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Mississippi: The Amicus Briefs in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Lawsuit Against Diverting Local Funds to Charters

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2018 //
3

Is your school district losing funds to charter schools that it did not authorize? If so, you might find this information useful.

A few months ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit in Mississippi to block the state from removing tax revenues from local school districts to pay for charter schools. The district in question is Jackson, Mississippi. SPLC argued that the state constitution requires that the funds of each district are to be spent solely for its own public schools, under local control.

The SPLC brief is linked in the original post.

SPLC shared with me the amicus briefs, which are excellent. If your state or district is being drained by charters, you may find these legal briefs to be useful.

The three briefs can be found here, here, and here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Mississippi, Privatization

Los Angeles: Charter Expansion Becomes a Stumbling Block in Contract Negotiations

By dianeravitch
December 28, 2018 //
12

Studies like those by Gordon Lafer have demonstrated the high cost that charters impose on public schools, which are left with stranded costs when students leave. The history of school segregation in the South has demonstrated the wastefulness of maintains a dual school system with both receiving public funds. Now charters are an issue in Los Angeles, where the funders use them to eliminate the teachers’ union.

Howard Blume writes in the Los Angeles Times:

In its 69 pages of demands to the school district, the union representing Los Angeles teachers barely touches on charter schools. But as they prepare for an announced strike on Jan. 10, union leaders are making the growth of these schools a focus to rally members and raise public awareness of what they see as an existential threat.

On Friday union President Alex Caputo-Pearl called for a halt to new charter schools in the district. It’s the latest escalation in the union’s anti-charter rhetoric.

“It’s time to invest in our existing schools,” said Caputo-Pearl, who heads United Teachers Los Angeles. “This unregulated growth is something that affects the long-term sustainability of the district. … This is about protecting the civic institution of public education.”

Charter supporters take issue with the union’s targeting. They say charters have provided valuable educational choices and have proved popular with parents.

L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner on Friday said it was wrong to characterize the dispute “as a referendum on charter schools.”

In an interview on Spectrum News, a cable channel, Beutner said “all schools should be looked at with the same tough set of standards.” For the teachers union, he said, “the difference is charter schools don’t have UTLA members, traditional public schools do.”

About 1 in 5 Los Angeles public school students now attends a charter. L.A. has more charters and more charter students than any other school system in the country. This growth has been substantially fueled by federal grants and donors, who include conservative and anti-union forces as well as some independents and Democrats.

Charters are privately managed and while most are nonunion, Caputo-Pearl said that his union represents about 1,000 charter-school teachers and that existing charters that are struggling with enrollment also are being hurt by the “grow at any cost” strategy of some charter advocates.
UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl calls for a cap on charter schools.

He also noted that because funding follows the student, charter expansion has drained funds from L.A. Unified, which also is losing enrollment based on unrelated demographic trends.

Fewer students means fewer teachers. And while a drop in enrollment should lower district expenses, the district has had a hard time shrinking and also is burdened with fixed costs for such things as school maintenance and retiree health benefits.

Union leaders “reason that the dramatic expansion of charter schools in Los Angeles over the last decade — an expansion fueled by funding from [Eli] Broad, the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation — has heightened instability and undermined the capacity of the system as a whole,” said UCLA education professor John Rogers. “UTLA leadership envisions creating a new reality on the ground that will change the dynamics of education in Los Angeles.”

The district also has a new reality in mind — a still mostly confidential plan to divide the nation’s second-largest school system into about 32 networks. The limited disclosure has exacerbated union fears about the goals of Beutner, a successful businessman without a background in working for or managing a school district.

While Beutner has called for a coming together with teachers, he’s also made comments that increase their anxiety.

“So [if] it’s the flexibility of charter schools that’s allowing them to excel, let’s bring that flexibility into the traditional school classroom,” he said in the TV interview on Friday.

But charter school growth and reorganization plans are not part of contract talks.

In its proposal to the district, the union devotes one page to charters — specifically to what happens when a charter shares a campus with a district-operated school.

These sharing arrangements, called colocations, are required by state law. But they frequently led to disputes over space as well as to protests against a charter’s presence.

The union proposal calls for notice by Nov. 15 of the preceding school year when a charter applies for space. UTLA also wants to establish a colocation coordinator who would get a $2,000 stipend and be involved in all discussions regarding logistics. In addition, the union wants an advisory panel at each affected campus that includes teachers, parents, the plant manager and the principal of the traditional school.

They are the union’s response to complaints from staff at traditional schools, which have had to surrender space set aside for computer rooms, tutoring and extracurricular programs.

L.A. Unified has opposed the union’s colocation proposals without much explanation. But there could be concerns about creating a new, potentially cumbersome bureaucratic layer or about letting the union interfere in district administrative decisions. That’s an issue the district has raised about many of the union demands.

Some district officials, notably school board member Nick Melvoin, have sought to ease tensions over campus sharing by sponsoring something very close to group therapy. Using donated funds, Melvoin organized a summer retreat at a local resort hotel that brought leaders of charters and district-operated schools together to get to know each other and talk.

To be sure, many union activists don’t particularly want to get along with charters. They see the charter incursion as too much of a threat.

A strike, if it happens, won’t be over a charter moratorium. But by bringing up the issue now, the union is taking advantage of the sudden spotlight turned on by the strike threat.

The strike “won’t directly settle any of the underlying issues,” said Charles Kerchner, a scholar on labor relations and a professor emeritus and the Claremont Graduate University. “Hence, the charter school wars will continue.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Los Angeles, Privatization

Rhode Island Is One of the Worst Run States in the Nation, Says Study

By dianeravitch
December 28, 2018 //
13

We know that Governor Gina Raimondo is a DFER favorite, but according to a new study, Rhode Island is one of the worst run states in the nation.

Rhode Island is one of the worst run states in the U.S., according to a report released earlier this month. The report evaluated 20 measures of state finances, economy, job market, and social-economic measures.
According to 24/7 Wall Street’s survey of Best Run States in America, Rhode Island is the worst run state in New England and the tenth worst run state in the country, ranking 40th overall.

About RI, 24/7 Wall Street writes:

“Rhode Island ranks as the worst-run state in New England and the broader Northeast. Rhode Island has accumulated some of the most debt of any state, and is one of just four states in which total outstanding debt is greater than annual revenue. Partially as a result, Rhode Island allocated 6.1% of its general expenditure to interest payments alone, the largest share of any state.”

24/7 adds, “Rhode Island is partially economically hamstrung by relatively high unemployment, a shrinking labor force, and sluggish growth. Last year, 4.5% of workers in the state were unemployed, slightly more than the 4.4% national unemployment rate. Over the last four years, the number of people working or looking for work in the state fell by 0.4%, even as the U.S. labor force grew 3.4%. Rhode Island’s 0.7% GDP growth in 2017 was less than one-third of the 2.2% national growth.”

Please don’t add more charter schools as the cure for all this mismanagement.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Rhode Island

When “School Choice” Means “Schools Choose”

By dianeravitch
December 28, 2018 //
11

Two scholars demonstrated what we already knew: many charter schools are skimming and choosing the students they want while excluding the ones they don’t want, the ones likely to cost too much or pull down their test scores.

Peter Bergman and Isaac McFarlin Jr. tested the hypothesis.

Here is the abstract of their paper.

School choice may allow schools to “cream skim” students perceived as easier to educate. To test this, we sent emails from fictitious parents to 6,452 schools in 29 states and Washington, D.C. The fictitious parent asked whether any student is eligible to apply to the school and how to apply. Each email signaled a randomly assigned attribute of the child. We find that schools are less likely to respond to inquiries from students with poor behavior, low achievement, or a special need. Lower response rates to students with a potentially significant special need are driven by charter schools. Otherwise, these results hold for traditional public schools in areas of school choice and high-value added schools.

An excerpt from the study:

We find that, overall, traditional public schools’ response rates are similar to the response rates from charter schools across treatment messages. However, there is a different response rate to messages that signal a child has a significant special need. Traditional public schools exhibit no differential response rate to these messages, but charter schools are 7 percentage points less likely to respond to them than to the baseline message. This result is important because students with disabilities are twice as expensive to educate than the typical student without a disability (Moore et al., 1988; Chambers, 1998; Collins and Zirkel, 1992), and students with the severe disabilities can cost 8-to-14
times to educate compared to the typical non-disabled student (Griffith, 2008).

Here are commentaries.

From the Atlantic:

Parents of students who are “harder to educate” may have a hard time getting schools to reply to their emails about how to apply.

From U.S. News:

Students with behavior problems, low achievement or special needs are sometimes not encouraged to apply to charter schools…

Charter schools and public schools of choice – those in school districts that allow students to choose from any number of schools instead of zoning them to just one – are less likely to encourage students with a history of poor behavior, low academic achievement or special needs to apply.

Charter schools, in particular, were less likely to encourage students with a potentially significant special need to apply.

That’s the latest research published Thursday by Peter Bergman, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Isaac McFarlin Jr., assistant professor at University of Florida’s College of Education.

The researchers sent emails from fictitious parents to nearly 6,500 schools in 29 states and the District of Columbia, asking whether any student is eligible to apply to the school and how to do so. Each email signaled either a disability status, poor behavior, high or low prior academic achievement, or no characteristic at all. The researchers also varied students’ implied race, household structure and gender.

“We find that schools respond less often to messages regarding students whom schools may perceive as more challenging to educate,” the researchers concluded.

The baseline response rate was 53 percent. But emails signaling a student with a potentially restrictive special need were 5 percentage points less likely to receive a response; emails signaling a behavior problem were 7 percentage points less likely to receive a response; and emails signaling prior low academic achievement were 2 percentage points less likely to receive a response.

Notably, emails indicating good grades and attendance were neither more nor less likely to receive a response.

In one sub-analysis, the researchers compared the responses of charter schools directly to the nearby traditional public schools. Overall, they found the response rates similar with one major exception: If an email signaled a child had a significant special need, charter schools were 7 percentage points less likely to respond while traditional public schools were not more or less likely to respond.

“This is one of the most striking findings of the study,” McFarlin said, “because it raises the question of whether high-performing charter schools are successful in part because they screen out the costliest-to-educate students from their applicant pools.”

Categories Accountability, Bias, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Special Education

Rhode Island: Achievement First Charter School Has One of the Highest Suspension Rates in State

By dianeravitch
December 27, 2018 //
5

Achievement First is a Connecticut-based charter chain known for its no-excuses style, akin to schools of the late 19th century.

Data released by the Rhode Island Department of Education show that one of the AF charters in Rhode Island has a sky-high suspension rate.

The school in question is a K-4 school.

PROVIDENCE — A charter elementary school run by Achievement First had among the highest out-of-school suspension rates in the state during the last school year, according to data recently released by the Rhode Island Department of Education.

The Achievement First Providence Mayoral Academy, a kindergarten-through-grade-4 school, has the fourth-highest suspension rate in the state among all schools, at 47.5 incidents per 100 students. The rate represents the total number of suspensions, not the the number of students suspended. Some students may have been suspended multiple times.

The academy has 460 students. Achievement First has a total enrollment of 1,127 students.

The only schools with higher rates of suspension were an alternative academy in the Charlestown, Richmond and Hopkinton school district, the West Broadway Middle School in Providence, and Hamlet Middle School in Woonsocket.

Among elementary school children from low-income families, Achievement First has the highest rate of suspensions in the state, the second-highest rate among black students, the second-highest among students learning English and the third-highest among Latino students.

Elizabeth Winangun, the charter school’s director of external relations, said the mayoral academy suspended 14 percent of its students during the 2017-2018 school year.

“This [school] year,” she said, “we committed to significantly reducing that number. We put a plan of action in place, and I am happy to report that it is working. Year to date, our suspension rate is below 1 percent, an all-time low.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhode Island

The Dark and Terrible World of a Billionaire Equity Investor

By dianeravitch
December 27, 2018 //
17

This article in The New Yorker is a long read. It will introduce you to a subject about which you are probably unfamiliar. It describes the world of Paul Singer, a billionaire investor. He is relevant to this blog because he is not only a billionaire but he gives generously to charter schools and Republican causes. Charter schools are the favorite hobby of hedge fund managers, equity investors, and Wall Street. These groups make large campaign contributions to influential politicians. They are underwriting the destruction of public education. They don’t know much about education, but they know markets. It is important for you to understand their thinking.

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

Waltons Are Shamefully Targeting Black Communities with Privatization Promises

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2018 //
42

The Waltons are an especially cynical bunch of billionaires. The family collectively is said to be worth something between $150-200 Billion. Alice Walton, at $46 Billion, is the richest woman in the world.

They have a family foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, which proclaims its love for children by funding privately managed charter schools. They boast that they have funded one of every four charter schools in the nation.

If they really cared about children, they would pay their one million employees at least $15 an hour. That would do more to help children than all their charter schools. But, as is well known, they pay low wages and are vehemently anti-union. When Walmart comes into a town, they drive every mom-and-pop store out of business, then give mom and pop a part-time job as “greeters” at the new big box store. If the Walmart is not profitable, they close it and move on, leaving all the small towns within 25-50 miles with empty main streets, their stores closed.

Now the Waltons, we learn from this excellent article by Sally Ho of the AP, have decided to target Black communities, to woo them away from public schools and to promise them the world in their privately managed charter schools. They woo them to enroll in a school where parents have no voice and children have no rights. If they don’t like it, they can leave. And by luring them away from their public school, the Waltons guarantee that the public schools will lose funding, fire teachers, have larger class sizes, and not be able to offer electives, while possibly eliminating recess and the arts.

This is not philanthropy. This is villainthropy. Nobody does villainthropy better than the Waltons. They have already forgotten that Sam Walton, the creator of their family wealth, graduated from a public high school, the David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. He would be ashamed of what his progeny are doing: Destroying the public institution that served the public good and made it possible for him to rise in the world. The entire Walton clan and everyone riding their gravy train should be ashamed of themselves. Probably they are not capable of shame.

Amid fierce debate over whether charter schools are good for black students, the heirs to the Walmart company fortune have been working to make inroads with advocates and influential leaders in the black community.

Walton family, as one of the leading supporters of America’s charter school movement, is spreading its financial support to prominent and like-minded black leaders, from grassroots groups focused on education to mainstream national organizations such as the United Negro College Fund and Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, according to an Associated Press analysis of tax filings and non-profit grants data…

While some black leaders see charters as a safer, better alternative in their communities, a deep rift of opinion was exposed by a 2016 call for a moratorium on charters by the NAACP, a longtime skeptic that expressed concerns about school privatization, transparency and accountability issues. The Black Lives Matter movement is also among those that have demanded charter school growth be curbed.

When NAACP leaders gathered to discuss charters in 2016, a group of demonstrators led the Cincinnati hotel to complain to police that they were trespassing. The three buses that brought the 150 black parents from Tennessee on the 14-hour road trip were provided by The Memphis Lift, an advocacy group that has received $1.5 million from the Walton foundation since 2015.

Please open the link to see the graphic that shows how the Waltons are funding leading black organizations, to buy their support for the privatization of public education, where parents have voice and children have rights.

Can you imagine learning civics in a Walton-funded school? Do they teach poor children and black children not to vote? Do they learn to sing the praises of unbridled capitalism? Do they learn to despise the common good? Do they teach deference to your betters? Do they teach children that protest is wrong and that rich people should never be taxed?

I’m reminded of a visit I paid to New Orleans in 2010. I was speaking at the historically black Dillard University. The audience contained many fired teachers. I spoke and we had a dialogue about what had happened to New Orleans. One woman got up and said plaintively, “First they stole our democracy, then they stole our schools.”

Black families should be wary of anything that the billionaires are promoting. If they won’t pay their workers a living wage, they can’t be trusted with the children of the workers.

Let’s hope that the Waltons are visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future.

I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas, and I wish the Waltons the gift of a soul and a conscience and a new birth of concern for their fellow men and women.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Lies, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Rhode Island: The “New Age Charter Model” and Governor Raimondo

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2018 //
9

Recently, while looking for the links between Governor Gina Raimondo, Corey Booker, and Charter Schools, I discovered this interesting critique of charter schools.

That article cited one by Pete Adamy, a professor at the University of Rhode Island, who pointed out that the original purpose of charters was to give teachers the freedom to innovate within their own schools.

Professor Adamy wrote:

“While there are certainly pockets of innovation in Rhode Island’s charter schools, as there are in most public schools in the state, our charters are not “laboratories of innovation,” as some have called them. Rhode Island’s charters have simply been better able to implement reforms that researchers have been pushing for decades: smaller class size, more teacher and administrative autonomy, curriculum that is linked across grade levels, increased parental involvement, community outreach, a coherent and consistent mission, etc.”

He wondered why the state did not take these successful strategies and apply them in public schools. Why benefit a few while ignoring the needs of the many?

The essay that led me to Professor Adamy was written by Robert Yarnall in “Progressive Charlestown,” and he cut right to the heart of the problem with charter schools, the distance the concept has traveled from the original idea of a school-within-a-School run by teachers.

Yarnall writes:

“Virtually every charter school in the state functions as a taxpayer-funded private school, with near-private school levels of control over admissions, student behavior, and parental involvement that are not available to traditional public schools.

“Teachers working in traditional public schools know it, teachers working in next-generation charter schools know it, and the bevy of charter school advocates- the politicians, the privateers, the parent groups- know it.

“This little chunk of inconvenient reality is the tenuous bedrock that the architects of new age charter schools hope to continue to exploit.

“New Age charter school networks react defensively to criticisms that they do not deal with the same sets of challenges as public schools. They routinely publish rebuttal dialogues using the popular “myth v. fact” format in professional marketing campaigns meticulously crafted by the research divisions of prestigious conservative think tanks.

“Their end game, beginning innocently enough with ventures like Rhode Island’s “mayoral academies,” is a gradual for-profit privatization of public education via a post-industrial Ponzi scheme masterminded by a consortium of ideologically conservative legislators, investment firms, and grassroots political action committees intent on exploiting the inherent weaknesses of a public education system struggling to cope with growing pains unleashed by the imperatives stipulated by The Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975.”

Yarnall briefly reviews the federal legislation that protects children with disabilities and the bullying that these children sometimes encounter in school because of their differences.

He sees how charter schools fit into the picture:

“A child’s physical and emotional welfare in school is the self-evident primary concern of parents. Academic achievement is important as well, but it necessarily takes second place in any conversation about school choice.

“Columbine and Sandy Hook changed American education forever. Those images lurk in the back of every American parent’s mind. Every time a son or daughter comes home from school with a story about a confrontational incident in school, a parent shudders.

“Some parents believe that New Age charter schools can make those bad thoughts go away by leaving the disruptive children behind in the real public schools. They believe that New Age charter schools, freed from the burden of managing behaviorally disabled children and instructing children with moderate to severe special needs, will produce superior academic gains for their children.

“So unless a child is one of the lucky 5% to pull a winning ticket stub, he or she will not be climbing aboard the charter express. Instead, they will join the other 95% on the regular bus. As Harry Chapin often said, “There’s always room in the cheap seats.”

“The school privatization investment crowd, fronted locally by Governor and former Wall Street hedge fund manager Gina Raimondo, First Gentleman and Director of Industry Learning for McKinsey & Company Andrew Moffitt, and Secretary of Commerce Stefan Pryor, founder of charter school chain Achievement First, Inc.

“They are further advised by Lieutenant Governor of Charter Schools Dennis McKee, former mayor of Cumberland who was instrumental in crafting legislation allowing charter schools to ignore a range of regulatory policies and practices applicable to traditional public schools, some of which are in violation of procedural rights accorded to special needs students by virtue of federal legislation such as PL94-142 and get the attention of advocacy groups because of this.

“The Raimondo Administration is well aware that Rhode Island public school teachers are catching up with their pernicious Wall Street pranks. Once the general public, especially parents of children who choose to remain in traditional public schools, become aware of the real tune that Gina & the Gypsters are having them dance to, the only things being left behind will be derailed political ambitions and a pathetic legacy of financial malfeasance perpetrated by a scurrilous band of Wall Street pirates.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Rhode Island, Special Education

Laura Chapman Researches a Lobby Shop Called “EducationCounsel”

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2018 //
18

Thank goodness for Laura Chapman. She has the patience to dig deep and find out who is behind the curtain.

She writes:

I looked at EducationCounsel. It is part of a very large corporation with legal and policy expertise, especially for federal and state policies in the South and among states on the East coast. The larger company is Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP– Attorneys and Counselors at Law. (see whisper type at the Education Counsel website)

A brief look at staff at EducationCounsel shows that some have advanced degrees from the Relay Graduate (sic) School of Education. Some began with TFA. Some have worked for the National Council on Teacher Quality (phony ratings of teacher education programs, promoter of NCLB). Some have experience with Jeb Bush’s corporate friendly Foundation for Excellent Education (FEE) see https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Excellence_in_Education

My impression is this: EducationCouncil is lobby shop. It has no principled approach to education other than serving clients who want policies shaped by the expertise of the staff.

Almost all of the senior people are former staffers and lawyers with experience in Congress or the Executive branch including the Obama and Trump administrations. The “current partners” (clients) dedicated to “closing the opportunity and achievement gap” include many who are not supporters of public schools but gifted at putting together punitive policies. Here are few.

America Achieves- orginal promoter of the Common Core now self described as an “accelerator that brings together exceptional educators and other leaders with game changing ideas, results-oriented funding, and strategic and operational support to drive success for students at scale.”https://achievethecore.org/author/23/america-achieves

Council of Chief State School Officers also big into promoting the Common Core and ESSA tests with several offspringalso clients of EducationCouncil: a) the National Network of State Teachers of the Year, a program of the Council of Chief State School Officers, and b) Partners for Each and Every Child –lobbyists for the Council of Chief State School Officers in seven states and funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Ford Foundation, The National Education Association, The American Federation of Teachers, The Stuart Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

These are are also clients of EducationCouncil: Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and others who are major supporters of charter schools and tech in schools including Turnaround for Children –lobbyists serving the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Add Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education really hostile to public schools.
Center for American Progress, The College Board, Institute for Higher Education Policy (B&M Gates funded), Lumina Foundation, and more.

In any case this not the only LLC set up to provide ready to use legislation, policy ideas, and advocacy packages for anyone who can pay the fees.

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

New Orleans: The Last Public School Closes, Despite Objections of Parents and Students and Alumni

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2018 //
13

The Orleans Parish School Board closed the last public school in New Orleans, in a meeting room filled with protesting parents, students and alumni of McDonough 35. New Orleans is now the first city in the United States without a public school. The board disregarded the protesters.

Why do parents and students fight for schools that have been labeled “failing” by authorities? To find out, read Eve Ewing’s book “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” about Rahm Emanuel’s brutal closure of 50 public schools in a single day. There too, parents, students, and teachers were disregarded. They were fighting for values that Reformers don’t understand: tradition, community, history, relations between families and schools, a spirit of connectedness that binds past to present. These are values that Reformers are determined to stamp out.

New Orleans is the Crown Jewel of “Reform,” even though 40 percent of its charter schools have been labeled either D or F by the state, and every one of these schools is segregated. On the much treasured measure of test scores, New Orleans ranks below the state average, in a state that is one of the lowest performing in the nation (and whose ranking on NAEP dropped in 2017). For more than a decade, Louisiana has been controlled by Reformers. Its leader currently is John White. The only jurisdiction in the nation that has worse test scores than Louisiana is Puerto Rico. And New Orleans is below the state average. What a triumph for Reform (not)!

Here is the story of another Reform takeover:

The Orleans Parish School Board has chosen InspireNOLA Charter Schools as the future operator of McDonogh 35 Senior High School, positioning New Orleans to be the nation’s first major city with an all-charter school district.

At the board’s November meeting Thursday, Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. recommended and received approval for InspireNOLA’s application to start a new high school starting in August 2019. It was unclear last month if the operator’s application was designed for McDonogh 35, but on Thursday (Dec. 20) the new school was added to the OneApp school selection system as McDonogh 35 College Preparatory High School.

The school board’s charter agreement with InspireNOLA requires the school to keep its name, school colors and mascot, the Roneagle.

McDonogh 35 was founded in 1917 as the first public high school in Louisiana for black children. Although the former magnet school was once considered a “School of Academic Achievement” by the Louisiana Department of Education, its academic ranking has declined since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The “D”-rated school now teaches 451 students in the St. Bernard area, according to state data.

The Orleans Parish School Board is trying to revive struggling schools such as McDonogh 35 by either closing them or turning their operations over to charters. The school district currently manages McDonogh 35 directly, but the board voted Thursday night to award a “short-term operator” contract to InspireNOLA to teach the school’s remaining 10th, 11th and 12th graders starting in August 2019.

A copy of the new contract wasn’t immediately available Thursday, but the district’s plan is to have InspireNOLA phase out the direct-run school until all current students have either graduated or transferred elsewhere within the next two school years.

The short-term contract, district sources say, essentially creates two schools on the McDonogh 35 campus: one for current students and a new school for freshmen who enroll in August. This implies McDonogh 35 will receive two individual school performance scores from the Louisiana Department of Education when its 2019 freshmen are graded in November 2020…

More than 100 parents, students and advocates weighed in on the district’s actions for more than two hours during the public comment period at Thursday’s meeting. Dozens of attendees had to stand.

A representative from New Schools for New Orleans, an InspireNOLA administrator, and an Edna Karr High sophomore were among the handful of residents who struggled to speak in favor of InspireNOLA as opponents shouted over them. Those who were against chartering every school in the city included state Rep. Joseph Bouie, D-New Orleans, McDonogh 35 alumni and dozens of education advocates from Louisiana and out of state…

Gertrude Ivory, president of McDonogh 35’s alumni group, told the school board its “experiment” with charters is “failing” the city’s families. McDonogh 35 alumna Yvette Alexis said the school’s performance scores have dropped because the district “pulled resources” and “didn’t fill vacancies.” Alexis’s claims came after district employees told board members Tuesday the school is projected to have a $145,000 deficit in fiscal year 2019.

Tomme Denney, a McDonogh 35 senior and student ambassador, asked the school board to continue running his school. He has witnessed “a vast amount of growth” among students in this year alone, he said.

“Stop the decline of the school, which has been used to justify giving the school a private operator,” Denney said.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Fraud, New Orleans, Privatization, Resistance
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