remains. As a former school board member said, “she worried the charter school would be a private school ‘in sheep’s clothing,’ benefiting only students of families with the means to sort out the school’s application process and ferry their kids to and from school.” And sure enough, about 45 percent the charter’s inaugural class qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, in contrast to 73 percent in the Seminole district.

And once again, Fordham’s Mike Petrilli stakes out a position about schools, a community, and a state he doesn’t know. Petrilli says of Campbell, “More power to him.” He endorses Campbell’s “vision of helping lift local school performance with market-style inducements. ‘Here is a person who is trying to bring up the quality of education in the community. He’s an employer; this is where a lot of the energy for education reform has come from, the employers who find they are just not getting the workers they need or they don’t have the schools to recruit people into the community.’”

The point should be clear. Charters have failed in terms of school improvement. Regardless of whether charter expansion is spun as a “portfolio” or an “innovation” school, it is a tool for economic gain as opposed to an education investment.

In urban districts, privatization is a means to spur gentrification, as well as to break unions. My approach has been to schmooze with Oklahoma City leaders, hoping to ground policy decisions in at least some education facts. As one of the most powerful and candid business leaders told me in response, “You may be right. I don’t know that much about education.” But low-performing schools make economic development more difficult, and “I believe economic growth will lift all boats.”

As will be explained in the next post, political and business leaders are still hearing nonstop spin from Fordham, edu-philanthropists, and portfolio advocates, and their pitch often sounds pretty good to business people who don’t know much about education.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Privatization, Testing

John Thompson: The News from Oklahoma, Part 1

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2019 //
9

This is the first of a three-part series. Last spring, Oklahoma experiences a mass teacher walkout to protest underfunding of public schools.

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, writes:

Oklahoma made national headlines in 2018 because of its teacher walkout; teachers running for the legislature; and a “Blue Wave” in Oklahoma City and the nation’s biggest congressional upset. But the election of a vocal Trump supporter as governor has emboldened privatizers. In some ways, the drama is more common in states, like Oklahoma, that have cut schools and public services in the most extreme manner. Mostly, however, the assault on the state’s schools and the teachers’ counter-attack is representative of national privatization campaign.

Test-driven, charter-driven reform failed, so now the Billionaires Boys Club is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in selling the “Portfolio Model.”

The Portfolio Model is new and different. Its strategy is the opposite: charter-driven, test-driven reform.

Seriously, the Oklahoma education crisis and teacher shortage has been extreme, but a large part of our ordeal was the predictable result of the corporate reform agenda. It was imposed on our schools just like it was across the nation. Oklahomans now need to ask what would have happened to our dramatically underfunded schools had a grassroots teachers’ revolt not rolled back the “reforms” of 2010 to 2014. We then need to ask what will happen to our still-weakened public education systems if we can’t fight off these new, supposedly kinder and gentler reforms, like the portfolio model.

Non-Oklahomans might not recognize the full, frightening message conveyed by the Oklahoman’s editorial entitled, “A Welcome Shift to Oklahoma Education Reform.” It was accompanied by a photograph of the conservative Speaker of the House Charles McCall, who now has a majority (if he doesn’t lose Republican legislators who were teachers) so large that it can’t be stalled by Democrats. McCall’s frightening glare previewed the message he conveyed to the extremely conservative newspaper editors: spending increases are needed but “We need to look at educational outcomes.” Sounding like he is oblivious to the fiasco which resulted from the accountability-driven, competition-driven experiments imposed at the beginning of the decade, the Speaker said we need to “look at both sides of the ledger.”

https://newsok.com/article/5617174/a-welcome-shift-to-oklahoma-education-reform

The editorial then quoted Senate Pro Tem Greg Treat, who leads an even more daunting Republican majority, who said that the Oklahoma City (OKCPS) and Tulsa districts (TPS) will be targeted. The Oklahoman then editorialized for Treat’s call for reforms in the urban districts, “That echoed comments Treat previously made to The Oklahoman editorial board, when he warned that continued struggles in the state’s two largest districts are ‘detrimental’ to the state’s economic future.”

For that reason, Oklahomans, as well as educators and school patrons across the nation, should review the last decade of corporate reforms. I’ll admit to being naively hopeful when the Gates Foundation announced its district-charter collaboration grants and I understood why Tulsa accepted the Gates teacher quality grant. But I had no way of knowing that the Gates Teacher Effectiveness Model (TLE) value-added teacher evaluations would become the model for the state’s dysfunctional TLE law. As the TPS leaders said at the beginning, before they fired or “exited” 260 teachers and 26 school leaders, the TLE wouldn’t become a “gotcha” system; they claimed to understand that Tulsa faced a teacher shortage, so the system would focus on improving teacher quality.

Even before the Chiefs for Change’s Deborah Gist staffed the TPS administration with nine Broad Academy graduates, Gates grants for charter/district partners required value-added school reports across district and district-authorized charters, and opening more “high-performing” charter schools in high-needs areas. Another grant funded “innovative professional development systems to create personalized learning systems for teachers;” and an “experiment with innovative modes of delivery.” After Gist took over, edu-philanthropists funded the salaries of three central office administrators, including a “director of portfolio management” to “absorb the duties of the director of partnership and charter schools.”
https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/education/tulsa-public-schools-teacher-evaluation-system-is-changing-culture-has/article_6be79be3-d934-5d4a-98ef-5ec90bcea9e9.html

https://www.tulsaschools.org/our-schools/charterpartner

https://www.lighthouse-academies.org/news/item/tulsa-public-schools-gets-gates-grant-to-improve-charter-collaboration/

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2014/09/OPP1114657

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/education/tulsa-public-schools-to-add-three-administrative-positions-paid-for/article_ca88f531-2f29-5232-88c1-0d6316957f1a.html
So, did the millions of dollars of money from Gates and other edu-philanthropists improve teaching and learning?
Because of Tulsa’s previous commitment to early education, students enter 3rd grade ahead of their peers in the OKCPS but TPS students’ progress from 3rd to 8th grade is the nation’s 7th slowest according to data from Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis. Its student growth advances only 3.8 years over the next five. By contrast, OKCPS students progress 4.4 years from third to eighth grade. Despite – or because of – the district’s reforms, Tulsa has about 75 percent more inexperienced teachers than the even more challenged Oklahoma City schools.

A recent Tulsa World article praised the TPS Teacher Corp led by Quentin Liggins, the Broad-trained director of talent initiatives, calling it a success because it helped 74 emergency certified teachers secure jobs.
https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/education/tps-educators-discuss-benefits-of-tulsa-teacher-corps-as-program/article_bd9c898c-938e-512d-acb4-257ea9edba45.html?utm_source=Education+Watch&utm_campaign=ad277b68cb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_17_02_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0ec15fa3fb-ad277b68cb-101023449&mc_cid=ad277b68cb&mc_eid=05d2eb1443

But, that sidesteps the key question that the legislature and the governor should ask: Given all the money and effort invested in the Gates TLE, why the TPS can’t retain experienced teachers, resulting in 34 percent of TPS’s teachers being hired in the past two years?
The World enthusiastically praised the system where applicants spend “about 15 to 20 hours completing online coursework during the spring” and attend “the six-week program in June with in-classroom training.” It then quoted a Teacher Corp teacher who praised its classroom management training which “went a long way in helping Martin [the teacher] instill some order in her class of kindergartners.”

And that leads to the question that legislators should ask that will be explored in a subsequent post. Given the importance of teaching reading for comprehension, hopefully by 3rd grade, why are we dumping that responsibility on rookie, emergency certified teachers?

Could that help explain why Oklahoma is #2 in the nation in retaining k through 2nd graders?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Privatization, Testing

Nancy Bailey: Arne Duncan Can’t Stop Peddling the Dangerous Corporate Reform Dogma

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2019 //
47

Nancy E. Bailey is turning into a superstar of education blogging. She is a retired teacher and she has a firm understanding of corporate reform and its dangers.

In this post, she reviews Arne Duncan’s stubborn embrace of dangerous corporate reform.

I will copy only a portion of the post. I urge you to read it all, because it is priceless as an evisceration of failed “reformer” ideas. You should also see her links, which are many.

She writes:

With Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, it might be tempting to see Arne Duncan as an educational expert, but Duncan has never formally studied education, or been a teacher. Duncan paved the way for DeVos.

EdSurge recently brought us Arne Duncan’s 6 lessons about education. They are nothing but the same old corporate reforms that have destroyed public schools and the futures of children for years.

The lessons are wrong.

Here are his claims and my anti-arguments.

He emphasizes early childhood education and the economy.

While there’s a school-to-work connection, especially with older students in high school, teaching young children should be about their development, not promoting the economy.

Too often this message results in pushing young children to work at a higher level than they’re capable.

The report of which Duncan refers is by James J. Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. It highlights the economy and the nation’s workforce.

Here are the subheadings of the article.

*Early childhood development drives success in school and life.
*Investing in early childhood education for at-risk children is an effective strategy for reducing social costs.
*Investing in early childhood education is a cost-effective strategy for promoting economic growth.
*Make greater investments in young children to see greater returns in education, health and productivity.

His thoughts about equity are misleading.

Duncan argues that poor children need something different than what wealthy students find in their schools.

But poor children deserve well-run schools, with resources and qualified teachers, not strict charter schools run by management companies and novices.

Most charter schools care more about their bottom line.

Feeding poor children and health screenings should be a part of every school plan.

If Duncan cared so much about grief and trauma in children, why didn’t we see an increase in counselors, school nurses, and school psychologists under his watch?

He claims class sizes don’t matter.

This has been the refrain by reformers like Bill Gates for years and it is false.

Here’s the STAR study as one example in favor of lowering class size.

Lowering class sizes would help teachers have better overall classroom management.

Students would be safer, and children would get a better grasp of reading and other subjects in the early years.

He says teachers matter more than class size.

Real teacher qualifications matter. But that’s not what Duncan is talking about.

He is promoting the faulty idea that a “good” teacher can manage huge class sizes. Of course, this makes no sense.

This is also connected in a roundabout way to replacing teachers with technology. Imagine one teacher teaching thousands online.

Duncan has always been on the side of Teach for America fast-track trained teachers. Consider that they will likely become charter school facilitators, babysitters, when students face screens for their schooling.

He uses teachers as the fix for poverty.

This is an old and dangerous refrain. This message drove No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It made standardized testing and one-size-fits all common practice.

Teachers can help students, but economic forces are greater than anything a child can learn at school.

Blaming teachers for the problems in the economy, has always been about getting the public to take their eyes off the real culprit of economic woes, the greed of those who run corporations!

Please read on. This is a great post!

Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Class size, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Economy, Education Industry, Poverty, Privatization, Teachers, Testing

Florida: Government Watchdog Agency Reports on Charter Corruption, Cronyism, Lack of Accountability

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2019 //
16

Betsy DeVos often says that Florida is a national model of choice. You will understand why she says this when you read the report from a government watchdog agency called Integrity Florida. This group, which is not focused on education but on government ethics, reveals in detail what happens when government money is handed out freely to entrepreneurs without any oversight or accountability.

Corruption and malfeasance run rampant.

The biggest money to finance the privatization of Florida’s schools came from Betsy DeVos and the Walton Family and a gaggle of rightwing out-of-state elites.

Betsy and the Waltons and their rightwing allies bought the privatization of Florida’s schools.

Here is the executive summary:

Underfunding, coupled with the continual adoption of tax cuts that make adequate public-school spending harder and harder to attain, prompts a look into the future. How much further growth in the number of charter schools is likely? How will that growth affect traditional schools and the public education system?

The answer to the first question appears to be that growth will continue unabated as long as private charter companies consider public schools a profit-making opportunity and they find receptive audiences in the legislature. If current trends continue, a 2015 national report concluded, “Charter schools will educate 20-40 percent of all U.S. public-school students by 2035.”1 Reaching those percentages in Florida would require doubling to quadrupling charters’ current 10 percent share of all public school students.

Some charter and school choice advocates are clear about their goal. Charters already have “created an entire new sector of public education” and they ultimately may “become the predominant system of schools,” the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has said.2 And the ultimate hope of many, as Milton Friedman wrote (see Page 8), is to bring about a transfer of government to private enterprise, in part by “enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop” in education.

Continued growth in the charter sector will exacerbate a problem that seemingly runs against the Florida Constitution’s decree that the state must provide “a uniform system” of high-quality education. As the number of charters has grown, with different rules than in traditional schools, some question whether a uniform system actually exists today. If Amendment 8 had remained on the November ballot and passed, a state charter authorizer could have approved new charter schools without the consent of the school district. In that case, the school district would not “operate, control and supervise all free public schools within the school district,” as another provision of the Constitution requires.

As the Miami Herald has said during a charter school investigation,
“Charter schools have become a parallel school system unto themselves, a system controlled largely by for-profit management companies and private landlords – one and the same, in many cases – and rife with insider deals and potential conflicts of interest.”

Key Findings

• Charter school enrollment continues to grow in Florida and nationwide, although at a slower rate than in previous years.

• The number of charter schools managed by for-profit companies in Florida continues to grow at a rapid pace and now makes up nearly half of all charter schools in the state.

• Although many charter schools in Florida are high performing, research has found no significant difference in academic performance between charter schools and traditional public schools.

• Numerous studies have found that charter schools strain traditional schools and school districts financially.

• Charter schools were originally proposed as teacher-run schools that would use innovative techniques to be shared with traditional schools. Over time, the concept changed to set up a competitive relationship between charters and traditional schools rather than a cooperative one.

• Charter schools have largely failed to deliver the education innovation that was originally promised and envisioned.

• Some charter advocates have explicitly said their goal is to privatize education by encouraging a for-profit K-12 industry. Today some charter proponents see charter schools, rather than traditional ones, as the “predominant system of schools.”

• Since 1998, at least 373 charter schools have closed their doors in Florida.

• Local school boards have seen reduced ability to manage charter schools in their
districts.

• The Florida Supreme Court removed Constitutional Amendment 8 from the November 2018 ballot that would have created a statewide charter school authorizer. However, future attempts by the legislature to establish a statewide charter authorizer may occur and should be opposed. A state charter authorizer would preempt voters’ rights to local control of education through their elected school boards, even though local tax dollars would pay for charter expansion.

• The charter school industry has spent more than $13 million since 1998 to influence state education policy through contributions to political campaigns.

• The charter school industry has spent more than $8 million in legislative lobbying expenditures since 2007 to influence education policy.

• The legislature has modified the original Florida charter school law significantly over the years to encourage creation of new charters, increase the number of students in charter schools and enhance funding of charters, sometimes at the expense of traditional schools.

• Some public officials who decide education policy and their families are profiting personally from ownership and employment with the charter school industry, creating the appearance of a conflict of interest.

• Lax regulation of charter schools has created opportunities for financial mismanagement and criminal corruption.

Policy Options to Consider

• Inasmuch as charter schools can be an inefficient and wasteful option for “school choice,” the legislature should evaluate the appropriate amount of funding the state can afford to offer in educational choices to parents and students.

• Require for-profit companies associated with charter schools to report their expenditures and profits for each school they operate.

• Require charter schools to post on their website their original application and charter contract along with their annual report, audit and school grade.

• Charter school websites should include lease agreements, including terms and conditions and who profits from the lease payments.

• Companies managing charter schools in more than one school district should have annual audits ensuring local tax revenue is being spent locally.

• Add additional criteria for school boards to consider when reviewing and deciding on a charter school application.

• Give local school boards more tools to manage the charter schools in their districts, including greater contractual oversight and the ability to negotiate charter contracts.

• Increase education funding to sufficiently fund all public schools to eliminate competition between traditional schools and charter schools for inadequate public education dollars.

• Prohibit charter schools from using public education funds for advertising to attract new students.

• Limit the amount of public funds that can be used for charter school facility leases to a certain percentage of the school’s operating budget.

• Require charter schools to report annually the number of dropouts, the number of withdrawals and the number of expulsions.

Go to pages 26-30 to see where the money came from to finance this plunder and privatization of Florida’s public schools. You will see familiar names.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Andy Smarick: The Corporate Reform Is Breaking Up and in Disarray But That’s OK (Link Added!)

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2019 //
47

This is a curious and entertaining article by Andy Smarick, a prominent Reformer who has made his way in the education industry by working in think tanks, in an occasional government post, opining here and there, and currently serving on the Maryland State Board of Education.

The big takeaway: the corporate reform movement has fractured and fallen apart.

That’s the good news.

But the fragments are splitting off into hit teams to continue their attacks on public schools and the teaching profession.

Portfolio districts! (De)Personalized learning. Never give up, as long as billionaires open their wallets.

Andy will be remembered, for a while anyway, as the coiner of the phrase, “relinquishment,” his advice to public schools. Time to give up! Relinquish your right and power to enroll students with public funding. They didn’t.

As long as the money is there, there will always be Reformers!

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

Reed Hastings Should Watch “Orange Is the New Black”

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2019 //
50

I don’t like Reed Hastings. I don’t like that he hates public schools and wants to turn every one of them over to a private corporation. I would never subscribe to Netflix, because it would put money into his overflowing bank account. He is a billionaire.

However I do not live alone and the other adult member of my family subscribed to Netflix despite my protestations.

Then she started watching shows with language I found very offensive. And then, much against my will, I became addicted to that show, called ”Orange is the New Black.” I warn you that the language and the visuals are XXX rated. No, XXXXXXX rated. I got hooked by the story and the characters. It is a story about women in prison, and there is quite a bit of graphic and prurient stuff. You are warned.

The one redeeming feature, having just finished the sixth season, is that the series demonstrates how repulsive, how corrupt, how disgusting privatization is.

Do you think Reed Hastings noticed that the private prison corporation that took over “Litchfield Prison” cut corners at every chance, cutting education programs, cutting the budget for food, hiring inexperienced and brutal guards (Prison Guards for America), subjecting the inmates to even worse indignities than when the government ran the prison? The private corporation cares only about profits, not the lives of the prisoners. The corporation’s budget-cutting caused a riot (that is exactly what has happened in privatized prisons).

The program is a powerful indictment of privatizing public services. I hope Reed Hastings watches his own hit series and learns about the inevitable human costs of privatization.

He is a smart man. He is a billionaire. But can he learn?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »