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Domingo Morel: The Racism Behind State Takeovers

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2018 //
9

Ever notice how many times Reformers push for a state takeover of majority black and brown districts? Ever notice that the state takeover is the prelude to privatizing the public schools, on the presumption that people of color can’t be trusted to run the schools in their district? Better bring in the smart white entrepreneurs who run charter chains and think they know what kind of discipline children of color need.

Domingo Morel, a political scientist at Rutgers University, has written a book about Takeovers and examined the racial dynamics behind them.

The article and interview are by Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum.

“In a new book, “Takeover,” Rutgers political scientist Domingo Morel concludes that the prevailing logic for takeovers is indeed tainted with racism. That’s based on an examination of data from every school district taken over by a state over a 30-plus year period, and case studies of the takeovers of Newark, New Jersey and Central Falls, Rhode Island.

“Predominantly black school districts are more likely to be taken over, Morel documents, and those takeovers are more likely to fully remove the elected school board. He also finds that cities with a greater share of black city council members are more likely to face takeovers, with state leaders arguing they must wrest control of chaotic local politics.”

A chart from Morel’s work shows that in the rare event that a majority white district is taken over by the state, 70% keep their elected school board.

In a majority Latin district, 46% keep their elected board.

But when a majority black district is taken over, only 24% retain their elected school board.

I think people don’t pay enough attention to how political education is — that education in the country is a political project. I think that’s the most important thing that I think we need to understand. And so if education is a political project, when we think about reforms, we need to think about them as political objectives as well. And so if we’re going to take over a school district, it just doesn’t seem consistent with what the literature says about improving schools that you just remove a community from the entire decision-making process. Because what the literature tells us in education is — and it’s just very intuitive — if you look at school districts across the country who are doing well, everybody has a stake in the school district.

Source: Takeover, by Domingo Morel. Graphic: Sam Park
But then we get still the expansion of takeovers. It suggests that there’s something else there. And this is where I come in and say that we need to understand historically role that education has played in communities and what type of power it gives a community.

If we look at education as a political problem and we see how important the schools are to communities’ political empowerment, then we can start to see how how takeovers make sense for two major reasons: Conservatives had consolidated within the Republican Party by the 1970s and blacks became an important part of the Democratic coalition by the 1970s. Moreover, the schools served as the political foundation for black political empowerment. This provided the context for increasing political tension between increasingly conservative state governments and cities. The schools were a major part of this political struggle.

Second, cities began to win court cases to secure more school funding from state governments, which led to further tensions.

[Barnum asks]: Reed Hastings, the Netflix founder, charter school advocate, and education reform funder, has said that “the school board model works reasonably well in suburban districts” but that the politically ambitious “use the school board as a stepping stone to run for higher office” in cities. And I take your argument to be, yes it’s true that the school board can be a stepping stone, but that has proven crucial for the political empowerment of communities of color. Can you speak to that?

“Let’s think about that comment and put it in perspective. So what he’s saying is democracy works for certain communities but it can’t work for others. Yes, you have ambitious people, but you also have people who are just interested being school board members. But even if you have ambitious people who want to be city council people, mayors, and so forth, why is that a justification for saying that school boards are not important?

“And so the message that sends is that democracy is worth fighting for and worth having in certain places and not in others because it may seem like it’s more messy in big cities and urban areas. And I say it “may seem” like that because I don’t think there’s any evidence that you find more corruption or people are not as prepared to be school board members in urban localities compared to suburban or rural — there’s just no research to support that…”

[Barnum asks:] Let’s talk about the research on academic gains from state takeovers. I know that’s not the focus of your book, but advocates for state takeovers could point to studies of New Orleans and in Newark, after three years, to say look, it has been successful in boosting test scores in some contexts.

“My response to this is multi-level. The first is that it’s contested to what degree these academic scores actually improved. But I spend very little time on this because as a political scientist, I’m interested in the politics of this mostly. What I will say is, OK, so let’s just agree that test scores have improved. What has been the cost of test scores’ improvement in New Orleans for example?

“In New Orleans, 25 percent of the black teachers lose their jobs. Seven thousand people lose their jobs. The school board was removed from the political process. The school governance was based on a two-tier level: one is the state-created board made up of people that are not from New Orleans and the second is actual charter school governing bodies, 60 percent of which have white members although 67 percent of the community is African-American. And so all of that is the price that the city of New Orleans — that black New Orleans — has to pay for contested improved test scores.”

This is an important article and book.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New Jersey, New Orleans, Privatization, Racism

Los Angeles: Charter School Closes Due to Low Enrollment (Forget about “Long Waiting Lists”)

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2018 //
17

Howard Blume reports in the Los Angeles Times that a charter school in the chain founded by convicted felon Ref Rodriguez closed due to low enrollment. It had projected a student body of 275 but only 114 signed up.

“On the fourth day of its second school year, an Eagle Rock charter school closed its doors this week, leaving parents and students disappointed, angry and tearful — and bucking the usual narrative of ceaseless charter growth.

“PUC iPrep Charter Academy had dual-language programs in English and either Spanish or Mandarin — the sort of offerings that are usually popular. But it was in an area with too many good school options, and it enrolled too few students.

“It may or may not have been a factor that the school was part of Partnerships to Uplift Communities, the group of charter schools co-founded by Ref Rodriguez, who resigned from the Los Angeles Board of Education in July after pleading guilty to criminal charges related to his campaign for office.
The school aimed to enroll 275 students this year, although the organization told parents it would try to make things work with 200. But by Wednesday, it had only 114 students — and PUC’s board voted to shut it down.”

Charter advocates like to claim that tens of thousands of students are on charter waiting lists, but those lists are never audited, and in the rare instances when anyone checks (it happened in Boston), the waiting list contained names of students who had applied to multiple charters and had long ago been enrolled elsewhere.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Failure, Los Angeles, Privatization

City Fund: Another Billionaire-Funded Phony Scheme to Steal Public Schools from the Public

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2018 //
26

You first read about “City Fund” when Tom Ultican wrote about it on August 18. Then four days later, Chalkbeat got the “leaked memo” and told the story that Tom had already broken.

Two billionaires, unhappy with the slow and slowing pace of privatization, have created another organization to spread the gospel of school choice, following in the venerable tradition established by racist Southern governors and senators following the Brown Decision of 1954. In the late 1950s (as Mercedes Schneider wrote in detail in her fine book School Choice), white southerners were mad for choice. They saw choice as the best way to stop racial integration.

Now, under the unesteemed leadership of rightwing zealot Betsy DeVos, the mask of benevolence has been stripped away from the choice movement.

But that doesn’t stop billionaires Reed Hastings (Netflix) and John Arnold (Enron). Education is their game, their hobby, and they are not ready to abandon their dream of privatizing every school in America.

They have hired a “dream team” of failed Reformers, who bring together in one place a long history of stealing democracy and public schools from poor African Americans.

The Reformers tell us that up until now, nothing in reform has worked. But they seem convinced that charter schools work (think Detroit, think Milwaukee). If NOLA is the model, start by closing all the public schools, firing all the teachers, then replacing them with charters and TFA. Crucial to the plan is to add hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending (they forgot that part of the formula).

Peter Greene takes a crack at explaining the grand plan for transforming public schools into a business–and failing as Kevin Huffman and Chris Barbic did in Tennessee’s Achievement School District, where they blew $100 million trying to turn “failing schools” into high-performing schools by handing them over to private operators. Say this for Huffman and Barbic: It was failure on a grand scale!

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

California: Charter School Borrows Nearly $30 Million for New Building, Then Was Closed Down

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2018 //
6

A charter school in Palmdale, California, raised nearly $30 million in bonds for its new building. But as matters stand, the school will never open. Charters are risky. They open, they close. Sometimes states close more charter schools than they open. That’s business. Where is Enron, Braniff Airlines, all sorts of brands that disappeared? Gone without a trace.


For the last year, construction on the corner of Avenue R and 40th Street East in Palmdale hummed along as a massive school campus took shape.

On its Facebook page, Guidance Charter School posted photos of students holding shovels adorned with yellow ribbons and contractors pouring the foundation for what would be an 87,000-square-foot campus with a swimming pool, library and playing fields — paid for with nearly $30 million in bonds.

Less visible was what was happening behind the scenes, as the local school system raised alarms that threatened Guidance’s existence.

The Palmdale School District’s board of trustees, which first authorized Guidance 17 years ago, voted in January to close the school, citing concerns about poor academic performance and questionable financial operations. As the new campus rose, charter officials launched a series of appeals, the latest of which came before the Los Angeles County Board of Education this week.

On Tuesday, the board rejected Guidance’s last-ditch effort to open for the 2018-19 school year. Unless a court overturns Palmdale’s decision, Guidance Charter School will not be able to enroll students — or receive the state funding that comes with them. But it still will be responsible for repaying the loan.

Supporters say the school is a victim of a process that puts decision-making power in the hands of the very districts that compete with charters for students and funding. Opponents see it as proof that charter schools, regardless of the quality of the education they offer or the extent of oversight they receive, are able to access bond money too easily.

The school’s executive director, Kamal Al-Khatib, blames its closure on the Palmdale School District, which he said purposely set the charter school up for failure in order to win students back. In the spring of 2017, less than a year before voting not to renew the school, the district had declared that Guidance was on solid ground, he said…

Guidance was founded in 2001 by Muslim leaders who promised to offer students a secular education and Arabic instruction.

The school leased space from a mosque owned by the American Islamic Institute of Antelope Valley, a religious organization run by the charter’s founder and its executive director, which would later prompt a host of conflict-of-interest concerns. Guidance’s ties to the mosque — and the thin partitions erected to separate its students from a prayer room — drew criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Anti-Defamation League that there was not enough of a wall between church and state.

Regardless, the school grew. It had opened with 65 students but by last year had about 900 in grades K-12. And every five years, when its right to operate came up for renewal, the Palmdale school board voted to keep it open. Guidance also rented classroom space from the district…

When district officials voted not to renew the charter, they cited Guidance’s lagging academic performance as their primary concern.

Although its students’ scores on the state English exam in 2017 were roughly comparable to their peers in the district, according to Palmdale, math was a different story. In that subject, scores at Guidance were worse than those at most other schools in the area; none of the charter school’s 11th graders tested at grade level.

Many of Guidance’s students didn’t graduate, according to county officials, who said its drop-out rate was about 23% for the class of 2016. Palmdale officials found that even when students did graduate, many were not prepared to go to four-year colleges. According to the district, of 32 students who graduated from Guidance in 2014 and 2015, 24 had not completed the courses required for admission to the University of California or California State University systems.

The district also flagged Guidance’s fiscal operations and governance structure. It accused Al-Khatib of having financial interests in several of the school’s transactions, including its lease with the American Islamic Institute and a roughly $2-million loan from a related company called Guidance Charter School Services LLC.

Guidance’s lawyers disputed the claims and said Al-Khatib’s role at the mosque was voluntary and unpaid.

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

Florida: State Appeals Decision to Knock Amendment 8 Off the November Ballot

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2018 //
11

The state of Florida moved quickly to appeal the judicial decision to knock Amendment 8 off the November ballot.

The decision will be rendered by the state’s Supreme Court.

The Florida League of Women Voters filed suit against Amendment 8 because it bundled three different school-related issues into a single amendment to the state constitution. The case was argued by the Southern Poverty Legal Center. The circuit judge in Tallahassee said the language of the amendment was confusing and misleading.

Critics say the true intent of the amendment is to strip local school boards of their authority over charter schools, cyber charters, and other forms of school choice.

A circuit judge in Tallahassee on Monday ruled Amendment 8 was “misleading” and ordered it removed from the Nov. 6 ballot. He ruled in a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters of Florida, which argued voters should not be asked to change Florida’s Constitution based on Amendment 8’s unclear and deceptive language…

The most controversial of the three deals with charter schools and the other two with term limits for school board members and the teaching of civic literacy.

The league’s lawsuit focused on the section of Amendment 8 that would add a phrase that says local school boards could control only the public schools they established. It was proposed as a way to make it easier for charter schools — publicly funded but privately run schools — or other new educational options to flourish. Now, charter schools need local school board approval to open, but that requirement would vanish if the proposal passed.

Circuit Judge John Cooper said that the amendment’s wording did not make it clear what it would do and that the three items should not have been packaged together.

Critics of Amendment 8 said it would unconstitutionally take power away from locally elected school boards and allow charter schools — some of which have private, for-profit management companies — to operate with little oversight. Proponents said it would allow the Florida Legislature to open the door to more charter schools and other options, giving parents more choices and a greater ability to decide the school best for their children.

The amendment is an effort by Reformers, led by Jeb Bush and his ally Patricia Levesque, a member of the Constitutional Revision Commission, to deceive voters into approving unlimited expansion of charter schools.

Despite their claims about the popularity of charter schools, they dared not be clear about their purpose. They tried to pull a fast one. Let’s see if the Supreme Court of Florida lets them trick the voters.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Florida, Fraud, School Choice

Bill Phillis: Those Poor, Poor, and Very Few Bad For-Profit Charters in Ohio

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2018 //
5

Bill Phillis, retired for many years as deputy state superintendent of education in Ohio and now the state’s most outspoken critic of charter fraud, writes on his blog about the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s lame defense of for-profit charters:

“The myth of Ohio’s ‘for-profit’ charter school system”: A Fordham Institute’s damage control effort

An August 20 Fordham article suggests the charter industry is getting a bad rap because of the cronyism of a few charter operators. The article also attempts to justify the use of for-profit management companies by charter schools.

The notion proffered is that ECOT and the White Hat Management Company are the only bad actors in the charter industry. What about the 250 or so charter schools that took state and federal money and closed or never opened leaving kids in an education lurch? What about the other charter operations that have been reported as fostering gross irregularities, such as the Gulen charters, but not appropriately investigated by state officials? What about the Imagine Schools Inc. charter school chain that requires the charter schools to pay absurdly high rent to a real estate company allied with Imagine?

Corruption in the charter industry in Ohio and elsewhere is not confined to just a few bad actors. The industry is rife with low performance, cronyism and corruption.

In the article, the author equates a charter board hiring a management company to operate its school to a school district purchasing buses, books, etc. from the private sector. An absurd stretch!

A management company that operates charter schools performs a governmental fiduciary function and thus should be subjected to the same accountability and transparency measures as school district officials. Bus and book companies don’t operate the schools to which they sell products.

The Ohio charter industry seems beyond repair but Fordham keeps defending it.

Be it noted that the NAACP report on charter schools not only called for a moratorium on them, but called for the elimination of all for-profit charters and the for-profit management organizations that manage charters.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Privatization

Biased Reporting from the Education Writers Association Blog

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2018 //
32

I was astonished to read a post on the EWA blog today about whether charter schools reduce the funding available to public schools.

https://www.ewa.org/blog-educated-reporter/how-much-do-charter-schools-cost-districts?utm_source=salsa&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

“There’s no question that the growth of charter schools presents significant financial challenges for many school systems, especially in cities where they serve a large share of students. Where researchers disagree is how great the costs to districts are, and to what extent charter schools are to blame.”

The author posed the question as a “debate” between the distinguished economist Helen Ladd of Duke University—whose bio is star studded with degrees and honors—and Robin Lake, who is an advocate for the charter industry at the pro-charter Center for the Reinvention of Public Education. Ladd is a scholar. Lake is not.

And yet they are treated as equals by this shoddy reporting.

The writer didn’t bother to contact scholar Gordon Lafer, author of the “One Percent Solution” and of a recent study demonstrating that charters diverted tens of millions of dollars from public schools in three urban districts in California.

Report: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts

When school districts cut their budgets because of charter schools, they must lay off teachers and cut programs. That affects the education of the vast majority of students. Why is that a debatable issue?

I googled the author, David Loewenberg, and saw that he was TFA and the New America Foundation (funded largely by Google), and it made sense.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization

Great News! The Southern Poverty Law Center is Now Fighting Privatization in Court

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2018 //
9

The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the most respected names in the nation among groups that fight for justice and civil rights.

They have turned their firepower to fight against the privatization of public schools.

SPLC was instrumental in the court case that ended with the judge striking down a constitutional amendment that hid its true intention–removing the ability of school districts to control the growth of privately managed but publicly funded charter schools.

The Florida League of Women Voters–a steadfast ally of the great majority of students who attend public schools, not charter schools–brought the suit.

There will surely be appeals. The SPLC is a powerful ally. It recognizes that privatization and school choice do not ensure the rights of vulnerable students but are a raid on state treasuries for the benefit of the few.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Carol Burris Finds Good News in Latest EdNext Poll

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2018 //
9

EdNext is a pro-choice, pro-privatization journal of education research. It is not neutral. It is funded largely by the ultra-conservative Hoover Institution. It advocates for charters and vouchers and against public schools and unions.

EdNext conducts an annual poll.

Here, Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, analyzes the good news in the new EdNext poll:

The Education Next polls typically read like push polls, with questions carefully worded to elicit an anti-public school, pro-privatization agenda. Nevertheless, there is some good news tucked away for friends of public education in their 2018 results.

The teacher walkouts in six states raised sympathy, not antipathy, for teachers most notably in the states where the walkouts occurred. According to Ed Next’s recent poll, 63% of respondents in the walk-out states support increasing teacher pay and there has been a 7 point increase in support for increased funding for public schools overall.

According to Ed Next polling, in 2014 support for charter schools was at its highest – – 54%. During the past four years, however, that support has dropped. In 2017, 39% percent of those polled supported charter schools with a small uptick this year to 44%. The small rebound for approval of charters has come nearly exclusively from self-identified Republicans. Among Democrats support has remained low with only 31% supporting charters in 2017, and 35% supporting them in 2018. Support for charters among teachers has dramatically declined from 44% in 2014, to only 30% four years later.

The Education Next poll records support for vouchers at the same 44%. However, in 2017 the PDK poll found support for vouchers to be only 39%–a figure that drops to 34% when vouchers for private schools are included. (Apparently about 5% of respondents think that vouchers are used in public schools only.) To understand the difference one only needs only to look how Education Next asks its question:

A proposal has been made that would give all families with children in public schools a voucher allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition. Would you support or oppose this proposal?

In the question, vouchers are proposed as theoretical. In reality, 15 states plus the District of Columbia have at least one direct voucher program. Second rather than using the word taxpayerto describe who pays for the voucher, Ed Next uses government—cleverly shifting the burden of payment away from those responding to the question. And third, the question limits vouchers to families that are in public schools, despite the fact that nearly all voucher laws have expanded so that attending a public school is no longer a requirement.

What do we learn from the Ed Next poll? Even in a poll with questions biased in favor of school choice, there is still more support for true public education than not. It is now our job to help the public understand the impact of vouchers and charters on their community public schools and their taxes.

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

Greg Windle Reports on a Zombie Charter in Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2018 //
14

You know the story about zombies. They are the walking dead. They can’t be killed.

Crack reporter Greg Windle has discovered a zombie charter school in Philadelphia.

It has been warned and warned and threatened with death, but it fails and appeals and fails and never dies.

I remember the early days of the charter movement, the late 1980s, early 1990s. Charter enthusiasts said that the great thing about charters was that they would always be accountable for results. If they didn’t keep their promise, they would promptly be closed.

How did that work out?

This zombie charter plans to fail forever and live forever. No accountability!

We now know that the charter lobbyists have made it extremely difficult to close a failing charter school. Zombies!

It takes a long time to close a charter school, and the process includes many opportunities to delay closure for years. Khepera Charter School has exhausted all but its final chance and is now appealing to the state’s Charter Appeals Board to overturn the School Reform Commission’s decision to close the school.

Khepera is a K-8 school with 450 students located in Hunting Park. It was awarded its first charter in 2004, which was renewed in 2009. After academic results declined, the charter was renewed in 2014 with explicit conditions, along with the proviso that failure to meet these conditions would lead to the closure of the school.

Many of the conditions were never met; beyond that, the school continued to violate the state charter law. Since signing the 2014 charter, the school failed to hire enough certified teachers. Growth on the PSSAs largely reversed as scores began to plummet. The school promised to revise its discipline policy and reduce student suspensions, but instead, suspensions increased, even among kindergarten students. Board members didn’t file the required conflict of interest forms. Nor did the school submit the required financial reports and independent audits.

In 2015, the SRC’s Charter Schools Office first warned Khepera that it was failing to meet the conditions. Yet the school has been operating ever since and, by all indications, plans to open for the 2018-19 school year.

Khepera’s appeal to the state essentially seeks to dismiss all charges for a variety of reasons. Its lawyers argue, for instance, that a lack of certification paperwork for a given teacher doesn’t prove that the teacher isn’t certified.

The school ignored the first “notice of deficiency” from the Charter Schools Office, sent in October 2015. The charter office sent another notice in May 2016, another in August 2016, and yet another in May 2017.

Khepera did not respond to these notices. So in June 2017, the SRC voted to begin conducting public hearings to determine whether it should revoke the school’s charter — fully two years after the school failed to meet multiple terms of its signed contract. Hearings began Aug. 10, 2017, and ended Sept. 12, for a total of seven sessions.

Then in December 2017, the School Reform Commission voted to close the charter. Case ended? No! The charter appealed to the state Charter Appeals Board, which could keep the charter open for years.

Zombie!

But that’s not all:

After the SRC voted to revoke the charter of Walter Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School in the spring of 2014, the school filed an appeal to the state so that it could open its doors in September for the next school year.

But when it could not pay employees, Palmer abruptly shut its doors in December 2014, stranding students mid-year and forcing the District to scramble to find places for them.

This cut short the hearings before the state Charter Appeals Board, at which administrators for the charter school had invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 77 times.

After closing the charter, Palmer, a longtime civil rights leader in Philadelphia who founded and ran his namesake school, became a consultant to Khepera, where he initially helped with recruitment. At the end of 2016, he was hired to be CEO.

Khepera’s website gives every indication that it intends to operate throughout the 2018-19 school year and is continuing to recruit and enroll new students.

Zombie walks, talks, and enrolls students even though it is a failing school.

Every failing charter in Pennsylvania can find inspiration in the story of this failing charter:

The longest charter revocation process in state history was for Pocono Mountain Charter School. It lasted six years from the initial revocation hearings to the date the school finally closed. The charter revocation hearings ran for two years, starting in 2008, and appealing to the state’s Charter Appeals Board allowed the school to remain open for three more years. Then the school appealed the state board’s decision twice to higher courts, and only closed in 2014 after it declined to file a third appeal.

Toward the end of the process, Pocono Mountain’s CEO was convicted of using the school to funnel more than $1.5 million in tax dollars to himself, his family, and his businesses. He was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

But taxpayers can take solace knowing that the charter revocation process ended after six years and the CEO was convicted. Justice is slow but sometimes happens.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Failure, Fraud, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Privatization
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