Julian Vasquez Heilig has been acknowledged as one of the nation’s most influential scholars.
He is a professor at Sacramento State, chair of the Education Committee of the California chapter of the NAACP, and a board member of the board member of the Network for Public Education.
He is a prominent scholar in studies of equity, TFA, and charter schools. His blog, Cloaking Inequity, is exemplary in its mid of erudition, policy analysis, graphics, and humor.
Congratulations, JVH!
Parents and education activists in Louisville are very upset about a quiet coup taking place behind closed door. A group of about 80 of the city’s business leaders has been meeting to decide how to solve the city’s problems, and one of them is the public schools. Needless to say, they do not trust democracy and are looking to the Republican leadership in the state to take over. The elitists are called LA SCALA, “the Steering Committee for Action on Louisville’s Agenda.” Others call them the Louminati, a reference to the Illuminati, a secretive group of power brokers.
Here is a summary:
By Chris Kolb
La Scala theater in Milan was founded by the Empress Maria Theresa and paid for by 90 wealthy Italians in exchange for luxurious boxes where they could enjoy the world’s finest artistic performances, including comic and tragic operas.
There is much about Louisville’s own SCALA that is comic. For instance, David Jones — Elder and Younger — and 70 of the most wealthy people in town have been brainstorming for months about how to solve all our problems. Here’s what they came up with: a Wal-Mart in West Louisville, more direct flights to the coasts and giving our barely functioning state government control over our schools.
In a city with over 100 homicides in 2017, more than 6,000 homeless children in public schools, and horrible air quality — to name a few bleak realities — what really makes Elder Jones see red is low-income citizens coming together to ask Wal-Mart to make a few minor changes to its proposed store design. I suspect Jones isn’t really upset about Wal-Mart but about normal people taking collective action to challenge corporate power. Imagine the hit to the pocketbook he might take if we all came together to fight for quality, affordable healthcare. Elder Jones also brought together Louisville’s self-professed powerbrokers to address the humanitarian crisis of the layovers he has to endure when flying to California wine country for the weekend. Satire really does write itself sometimes.
And then we come to education, which is where comic blends into tragic. Like Macbeth spurred on by his wife who is willing to throw all of Scotland into chaos in the naked pursuit of power, Younger Jones — spurred on by his father — is willing to throw our public schools and our children’s lives into the roiling tempest that is Kentucky state government. This is the same government that is unlikely to even pass a budget, has no current House Speaker due to a sex scandal, and has a governor so blinded by hatred of public schools that he tries to change the laws of mathematics to challenge the fiscal qualifications of the democratically-elected School Board. There’s a reason we continue to perform classics such as Macbeth: We remain plagued by a power-hungry nobility who will sacrifice the common good in seeking to rule over us plebeians.
Returning to comedy, Jones the Younger’s logic for a state takeover of JCPS is reminiscent of Sigmund Freud’s case of the man accused of damaging a kettle he borrowed from his neighbor. The man gives three reasons he is not responsible for the damage: He returned the kettle undamaged; it was already damaged when he borrowed it; and he had never borrowed the kettle at all. By completely contradicting each other the three reasons reveal the truth: It was indeed the neighbor who damaged the kettle.
Likewise, Younger Jones first says that academic achievement is largely determined by where you live, how much money your parents make and your race. I’m not optimistic that this state government is going to end segregation, poverty and institutional racism in Louisville if it takes over JCPS.
Second, Jones says that SCALA members are concerned about education from a workforce perspective. Is the real issue that corporate heads want more worker bees to generate additional wealth for them to capture (while wages remain stagnant)?
Third, Jones says the real problem is that state laws make it difficult for school boards to govern. I’ve been on the School Board for 13 months and, while there are always bureaucratic annoyances in any organization, we’ve been able to make significant progress in that short time. This includes cleaning up the many messes left by the Jones-Hargens-Hudson trio.
Like the neighbor who gave contradictory reasons for the damaged kettle, Younger Jones accidentally reveals the truth in blaming everything but himself: Jones found JCPS ungovernable because Jones himself is very bad at governing. We shouldn’t really be surprised. Many among the wealthy are used to making colossal messes, refusing to accept responsibility, and leaving the clean up to others. The ancient Greeks gave us a word for this level of arrogance so astounding it offends the gods themselves: hubris.
Thankfully, my colleagues and I have made tremendous strides to clean up the mess. Though much work remains, we will soon be able to turn our full attention to ensuring that every child has access to innovative, meaningful, challenging, and rewarding learning and professional experiences no matter their zip code, race, gender or native country. Anytime Louisville’s nobility wants to actually assist JCPS, I’d be happy to help them find ways to do so. Of course, first they’d have to invite at least one public education professional to a secret SCALA meeting, which doesn’t look like it’s happening anytime soon. •
Chris Kolb represents District 2 on the Jefferson County Public Schools Board of Education and is a professor of anthropology and urban studies at Spalding University. He may be reached at: chris@kolbforschoolboard.com
The article is followed by one defending LA SCALA as a perfectly appropriate exercise of civic duty.
It’s important to appreciate how SCALA began — not in some diabolical, smoke-filled vault as our critics would suggest, but with PNC Bank President Chuck Denny and Humana cofounder David Jones, Sr. seeing the need for such a group here in Louisville. They began the process of forming SCALA by hosting a group of 12 business and religious leaders in March 2017 and asking them if they believed such a group should exist in Louisville. The response was unanimous, and the 12 attendees were tasked with informally nominating other potential members who were either CEOs or the lead decision maker within their organizations.
The organizational meeting of the larger group was held in April 2017 and the committee members were charged with listing what they personally believed are the top issues facing Louisville needing to be addressed, with the top responses being education, public safety, improved and increased non-stop commercial air service, pension reform, and tax reform. Subcommittees were formed, and members were invited to participate in various subcommittees or simply participate in the broader committee by learning more about the critical issues impacting our community.
Here is the bottom line: If the purpose of LA SCALA is to eliminate democratic control of public schools, then it deserves all the opprobrium directed its way. If it instead opposes privatization and lobbies the Legislature for greater resources and stronger public schools, then it is a civic boon. The decision belongs to LA SCALA. Stand with democracy or against it. Your choice.
I write this post with a mixture of joy and sadness. And exhilaration!
I have been blogging every day for five years. I post whatever interests me and whatever I think will interest you. I confess to being compulsive because I blog with passion and zeal. I have blogged in elevators and taxis, while waiting on a line or in the middle of the night. I have written nearly 20,000 posts, and you have sent me nearly half a million comments.
I won’t stop blogging, but I will try to limit myself to no more than one post a day. I will post every day at 9. I will have the best of the best (in my opinion) every day. If there is breaking or important news, I will post again. When there is a big event or election, I will post. I will post short items of importance, just a link, when I must. I will keep tweeting.
When NPE endorses a candidate, you will hear from me. When one of the supporters of public education scores a win for democracy and the common good, you will hear from me. We have to keep winning elections.
I am not going anywhere but I will spend more time working on the book than blogging.
If I can encourage you to write a letter to the editor, run for office, speak out at a public meeting, you can bet I will. I will insist that you get out to vote and get your friends to vote too.
The reason I am stepping back is that I have a contract with my publisher, Knopf, the most distinguished publishing house in America, with the best editor in America, Victoria Wilson. Knopf published and Wilson edited my last, most important book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to Our Public Schools. I am going to write a new book about the growing and powerful resistance to privatization. I will rely on what I have learned from you —as I have traveled, as I have blogged, as I have read your comments here, as I have followed your work on behalf of the common good.
Of course, I will write about the BATS, Journey for Justice, the SOS groups, the battling unions, the legal battles, the electoral victories, the battles by parents against data mining, Class Size Matters, the historic defeat of Question 2 in Massachusetts last November, the historic court decision in the Vergara Case, the Pastors for Texas Children, the NAACP, the fight against vouchers, the resistance in many, many states by brave parents and teachers. And of course, the Network for Public Education, which was created five years ago by Anthony Cody and me to build and support the resistance. (Speaking of which, plan to join us at the NPE Annual Conference in Indiana on October 20-21. There will be more details on the NPE website.)
I’m not signing off. You will hear from me less often. You will get fewer posts. You will get shorter posts.
This is what I need from you: tell me what is happening in your state to fight for public education. Tell me which groups are fighting back against the malefactors of wealth and the peddlers of privatization. Tell me about your wins.
The fight continues. I have a strong sense that the tide is turning. I am not giving up, and neither should you. There is much good news to share. Books reflect the world and books can change the world. All of us acting together are changing it right now. I have never been more hopeful about the future. I want to gather the hope and inspiration that you have generated and use it to inspire even greater activism to defeat the stale and dying status quo.
Help me write this important next book. Share your stories. Help me stop the privatization train, which ran off the rails long ago. I recall being told repeatedly a few years ago that it was useless to resist because the train had left the station. When they said that, they never said where the train was heading. Not a good place. Maybe to a steep cliff. Trump and DeVos know. They tell us. The Koch brothers tell us. They want to destroy public schools. They are the “low hanging fruit.” They are driving the train to nowhere, and the “low hanging fruit” are our children.
Friends, together we are telling them that their plan to destroy our public schools is not going to happen.
It. Is. NOT. Going. To. Happen. We will show them what democracy looks like.
Keep me informed about your community, your state. They have money. We have numbers. Together, we will save our schools, our children, and our democracy.
Steven Singer presents a hypothetical but nutty analogy. He opens this post with a teacher pulling out a gun and shooting a student in the head. The principal hears the gun shot, runs to the classroom, sees the body on the floor, and is about to reprimand the teacher but quiets down and leaves when he realizes that the other students are working diligently. The teacher has used this extraordinary method to encourage students to work harder. Her method is effective. Why mess with success?
This is his commentary on a study that proposes that public schools should absorb the lessons of the no-excuses charter schools. If harsh discipline works for them and produces higher test scores, isn’t that what all schools should do?
Is this what parents want?
Are high scores the goal of education?
I am reminded of something I wrote about a study by Roland Fryer in which he concluded that while bonuses don’t seem to produce higher scores, aversive policies do. For example, pay a teacher $4,000 in the beginning of the school year, and if the teacher’s students don’t get higher test scores, take the money away. That works. I suggested another method that might work, using the aversive method: tell economists that if their predictions are wrong, you will cut off one of their fingers.
Peter Greene, like Steven Singer, is unimpressed by Sarah Cohodes’ claim that no-excuses charter schools have solved the problem of low scoring students. Discipline! SLANT! No excuses! Look at the teacher! Walk in a straight line! Thats what the black and brown kids need.
“Cohodes opens with a quick recap of charter history, then lays out the problem with measuring charter effects– selection bias because charter students have chosen the charter. But good news– the selection bias problem is completely solved by charter school lotteries. Except (she acknowledges) not everybody chooses to enter the lottery. And the lottery only applies when schools are over-subscribed. But maybe we can find comparable groups of non-charter students to compare charter students to. Which is hard. Cohodes seems to conclude this kind of research is really hard to design well. So she used some lottery studies and some observational studies in her research. And, having scanned the research, she drops this right in this intro section:
“The best estimates find that attending a charter school has no impact compared to attending a traditional public school….
”Let’s go to the headline material. Essentially, she finds that No Excuses charters set up in neighborhood served by very struggling public schools show a big gain in test scores. But here I will get into specifics, because she cites in particular the KIPP schools and the charters of Boston. Yet Boston charters have been found to come up very short in sending students on to complete college.
“The No Excuses practices that Cohodes zeros in on are ” intensive teacher observation and training, data-driven instruction, increased instructional time, intensive tutoring, and a culture of high expectations.” Not being able to narrow the list down is a problem– if I tell you that my athletic program gets great results by having athletes exercise for two hours daily, drink high protein shakes, breathe air regularly, and sacrifice toads under a full moon, it will be easy to follow my “research” to some unwarranted conclusions. Cohodes’ list is likewise a hugely mixed bag.
“Longer school day and school year is obvious. More time in school = getting more schooling done. A culture of high expectations is meaningless argle bargle. And the teacher training and “data-driven” instruction boils down to the same old news– if you spend a lot of time on test prep, your test results get better.
“Cohodes also notes that the worse the “fallback” school results, the greater the charter “improvement.” In other words, the lower you set the baseline, the more your results will surpass it.
“She doubles back to look at how charters relate to the surrounding public schools, again kicking the tires on the research to test reliability.
“She notes that there are two ways for lottery charters to cream the best students from the community. One is to manipulate the lottery, which she doesn’t think happens (for what it’s worth, neither do I, mostly because it’s not necessary). The second is to push out the students the school doesn’t want. But she is missing two more– make the lottery system prohibitively challenging, so that only the most motivated families can navigate it. And advertising allows charters to send a clear message about which students are welcome at their school. And nobody works those creaming tricks like No Excuses schools, with their highly regimented and oppressive treatment of students….
”And the criticism that I found myself leveling at very page finally surfaces here:
Given that the overall distribution of charter school effects is very similar to that of traditional public schools, expanding charter schools without regard to their effectiveness at increasing test scores would do little to narrow achievement gaps in the United States. But expanding successful, urban, high-quality charter schools—or using some of their practices in traditional schools—may be a way to do so.
Emphasis mine. If you think that closing the achievement gap is nothing but raising test scores, you are wasting my time. It’s almost two decades into this reform swamp, and still I don’t believe there’s a person anywhere sayin, “I was able to escape poverty because I got a high PARCC score.” Using the Big Standardized Test score as a proxy for student achievement is still an unproven slice of baloney, the policy equivalent of the drunk who looks for his car keys under the lights, not because he lost them there, but because it’s easier to look there.
It’s really not that hard to raise test scores– just devote every moment of the day to intensive test preparation. What’s hard is to raise test scores while pretending that you’re really doing something else.
Let’s consider a thought experiment in which further expansion focuses on high-quality charters. What would happen to the achievement gap in the United States if all of those new charter schools were opened in urban areas serving low-income children, had no excuses policies, and had large impacts on test scores like Boston, New York, Denver, and KIPP charters?
Yes, I want to say, and let’s consider a thought experiment in which pigs fly out of my butt. However, she continues
Expanding charters in this way certainly could transform the educational trajectories of the students who attend. But if we consider the US achievement gap as a whole, it would have a negligible effect.
What she wants to see is an expansion of charter practices expanded to public schools, and she sees ESSA as a policy tool to do it. But what practices? Expanded school time? That would take too much money for policy makers to support. Relentless test prep at the expense of broader education? No thanks. High expectations in the form of heavy regimentation, speak-only-when-spoken-to, treatment? Pretend that student socio-economic background and the opportunity gap are not really factors? That seems just foolishly wrong. Besides the questionable morality of such an approach, a vast number of parents simply wouldn’t stand for it. And how would we replace the mission of public education– to educate all students– with the mission of No Excuse charters– to educate only those students who are a “good fit.”
The recent defeat of legislation that would make charter schools accountable and transparent, AB 1478, established definitively that charter schools are private businesses, not public schools.
All public schools must comply with the Brown Act, the California Public Records Act (PRA), or the Political Reform Act of 1974, which make their spending and operations transparent to the public. The charter lobby insists that there are merely bureaucratic burdens and that charters must be free to operate without any public transparency, as private businesses do.
Carl Petersen writes about this issue here.
As recipients of public funding, one would expect that organizations running charter schools would be subjected to the same open government regulations that other government entities, including elected school boards, must follow. While it is not always convenient to conform to the Brown Act, the California Public Records Act (PRA), or the Political Reform Act of 1974, these provisions of California law help ensure transparency to the taxpayers. Unfortunately, under the state Education Code, the charter industry is currently exempt from following these requirements, leaving parents of students in these schools blind to their operations…open government laws help to protect students and ensure that public funds are spent correctly. However, the California Charter School Association (CCSA) considers them to be part of a “bureaucracy” from which families need to be “protected” as if having access to information harms students and their parents.
The charter industry doesn’t want to be bothered complying with state laws that public schools must comply with.
If California State AB 1478 had passed, parents and students in Los Angeles and across the state would have had the same protections enshrined into the education code that are found in the LAUSD’s District Required Language. This bill expressly stated that charter schools and entities managing charter schools are subject to the Ralph M. Brown Act, the California Public Records Act, and the Political Reform Act of 1974. Unfortunately, the CCSA was able to use its vast lobbying power and campaign donations in Sacramento to ensure that the business interests involved in running charter schools can receive public funds without any public oversight. AB 1478 failed by what the CCSA called “a historic margin”. You can thank those who voted “no” and those who lacked the courage to take a stand (and whose abstention counted as a “no”) for impending charter school scandals that will not see the light of day until children have been harmed:
What the charter industry proved beyond a shadow of a doubt is that charter schools are private businesses. They insist on the rights and privileges of private businesses. They are not public schools.
I wrote about the sudden closing of the Discovery Creemos Academy in Goodyear, formerly known as the Bradley Academy of Excellence. It ran out of money. The leader of the school made withdrawals of various kinds of nearly $1 million, which was certainly not good for the fiscal health of the school.
But as radio announcer Paul Harvey used to say, “here is the rest of the story,” in this case, told by Peter Greene.
There is that nasty thing about “related businesses,” the ones that the charter schools give contracts to, that just happened to be owned by the person who runs the charter.
Once again, the charter founders make money, the kids are out on the street. But not until the 100th day of school, so the charter could collect full tuition, and the public schools that take these kids in get nothing.
People of Arizona, wake up! They are stealing your tax money! The kids are not getting an education. Do you care?
First it was New Orleans, its public schools crippled by a devastating hurricane, which was used to sweep away public education. Now, it is Puerto Rico, crushed by a powerful hurricane, with most of the island left by the federal government without access to electricity or clean water.
Now Puerto Rico will abandon public education and turn its students over to private operators and religious schools. Let someone else run the schools. The government prefers to abandon them.
Steven Singer writes a cogent analysis of the death of public education in Puerto Rico.
“More than five months since a devastating hurricane hit the island’s shores, some 270 schools are still without power.
“Roughly 25,000 students are leaving with that number expected to swell to 54,000 in four years. And that’s after an 11-year recession already sent 78,000 students seeking refuge elsewhere.
“So what do you do to stop the flow of refugees fleeing the island? What do you do to fix your storm damaged schools? What do you do to ensure all your precious children are safe and have the opportunity to learn?
“If you’re Puerto Rico’s Governor Ricardo Rossello, you sell off your entire system of public education.
“After an economic history of being pillaged and raped by corporate vultures from the mainland, Rossello is suggesting the U.S. Territory offer itself for another round of abuse.
“He wants to close 300 more schools and change the majority of those remaining into charter and voucher schools.
“That means no elected school boards.
“That means no public meetings determining how these schools are run.
“It means no transparency in terms of how the money is spent.
“It means public funding can become private profit.
“And it means fewer choices for children who will have to apply at schools all over the island and hope one accepts them. Unlike public schools, charter and voucher schools pick and choose whom to enroll.
“Make no mistake. This has nothing to do with serving the needs of children. It is about selling off public property because it belongs to poor, brown people.”
The district school board voted unanimously to close the Imagine School Charter due to poor academic performance.
“The El Centro Elementary School District Board of Trustees voted unanimously Wednesday to deny Imagine School Imperial Valley’s petition to renew its charter, citing the charter school’s failure to meet academic requirements.
“The vote came during a special meeting that drew an overcapacity crowd of ISIV personnel and supporters, many of whom were visibly saddened by the board’s decision.
“Following the meeting, Imagine School Principal Grace Jiminez said that the school would appeal the board’s decision to the Imperial County Office of Education.
Jiminez also expressed frustration that the ECESD board had limited the amount of time that the charter school’s supporters had to speak during the meeting’s public comment session.
“Between all of these people, we were only able to speak for 30 minutes and that’s unfortunate because we have a large community here that wants to be here to say what they feel,” she said.
“Yet, remarks made by board members prior to the vote raises doubts whether any additional public comments in support of Imagine Schools would have persuaded them to vote otherwise.
Although they acknowledged the familial atmosphere that the Imagine School campus community enjoys, board members were explicit about their concerns that the campus’ academic program was placing students at risk.
Ultimately, the board appeared to have come to their decision with the assistance of a 21-page report prepared by district staff which recommended the charter renewal’s denial and that cited a number of deficiencies with Imagine’s governance, academic progress, corporate structure and teachers’ credentialing.
“Every decision that we make is made in what’s in the best interest of our students,” said Trustee Michael Minnix.
Trustee George McFaddin said that it would be wrong to suggest that the district was not generally supportive of charter schools, and highlighted the fact that ECESD now has three separate charter schools
ECESD board denies Imagine School’s charter renewal – Imperial Valley… http://www.ivpressonline.com/news/local/ecesd-board-denies-imagine-s… operating within the district.
“We’ve embraced them more than any other district in the Valley,” he said.
Yet, he too cited Imagine School’s poor academic performance in comparison to ECESD and the county as the reason for his choosing to ultimately vote how he did.
“You still haven’t reached that magic number that we need,” McFaddin said. “The figures here tonight shows that, that is not happening.”
“Some of those figures highlighted the fact that approximately 75 percent of ISIV students did not meet English Language Arts standards and 88 percent did not meet mathematics standards last year.
In comparison, 40 percent met or exceeded ELA standards and 31 percent met or exceeded mathematics standards in the El Centro Elementary School District, according to the ECESD report regarding ISIV’s petition for charter renewal.
“During the 2015-2016 school year, 81 percent of ISIV students did not meet English Language Arts standards and 86 percent of students attending did not meet mathematics standards.
“During the same school year, 37 percent of students met or exceeded ELA standards and 28 percent met or exceeded mathematics standards in the El Centro Elementary School District, the report stated.
One of the many criteria that a supervisory board must consider when deciding whether to grant a charter school’s petition for a renewed charter is whether its academic standards are on par with those of the district, or districts, from which it draws its students.
“My biggest concern is the fact that you’re not growing academically,” said Trustee Frances Terrazas.
A common refrain among board members was how often they reportedly hear from community members and educators that Imagine students that transfer to another district often are a grade level or two behind.”
Imagine charters are known for making profits from real estate and dealing with related companies.
The company can bow appeal the decision to the county board of education. If unsuccessful, they can appeal to the state board.
Want to know why the public is losing interest in charter schools?
The Goodyear Discovery Creemos Academy Closed its doors abruptly midyear. The money was all gone, they said.
“Many were unaware of the extent of the financial trouble the school had gone through for the past few years. But it appears that at least part of that trouble was exacerbated by payments made to school administration.
“Tax returns obtained by CBS 5 Investigates show an increasing amount of money paid to and transferred to Discovery Creemos Academy president and CEO Daniel Hughes and entities controlled by Hughes in the years prior to the school’s abrupt closure.
“In the 2014 IRS Form 990 filing, the school showed a salary to Hughes of $60,736. But the following year, 2015, Hughes’ salary had increased to $100,000.
“The filing also showed hundreds of thousands of dollars in reimbursements to Hughes for “Purchases on behalf of the school,” “Reimbursements of amount due,” and “Purchases and payments on revolving agreement.”
“The payments were made to Hughes and to Creemos Association, which is a separate organization owned by Hughes.
“The payments to Hughes and Creemos in 2015 totaled $949,000, according to the tax filings. 2015 is the most recent year on record, but a financial audit conducted in 2017 showed the school was still in financial trouble. The State Board of Charter Schools rated Discovery Creemos’ financial situation as “Not Acceptable.”
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