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San Francisco: Walton-Funded Charter Pushers Launch Campaign to Woo Black and Latino Families

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2018 //
14

 

The rightwing, anti-union Walton Family Foundation has funded a group called Innovate to push charter schools as the solution to achievement gaps in San Francisco.

Innovate targets Black and Latino families and peddles the hoax that charters have the secret formula for closing achievement gaps that are rooted in poverty.

“Innovate is a South Bay-based group founded in 2013 and describing itself as a “nonprofit organization whose mission is to build the parent and community demand for world-class public schools, and to accelerate the growth of these schools, particularly for low-income students and students of color.”

“Fair enough. But achieving this end has, reliably, taken the form of agitation for charter schools. The organization is generously funded by pro-charter outfits such as the Walton Family Foundation, which has put hundreds of millions of dollars into bankrolling taxpayer-funded, privately operated schools nationwide. Innovate’s own founding documents state that its raison d’être is to “focus on education reform that will support the creation of new charter schools and innovative district schools, parent choice, and strong systems of accountability.”

“Prior to turning its eyes to the north, Innovate won contentious battles in the San Jose area, besting opponents claiming that charter schools are cannibalizing the public system. They began quietly cultivating black and Latino parents in the Bayview and Mission two years ago, but it’s only in the last several months that this has garnered much attention. The organization began saturating area residents’ social media feeds with links to its report claiming San Francisco schools are the very worst in all of California for poor students of color.

“(The district disputes Innovate’s use of the data — but there’s no way to make the stats look good; generations of minority parents have complained that San Francisco’s schools have failed them, and the gaping achievement gap shows no indications of narrowing in the short term.)

“Innovate’s report is titled, “A Dream Deferred,” a Langston Hughes reference lost on few. Also lost on few is the exquisite quality of this document’s online form, which allows readers ample opportunity to share it with elected officials — and share their personal data with Innovate — at the push of a button.

“Innovate’s most recent tax forms indicate it grossed more than $4 million in 2015 alone, and its slick materials, excellent website, and a communications staff dwarfing the San Francisco Unified School District’s are indicative of that.”

Innovate implied that it has the support of the NAACP, but failed to mention that the state and national NAACP have called for a moratorium on new charters. They used the words of Amos Brown, the head of the local NAACP, and he was unhappy.

““You can tell everybody you see, whether in hell or heaven, that it is not my position to support Innovate and their move for charter schools,” Brown told us. “I want to make it crystal clear to those people: They are not to use my name in support of no charter school! I don’t appreciate this one bit.”

”Mission Local has heard many such stories: Innovate staff packing public meetings and clapping and shouting at the right times; Innovate employees crashing seminars intended for parents, participating in them, and scouting for recruits; Innovate staff trying to gain entry into community organizations.

“These are tactics more befitting campus Marxists or Lyndon LaRouche acolytes than a multi-million-dollar nonprofit with dozens of employees and a coterie of extremely wealthy backers. But the strategies employed by scrappy ideological groups do work — and can be even more effective when you have big bucks on-hand to pay professional organizers.”

Innovate is preying on parents’ hopes and fears. You can be sure that parents will never hear about the many failed charters that litter California, Tennessee, Nevada, Michigan, and other states.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, San Francisco

New Jersey: Legislature Set to Give Camden to Charter Chains

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2018 //
12

 

The Education Law Center reports that the New Jersey legislature plans to give Camden’s public schools to out-of-state charter chains. Camden is one of the most impoverished small cities in the state. Public assets will be handed over to private entities, a blatant grab of public funds.

http://edlawcenter.org/news/archives/nj-charter-schools/nj-legislature-poised-to-hand-over-camden-public-schools-to-out-of-state-charter-chains.html

January 8, 2018

A NJ Senate bill pending in the lame duck legislative session would allow the State-operated Camden district to turn over operation of most, if not all, of its enrollment and schools to three out-of-state charter groups: New York-based KIPP and Uncommon and Philadelphia-based Mastery charter networks.

Under special legislation enacted in 2011, the Camden school district has approved the operation of 12 elementary, middle and high schools by KIPP, Uncommon and Mastery, closing several district schools in the process. Under the law, the three charter chains have also secured pre-approval from the NJ Department of Education and the Camden district to enroll over 9,000 Camden students, or more than 60 % of Camden’s total enrollment, and open 16 additional schools.

The NJ Senate bill would amend the existing law by expanding the scope of the geographical area in Camden where KIPP, Mastery and Uncommon can expand from specific Camden neighborhoods to the entire city.

Another amendment in the bill would eliminate the requirement that the charter chains can open schools only in new or substantially reconstructed buildings financed by the charters themselves. Instead, they would be allowed to expand to any building newly constructed or renovated in the last five years, including district schools. This opens the door to the takeover of buildings with improvements financed by the NJ Schools Development Authority (SDA) under the court-ordered Abbott v. Burke school construction program.

The SDA has approved the demolition of Camden High School and has authorized construction of a new, $130 million Camden High for the district.
In a January 5 statement prepared for the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, Education Law Center urged lawmakers to reject the Senate bill, expressing serious concerns including a potential turnover of the new Camden High to either KIPP, Uncommon or Mastery.

“The Senate bill will permit the State-operated Camden district to transfer, after construction by the SDA, the new Camden High School to either the KIPP, Uncommon or Mastery charter chains,” David Sciarra, ELC Executive Director and counsel to Camden school children in the landmark Abbott litigation, wrote in ELC’s testimony. “It would be a flagrant fraud upon the Abbott court rulings, the Abbott school construction program, the SDA, and NJ taxpayers if the SDA builds Camden High as a district public school, only to have the district then hand the brand new facility over to a non-public, private entity.”

ELC also opposes the bill because the amendments, taken together, would delegate to KIPP, Uncommon and Mastery the authority to serve the vast majority of Camden students, fueling the Camden district to close even more schools.

“This bill green-lights the State-operated Camden district to close not just a few, but all or most district-operated schools, and then consign all or the vast majority of Camden students to attend a KIPP, Uncommon or Mastery-run school,” Mr. Sciarra added in the testimony. “The bill delegates the authority and responsibility for the education of most, if not all, Camden school children to three private charter chains, with scant accountability to Camden parents, residents, voters and taxpayers.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

North Carolina: How a Once Great State Destroyed Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2018 //
11

This Report was written by Kris Nordstrom, who works for the North Carolina Justice Center. He previously was a research analyst for the North Carolina General Assembly. The report tells the story of a state that was once the envy of the South for its education policies, but is now in rapid decline, copying failed policies from other states,

Home

PRESS RELEASE and SUMMARY

By Kris Nordstrom
Contracting Analyst, Education & Law Project

North Carolina was once viewed as the shining light for progressive education policy in the South. State leaders—often with the support of the business community—were able to develop bipartisan support for public schools, and implement popular, effective programs. North Carolina was among the first states to explicitly monitor the performance of student subgroups in an effort to address racial achievement gaps. The state made great strides to professionalizing the teaching force, bringing the state’s average teacher salary nearly up to the national average even as the state was forced to hire many novice teachers to keep pace with enrollment increases. In addition, North Carolina focused on developing and retaining its teaching force by investing in teacher scholarship programs and mentoring programs for beginning teachers.

North Carolina innovated at all ends of the education spectrum. The state was one of the first in the nation to create a statewide pre-kindergarten program with rigorous quality standards. At the secondary level, North Carolina was at the forefront of dual credit programs for high school students, and the Learn & Earn model (now known as Cooperative Innovative High Schools) became a national model, allowing students to graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in five years. Students graduating from North Carolina public schools could enroll in the state’s admired, low-cost community college system or its strong university system, most notably UNC Chapel Hill. For much of the 1990s through early 2000s, policymakers in other states often looked to North Carolina’s public schools as an example of sound, thoughtful policy aiming to broadly uplift student performance.

Unfortunately, over the past seven years, North Carolina has lost its reputation for educational excellence. Since the Republican takeover of the General Assembly following the 2010 election, the state has become more infamous for bitter partisanship and divisiveness, as reflected in education policies. Lawmakers have passed a number of controversial, partisan measures, rapidly expanding school choice, cutting school resources, and eliminating job protections for teachers.

Less discussed, however, has been degradation in the quality of North Carolina’s education policies. General Assembly leadership has focused on replicating a number of education initiatives from other states, most lacking any research-based evidence of delivering successful results to students. The General Assembly has compounded the problems though by consistently delivering exceptionally poorly-crafted versions of these initiatives.

Sadly, these controversial, poorly-executed efforts have failed to deliver positive results for North Carolina’s students. Performance in our schools has suffered, particularly for the state’s low-income and minority children.

So how did we get here? How is it affecting our students?

Lack of transparency leads to poor legislation

The past seven years of education policy have been dominated by a series of not just bad policies, but bad policies that are incredibly poorly crafted. This report provides a review of the major education initiatives of this seven-year period. In every case, the major initiatives are both:

Based on very questionable evidence; and
Crafted haphazardly, ignoring best practices or lessons learned from other states.
These problems almost certainly stem from the General Assembly’s approach to policymaking. Over the past seven years, almost all major education initiatives were moved through the legislature in a way to avoid debate and outside input. At the same time, the General Assembly has abandoned its oversight responsibilities and avoided public input from education stakeholders. The net result has been stagnant student performance, and increased achievement gaps for minority and low-income students.

One commonality of nearly all of the initiatives highlighted in this report is that they were folded into omnibus budget bills, rather than moved through a deliberative committee process. Including major initiatives in the budget, rather than as stand-alone bills, is problematic for three reasons:

Stand-alone bills are required to be debated in at least one committee prior to being heard on the floor. Committee hearings allow public debate and bill modifications from General Assembly members with subject-area knowledge, and can permit public input from stakeholders and other outside experts.
Stand-alone bills require majority of support to become law. While the budget bill also requires majority support to become law, there is great pressure on members to vote for a budget bill, particularly one crafted by their own party. Budget bills are filled with hundreds of policy provisions. As a result, members might vote for controversial programs that are incorporated into the budget that they would not support if presented as a standalone vote.

Budget bills are very large, and members are often provided limited time to review the lengthy documents. For example, the 2017 budget bill was made public just before midnight on June 19 and presented on the Senate floor for debate and vote by 4 PM on June 20. As a result, members are unable to adequately review programs and craft amendments that could improve program delivery.
Compounding matters, the General Assembly has effectively dismantled the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee (Ed Oversight), while joint meetings of the House and Senate Education Appropriation subcommittees (Ed Appropriations) are becoming increasingly rare. In the past, these two committees were integral to the creation and oversight of new initiatives.

From its formation in 1990 through 2015, Ed Oversight regularly met during the legislative interim to recommend ways to improve education in the state. However, the committee met just once in the 2015-16 interim, and not at all during the 2016-17 interim.

Similarly, Ed Appropriations—which is responsible for crafting the state budget for public schools, the community college system, and state universities—is meeting less often. Historically, Ed Appropriations meetings during long sessions have been the venue through which General Assembly members undertake detailed, line-item reviews of each state agency’s budget.

2017 marked the first time in known history that Ed Appropriations meetings featured zero in-depth presentations of K-12 funding issues. The General Assembly’s education leaders stood out for their lack of effort. Every other budget subcommittee received detailed presentations covering all, or nearly all, agency budgets.

North Carolina’s teachers, Department of Public Instruction employees, and the academic community are an incredibly valuable resource that should be drawn upon to strengthen our state educational policy. Instead, these voices have increasingly been ignored. As shown below, the net result has been a series of poorly-crafted policies that are harming North Carolina’s children.​

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Hoax, North Carolina, School Choice

Today is the Anniversary of the Worst Education Law Ever Passed by Congress

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2018 //
51

On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into Law.

NCLB, as it was known, is the worst federal education legislation ever passed by Congress. It was punitive, harsh, stupid, ignorant about pedagogy and motivation, and ultimately a dismal failure. Those who still admire NCLB either helped write it, or were paid to like it, or were profiting from it.

It was Bush’s signature issue. He said it would end “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It didn’t.

When he campaigned for the presidency, he and his surrogates claimed there had been a “Texas miracle.” There wasn’t.

All that was needed, they said, was to test every child in grades 3-8 every year in reading and math. Make the results for schools public. Reward schools that raised scores. Punish schools for lower scores. Then watch as test scores soar, graduation rates rise, and achievement gaps closed. It didn’t happen in Texas nor in the nation.

The theory was simple, simplistic, and stupid: test, then punish or reward.

Congress bought the claim of the Texas miracle and passed NCLB, co-sponsored by leading Republicans and Democrats, including Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Congressman George Miller of California.

Congress mandated that every student in every school must be proficient on standardized tests of reading or math or the school was a failure, facing closure or privatization by 2014. NCLB was a ticking time bomb, set to destroy American public education by setting an impossible goal, one that almost every school in every state would ultimately fail.

It was the largest expansion of the federal role in history. It was the largest intrusion of the federal government into state and local education decisiomaking ever.

It was the stupidest education law ever passed.

Bush’s original proposal was a 28-page document. (I was invited to the White House ceremony where it was unveiled; at the time, I was a member in good standing of the conservative policy elite). By the time the bill passed, the new law exceeded 1,000 pages. A Republican Congressman from Colorado told me that he thought he was the only member who read the whole bill (he voted against it.)

NCLB took the place of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a component of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” Program. The primary purpose of ESEA was to send federal funds to the poorest districts. (During the Clinton administration, ESEA was renamed the Goals 2000 Act and incorporated the lofty education goals endorsed by the first Bush administration.

To learn more about this history and why NCLB failed, read my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” To learn more about the negative effects of NCLB, read Daniel Koretz’s new book, “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” To learn more about the unintended negative effects of accountability, google Richard Rothstein’s monograph “Holding Accountability to Account.”

This is what we got from NCLB: score inflation, cheating, narrowing the curriculum, obsession with test scores, more time devoted to testing, less time for the arts, physical education, history, civics, play, and anything else that was not tested. Among other consequences: demoralization of teachers, a national teacher shortage, more money for testing companies, and less money for teachers and class size reduction.

We also got a load of “reforms” that had no evidence to support them, such as closing schools, firing teachers and principals because of low scores, handing schools with low scores over to charter operators or the state.

NCLB, in turn, led to its ugly spawn, Race to the Top, which was even meaner and more punitive than NCLB. Race to the Top turned up the heat on test scores, making them the measure of teacher quality despite decades of social science that refuted that policy. More teachers and principals were fired,  more public schools were closed, enrollments in professional education programs plummeted across the country.

NCLB was the Death Star of American education. Race to the Top was the Executioner, scouring the land with a giant scythe in search of teachers, principals, and schools to kill if student scores didn’t go up.

When the law was passed, I went to an event at the Willard Hotel in D.C. where key senators discussed it. One of them was Senator Lamar Alexander, former governor of Tennessee, former U.S. Secretary of Education (for whom I worked as Assistant Secretary of Education in charge of the Office of Education Research and Improvement). At the end of the panel, when it was time for questions, I asked Senator Alexander whether Congress really believed that every student in the nation would be proficient by 2014. He said that Congress knew they would not be, but “it’s good to have goals.”

So NCLB demanded that schools meet goals they knew were impossible. People were fired, lost their careers and reputations. Schools were closed, communities destroyed. Because “it’s good to have goals.”

Sixteen years ago, NCLB became law. It was a dark day indeed for children, for teachers, for principals, for public education, and for the very nature of learning, which cannot be spurred by incentives or mandates or punishments or rewards.

“You measure what you treasure,” I was told by Arne Duncan’s Assistant Secretary for Thinking.

“No,” I replied, “that’s exactly what cannot be measured.” Love, honor, kindness, decency, compassion, family, friends, courage, creativity. No standardized test measures what matters most. I do not treasure what standardized tests measure.

Farewell, NCLB. May you, your progeny, your warped understanding of children and learning disappear from our land, never to be recalled except as an example of a costly failure.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Jersey Jazzman Debunks the Gorilla Channel and Miracle Schools

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2018 //
16

 

Do you believe in miracles? Do you want to believe that a charter chain—unlike public schools— can graduate every student, no matter what their economic status, and send them on to college? We all want to believe in heroic teachers and miracle schools. The reality is often not as impressive in the cold light of day. Incremental change is a stabler, more reliable base for lasting change but it is not so exciting as miracles.

Along comes Jersey Jazzman to debunk the latest miracle charter story promoted by the New York Daily News. 

The story and follow-up editorial cited this statistic about Democracy Prep Charter High Schools:

“According to the network, last year 189 of the 195 seniors in its three high schools that had graduating classes went on to college. And although the sample size is small (the network has graduated fewer than 400 students), the network estimates that 80% of its graduates either are still in college or have graduated.“

Wow! A 97% graduation rate!

The first reason to question the claim is that the article was written by the education policy director of a rightwing think tank, the Manhattan Institute, whose job is to promote privatization.

But Jersey Jazzman had something that the Manhattan Institute didn’t acknowledge and the Daily News didn’t investigate: data on attrition rates from the state education department website. Think of it! Facts! It turns out that 40% of the students enrolled in Democracy Prep in ninth grade left before the end of senior year. Shouldn’t that be included in the story? Why leave it out? In the Democracy Prep School in Camden, “This year’s seniors at Freedom Prep were in a class of 78 freshman. By the fall of their junior year, they were down to 33 students. 58% of the freshmen of the Class of 2018 at Freedom Prep had left by their junior year.” That’s an inconvenient fact for a “miracle” school.

The fault, Jersey Jazzman points out, is not so much with the hired PR flacks nor the thinky tank PR guys as it is with the journalists who swallow these incredible stories without investigating, who forget that miracles should always invite skepticism rather than a dogged will to believe.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization

New York: How Charter Schools Won the Right to Hire Unqualified Teachers

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2018 //
13

 

Jake Jacobs reports the complicated political story behind the decision by the State University of New York’s charter committee to allow its nearly 200 charter schools to hire unqualified teachers. New York State has high standards for new teachers. SUNY has some of the best education programs in the state.

Yet a SUNY  committee selected by Governor Cuomo decided that charter schools it approves need no qualifications at all, not even a college degree, not even a high school degree.

Behind this tangled tale is Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Chain, which has such a high teacher turnover rate (as much as 60% annually in some schools) that she is faced with a perennial teacher shortage.

Read on to learn why SUNY would undermine teacher professionalism.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New York, Teachers, Testing

Proof that Choice Zealots Never Learn: Thomas Carroll’s Failed Albany Charters

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2018 //
13

 

Thomas Carroll was one of the authors of New York state’s charter law, passed in 1998,when Republican George Pataki was governor. The governor traded a pay raise for legislators to get their support for charters.

Carroll started a charter chain in Albany called “Brighter Choice.” It included single-gender schools for boys and girls. He operated 11 charter schools in the state capitol and hoped to charterize the entire district. He failed, the chain failed. But Carroll is now promoting the virtues of school choice on behalf of the Trump-DeVos agenda to denizens of D.C. who are ignorant of his over-hyped, costly, failed charter chain in Albany.

Carroll is not an educator, but he figured out how to make charters pay. His chain was handsomely funded by the Walton Family Foundation, and Carroll thought of other ways to generate funding and profits through real estate deals and clever use of public bonds.

This article by a union activist in Albany was written in 2010:

“They said charters would offer needed competition to community schools, but they didn’t say the competition would be about public dollars. Last week Albany Times Union reported on the city’s Albany Leadership Charter High School for Girls “asking for $15 million in tax-free public financing to buy the brand-new charter high school for girls built by the Brighter Choice Foundation.”

“Here’s the cute part. The nonprofit Brighter Choice Foundation, which runs all 11 charter schools in Albany and erected the building at a cost of some $10.1 million, is directing its Charter Facilities Finance Fund to ask the city to back its selling tax-exempt bonds to investors so it can buy the school building and — are you ready for this? — lease it back to Brighter Choice.

“Forget about whether the deal sounds dodgy, because it does. If the deal also sounds a bit familiar, it may be because Thomas Carroll, the prime mover behind the Brighter Choice charter schools, has been profiting from a similarly questionable real estate tax loophole for the past several years, a story exposed earlier this year by Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News.

”Critics say Carroll’s latest charter real estate trick runs counter to the purpose of the city providing tax free bonds, which is to jump-start job creation and promote economic development. No jobs will be created here; the school is already up and running. Where’s the public benefit in financing a project that’s already completed?

“The paper cites Brighter Choice Chairman Chris Bender’s bright expectation that the high school’s sale would “replenish the revolving line of credit” it holds with the Walton Family Foundation, the charity run by the family that owns the nonpareil union-busting Wal-Mart.

“As the paper notes, that cozy arrangement “could create another potentially controversial scenario in which Brighter Choice is essentially using the proceeds from the sale of tax-free bonds to bolster the account from which it builds new schools to compete with the city school district.”

“Supporters say the school does create jobs —some two dozen new ones — but that’s denied by an Albany schools spokesperson who says it’s more a case of job shifting than job creation, given that 200 public school staff members, including 100 teachers, were laid off in the last two school years.

“We should note that Carroll, the little man on the charter school stair, is the honcho behind School Performance Inc., which in turn runs the Charter Facilities Finance Fund that wants to make deal for the city.

“His adventures in education aren’t restricted to the state’s snow belt. President of the charter-flacking Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, Carroll is also president of the Empire Foundation and CHANGE-NY, both far-right-of-center organizations that mask conservative ideology as fiscal prudence. Ripping off Albany’s tax base must be the new style in protecting the public’s dollars.”

This is what Juan Gonzalez wrote about Thomas Carroll’s Brighter Choice real estate deals:

“Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction.

“The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.

“In Albany, which boasts the state’s highest percentage of charter school enrollments, a nonprofit called the Brighter Choice Foundation has employed the New Markets Tax Credit to arrange private financing for five of the city’s nine charter schools.

“But many of those same schools are now straining to pay escalating rents, which are going toward the debt service that Brighter Choice incurred during construction.

“The Henry Johnson Charter School, for example, saw the rent for its 31,000-square-foot building skyrocket from $170,000 in 2008 to $560,000 last year.

“The Albany Community School’s rent jumped from $195,000 to $350,000.

“Green Tech High Charter School rents went from $443,000 to $487,000.

“Meanwhile, all the Albany charter schools haven’t achieved the enrollment levels their founders expected, even after recruiting hundreds of students from suburban school districts to fill their seats.

“The result has been less money in per-pupil state aid to pay operating costs, including those big rent bills.

“Several charters have fallen into additional debt to the Brighter Choice Foundation.”

In 2015, the state closed down two of the Brighter Choice charter schools for low performance, high teacher turnover, poor learning materials,  Eventually, all but two of the Brighter Choice charters were closed.

Scott Waldman wrote in Politico in 2015  about “the educational model that failed”:

“In total, Albany taxpayers have spent more than $300 million on the city’s charter schools in the last decade, Albany school district spokesman Ron Lesko said. Many of those schools have now been closed.

“We didn’t need to spend scores of millions of dollars to find out that the work our teachers and staff do and the staff in Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo and New York City, and every city in poor communities in America is doing is hard work,” he said. “There is no quick and easy fix and privatizing education is no answer and that’s been proven here.”

“The failure in Albany has shown the disruption that charters can cause to public school systems and surrounding neighborhoods. The Brighter Choice middle schools set to close were built just a few years ago, near the foundation’s headquarters. Half of a city block was leveled and residents were displaced from their homes.

“The closure of those schools has created an administrative nightmare for the Albany city school district, which must now establish an entirely new middle school in the next six months to handle the almost 400 charter school students who were enrolled in the failed Brighter Choice schools.

“Albany was once among the top 10 districts in the nation when it came to the percentage of public school students enrolled in charter schools. Just a few years ago, more than a fifth of the city’s 10,000 public school students were enrolled in charters.

“The Brighter Choice schools are supported by the Brighter Choice Foundation, once headed by Tom Carroll, a lobbyist for education reform and a former Pataki official who helped write the state’s charter school law. Carroll was a prominent critic of one of Albany’s first charter schools, New Covenant Charter School, which he did not create, and which he argued should be shuttered because it reflected poorly on the rest of the city’s charter sector. Carroll criticized the school, which started in trailers on a vacant lot in Albany, for growing too quickly and never developing its curriculum. Its closure, over the objections of Governor George Pataki, drew significant media attention.

“The Brighter Choice schools, Carroll said, were designed to be better, the answer to New Covenant failings, small and with a “relentless focus on standards and results.” Carroll, who earned more than $400,000 annually from the nonprofits he created to encourage charter growth, raised more than $15 million from the Walton Foundation to help build Albany’s charter schools. He also turned to hedge-fund billionaires including Bruce Kovner to bring outside money for help growing Albany’s charter sector.”

So, having cost the district of Albany hundreds of millions of dollars, having demonstrated the failure of school choice, Thomas Carroll now claims that school choice is the wave of the future.

His own example proves that he is wrong. Unless we want to waste billions on more failures.

 

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

Kevin Welner and William Mathis: School Choice Promotes Segregation, Which is Bad for Our Society

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2018 //
29

 

In an important article, Kevin Welner and William Mathis of the National Education Policy Center argue that school choice is not “the civil rights issue of our time,” as Betsy DeVos and Trump (and before them, Arne Duncan) maintain.

School choice was devised by southern segregationists to fight the Brown decision of 1954, and school choice today is promoting racial and economic segregation.

Segregation is bad for students and for our society.

As they show, Jeanne Allen and other charter and voucher zealots attacked not only Randi Weingarten for accurately describing the history of school choice, they even attacked the NAACP for calling for a moratorium on new charters.

Choice is a consumer good but not a social good.

They write:

”When schools shift from democratically run to privately run institutions, their very purpose itself can shift toward merely serving the private interests of customer parents. In that context, success is often realized by wooing more students who are lower-cost and higher-achieving.

“Contrast this with the purposes of education memorialized in states’ constitutional provisions. To advance the common good, Massachusetts speaks to wisdom, knowledge and virtue among all groups of people. New Hampshire says that knowledge and learning must be spread throughout the various parts of the land. Vermont speaks of expanding virtue and preventing vice. The private benefits of an education received by individual children are valuable, but so are the societal benefits of a thoughtful, informed and united popu-lace.

“The genius of the American educational system is not just in what it gives to the individual. It is in what it provides to society as a whole. We face the great challenge of providing equal opportunities and common values to an increasingly fragmented society. Can we sustain and transmit this democratic covenant of rights and responsibilities to a new generation? Can we do this in a society with increasing levels of privately run choice schools?”

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Vouchers

North Carolina: Rightwing Republicans Continue to Wreak Havoc on State’s Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2018 //
6

 

In 2010, the Tea Party and assorted rightwing zealots took control of the North Carolina General Assembly. They gerrymandered districts to assure their continued domination. They passed legislation for charters, vouchers, and cyber charters. They approved for-profit schools. They damaged every functioning part of the government.

Recently, they passed a mandate to reduce class sizes in the early grades but did not increase funding. Educators warned of massive layoffs, loss of the arts and physical education, and other consequences. Now a key legislator claims he has heard their complaints and plans to fix the mess. Educators fear that the chaos is intended to promote privatization.

On another front, the North Carolina General Assembly decided to replicate Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District. In Tennessee, the ASD took over low-performing schools, turned them over to charter operators, and promised miraculous results. There were no results. It flopped.

North Carolina  was impressed nonetheless. Nothing like copying failure. It created an “Innovative School District.” It hired a superintendent, Eric Hall, who is paid $150,000 a year. The plan was to take control of five schools and give them to charter operators. However, almost all the schools that were supposed to be placed in the ISD backed out. Only one school is now about to be taken over. The state has received applications from two firms to operate the one-school district. 

So the one school in the Innovative School District will have a principal, a superintendent, and will be operated by a reform organization.

How do you spell B-O-O-N-D-O-G-G-L-E?

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Hoax, North Carolina, Privatization

Plessy and Ferguson Explain What Happened to the Public Schools of New Orleans

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2018 //
12

 

In 2010, after the publication of my “turnaround” book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” I was invited to speak at Dillard University, a historically black university in New Orleans. Two events about that occasion were memorable. After I spoke, a woman in the audience got up to speak, and she said, “First they stole our democracy, then they stole our schools.” Later, during the post-lecture reception, I met a white woman whose last name was Ferguson and a black man whose last name was Plessy. They were descendants of the two principals in the historic Supreme Court case of 1896 that approved state laws requiring separate-but-equal public facilities.

The Plessy and Ferguson I met had joined to create an organization to fight for social justice.

“When Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson decided to start a new civil rights education organization that would bear their famous names, they sealed the deal in a fitting local spot: Cafe Reconcile.

“They represent the opposing principals in one of the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions, Plessy v. Ferguson , which upheld the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws mandating segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. It stood from 1896 until the court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.

“The descendent of the man who tested Louisiana’s law requiring separate railroad cars for whites and blacks and the great-great-granddaughter of the judge who upheld it met in 2004.

“The truth is, no reconciliation was required.

“The first thing I said to her,” recalled Plessy, “was, ‘Hey, it’s no longer Plessy versus Ferguson. It’s Plessy and Ferguson.’ ”

“Her first reaction was to apologize.

“I don’t know why,” she said in an interview. “It’s just that I felt the burden of it, this great injustice.”

“Plessy’s response?

“I said, ‘You weren’t alive during that time. I wasn’t either. It’s time for us to change that whole image.’ ”

What an amazing turn of the historic wheel! Plessy v. Ferguson had become Plessy and Ferguson, teamed up for good causes.

Phoebe Ferguson, great-great-granddaughter of the judge who upheld the Plessy v Ferguson decision, is now an outspoken advocate for public education and the right to a free and appropriate education for all children. She was executive producer of  “The Perfect Storm: The Takeover of New Orleans Public Schools,” a series of short videos that reveal the true story behind the creation of the nation’s first all-charter school district. The Plessy and Ferguson Foundation sponsored the series.

Each video is short. Together, they are an effective counter to the multi-million dollar marketing campaign that has sold the public and the media the myth of the “miracle” of New Orleans.

I am not posting any more today so that you will have the time to see all the videos in this series.

 

 

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