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North Carolina General Assembly Passes Bill to Promote Resegregation of Schools

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2018 //
13

The North Carolina General Assembly, controlled by extremis of the right, passed legislation to use charter schools to promote resegregation. Towns that want to create their own charters for white students may do so under this legislation. Thus, charters have become the white flight academies of the South. National corporations whose workforce is diverse should avoid North Carolina, to avoid humiliating their executives and other employees. Jesse Helms, George Wallace, and Storm Thurmond would be proud to see their dream of school choice and segregation revived in North Carolina.

Statement on NC Senate’s passage of House Bill 514

Keith Poston, President & Executive Director

Public School Forum of North Carolina

Our nation abandoned “separate but equal” long ago – we don’t need to bring it back in North Carolina.

House Bill 514 would allow four towns in Mecklenburg County to run their own municipal charter schools and give preferential access to their residents. This bill, along with its companion municipal funding measure in the state budget, are terrible ideas for North Carolina. Taken together, they set the stage for a slippery slope toward further resegregation of NC public schools.

Two major education challenges we are confronting in North Carolina are inequities in school funding across the state and the growing resegregation of our schools. They both contribute to lower overall academic results and drive the achievement gap between white students and students of color, as well as between poorer students and their more affluent peers. HB 514 will only exacerbate these profound challenges.

Last night the NC Senate made a bad bill even worse by stripping the State Health Plan and retirement benefits from any teacher employed by these new municipally-run charter schools.

At a time when we are courting major new investments from Apple, Amazon and the U.S. Army, the last thing we need are national headlines about a new NC law driving resegregation. HB 514 threatens to become our state’s education version of HB 2.
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The Public School Forum of North Carolina is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on public education in NC. Follow us on Twitter @theNCForum and visit our website at http://www.ncforum.org/.

Categories Charter Schools, North Carolina, Privatization, Segregation

Steven Singer: Why the Best Charter School Is Not As Good As The Worst Public School

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2018 //
12

Steven Singer here explains why any public school, no matter how “bad,” is better than ant charter school, no matter how “good.”

He begins:

But if one had to choose between the worst public school and the best charter school, you’d still be better off with the public school.

Does that sound crazy? Does it sound ideological, partisan, or close-minded.

I don’t think so.

Imagine if we said the same thing about tyrannies and democracies.

There are good tyrannies.

There are bad democracies.

Still, I’d prefer the worst democracy to the best tyranny.

Why?

Because even a badly run democracy is based on the principle of self rule. The government gets its right to make and enforce laws from the consent of the will of the governed.

Even if our representatives are corrupt and stupid, even if our federal, state and local agencies are mismanaged and disorganized – there is the potential for positive change.

In fact, the catalyst to that change is embedded in democracy, itself. Egalitarian systems founded on the principle of one person, one vote tend toward fairness, equity and liberty much more than others.

Bad leaders will be replaced. Bad functionaries will be retrained or superseded. Bad agencies will be renovated, renewed, and made to serve the will of the people.

However, in a tyranny, none of this is true.

Even if you have a benevolent tyrant who does nothing all day but try to do whatever is best for his or her subjects, that is a worse state of affairs.

Eventually the tyrant will change. Absolute power will corrupt him or her absolutely. Or even if this bastion of human goodness is incorruptible, he or she will eventually be deposed, replaced or die.

And there is nothing – absolutely nothing – to ensure the next tyrant is likewise benevolent. In fact, the system is set up to increase the likelihood that the next ruler will be as selfish, greedy and malevolent as possible.

This is because it is the system of tyranny, itself, that is corrupt – even if those that fill its offices are not.

The same goes for good charter schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Privatization, Supporting public schools

Joanne Barkan: Who and What Are Behind the Privatization Movement?

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2018 //
11

Joanne Barkan has been writing brilliant articles about the billionaire assault on public education for several years. Her first was “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools.”

Her latest is this article, which appeared on Valerie Strauss’s “The Answer Sheet.” She calls it “Death by a Thousand Cuts.” It will ring true for everyone who is fighting the massive money and power of the privatizers.

Barkan supplies a brief history of neoliberalism, as well as the federal efforts to introduce competition and privatization into the schools.

She begins:

When champions of market-based reform in the United States look at public education, they see two separate activities — government funding education and government running schools. The first is okay with them; the second is not. Reformers want to replace their bête noire — what they call the “monopoly of government-run schools” — with freedom of choice in a competitive market dominated by privately run schools that get government subsidies.

Public funding, private management — these four words sum up American-style privatization whether applied to airports, prisons, or elementary and secondary schools. In the last 20 years, the “ed-reform” movement has assembled a mixed bag of players and policies, complicated by alliances of convenience and half-hidden agendas. Donald Trump’s election and his choice of zealot privatizer Betsy DeVos as U.S. secretary of education bolstered reformers but has also made more Americans wary.

What follows is a survey of the controversial movement — where it came from, how it grew, and what it has delivered so far to a nation deeply divided by race and class.

Print it out and take the time to read it. An informed citizenry can stop this behemoth. All that money and power and the privatizers have achieved exactly nothing other than destruction.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, Vouchers

John Hechinger: Are America’s Most Segregated Charter Schools in Minneapolis?

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2018 //
28

Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter school law in 1991 and opened the first charter school in 1992.

Seven years ago, Bloomberg News reporter John Hechinger (son of the eminent education writer Fred Hechinger, for whom The Hechinger Institute at Teachers College is named) went to see what had happened in Minneapolis 20 years later. What he discovered stunned him. Since charter cheerleaders care about test scores, but not racial segregation, it is not likely that much has changed.

“At Dugsi Academy, a public school in St. Paul, Minnesota, girls wearing traditional Muslim headscarves and flowing ankle-length skirts study Arabic and Somali. The charter school educates “East African children in the Twin Cities,” its website says. Every student is black.

“At Twin Cities German Immersion School, another St. Paul charter, children gather under a map of “Deutschland,” study with interns from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and learn to dance the waltz. Ninety percent of its students are white.

“Six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, segregation is growing because of charter schools, privately run public schools that educate 1.8 million U.S. children. While charter-school leaders say programs targeting ethnic groups enrich education, they are isolating low-achievers and damaging diversity, said Myron Orfield, a lawyer and demographer.

“It feels like the Deep South in the days of Jim Crow segregation,” said Orfield, who directs the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race & Poverty. “When you see an all-white school and an all-black school in the same neighborhood in this day and age, it’s shocking.”

“Charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools, according to a 2010 report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers studied 40 states, the District of Columbia, and 39 metropolitan areas. In particular, higher percentages of charter-school students attend what the report called “racially isolated” schools, where 90 percent or more students are from disadvantaged minority groups.

“Charter-School Birthplace

“In Minnesota, the birthplace of the U.S. charter-school movement, the divide is more than black and white.

St. Paul’s Hmong College Prep Academy, 99 percent Asian-American in the past school year, immerses students “in the rich heritage that defines Hmong culture.” Its Academia Cesar Chavez School — 93 percent Hispanic — promises bilingual education “by advocating Latino cultural values in an environment of familia and community.” Minneapolis’s Four Directions Charter School, 94 percent Native American, black and Hispanic, promotes “lifelong learning for American Indian students.”

“Charter schools, which select children through lotteries, are open to all who apply, said Abdulkadir Osman, Dugsi’s executive director.

“Some people call it segregation,” Osman said. “This is the parent’s choice. They can go anywhere they want. We are offering families something unique.”

“Nobody ‘Forced’

That’s a “significant difference” between Minnesota charters and segregated schools in the 1950s South, said Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at Macalester College in St. Paul.

“Nobody is being forced to go to these schools,” said Nathan, who helped write Minnesota’s 1991 charter-school law.”

That’s the way segregation and choice work together. This is why Southern governors were champions of school choice in the decades after the Brown decision.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation

Rob Levine: Charter Schools in Minnesota after 25 Years, a Costly Failure

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2018 //
15

Recently I posted an article by pro-choice advocate Paul Peterson about the origins of charter schools. He wrote, “No, Albert Shanker Did Not Invent Charter Schools.” Shanker wanted teacher-led schools, schools-within-schools. He believed that their teachers would be union members and that the charters would be approved by the other staff in the school and by the local school board.

But, wrote Peterson, Minnesota rejected Shanker’s views and instead wrote a law in 1991 that allowed other authorizers besides the district, that cleared the way for entrepreneurs and other non-educators to open charters, and that were not bound to accept teachers unions. Shanker wanted charters to be Research and Development programs for public schools. Led by Ted Kolderie and Joe Nathan, the Minnesota reformers wanted charters to compete with public schools.

A few states made school districts the sole authorizers of charters, and those states have few charters. Most, however, followed Minnesota’s lead, encouraging many authorizers, many kinds of charter management organizations, and the emergence of an aggressive entrepreneurial sector. The latter states have h7 drew of charters of varying quality.

So what happened to charters in Minnesota, the first state to launch them in 1992?

Rob Levine, native Minnesotan, writer, photographer, blogger, assays the failed promises of charters in Minnesota in this post.

Levine shows that the push for charters came not from teachers or parents, but from “a who’s who of the state’s business, civic, foundation, non-profit and political elite.”

“Key to that sales pitch: the idea that education is, at its heart, a business and should operate by the business principles that govern virtually every other sector of the economy, with a spoken goal of “breaking the government monopoly” on public primary and secondary education. The unspoken goals were many and varied but the budgetary results of those efforts are quantifiable: the conversion of nearly $1 trillion spent annually nationally on public primary and secondary education to private profit, and the breaking of the nation’s teachers’ unions.

“To make this palatable, charter boosters focused on a righteous idea: the creation of better and more educational opportunities for poor children of color. In the end, the change model they embraced was what’s sometimes called the Shock Doctrine. First you create and/or declare an emergency in a cash-rich public sector, then you propose the solution that inevitably results in the privatization of as much of the sector as possible.

“In a wide-ranging proposal to reform government called the Minnesota Policy Blueprint, Mitch Pearlstein, a leader in Minnesota’s “School Choice Movement,” admitted as much in his chapter on education policy. In Pearlstein’s view, the answer to the challenges of public education is obvious: all public schools should be converted to charter schools.
Today only two of Minnesota’s 174 operating charter schools have a unionized faculty.”

“It’s not hard to see why that conclusion appealed to Pearlstein. For decades, the teachers unions have been the bête noire to GOP lawmakers in state houses across the nation. As the founder and leader of a Republican “think tank”, the Center of the American Experiment, Pearlstein understood that unions would not be able to get a foothold in charter schools. He was right. Today, 22 years later, only two of Minnesota’s 174 operating charter schools have a unionized faculty.”

Charter promoters, he says, worked out a deal that the state would ignore segregation in return for higher test scores.

“Twenty five years later the results of those “deals” are clear. After adjusting for external factors charter school students do no better, and probably marginally worse, on standardized test scores than students at regular public schools. And charter schools are decidedly more segregated than their regular public school counterparts. By 2016 there were 93 “hypersegregated” schools in the Twin Cities – more than 95% children of color. Almost two-thirds of those schools are charters. Children of color in the state who attend charter schools are twice as likely as their regular public school counterparts to attend a highly segregated school…Today, according to a report from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, “Of the 50 most racially concentrated Twin Cities schools, 45 are charters.”

The Big Daddy of charters in Minnesota is the Walton Family Foundation. Levine points out that “the Walton Family Foundation…has started or helped to start 30 percent of all charter schools ever opened in the state. In effect we’ve partially outsourced the starting up of new schools to the heirs of the Walmart fortune.”

Levine writes that there are 48,000 students in the Minneapolis schools, public and charter. 36,000 are in public schools. Reformers plan to add 30,000 new “relevant and rigorous seats.” He assumes they mean seats in charters. He foresees the withering away of public schools in Minneapolis.

Given the charters’ failure to fulfill any of their promises, he thinks the public might get tired of paying for them. But he worries that time grows short.

“A journalist once seeking to report on the Gates Foundation’s education activity lamented how difficult the job was because nearly everyone in the education community was taking his money. That’s how it is in Minnesota education policy discourse. The only voices making it through our media din are the ones with a steady stash of tax-exempt income. The reformers’ money guarantees a seat at every table.

“When they’re not dredging up or paying for bogus studies or polls, the foundations and organizations are sponsoring events to push their agenda. These events are then broadcast by local public media, presented as a “public service.” This is especially true for non-profit media the foundations contribute to, especially MinnPost, but also including Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public Television (TPT).

“Education reformers will need all that firepower because evidence and reason are always just around the corner. They can only make excuses for low test scores, all kinds of impropriety, incompetence and segregation for so long. Providing marginally better test scores at a few segregated schools won’t cut it. And it remains to be seen how long the voting public will take paying taxes to support schools while having little to no control over them. If we wait much longer to take action to end the failed experiment of charter schools it could very well result in the end of the Minneapolis public schools, and that’s just a start.”

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

DFER’s Candidates for 2018

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2018 //
11

Democrats for Education Reform is a political action group that raises money for Democratic candidates who will support high-stakes testing and charter schools.

Here is its list of candidates for the 2018 elections.

Most notable on the list:

DFER endorsed Marshall Tuck for State Superintendent of Instruction in California. The Network for Public Education Action Fund and the Los Angeles Times endorsed his opponent Tony Thurmond.

DFER endorsed Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut for re-election. When the ESSA bill was written to replace NCLB, Murphy introduced an amendment (“the Murphy Amendment”) to retain all the punitive features of NCLB. Fortunately, his amendment was defeated.

DFER endorsed Senators Corey Booker (NJ) and Michael Bennett (CO) for re-election. No surprises there. Both are well-known supporters of school choice. Booker has even supported vouchers and charters.

DFER endorsed Congressman Bobby Scott for re-election. He is the chair of the House Education Committee.

Regaining control of the House and possibly the Senate this fall override any concerns I have about these candidates. If I lived in their state or district, I would vote for them. But if any of them aspire to higher office, I will do whatever I can to stop them because privatizers should not be rewarded.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Education Industry, Privatization

Peter Greene: Progressives Do Not Endorse Privatization of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2018 //
17

As a rule, if a progressive shares any part of Betsy DeVos’s agenda, chances are he or she is not a progressive. Progressives usually support public schools governed by a democratic entity; progressives believe that teachers should have the right to bargain collectively and to seek better funding and better working conditions for the students and staff; progressives think that all teachers should be well educated and certified; progressives believe that educators, students, and families should be treated with respect; progressives believe that civil rights law should be enforced; progressives work towards a society that is fair and just to all its citizens. Progressives do not defend racial segregation.

That’s my peroration.

Now comes Peter Greene’s response to Conor Williams’s loopy claim that progressives should defend charter schools even though they are segregated and non-union. Peter notes that Conor’s teaching experience was limited to a couple of years at the “no-excuses” Achievement First Charter School in Brooklyn.

He adds:

“Williams shows his bias right off the bat, saying that Hiawatha runs “some of Minnesota’s best public schools for serving such students.” The link takes you to a six-year-old article, and as usual, “best” doesn’t mean anything except “high score on the Big Standardized Test.” And Hiawatha does not operate public schools– it runs a charter school chain, and charter schools are not public schools. Calling charters “public” schools continues to be a way to obscure the problems of a privatized education system while giving charters the gloss of public school values which they do not possess. If “financed by public tax dollars” is the definition of “public,” then Erik Prince operated a public security company and most defense contractors are public corporations. Charter schools are not public schools; their leadership is not publicly elected, their finances are not publicly transparent, and they do not take every child that shows up on their doorstep (which is one way they are able to achieve outstanding test results).”

He has many other sharp observations. I urge you to read his entire post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Should Liberals Love Non-Union, Segregated Charters?

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2018 //
19

The New York Times published an opinion article yesterday by Conor P. Williams of the New America Foundation, in which Williams argues that liberals should love charter schools and ignore the fact that Betsy DeVos loves them too.

He selects one school in Minneapolis to make his point. Hiawatha Academies, where 95% of the students are Hispanic. The school is non-union, like most every charter school. Williams proposes Hiawatha as a charter very different from the views of Betsy DeVos. But he forgets to mention that DeVos just gave Hiawatha Academies $1.8 Million. Maybe not so out of step with Betsy as he pretends.

But even though it is segregated and non-union, writes Williams, liberals should love it because it is good for Hispanic children.

But liberals are critical of charters, and Williams doesn’t understand why.

“And now the teachers are being forced to respond to criticism from people who by most measures should be their allies. Robert Panning-Miller, the former president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, has called Hiawatha schools emblematic of a “corporate reform movement” that values “compliance and test scores over critical thinking” and criticized them as being part of an “apartheid education” movement, because their students are almost exclusively children of color.

“It’s true that nine out of 10 Hiawatha students are Hispanic. But if Hiawatha schools enroll a high number of minority students and English learners, that’s because they serve them well.”

Now why in the world would the leader of the state union reject a non-union school? Shouldn’t all schools be non-union?

Williams says certain liberals are picking on charters because they are part of the DeVos agenda.

“Progressive critics are taking advantage of the moment to tie charter-friendly Democrats to her toxic public image. On the day after President Trump’s inauguration, Valerie Strauss, a Washington Post education writer, accused Democratic reformers like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, the former Newark mayor, of “advancing corporate education reform” through their support of school choice.”

Corey Booker is not only in favor of charters, he also supports vouchers. Is it possible for Booker to be completely aligned with DeVos’ school choice beliefs and still be a “liberal?”

Williams writes, “Progressives can ill afford this kind of sniping. The last thing the left needs right now is a war between teachers unions and liberal charter supporters.”

He does not explain why teachers unions should support non-union schools.

The New America Foundation has a long list of big donors. The biggest is Eric Schmidt ($4 Million), former CEO of Google. The second biggest is the Gates Foundation.

What Williams forgets to mention is that the biggest funder of charter schools is the far-right Walton Family Foundation, the far-right Anschutz Foundation, the far-right Koch Brothers, the Heritage Foundation, plus ALEC, plus every red state Governor and Legislature. The Waltons funded one of every four charters in Minnesota. This article is fundamentally dishonest.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Segregation, Unions

Delaware: Teachers at Charter School of Wilmington Are Joining the Union

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
21

This is going to make the Waltons very unhappy. They have spent $200 Million a year funding new charters with the expectation that they would never be unionized. They want public schools to be like Walmart’s: low wage and non-union, with lots of part-time workers.

Sorry, Waltons!

The teachers at the Charter School of Wilmington have voted to unionize.

“Charter School of Wilmington teachers made a huge vote. They became the only current charter school in Delaware to join the Delaware State Education Association. As such, they will be a part of the National Education Association as well. This opens the door for other charter schools to unionize in the future. Often, when one domino falls…”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

California: 5 Billionaires Trying to Elect a Charter-Friendly Governor and State Ed. Superintendent

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
11

Imagine this absurd scenario: Five billionaires are pouring huge sums of money into the races for Governor of California and State Superintendent of Instruction. What is their main goal? More charter schools. More and more.

Crazy but true

You would think the main goal of campaign funding would be the economy, or water, or health care,the environment. No, it is charter schools.

Open the link to see who they are.

And be sure to read the comments. One from Lisa Alva could be a post by itself.

It speaks volume about the ultimate goal of the privatizers.

Lisa Alva writes:

Based on my experience, I believe that the goal of this consortium is on-line learning for most California students, supported by expensive software and more expensive hardware that replaces unionized teachers where possible.

I was on the Board of Directors for Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools; I was in every meeting of this entity and heard their claims and concerns first-hand, I saw their methods in the planning and implementation phases, I heard their rationales and values. I saw and heard that data and results were the focus that kept money and participation among donors at an acceptable level. I did not ever, ever hear or see efforts to gather information from classroom-level staff; aside from image-building listening sessions, teacher experience was largely unimportant in making decisions or plans.

I worked at a PLAS high school from the inception of PLAS as a teacher and a coordinator. I saw that the so-called “graduation rate” of “80%” that Tuck and Tony V. are claiming was completely gamed using on-line “learning” in credit-recovery classes.

Nothing different was taking place in classrooms.

No students were held accountable for anything.

Students freely web-surfed, copied and pasted their way to diplomas despite the supervising teachers’ best efforts to enforce real learning. Teachers eventually revolted, resulting in tighter standards for enrollment in credit recovery classes, which diminished the “amazing results” significantly.

I saw very expensive executives burn through a revolving door of management, first in the pursuit of immediate impact, and then in pursuit of other employment. Two top executives responsible for the dramatic increase in graduation statistics lasted less than a year in the PLAS; they, like many other PLAS people, now work in San Diego or in private education-related enterprise.

The Tuck-Villaraigosa effort has nothing to do with creating whole, self-actualizing citizens who can handle the challenges of a 21st century workplace and lead happy, fulfilled lives. With John Deasy back in California and Eli Broad’s plan for charterizing California schools in full swing, the automization of public education seems to be a foregone conclusion.

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