Archives for category: Charter Schools
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Gary Rubinstein: Louisiana and the Hoax of Growing AP Performance

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2017 //
7

As Gary Rubinstein writes, Louisiana is one of the most “reformed” states in the nation. It’s superintendent John White is a TFA alum and a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. It has an all-charter city. It has vouchers. It received a Race to the Top grant. What could possibly go wrong?

Rubinstein writes here about a seeming paradox: Every year, Louisiana State Superintendent John zwhite boasts about an astounding increase in the proportion of students passing AP exams. Yet, Louisiana has pretty awful performance on the AP exams.

Paradox solved!

Louisiana moved from fourth worst to third worst in the nation on AP performance. It was recently overtaken by North Dakota.

Read his post and ask yourself why anyone would boast about such low performance. Is that what they teach at the Broad Academy?

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Louisiana, New Orleans, Privatization, Race to the Top

Jennifer Berkshire: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2017 //
93

This is one of the best pieces I have read about the pernicious effects of “education reform” on the the Democratic Party. I have consistently argued that the Democrats triangulated so far during the Clinton administration that they blurred the distinct lines between the parties, then ended up supporting the Republican policies of testing, accountability, and choice, which previously they abhorred.

Jennifer Berkshire here fills in the details with her sharp eye and wit. So thoroughly have Democrats joined with Republicans in demonizing teachers and unions, that there is hardly a dime’s worth of difference between them on education issues. Things have gotten so bad that one Democrat espousing privatization recently co,pare the teachers unions to Alabama governor George Wallace, blocking children as they try to escape public schools to enter charter nirvana.

She writes:

“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.

“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….

“Today’s Democratic school reformers—a team heavy on billionaires, pols on the move, and paid advocates for whatever stripe of fix is being sold—depict their distaste for regulation, their zeal for free market solutions as au courant thinking. They rarely acknowledge their neoliberal antecedents. The self-described radical pragmatists at the Progressive Policy Institute, for instance, got their start as Bill Clinton’s policy shop, branded as the intellectual home for New Democrats. Before its current push for charter schools, PPI flogged welfare reform. In fact, David Osborne, the man so fond of likening teacher unions to arch segregationists in the south, served as Al Gore’s point person for “reinventing government.” Today the model for Osborne’s vision for reinventing public education is post-Katrina New Orleans—where 7,500 mostly Black school employees were fired en route to creating the nation’s first nearly all-charter-school-system, wiping out a pillar of the city’s Black middle class in the process.”

Read the article.

It brilliantly describes how Democrats attacked their own base, embraced Republican ideas, and merged their thinking with that of Republicans. A sure-fire recipe for disaster, since Republicans are so much better at being Republicans than Democrats are. You can’t win by destroying your base.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Deregulation, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Teachers, Unions

BREAKING NEWS: The Myth of the New Orleans “Miracle” Exposed!

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2017 //
22

What a time to get this news: Thanksgiving Eve.

The New Orleans Tribune rips the myth of the New Orleans miracle.

Digest it over the weekend.

We have been hoaxed by Reformers.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Hoax, New Orleans, Privatization

Peter Greene: Here Are the Conditions That Make a Charter School a Public School

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2017 //
47

Charter advocates like to say that a charter school is a public school.

Peter Greene lays out the conditions that charter schools must meet to be considered public Schools.

Here are three of those conditions. There are more.

“If it is owned and operated by the local community and their duly elected representatives. If you can call the people who run your school to talk about your school, and it’s not a long distance call, that might be a public school. If your school is run by a board of directors who must all stand for election by the taxpayers who foot the bill for your school, you are probably a public school.

“If it is operated with financial transparency. If any taxpayer can walk into the main district office and request a copy of the budget and receive a copy, that’s a public school system. If you have the opportunity to call or meet with those local elected board members t argue about how your tax dollars are being spent, it’s probably a public school.

“If it cannot turn down a single student from your community. Your school system may sort students into specialized schools, or it may pay the cost of sending Very Special Need students to Highly Specialized schools, but it cannot ever deny unilaterally responsibility for students just because they cost a lot of money or require specialized programs or just fail to behave compliantly. If your school system can’t wave a student off and say, “She’s not our problem,” your system is probably a public school system….

“You can say that a pig is a cow. You can dress it up in a cow suit and just keep insisting over and over that it’s a cow, correcting everyone who says differently. But at the end of the day, when you butcher it, you still get pork.”

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

Missouri: Governor Stymied in His Effort to Oust State Superintendent

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2017 //
9

Missouri Republican Governor Eric Greitens wants to remove the state superintendent and install his own choice, a buddy who believes in privatization.

The state board is, by law, supposed to be independent, not politically subservient, but Greitens appointed members who were supposed to do as he told them.

One of his five appointees refused and was removed.

When the vote was called, the board split 4-4, so for now the governor won’t get his way.

More than three hours after the meeting ended, Greitens responded by slamming local school district officials and education organizations, saying the state earmarked more money for schools this year, but the money didn’t result in higher pay for teachers and improved test scores.

“Today, the system works for insiders and bureaucrats who get paid real well, but it fails too many students, families, and teachers,” Greitens said. “There are a lot of people committed to the status quo. They’ve been willing to harass and intimidate anyone who stands up to them. That won’t stop us from doing what’s right. We’re fighting to get results for Missouri teachers and students.”

The four recent appointees who supported Vandeven’s ouster included Eddy Justice, Doug Russell, Sonny Jungmeyer and new member Jennifer Edwards.

Vandeven’s supporters say she is doing a good job and that Greitens is meddling with a school board that operates independently of politics.

“It is critical that the independence of the state Board of Education be maintained so the board can make the best policy decisions for the nearly one million students in Missouri’s public schools,” said Melissa Randol, executive director of the Missouri School Boards’ Association.

Imagine that! The state spent more money on education this year, but test scores didn’t go up!

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Missouri

Stephen Dyer: How Kids Not in Charters Are Hurt By Charter Funding

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2017 //
7

Stephen Dyer, a fellow with Innovation Ohio and former legislator, explains how the charter funding system in Ohio takes money away from students who are not in charters.

“It’s really easy to sit back and make esoteric arguments about how Ohio’s charter school funding system hurts kids who are not in charter schools. And there’s a recognition from leaders in the Ohio General Assembly that the funding system — which diverts state funding meant for a district to a charter — is a shell game that leave school districts with far less state revenue than the state says they need to effectively educate their students. This, in turn, forces school districts to use sometimes large segments of their locally raised revenue to make up the difference.

“But what does that mean for a kid attending a local public school district?

“As an example, I’m going to use a student in Columbus City Schools. Let’s assume he or she started first grade in the 2005-2006 school year, which would make this student a senior this year (by the way, I was first elected to the Ohio House in 2006. Wow, does this make me feel old!)

“Anyway, I looked at how much state funding this student lost each year of their career because charter schools receive so much more per pupil state funding than Columbus City Schools would have received for the same kids. (Looking at state funding reports here and doing addition and subtraction based on number of students in Columbus before and after charter students leave, as well as how much state funding comes to Columbus before and after charter students leave.)

“Yes, I know charters can’t raise local revenue. However, the legislature has chosen to not put its money where its school choice mouth is and create a separate fund to make charter schools whole. Instead, they make up a chunk of the local funding disparity by removing extra state funding from the local school district’s bottom line, forcing local property taxpayers to do their work for them.”

Check out his graphs and data.

So, for every student who began their Columbus City Schools career in 2005-2006, they have received $10,548 fewer in state revenue, with another $1,142 set to be lost this, their senior year (charter enrollment is so volatile, this figure could change substantially during the year). To give you a sense of scale, that amount equals about the amount of state funding these Columbus students received their first three years of school — in many ways the most important years.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Funding, Ohio

Indianapolis: On the Way to Phasing Out Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2017 //
17

Indianapolis is a hotbed of privatization, where the DEFER-style Mind Trust has allied with the forces of rightwingers Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence to bid farewell to democratically-controlled, community-based public schools. The latest addition to the privatization toolkit is “unified enrollment.” When parents begin to look for a school placement, there is no neighborhood school, no zoned school. Instead, they look for a school on a list that combines both charter schools and public schools, each of which is identified by their offerings or specialty. Thus, consumerism is firmly established, and charter schools are turned into the equivalent of public schools, even though they have private management and may operate for profit.

The idea of OneApp was funded by the charter-pushing, anti-union Walton Family Foundation in New Orleans and other cities controlled by privatizers.

Categories Charter Schools, Indianapolis, Privatization

Mark Naison: The Genius of Luis Torres

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2017 //
43

Mark Naison salutes a principal in the Bronx, Luis Torres, who has overshadowed the Success Academy co-located in his Building because his school is more innovative, more dynamic than the test-taking machine at SA.

Mark calls him “a genius.”

“One of the most brilliant and important achievements of PS 55’s visionary Principal, Luis E Torres, is that through innovative programming and a relentless public relations campaign, he has totally overshadowed the Success Academy Charter School co-located in his building! Normally, Success Academy tries to humiliate and stigmatize the public schools it is co-located by pointing out how much better it’s performance is! Not at PS 55! Here, the action, innovation and excitement is all with the public school, whether it is the scientific and pedagogical innovations of the Green Bronx Machine, the school based agriculture program housed at the School; the full service Medical clinic Principal Torres has created; or the school’s championship step team and basketball team! People from all over the city and the nation come to see what Principal Torres has done; while Success Academy stays in the background.”

Was it competition that spurred Torres’ creativity? Or was he an exemplary principal who wanted the best for his students regardless of the competition?

Categories Charter Schools, Creativity, Education Reform, Innovation, New York City, Privatization

Burris and Cimarusti: How “The DeVos Effect” Can Affect the Elections in 2018

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2017 //
11

Carol Burris and Darcie Cimarusti of the Network for Public Education argue here that the candidates who forcefully stand up for public schools and speak out against privatization will win in November 2018.

Their evidence is the Elections of 2017.

Start with the remarkable results in Virginia.

“The most important race of 2017 was the hotly contested race for the governor of Virginia, in which a strong public education advocate, Democrat Ralph Northam, faced off against Republican Ed Gillespie. Gillespie fully embraced the entire DeVos agenda — charter expansion, online virtual schools, home schools, and vouchers in the form of tax credits and education savings accounts. There was not an inch of policy daylight between Gillespie and DeVos.

“This should come as no surprise. Gillespie received over $100,000 in campaign contributions from the DeVos family, including a donation from the Secretary’s husband, Dick DeVos. Americans for Prosperity, which is controlled by the Koch brothers, launched a digital video in which a charter school leader criticized Northam for being the vote that stopped the neo-voucher “educational savings accounts.”

“Northam, who was supported by the teachers union, has been a strong and consistent supporter of public education. As stated on his website, “Ralph took tie-breaking votes to protect Virginia’s public education from being raided with unconstitutional private school vouchers and to keep decisions about public charter schools in the hands of local school boards.”

“The election of Gillespie would have been a game changer for public education in the Commonwealth. Virginia is one of a handful of states that allow charter schools to only be authorized by local school boards. In Virginia, charters are subject to the same transparency guidelines as public schools in the state. There are only eight charter schools in Virginia, much to the chagrin of charter advocates.”

Northam, who calls himself a “friend of public schools,” will keep privatization out of the state and instead work to strengthen and improve Virginia’s public schools.”

Friends of public schools will win. Democrats who abandon public schools will not be able to take advantage of “The DeVos Effect.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Virginia, Vouchers

The Working Notes for My Speech at Oberlin Conference on the State of American Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2017 //
19

Some readers have asked for a copy of the speech that was so beautifully illustrated by the graphic posted earlier today.

I didn’t have a speech. I made notes and used them as talking points, on which I elaborated. When some in the audience (composed of progressives) insisted that charter schools were saving lives, I should have pointed out that the single biggest funder of charters is the anti-Union Walton Family Foundation, which is known for low wages and resistance to workers’ rights. About 95% of charters are non-union. The best kind of social justice that could be done by the Waltons is to pay their one million employees $15 an hour and allow them to unionize, in the stores and the charters they fund.

Here are my talking points.

“War on public sector.

“Take any public sector activity and google it with the word “privatization.”
Police, firefighters, prisons,hospitals, libraries, parks, schools—and what we once thought of as public is either privatized or under threat of privatization.

“Powerful movement—some driven by profit, some by libertarian ideology—seeks to shrink the public sector and monetize it.

“My area of specialization is education.

“There is today a full court press to privatize public education.

“How many in this room went to public schools?

“The fundamental purpose of public schools is to develop citizens, to sustain our democracy. To prepare young people to assume the duties of citizenship, to vote wisely, to understand issues, and to sit on juries.

“Our current obsession with standardized testing has corrupted the purpose of schooling. Clinton, Bush, Obama. We are now locked into a marketization approach to education: Testing, Accountability, competition, Choice. This is market-driven education, with winners and losers.

“The Bush program: NCLB. The same children were left behind.
THE Obama program: Race to the Top. Same as NCLB. Where is the top? Education is not a race.

“Test scores are fundamentally a reflection of family income and education. They are now cynically used by rightwing politicians to declare schools to be failures and set them up for privatization.

“Public education is one of the foundation elements of our democracy.
The movement to privatize public schools is a threat to democracy.

“Education Policy today is decided not by deliberation and debate but by big money.

“The Queen of Dark Money in education is now Secretary of Education.

“Betsy DeVos sees education as a Consumer good, not a civic responsibility
She has Compared choosing a school to choosing an Uber or choosing which food truck to buy lunch from. These are trivial choices, consumer choices. They are not public goods.
She really doesn’t understand the role of the public school in a community, as part of our democracy

“Dark Money, major philanthropies, and Wall Street billionaires have collaborated in attacking democratic control of schools. They have encouraged State takeovers, Charters, Vouchers. Private management. Mayoral control.

“Goals:

“School Choice, which promotes segregation by race and social class
Get rid of unions
Attacks on teaching profession.

“Venture philanthropies back Privatization: Gates, Broad, Walton, Arnold Foundation, Fisher Foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Bloomberg Foundation, Dell Foundation, Jonathan Sackler, many more

“Dark Money funneled to state and local elections— by such groups as: Education Reform Now, Stand for Children, Families for Excellent Schools, Democrats for Education Reform, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Walton family. All have the same goal: Privatization.

“Half the states now have vouchers for private schools, enacted by the legislature, despite the fact that vouchers have always been defeated in state referenda.

“Betsy DeVos paid for a voucher referendum in Michigan in 2000. It was defeated overwhelmingly. So Michigan went for unbridled Choice with charter schools, no district lines. 80% of the charters in Michigan operate for profit, more than any other state. Michigan’s standing on national tests dropped from the middle of the pack, to the bottom, between 2003 and 2013. Detroit is overrun with charters yet it continues to be the lowest scoring district in the nation.

“Milwaukee has public schools, charters, and vouchers, and all three sectors are low performing.

“Demand for vouchers is actually very low: Indiana, only 3% use them, less in Louisiana. Only 6% in charters. Yet every dollar for vouchers and charters is taken away from the schools that educate the great majority of children.

“Katherine Stewart in the current American Prospect: “Proselytizers and Profiteers.” Religious extremists in the voucher movement made “useful idiots of the charter movement.” Community public schools replaced by Corporate charter chains. Some of the biggest charter chains are owned and run by evangelicals and fundamentalists.

“The real Dark Money wants vouchers, religious schools, homeschooling, charters, anything but public schools.

“DeVos, American Federation for Children
Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity (Libre Initiative) (AZ referendum)
ALEC— model legislation for charters, vouchers, ending certification, breaking unions.

“Public schools struggle where there is high poverty.

“Income inequality is the scourge of our society.

“Privatizing public schools won’t solve poverty.

“Hopeful signs:

*Virginia election: pro-public schools, many of the winning candidates are teachers

*Douglas County, CO, rebuff to vouchers

*upcoming referendum in AZ on vouchers, which Koch brothers want to knock off the ballot

*In 20 State referenda, vouchers have lost every single time.

*support for charters dropped from 51% to 39% in the past year, among both Democrats and Republicans, largely in response to scandals, prosecutions, and also NAACP criticism of charters.

“The origin of school choice was in segregated states fighting the Brown decision.

“Betsy DeVos is such a polarizing figure that she reminds us of the importance of public schools.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing, Unions, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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