Archives for category: Charter Schools
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Does Puerto Rico Need “No Excuses” Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2018 //
51

The link in this post will take you to a discussion that took place in Puerto Rico about the introduction of “no excuses” charter schools. The government has announced that it is closing and privatizing hundreds of public schools. The embedded post was translated from Spanish to English. Sarah Cohodes, a professor at Teachers College in New York, advocates for such charters because of their strict discipline, which she admires. Critics object to such charters because of the strict discipline.

You can read the report here.

My own view, for what it is worth, is that “no excuses” charters were created for poor children and children of color. They are designed to civilize children. They are the educational equivalent of neocolonialism.

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline, Education Reform, Privatization, Puerto Rico

National Education Policy Center: What Is the Evidence for the Success of No-Excuses Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2018 //
36

 

Two researchers review a report recommending the widespread adoption of “no-excuses” methods and find the evidence inconclusive. 

A. Chris Torres of Michigan State University and Joann W. Golann of Vanderbilt University review a report on “Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap.”

They write:

“A recent report, ‘Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap,” finds that, though charter schools on average perform no better than traditional public schools, urban “no-excuses” charter schools—which often use intensive discipline to enforce order—demonstrate promising re- sults. It recommends that these schools and their practices be widely replicated within and outside of the charter school sector. We find three major flaws with this conclusion. First, the report’s recommendations are based solely on the academic success of these schools and fail to address the controversy over their use of harsh disciplinary methods. No-excuses dis- ciplinary practices can contribute to high rates of exclusionary discipline (e.g., suspensions that push students out of school) and may not support a broad definition of student success. Second, the recommendation that schools replicate no-excuses practices begs the question of what exactly should be replicated. It does not confront the lack of research identifying which school practices are effective for improving student achievement. Third, the report does not address many of the underlying factors that would allow no-excuses schools and their practices to successfully replicate, such as additional resources, committed teachers, and students and families willing and able to abide by these schools’ stringent practices. Thus, while the report is nuanced in its review of charter school impacts, it lacks this same care in drawing its conclusions—greatly decreasing the usefulness of the report.”

How many parents are eager to subject their children to harsh discipline?

 

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

Tom Ultican: Will Atlanta Be The Next New Orleans?

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2018 //
6

 

Tom Ultican is on a mission to document the tentacles of the Destroy Public Education movement.

In this post, he traces the career of Atlanta’s current superintendent, Maria Carstarphen, whose singular goal is to turn the school district into an all-charter district. She embraces not only charter schools, but TFA, Relay Graduate School of Education, school closures, and of course, is funded by the notorious Walton Family Foundation in her efforts to stamp out public schools.

Operating in a conservative state with a governor committed to privatization of public schools, she is in a friendly environment.

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

Toys “R” Us, Hedge Fund Managers, Charter Schools: Go Figure

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2018 //
25

 

When I read about the demise of Toys “R” Us in the New York Times, I was reminded of the business books I read to understand the corporate raiders who caused the collapse of many iconic American businesses. Michael Milken, junk bond king and founder of the online charter chain K12 Inc., bought control of undervalued businesses, broke them up into parts, kept the profitable parts, discarded the unprofitable parts, and loaded them up with debt. The investors made money but the company disappeared under a mountain of debt.

The reality is that Toys “R” Us, which announced on Thursday that it would shutter or sell all of its stores in the United States, never had much chance at a turnaround.

For over a decade, Toys “R” Us had been drowning in $5 billion of debt, which its private equity backers had saddled it with. With debt payments siphoning off cash every year, Toys “R” Us could not properly invest in its worn-out suburban stores or outdated website. Sales plummeted, as Amazon captured more children’s desires — and their parents’ wallets — for Star Wars Legos and Paw Patrol recycling trucks.

Toys “R” Us is the latest failure of financial engineering, albeit one that could portend a potentially more ominous outlook for private equity in the digital era.

Most buyouts tend to work the same way. A private equity firm takes over a troubled company with the goal of sprucing up the strategy, cutting costs and overhauling the business over three or five years. But they often load up a company with debt to pay for the deal, which can prove problematic if the profits do not perk up.

Once the vultures began to pick over the bones, the company was done for.

This is the model for corporate education reform. The reformers arrive with promises of “saving poor kids trapped in failing schools.”

Then they open privately managed schools that choose the  kids they want and exclude those they don’t want. Eventually the public school system teeters on the edge of financial collapse, but the reformers say it is not their fault. But it is. It is baked into their business model. Cut costs. Hire inexperienced teachers. Work them 60-70 hours a week to be sure they don’t hang around long enough to expect a pension or healthcare. Demand free space from the public schools. Or, buy your own real estate and pay yourself exorbitant rents. Spend more on administrative overhead than on instruction.

And don’t forget to say, “It’s for the kids! Kids First! Children First! Students First!”

It is summed up in a comment by a reader of the blog:

All choice options promoted by the DOE fail the “equal access” goal of its mission. Choice is often about selection of best and discarding of the weak, problematic, expensive and struggling. Choice has resulted in increased segregation. Choice is enhancing more separate and unequal treatment of students, not equal access.

 

 

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

Jennifer Berkshire: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2018 //
148

 

Jennifer Berkshire recounts the sad history of the Democratic party’s abandonment of teachers, public schools, and teachers’ unions. 

This article is worthy of your attention. In my view, Democrats won’t start winning seats again until they embrace public schools again and break free of their love affair with charters and other free-market solutions that evicerate their message and turn them into Republican-lite.

How many Democratic governors today are unabashed supporters of public schools? How many Democratic Senators and members of Congress? How many are funded by Democrats for Education Reform (hedge fund managers who love charter schools and high-stakes testing), whose purpose is to buy Democratic support for Republican policies?

The strange part about the story that Berkshire tells  is that the teachers’ unions were a core part of the Democrats’ base. As party leaders turned against their own base, they hurt their party. They turned off teachers and lost seats across the nation. They lost governorships and they lost legislatures. They lost the House and they lost the Senate.

Berkshire says that it started with the Clintons in Arkansas.

“To begin to chronicle the origin of the Democrats’ war on their own—the public school teachers and their unions that provide the troops and the dough in each new campaign cycle to elect the Democrats—is to enter murky territory. The Clintons were early adopters; tough talk against Arkansas’s teachers, then among the poorest paid in the country, was a centerpiece of Bill’s second stint as Governor of Arkansas. As Hillary biographer Carl Bernstein recounts, the Arkansas State Teachers Association became the villain that cemented the couple’s hold on the Governor’s mansion—the center of their Dick Morris-inspired “permanent campaign.” The civil rights language in which the Democratic anti-union brigade cloaks itself today was then nowhere to be heard, however. And little wonder: Civil rights groups fiercely opposed the most controversial feature of the Clintons’ reform agenda—competency tests for teachers—on the grounds that Black teachers, many of whom had attended financially starved Black colleges, would disproportionately bear their brunt.

“Tough talk against Arkansas’ teachers, then among the poorest paid in the country, was a centerpiece of Bill’s second stint as Governor of Arkansas.

“Hillary made the cause her personal crusade in 1983, trotting out anecdote after anecdote about teachers she’d heard about who couldn’t add or read. The reform package passed, cementing Bill’s reputation as a new breed of Democratic governor, one who wasn’t afraid to take on entrenched interests in order to tackle tough problems. “Anytime you’re going to turn an institution upside down, there’s going to be a good guy and a bad guy,” recalls Clinton campaign manager Richard Herget. “The Clintons painted themselves as the good guys. The bad guys were the schoolteachers.”

“By the early 1980s, there was already a word for turning public institutions upside down: neoliberalism. Before it degenerated into a flabby insult, neoliberal referred to a self-identified brand of Democrat, ready to break with the tired of dogmas of the past. “The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties,” wrote Randall Rothenberg in his breathless 1984 paean to this new breed, whom he called simply The Neoliberals. His list of luminaries included the likes of Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Al Gore (for the record, Gore eschewed the neoliberal label in favor of something he liked to call “neopopulism”). In Rothenberg’s telling, the ascendancy of the neoliberals represented an economic repositioning of the Democratic Party that had begun during the economic crises of the 1970s. The era of big, affirmative government demanding action—desegregate those schools, clean up those polluted rivers, enforce those civil rights and labor laws—was over. It was time for fresh neo-ideas.

”Redistribution and government intervention were out; investment and public-private partnerships were the way to go. Neoliberal man (there are no women included in Rothenberg’s account) was also convinced that he had found the answer to the nation’s economic malaise: education, or as he was apt to put it, investment in human capital. “Education equals growth is a neoliberal equation,” writes Rothenberg.

“But this new cult of education wasn’t grounded in John Dewey’s vision of education-as-democracy, or in the recent civil-rights battles to extend the promise of public education to excluded African-American communities. No, these bold, results-oriented thinkers understood that in order to fuel economic growth, schools had to be retooled and aligned in concert with the needs of employers. The workers of the future would be prepared to compete nimbly in the knowledge-based post-industrial society of the present, For the stragglers still trapped in older, industrial-age models of enterprise and labor, re-training—another staple of the neoliberal vision—would set them on the path to greater prosperity…

”The irony is that the DeVos-Trump vision for fixing our schools is almost as unpopular as the GOP’s plan for health care; if there’s political ground to be gained with Trump supporters, the defense of public education is fertile territory. DeVos’ nomination sparked ferocious grassroots opposition, red and blue, and in a cabinet of rogues, she remains Trump’s most reviled official. Her signature issue—paying for private religious schools with taxpayer funds—has never been popular with voters, even in deep red states.

“The problem is that the Democrats have little to offer that’s markedly different from what DeVos is selling. Teachers unions, regulation, and government schools are the problem, Democrats continue insisting into the void; deregulation, market competition and school choice are the fix. Four decades after the neo-Democrats set their sights on the education bureaucracy, the journey has reached its predictable destination: with a paler version of what the right has been offering all along.

“When the Democrats next attempt to rouse the base of unionized teachers they count on to be their foot soldiers, they are sure to meet with disappointment. In once reliably blue states like Michigan and Wisconsin, the unions have been eviscerated. The right went all in to crush unions—not because they “impede social mobility,” but because they elect Democrats. That wager is now paying off handsomely.”

Unless there is breaking news, no more posts today.

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Duncan, Arne

New Mexico: What I Said in Santa Fe

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
21

 

I was invited to speak in Santa Fe about the state of education by the Lannan Foundation. Jesse Hagopian, the great teacher activist and test critic from Garfield High School in Seattle, was the interlocutor, who arranged the invitation, introduced me, and led a discussion afterwards.

Here is a summary of the talk.

New Mexico is a purple state with a Republican Governor. The governor brought in Hanna Skandera, an associate of Jeb Bush, to lead the state education department. Skandera introduced every element of the corporate reform program. None of it worked. New Mexico vies with Mississippi and Louisiana for the lowest NAEP scores in the nation. It also has the highest child poverty rate in the nation, at 36%, worse than child poverty in Mississippi. But nothing was done to reduce poverty over the past decade. Instead of doing anything about poverty, medical care, or hunger,  Skandera and Governor Martinez pushed test-based teacher evaluation, charter schools, and school grades. The ultimate endorsement of the vaunted Florida model that Betsy DeVos applauds. The result? Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Mexico, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations

BATS: What Is DFER? Why Does It Matter?

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
30

 

Marla Kilfoyle and Melissa Tomlinson of the BadAss Teachers Association wrote this analysis of the organization called Democrats for Education Reform, known as DFER. It was organized in 2005 by a small group of hedge fund managers. Its purpose is to promote charter schools by funding candidates for Office who share its goal. It also supports test-based evaluation of teachers and high-stakes testing of students. Its inaugural meeting was held at a luxurious apartment in New York City in 2005, where the speaker was Illinois Senator Barack Obama (as recounted in Stephen Brill’s admiring account “Class Warfare”).

During the Obama campaign of 2008, the candidate’s spokesperson on education was Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University. It was widely assumed that she would be Obama’s Secretary of Education. But DFER recommended Arne Duncan, a charter enthusiast known by DFER, and Duncan it was. Obama and Duncan’s Race to the Top embodied DFER’s principles. It propelled the proliferation of charter schools, school closures, Common Core, VAM for teachers, and high-stakes testing for students. It was a complete failure when judged by its announced goals of closing achievement gaps and lifting test scores to the top rank on international tests.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Obama, Privatization, Testing

Why the Colorado Democratic Party Denounced DFER

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
5

 

Democrats for Education Reform is an organization founded, funded, and led by hedge fund managers who support charter schools and high-stakes testing. They raise money to elect likeminded people across the country and are a key part of the Dark Money world of fundraisers for privatization of public schools.

On Saturday, the Colorado Democratic Party passed a strong resolution opposing privatization of public schools and demanding that DFER stop calling themselves “Democrats.”

Here is the story of the state Democratic convention, as reported in Chalkbest.

Colorado has been fertile ground for corporate reform, and DFER has been a source of funding for candidates for the state board, the Denver board, and other critical races. Senator Michael Bennett, once a superintendent of the Denver public schools, is a DFER favorite. So are two current candidates for governor, Jared Polis (who is so rich he doesn’t need DFER money) and former TFA State Senator Michael Johnston, who drafted the state’s harsh and ineffective teacher evaluation law.

“Vanessa Quintana, a political activist who was the formal sponsor of the minority report, was a student at Denver’s Manual High School when it was closed in 2006, a decision that Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, then Denver’s superintendent, defended at an education panel Friday.

“She said that before she finally graduated from high school, she had been through two school closures and a major school restructuring and dropped out of school twice. Three of her siblings never graduated, and she blames the instability of repeated school changes.

“When DFER claims they empower and uplift the voices of communities, DFER really means they silence the voices of displaced students like myself by uprooting community through school closure,” she told the delegates. “When Manual shut down my freshman year, it told me education reformers didn’t find me worthy of a school.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Colorado, Democrats, Denver, DFER, Education Reform, Privatization

Leonie Haimson: Is Colorado’s Rebuke to DFER a Turning Point in the Battle Against Privatization?

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
15

 

Leonie Haimson writes here about the stunning rebuke administered by the Colorado Democratic Party to “Democrats for Education Reform” last Saturday. 

It is hard to overstate the commanding position of DFER in that state. Senator Michael Bennett is DFER-approved. So are two of the leading Democrats running for Governor. DFER’s Dark Money has captured the Denver school board.

Until now, no one has stood up to them. No one could match their cash.

Will DFER survive this denunciation? Of course. But their stamp of approval might turn into a stigma for real Democrats. Real Democrats do not support the DeVos privatization agenda. Real Democrats support public schools u dear democratic control.

Leonie writes:

”Let’s hope that the Colorado vote is a turning point, and that it is no longer politically or ethically acceptable for progressive Democrats to act like Republicans when it comes to education policy.”

Wouldn’t that be great?

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

Puerto Rico: President of the Teachers Association Denounces Privatization of Island’s Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
12

Mensaje: Aida Díaz, president of the Teachers Association of Puerto Rico (AFT), spoke on television and denounced the privatization of the Island’s public schools.

 

Good afternoon and thank you for allowing me to enter your homes.

• For decades, the public education system, its students and teachers, have had to fight hard battles to advance the right to an education of excellence,

• The rights acquired by teachers have been threatened by the administrations on duty. The Association of Teachers has successfully confronted them in the courts, administrative forums and the Legislature.

• All administrations have attempted against public education and its teachers, but never, never, have we witnessed an effort to dismantle our education system as Governor Rossello and Secretary Keleher intend to do. We had never seen such a clear intention to run over our teachers and students.

• First the Governor and his Secretary told us that they had to close schools and closed 167.

• Then, they awarded operators with 100 charter schools and educational vouchers, opening the door to fraud.

• And I wonder … and I know that you too, to benefit whom? To the teachers and the students, or is it to advance the interests of the Fiscal Control Board and the vulture funds?

• Governor Rosselló and Keleher now want to close 283 schools. If we allow it, they mean 450 schools closed in less than a year. 35% of schools.

• There are 450 affected communities, over 8,000 displaced teachers and thousands of families and students whose lives were interrupted without foundation. To the tragala!

• Has anyone thought about the effect that these closures are going to cause the small businesses that depend on our schools, the corner shop or the lady who sells “limbers” to keep her house?

• Has anyone thought of those teachers, who with their own money bought materials because the government does not help?

• Has Secretary Keleher thought of the thousands of students with health conditions whose parents walk to their schools to give their children medicine because there are no nurses?

• If the enrollment of students was reduced by 15%, how is the closure of 35% of the schools justified?

• How does the Governor allow his Secretary to disparage our people, opening a call for outside managers, with a payment of $ 125,000 per year?

• These acts reflect the little respect we have for our people.

• The Governor said he was not going to do more of the same, and he’s right. No one has tried to close down a third of the schools, run over thousands of teachers, displace thousands ofstudents, close Montessori schools because they refused to become charter, and affect thousands of small businesses.

• No Governor has placed public education in the hands of third parties or given a blank check to a Secretary who disparages our people.

• GOVERNOR: ENOUGH!

• Do not criticize the Control Board when your actions are so aggressive towards teachers and our students. We are paying too high a price for the irresponsibility of the Government.

• Paulo Freire, said “teaching demands to know how to listen”.

• Governor, you have an obligation to hear the voices of thousands of teachers, parents, students, small businesses, whose lives will be marked by the closing of 35% of schools. Listen to the mayors.

• Governor, listen.

• The Association, as the exclusive representative of the Magisterium will continue taking firm actions to protect the future of our education system. The voices of children, parents and teachers are silenced by NO ONE

• Therefore, teachers, parents, students and communities, join us to create a human shield to protect our education, next Wednesday, April 25 from 3:30 in the afternoon, at the Capitol. To defend our schools!

• The voice of the people must be heard because the future of our children depends on the present they live.

May God bless and protect Puerto Rico

To see and hear her speak, you can watch the video.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization
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