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Sweden: Education Minister Declares For-Profit Schools a Failure

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2023 //
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Is it possible that we might learn from other countries’ experience of “school reform”? Why not start with Sweden?

The Swedish education minister just called for a major overhaul of Sweden’s all-choice system. Critics of the Education Minister believe that her reforms will have no effect “because it proposes that only when new, privatized schools have proved good effects/results for some years they would be able to take out a profit for owners/shareholders. But no one gets the money back the first years. So what?” (Sara Hjelm)

The consequences of widespread “marketization”have been bad for education and bad for Swedish society.

The Guardian reports:

Sweden has declared a “system failure” in the country’s free schools, pledging the biggest shake-up in 30 years and calling into question a model in which profit-making companies run state education.

Sweden’s friskolor – privately run schools funded by public money – have attracted international acclaim, including from Britain, with the former education secretary Michael Gove using them as a model for hundreds of new British free schools opened under David Cameron’s government.

But in recent years, a drop in Swedish educational standards, rising inequality and growing discontent among teachers and parents has helped fuel political momentum for change.

A report by Sweden’s biggest teachers’ union, Sveriges Lärare, warned in June of the negative consequences of having become one of the world’s most marketised school systems, including the viewing of pupils and students as customers and a lack of resources resulting in increased dissatisfaction.

Now Lotta Edholm, a Liberal who was appointed schools minister last year during the formation of Sweden’s Moderate party-run minority coalition, has launched an investigation into the issue which, she said, would oversee her plans for reform.

“It will not be possible [in the reformed system] to take out profits at the expense of a good education,” she told the Guardian at the ministry of education and research in Stockholm.

Edholm said she planned to “severely limit” schools’ ability to withdraw profits and to introduce fines for free schools that did not comply.

“It can’t be that the state pumps in lots of money so that you can improve your business and at the same time a portion of that money goes out to you as profits. That we will put a stop to,” she said.

The largest profits were made by upper secondary schools, known in Sweden as gymnasieskola, she said. “There it has been easier to make profits through having bad quality.”

There are thousands of friskolor – directly translated as “independent schools” but known as “free schools” – across Sweden, with a higher proportion in cities. About 15% of all primary schoolchildren (six- to 16-year-olds) and 30% of all upper secondary school pupils (16- 19-year-olds) go to a free school.

Edholm said she could not put a number on how many schools were experiencing these issues but said the problem lay in the system itself. “It’s not just a problem that it is a number of schools, but it becomes a system failure of everything.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, International, Vouchers

Watch This! Gloria Ladson-Billings Speaks at NPE Conference about Attacks on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2023 //
6

If you missed the 10th annual conference of the Network for Public Education, you missed some of the best presentations in our ten years of holding conferences.

You missed the brilliant Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor Emerita and formerly the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ladson-Billings gave an outstanding speech that brought an enthusiastic audience to its feet. She spoke about controversial topics with wit, charm, wisdom, and insight.

Fortunately, her presentation was videotaped. If you were there, you will enjoy watching it again. If you were not there, you have a treat in store.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Network for Public Education, Parents, Privatization, Racism, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching

Pennsylvania: A Bipartisan Appeal for Reform of Cybercharter Funding

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2023 //
1

Pennsylvania has long awarded generous fees to cybercharters, despite the fact that prominent cybercharter founders have been convicted of massive frauds. In this article, Lawrence Feinberg and Rob Gleason call for a change in the funding formula, which unfairly benefits the cybercharters.

Lawrence Feinberg is the director of the Keystone Center for Charter Change and a member of the Haverford School Board in Delaware County. Rob Gleason is former chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party and is president of the Westmont Hilltop School Board in Cambria County.

They write:

School boards in 466 of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts have passed resolutions calling for common-sense reforms to the state’s 26-year-old charter school law, such as those included in House Bill 1422.

That’s several thousand locally elected, volunteer school directors – Republicans and Democrats – responsible for levying taxes on their neighbors in order to fund public education.

In July, the state House of Representatives, in a bipartisan vote that saw 20 GOP members join with Democrats, agreed with those school directors and voted for HB 1422, which makes comprehensive and long-overdue reforms to the way cyber charter schools are funded and governed.

Most importantly, HB 1422 establishes a statewide tuition rate of $8,000 per non-special education student and a tiered tuition rate for special education students that more accurately reflects the lower cost of providing a virtual education and that provides resources based on a student’s special education needs.

The cyber charter community has come out strong against HB 1422, alleging that the reduction in tuition rates will close schools and eliminate school choice. However, that’s simply not true and is based on a desperate desire to hang on to the status quo, in which cyber charter schools are benefiting by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in profit.

Think that’s an exaggeration? In the annual audit for the 2021-22 school year, the state’s largest cyber charter school reported total revenues of $397.5 million while only incurring $275 million in expenses, for a profit of $122.5 million. Statewide, the reforms included in HB 1422 could save school districts – and taxpayers – more than $400 million.

That’s serious money for the public school districts that pay those bills and the taxpayers who have taken the brunt of the local property tax increases required to pay them.

Since its introduction, HB 1422 has been the subject of numerous attacks that paint the bill in a false light. But what the attacks fail to mention is that the bill contains a number of provisions that will help cyber charters make and save money. Under the bill:

Like any large, profitable business, the cyber charter community is looking to protect its profits.

• Cyber charters will be able to sell their courses and programs to other schools.

• School districts will be required to transport special education students who choose to attend a cyber charter school.

• Other public schools will be required to provide space for cyber charter school students to take state tests.

• Intermediate units will be required to provide ser- vices and supports to cyber charter school students who need them.

This is not a Republican or Democratic issue. This is not a school choice issue. This is simply about the most efficient and effective way to use limited resources to provide public education.

When you sit on a school board as we do and you see how much money is going to cyber charter schools, you start to take issue with those ubiquitous (and expensive) ads that say cyber charter schools are “free” when you know that you’re going to have to raise taxes on your friends and neighbors or cut programs and services to kids in your school district to pay those costs.

We hope you’ll join us in supporting HB 1422 and calling on the state Senate to act on the bill and get it to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s desk.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Online Learning, Pennsylvania, Virtual Charter Schools

Thom Hartmann: Stop the Republican War on Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2023 //
11

Thom Hartmann is a remarkably well-informed journalist and blogger. In this article, he traces the history of the Republican war on one of our nation’s most important democratic institutions: its public schools.

He writes:

I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.

That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:

“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places–and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”

In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.

I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.

Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public schools, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.

Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:

“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)

Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.

Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:

1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”

“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”

There is no more powerful urge humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.

In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing: “[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”

Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:

“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.

The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.

While Republican Glen Youngkin successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory to the governor’s office in Virginia, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: a subset of Republican voters. 

The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:

“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).

“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”

Nonetheless, they note:

“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”

America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and churches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s schoolchildren.

Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.

First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.

(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)

As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.

Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (white) people.  

Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)

This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal.

Republicans are generally convinced that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values. Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.

As conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten writes:

“Red states are increasingly engaging in a broad push to purge public institutions of a Wokeness antithetical to the values and principles of their constituents…

“Yet at root, it is the schools — where our children spend much of their waking hours — that have disproportionate influence over American society, seeding every other institution that has succumbed to left-wing ideological capture. …

“It is incumbent on lawmakers and their appointees to use every lever of power they can, within every educational institution under their purview, to combat the divisiveness and forcible conformity engendered by DEI, CRT, and the like and to replace it with a system rooted in the values and principles on which Western civilization is based.”

Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well. David Pepper has a great post in his Pepperspectives Substack newsletter about how to spot the extremists and GOP shills at election time.

Bottom line: the Republican war on public education is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. 

Lobby your state legislators and either run for your local school board or support good people who are. 

Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Fordham Institute Debunks “Study” of Charter School Innovation

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2023 //
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Peter Greene writes faster than most people can read, and what he writes is always worth reading. In this article, he describes a remarkable occurrence: the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute debunked a study by charter advocates claiming that deregulation spurs innovation in the charter sector.

In his latest article, Greene writes:

It’s an ordinary day when a pair of charter school boosters conclude that charters work best when mean old government doesn’t make them follow a bunch of rules and stuff. It is an ordinary day when someone points out they’re full of regular non-innovative baloney. It is a less ordinary day when the baloney is being called out by a piece in the house organ of the Thomas Fordham Institute.

So let’s pretend for a moment that the question of regulations vs. charter innovation is a real question. David Griffith, the Fordham Associate Director of Research, frames this as the old tension between autonomy and accountability, which makes more sense than talking about charter school innovation, because after a few decades of charter proliferation, the amount of innovation they have produced is somewhere between jack and squat. Despite being billed as “laboratories of innovation,” charter schools haven’t come up with much of anything that public schools were not already well aware of.

The study argues for less regulation of charters. Greene responds:

The more regulation, the less innovatiness in charter schools. For charter fans, it’s simple–more options means they can move more product, and while I get their point, it is also true that we would have far more innovation in the food industry without all those government regulations about poison and stuff.

The study was thoroughly demolished by David Griffith, Fordham’s associate director of research.

Greene writes:

Griffith makes a similar observation. Their technique of quantifying “innovation” gives the charter points for being unusual, and that’s problematic:

From a purely normative perspective, an obvious problem with the authors’ approach is that it is content neutral. So, for example, a school that was grounded in Satan Worship would count as highly innovative (provided it didn’t start a movement), as would one that imparted no knowledge whatsoever (as seems to be the case for many virtual schools).

And he doesn’t think “innovation” means what they think it means either, noting that many of their “innovations” aren’t particularly new but instead include “longstanding programs such as Core Knowledge (est. 1986), Waldorf (1919), and Montessori (1907), not to mention “single-sex” education (Harvard, circa 1636) and “project-based” learning (the Pleistocene).” (That is Griffith’s snark there, not mine).

Kudos to David Griffith and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Deregulation, Education Industry, Fake News, Research

Jeannie Kaplan, a Hero of Public Education in Denver, Has Died

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2023 //
8

Jeanne Kaplan was a tireless champion of public schools in Denver. She was elected to two terms on the Denver school board. She fought for better, more equitable, fully funded schools. She opposed charter schools because they drained funding from public schools. She was a long-time crusader for civil rights, and she appalled by the takeover of the Denver schools by charter interests, who flew a false flag, pretending to care about equity.

Jeannie learned that she had lung cancer last April. Her medical treatment did not slow the disease. She died yesterday. She was 78.

I met Jeannie in Denver in 2010 as I was traveling the country to promote my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. When I met her, we became fast friends. We were on the same page, and she told me about the damage that charter schools were doing to Denver’s public schools. Candidates for the Denver school board were funded by Dark Money, privatizers, and out-of-state billionaires. It was almost impossible for a parent to raise the money to be competitive with the corporate reform candidates.

Jeannie was a warm and caring person who inspired others to get involved, despite the odds crested by Big Money. She started her own blog called “Kaplan for Kids,” and I reposted some of them here.

I think the best way to honor her memory here is to post what seems to be her last commentary, which overflows with wisdom, candor, experience, and common sense. I humbly add her name to the honor roll of the blog.

Jeannie Kaplan wrote:

CHARTERS, CHOICE, and COMPETITION = CLOSURES, CHAOS, and CHURN Principles of Privatization

Posted on November 1, 2022 by Jeannie Kaplan

Reap what you sow and the chickens come home to roost. The elephant in the room.  Aphorisms appropriate to describe what is happening in public education in Denver. 

After 20 years,  more than 5  superintendents, and 11 different school boards, the results of education reform in Denver have become clear, and they aren’t pretty. After opening 72 charters in the last 20 years, 22 of which have closed, the declining enrollments in neighborhood schools have forced the prospect of school closures.  Who knew opening 26 privately run elementary charter schools in competition with district-run schools would ultimately force the district to make some hard financial decisions?  And who knew that ignoring its own 2007 data showing stagnant population growth would lead to less demand for elementary school seats in the 2020s?  Apparently, not those with the power for the last 20 years.  And, as an ironic aside, many of the same people who were the decision-makers in the past and who were unable to make substantive change then, have now decided they will somehow make these previously unattainable changes from their outside “oversight” committee, EDUCATE Denver. In fact one of the co-chairs, Rosemary Rodriguez, was a DPS board member when on March 16, 2017, a Strengthening Neighborhoods Resolution passed, stating:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a citywide committee be formed to review changing demographics and housing patterns in our city and the effect on our schools and to make recommendations on our policies around boundaries, choice, enrollment and academic programs in order to drive greater socio-economic integration in our schools.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that in the face of the sharp decline in the number of school-aged children in gentrifying neighborhoods, the committee is also charged with how to think about school choice and school consolidation to ensure that our schools are able to offer high-quality, sustainable programs for our kids.

These former school board members and former and current civic leaders have formed a “shadow school board” to evaluate and oversee the current superintendent and school board.  Why?  It appears they don’t like what they are seeing being proposed by the current superintendent. What don’t they like?  It appears they have determined the current superintendent is not committed enough to their reform agenda.  You know – the one that has been in place when they were in power, the one that has produced the biggest gaps in the nation, more segregation, and more resource inequity.

As school closures have risen to the fore this week Chalkbeat disclosed these statistics:

“Over the past 20 years, Denver Public Schools has added a lot of schools. It has added students, too — but at a much slower rate.

  • The number of public schools in Denver grew 55% between the 2001-02 and 2021-22 school years, while the number of students grew just 12%.
  • Denver went from having 132 schools serving about 72,000 students in 2001-02 to 204 schools serving nearly 89,000 students in 2021-22.
  • The number of elementary schools in Denver grew 23% over the past 20 years, while the number of students grew just 4%.”

Through expensive marketing and often false narratives, charter schools have had free reign to prey on susceptible families resulting in DPS losing 7400 elementary school students who would have otherwise most likely attended a neighborhood school. Then add in:

  • a state law that prohibits a district from shutting down low enrollment charters, 
  • a district that has ignored demographic information predicting declining enrollment, 
  • a district that employs “attendance zones” and a secretive CHOICE system to often force place students into heavily marketed, often unwanted CHARTER SCHOOLS, and 
  • a competitive financial model called Student Based Budgeting (SBB – money follows the kid) to fund schools, depending on student needs, the goal of which is to close the achievement and resource gaps.  The 2010 Denver Plan/ Strategic Vision and Action Plan describes SBB this way:  
  • Established student-based budget formulas that increase dollars for middle and high school students, special education, English language learners, gifted and talented programs, and students living in poverty. Resource distribution is now more closely aligned with the costs of serving these students. p. 51
  • Refine Student-Based Budgeting formulas to ensure they are best meeting the needs of all of the district’s students. Continue to evaluate and adjust student-based budgeting formulas to 1) meet student needs, 2) make progress on closing the achievement gap, and 3) grow the number of high school graduates and college-ready students. p. 53

No one should be surprised the DPS superintendent is saying schools must be closed (new word is UNIFIED but it still means CLOSURE), given the quagmire he entered.  What would you expect to happen when 72 new charter schools are opened in a landscape of stagnant or declining population growth? Who should be held responsible for the chaos and churn caused by this over-expansion of new charter schools? 

I know, I know. One isn’t supposed to talk about charters any more. But it is the elephant in the room. Education “reformers” want you to believe charters are an irrevocable fact of life in public education, stare decisis if you will. But as we have recently witnessed, that precedent is non-binding. So let’s use it to the advantage of neighborhood school advocates. Let us not assume charters are inevitable, especially given the chaos and poor academic outcomes charters are producing. Denver isn’t the only place experiencing the madness of so many charters. Just this week lifelong educator Arthur Camins wrote:

It is time for Democrats–voters and the politicians who represent them–to abandon charter schools as a strategy for education improvement or to advance equity. Charter schools, whether for- or non-profit, drain funds from public schools that serve all students, increase segregation, and by design only serve the few.

It is worth repeating that in 20 years, DPS has added 72 charter schools, 22 of which have closed.  As students of public education repeatedly attest to, charters have been particularly harmful to neighborhood schools for they gut these schools of resources. Charters have also been disruptive to communities and have contributed to increasing inequity and segregation in our schools. It is not possible to have an honest conversation without addressing that elephant in the room.  Charter schools along with their partners – choice and competition – have had their chance in Denver and their biggest accomplishment has been to pressure neighborhood schools to close.

Let us not overlook the demographic projections DPS has been aware of since the mid 2000’s. 

“It’s really simple, we’ve seen a slow down in births,” said Elizabeth Garner, demographer for the state. “Starting back in 2007, that was our peak birth year, we’ve seen a slowing in births ever since. So with fewer kiddos, that means lower school enrollment.”

Let us not overlook who was supporting and approving this unchecked expansion.  DPS had strong indicators from as early as 2007 onward the population of the city and the number of school-age children was flattening, and yet the district with the strong support of many of the aforementioned  “oversight committee”, EDUCATE Denver, pushed for this proliferation of new charter schools without giving demographics its proper due.

Loss of students = loss of funding (SBB) = loss of programming and supports = closure

Superintendent Alex Marerro has been charged with improving student outcomes and reducing gaps by implementing his strategic plan.  School unifications are one way he has chosen to start this process.  He inherited a district suffering from years of “feel good” oversight from boards and the nonprofit world determined to paint a rosy picture of reform education success, a district more focused on good public relations stories than actual educational outcomes. Now he has to try to provide solutions to problems that have not been dealt with honestly for years. And yes, “unification” has raised as many questions as it has provided answers such as how transportation and language services will be provided and what will be done with these empty buildings. And there is the elephant in the room – again.  Charter schools. Why are they not included in his recommendations? Again, he has no authority to recommend closing them, even though several are also suffering from declining enrollment.  Given this reality, it will be interesting to see how he chooses to address this issue. In the end, how can the board fairly evaluate him according to measures both they and he just agreed on, if it rejects his operational ideas?

As for what neighborhoods these closures would most heavily affect – What would one expect to happen when new charters are opened in neighborhoods heavily populated by families of color and families struggling economically?  Why is there any surprise that most of the schools on the “unification” list affect these neighborhoods?  How could it be otherwise when these are the sites of uncontrolled, privately run options to public schools.  Sadly, it only makes sense that these are the neighborhoods that would suffer the highest impact of school closures.

Few like to close schools.  It is a heart-wrenching, disruptive, negative process. But given the lack of thoughtful planning and oversight for 20 years, what is the better option? Keeping schools open without the financial ability to provide necessary services and supports, or providing unified schools with the money to provide language support,  art, music, nurses, librarians, psychologists, speech therapists?  

Imagine a great school district that had paid attention to population warnings and  hadn’t opened so many charter schools over the last 20 years. Imagine all those charter school children filling those neighborhood schools.

The chickens have come home to roost.

Jeannie and I in Denver, 2013.
Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Denver, Education Reform, Honor Roll

John Oliver Pulls Apart the Myth of McKinsey

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2023 //
22

As The Guardian explains, McKinsey is the most influential management consulting company in the world. Presidents, kings, and corporations hire them to get their expert advice. When I worked for Bush 1 in the early 1990s, youngsters from McKinsey met frequently in the White House to give advice on education policy; by their age, it was apparent that none had ever been a teacher. McKinsey has been hit with numerous scandals, but nothing seems to stick.

The Guardian article includes a link to John Oliver’s brilliant takedown of McKinsey. Don’t miss it.

Oliver demolished charter schools in 2016. If you missed it, watch it now.

If that link doesn’t work, try this one.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit

Texas AFT to Senator Cornyn: Stop the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in the Federal Charter Schools Program

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2023 //
4

The Network for Public Education sent out an alert, warning that several members of the U.S. Senate were proposing a bill to enrich the sponsors of privately-managed charter schools.

The Texas AFT answered that alert with an appeal to Senator Jon Cornyn.

Tell Sen. Cornyn: Do Not Support More Charter School Program Waste, Fraud

Eight U.S. senators (including Texas Sen. John Cornyn) introduced a bill last week that was clearly written with the help of the charter school lobby. The Empower Charter School Educators to Lead Act would allow billionaire-funded nonprofits operating as “state entities” to keep more of a cut when dispersing Charter School Program (CSP) grants. The bill would also allow these “state entities” to award up to $100,000 to would-be charter entrepreneurs, including religious organizations, to pre-plan a charter school before they have even submitted an application to an authorizer.

Our partners at the Network for Public Education (NPE) urge you to send a letter to your senator to oppose the charter lobby’s bill today.

As the NPE has documented, CSP planning grants have led to enormous waste and fraud. Millions of CSP dollars have gone to school entrepreneurs who never opened a school — a fact confirmed by the Department of Education and the Government Accountability Office. That is why the NPE and other public education advocates supported the addition of modest guardrails in 2022 that provided guidance on how and when planning grants could be spent.

Clearly, that did not sit well with the charter lobby, led by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which persuaded these eight senators to make it even easier to get funding to pre-plan a school.

There’s more. This bill would also increase the funding “state entities” can keep for themselves when they disperse grants. That cut is already at 10%, and this bill would raise it to a whopping 15%. Contact Sen. Cornyn today. Stop the charter school lobby’s new attempts to fleece American taxpayers and undermine public schools.

STOP THE SCAM!

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Texas, U.S. Department of Education, Unions

Nora DeLa Cour: Religious Charter Schools Corrupt the Charter idea

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2023 //
11

Nora De La Cour was a teacher who now writes about education with sharp insight.

She warns about the danger of religious charter schools in Jacobin:

A church-run charter school is on track to open in Oklahoma — publicly funded but run by the archdiocese. The arrival of religious charter schools is one more piece of evidence that public charter schools are not so public after all.

In early October, Georgia state senator Elena Parent coauthored an op-ed for the 74 entreating her fellow Democrats to recall their former support for charter schools. Decrying the GOP-backed private-school voucher schemespassing in state after state, Parent warns that these programs’ unfairness “does not mean Democrats should abandon discussion around school choice.” Rather, she argues, they must reenergize their own liberal vision of school choice, focused on bringing opportunities to underserved populations.

A decade ago it was easier to make this sort of pro–civil rights, liberal defense of charter schools (albeit ignoring the gathering evidence about who is harmedby charterization and the attendant defunding and closure of neighborhood schools). Today though, it’s overwhelmingly clear that charters, like other forms of school privatization, are among the Right’s primary tools for advancing a decidedly illiberal vision of free-market fundamentalism and Christian nationalism. And recent decisions from our radicalized Supreme Court have suggested that, legally speaking, charter schools may not be all that different from voucher-supported private schools.

One of the most glaring examples of this is St Isidore of Seville, a virtual Oklahoma Catholic school that, if it opens in 2024 as planned, will be the nation’s first church-run charter. The archdiocese of Oklahoma City intends to use this publicly funded statewide school “as a genuine instrument of the Church, a place of real and specific pastoral ministry,” complete with religiously motivated discrimination against protected groups of kids. It’s just one more example of how privatization makes fertile ground for the desecularization of America’s schools — and the erosion of students’ rights.

St Isidore of Vanishing Civil Rights

Weeks before the Supreme Court elevated religious free exercise over the Establishment Clause by ruling that Maine’s town tuitioning program could not bar private schools from putting taxpayer money to religious uses, attorney and leading education policy scholar Kevin Welner made a prediction: such an outcome in Carson v. Makin, he argued, would act as an invitation for church-run charter schools.

Sure enough, Oklahoma’s virtual charter board (with two new right-wing appointees) voted in June to grant a charter for St Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School (SISCVS), which will be operated by the archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the diocese of Tulsa. This month the board approved the school’s contract, bringing it one step closer to furthering the “evangelizing mission of the Church” on Oklahoma taxpayers’ dime. But the board’s chairman is currently refusing to sign the contract — demonstrating the high level of contention surrounding SISCVS within the conservative Bible Belt state.

A religious charter school runs afoul of both the Oklahoma Constitution and the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act — to say nothing of the US Constitution’s promise of church/state separation. While Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt has been among the school’s most avid cheerleaders (along with the state’s previous attorney general), current attorney general Gentner Drummond — also a Republican — has vehemently opposed SISCVS, asserting that “Christian nationalism is the movement that is giving oxygen to this attempt to eviscerate the Establishment Clause.”

In the SISCVS charter application, the archdiocese of Oklahoma City states that the school “will operate in harmony with faith and morals, including sexual morality, as taught and understood by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.” Instruction will assist parents in “forming and cultivating” children who believe, among other things, “that God created persons male and female,” and that if we “reject God’s invitation,” we will “end up in hell.”

In response to Drummond’s charge that the school appears intent on violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the archdiocese insists it is “committed to providing a school environment that is free from unlawful discrimination, harassment, and retaliation” (emphasis added). But, emboldened by Supreme Court rulings subordinating antidiscrimination laws to religious free exercise, they suggest that these practices are lawful when they’re required by faith….

Public Schools Are the Only Public Schools

School-choice Democrats like Cory Booker, Barack Obama, and Arne Duncan mastered the contortionist art of pitching school privatization — which strips families of their right to democratically elected school boards — as “the civil rights issue of our time.” Publicly funded, privately managed charter schools, they argued, would increase opportunities for marginalized students, leveling an unfair playing field.

It was never true, and decades of research have shown us that charter schools don’t outperform their publicly managed counterparts — but they do drain funding from neighborhood schools attended by poor kids. Nevertheless, a sheen of “equity” and “opportunity” sparkled around bipartisan charter school initiatives in the Bush and Obama days of education reform.

But in the Trump era, Besty DeVos, a privatizer laser-focused on state-funded Christian education, made the school-choice brand feel icky to its D-column champions. While DeVos treated the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) as “a slush fund for large charter chains,” Carol Burris and her team launched a series of reports documenting the rampant waste, fraud, and abuse the program was enabling. By the 2020 presidential primary it was clear that Democrats were looking to distance themselves from the charter movement, taking their cues from organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which called for a moratoriumon new charters in 2016.

Biden’s education department attempted to make good on a campaign promise to eliminate federal funding for for-profit charter schools (thanks in no small part to the work of Burris and NPE, who marshaled a grassroots network of public education advocates willing to take on the charter sector’s powerful Washington guardians). And while the department’s new CSP rules don’t go quite that far, they do make it much harder for profit seekers to cash in on the program. They also increase transparency and accountability for grantees, and set up requirements aimed at combating resegregation and federally financed “white-flight charters.” In Congress, the 2023 House Appropriations Bill supported these tighter rules and reduced CSP funding by $40 million, seemingly in recognition that the federal government caused grave harm by promoting reckless charter expansion.

Open the link and read the article in full.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Religion

Nancy Flanagan: How School Choice Erodes Support for the Public Good

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2023 //
9

Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher of music in Michigan, writes here about how “school choice” has damaged the perception of public schools, turning them from a valued public good to just another consumer choice. when she started teaching, public schools were the glue of the community. Now they are forced to compete with multiple private choices, which claim to be better although they are not.

She explains why we could have good public schools in every community, but we have lost the will to pursue that goal. instead we have pursued a series of demonstrably failed ideas, wasting money and lives, while disintegrating the will to improve our public schools.

She writes:

The only contentious thing I ever talk about, at holiday hang-outs or on Facebook (our new town square), is education policy. I will talk to just about anybody—persistently and passionately—about schools, and what it would take to make our public education system not merely workable, but beneficial for all kids in the United States.

This is, by the way, a goal that could largely be accomplished. We have the human capital, the resources and the technical knowledge to transform public education over a generation. What we lack is the public will to do so—for children other than our own, at least.

This represents a sea change in our 20th century national approach to public education, that post-war America where the GI Bill and the Baby Boom made tan, rectangular brick elementary schools spring up like mushrooms in the 1950s. Teachers were in high demand, and state universities were adding a new dormitory every year. Education was going to lift us up, make us (here it comes) the greatest nation on earth.

We don’t think that way anymore.

Somewhere in between our rush to put a man on the moon and the advent of computers in all our classrooms, we lost our “public good” mojo, the generous and very American impulse to stir the melting pot and offer all children, our future citizens, a level playing field, educationally. Lots of edu-thinkers trace this to 1983 and the Nation at Risk report, but I think that the origins of losing that spirit of unity are deeper and broader than that.

Recently, I posted an article from American Prospect on my Facebook page—The Proselytizers and the Privatizers: How religious sectarian school voucher extremists made useful idiots of the charter movement (Katherine Stewart). You can read divergent articles on charter schools (the most obvious and deceptive signal of the loss of our sense of “public good” in education) everywhere, but this was a particularly good piece, honest without being accusatory, damning but cautious:

A wing of the charter movement that is ideologically or religiously opposed to “government schools” was present at the charter movement’s creation, and has grown to comprise a sizable segment of the charter universe. With the election of Donald Trump and the appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, it is presently empowered as never before. Public confusion about vouchers and charters continues to create opportunities. A lightly regulated charter school industry could achieve many of the same goals as voucher programs. They could drain funding from traditional public schools, deregulate the education sector, and promote ideological or religious curricula—all without provoking the kind of resistance that vouchers received.

I posted the article because it was true and thoughtful.

I live in Michigan, where charters took root over two decades ago. Like a handful of other states, we now know what happens to public education, including healthy districts, when charter schools damage the perceived desirability of one—thriving, publicly supported—school for all children. It’s happened all over our state, first in the urban and rural districts, struggling to maintain programming and viability, and now in Alpha districts, as their budgets are diminished and their student populations lured to schools that are “safer” (read: whiter).

After I posted the article, the online conversation was revealing. Teachers (and a lot of my Facebook friends are educators) contributed positive commentary. But there was also a fair amount what Stewart calls public confusion.

  • A sense that charter schools are, somehow, de facto, better than public schools—simply by the virtue of the fact that they’re not public, but selective and special.
  • Assertions that public schools (schools I know well, and have worked in) are attended by children who haven’t learned how to behave properly.
  • Blaming teacher unions for doing what unions do: advocating for fairness, serving as backstop for policy that prioritizes the community over individual needs or wants.

None of these things is demonstrably true. The conversation illustrated that many parents and citizens are no longer invested in public education, emotionally or intellectually. School “choice” is seen as parental right, not something that must be personally paid for. There is now agreement with an idea once unthinkable in America: corporations also have a “right” to advertise and sell a for-profit education, using our tax dollars.

Education is a major major public good where we tax the rich in order to provide a public benefit that you get just by right of being a citizen. When they talk about needing to do away with the entitlement mentality, the most problematic entitlement for them is not Medicare or Social Security. It’s education. Education is even more of a problem for them because teachers are trying to encourage kids to think they can do more. And that’s dangerous.

The core of the public confusion around schooling has been carefully cultivated for decades.

It’s worth talking about—the uniquely American principle of a free, high-quality education for every single child—even if the dialogue is heated. We’re in danger of losing the very thing that made us great. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Michigan
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