Archives for category: Charter Schools
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Corporate Reform Groups Merging: A Sign of Weakness or Strength?

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2017 //
6

Politico reports that two groups advocating for privatization and against teacher tenure are merging.

The merger is presented in typical “reform” doublespeak as a “victory,” but to the naked eye it appears to be an admission of defeat, an admission that neither group has been successful.

50CAN began as ConnCAN, with billionaire funding (supplied largely by the infamous Sackler family, which gained billions by producing and marketing Oxycontin, which is at the center of a national opiod crisis). 50CAN is supposed to spread privately managed charters everywhere, but what it can’t do is cook the research, which shows that charters don’t perform better than public schools unless they cherrypick their students, and many underperform public schools. Their new partner, Campbell Brown’s PEJ, has brought law suits intended to destroy the rights of teachers, but none of its lawsuits has been successful; its lawsuit in Minnesota was thrown out without so much as a hearing. You might say it was laughed out of court, by the judge.

EXCLUSIVE: GROUPS TEAM UP TO MAKE BIGGER MARK: Two reform groups are teaming up to drive change in state education policy by using the courts. The nonprofit 50CAN is joining forces with the Partnership for Educational Justice, a nonprofit founded by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, which is known for lawsuits targeting state policies the group says allow ineffective teachers to remain in the classroom. The partnership will allow 50CAN to get involved in litigation for the first time. And it will allow the Partnership’s small staff to draw on 50CAN’s policy expertise to better determine where lawsuits might be successful.

– The Partnership for Educational Justice will retain its name and pro bono legal help, but 50CAN will serve as PEJ’s fiduciary board. Both organizations will continue their push against teacher tenure laws in three states – Minnesota, New Jersey and New York – and may look at litigation on other issues, like school funding. “50CAN has never done any impact litigation work, so we see an opportunity to provide the backend support for their work in a way that helps them go further,” said 50CAN CEO Marc Porter Magee. “I really think the next set of successes in education reform are going to come from these kinds of collaborations.” Ralia Polechronis, executive director of the Partnership for Educational Justice, said “the beauty of a partnership like this is that PEJ can take advantage of the policy expertise that 50CAN has at a very local level.”

– The Partnership for Educational Justice has yet to prevail in lawsuits aimed at ending teacher tenure policies in Minnesota, New Jersey or New York. And the organization suffered a setback Monday when the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld a dismissal of its lawsuit, The Star Tribune reports. Porter Magee said the lawsuits aren’t intended to bring about quick change, but are “long-term commitments.”

As long as the money keeps coming in, the groups will survive. Results don’t matter.

Categories Charter Schools, ConnCAN, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Privatization, Teacher Tenure

Erika Christakis: The War on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2017 //
33

Writing in The Atlantic, Erika Christakis describes “the war on public schools” that readers of this blog know well, but that has been sold to the public as “reform.”

She writes:

“Few people care more about individual students than public-school teachers do, but what’s really missing in this dystopian narrative is a hearty helping of reality: 21st-century public schools, with their record numbers of graduates and expanded missions, are nothing close to the cesspools portrayed by political hyperbole. This hyperbole was not invented by Trump or DeVos, but their words and proposals have brought to a boil something that’s been simmering for a while—the denigration of our public schools, and a growing neglect of their role as an incubator of citizens.

“Americans have in recent decades come to talk about education less as a public good, like a strong military or a noncorrupt judiciary, than as a private consumable. In an address to the Brookings Institution, DeVos described school choice as “a fundamental right.” That sounds appealing. Who wouldn’t want to deploy their tax dollars with greater specificity? Imagine purchasing a gym membership with funds normally allocated to the upkeep of a park.

“My point here is not to debate the effect of school choice on individual outcomes: The evidence is mixed, and subject to cherry-picking on all sides. I am more concerned with how the current discussion has ignored public schools’ victories, while also detracting from their civic role. Our public-education system is about much more than personal achievement; it is about preparing people to work together to advance not just themselves but society. Unfortunately, the current debate’s focus on individual rights and choices has distracted many politicians and policy makers from a key stakeholder: our nation as a whole. As a result, a cynicism has taken root that suggests there is no hope for public education. This is demonstrably false. It’s also dangerous.”

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

BREAKING NEWS: Senate Rejects Trump Budget Cuts, Reduces School Choice Requests

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2017 //
7

Education Week reports on decisions made by Senate and House committees that preserve programs targeted for deep cuts by the Trump administration and sharp rebuffs to Trump plans to expand school choice. However, the federal appropriation for charter schools was increased by $25 million, which is a big victory for DeVos and a rebuff to the NAACP.


Lawmakers overseeing education spending dealt a big blow to the Trump administration’s K-12 budget asks in a spending bill approved by a bipartisan vote Wednesday.

The legislation would leave intact the main federal programs aimed at teacher training and after-school funding. And it would seek to bar the U.S. Department of Education from moving forward with two school choice initiatives it pitched in its request for fiscal year 2018, which begins Oct. 1.

The bill, which was approved unanimously by the Senate budget subcommittee that oversees health, education and labor spending, would provide $2.05 billion for Title II, the federal program that’s used to hire and train educators. Both the House spending committee and the Trump administration have proposed scrapping the program, so it remains in jeopardy despite the Senate’s support.

The measure rejects another high-profile cut pitched by the Trump administration, $1.2 billion for the 21st Century Community Learning Center program, which helps school districts cover the cost of afters-chool and summer-learning programs. The House also refused to sign off on the Trump administration’s pitch to eliminate the program. Instead, it voted to provide $1 billion for 21st Century, meaning the program would almost certainly see some funding in the 2018-19 school year.

The panel also dealt a blow to the administration’s school choice ambitions. And the bill seeks to stop the Education Department from moving forward on a pair of school choice programs it proposed in its budget request. The administration had sought a $1 billion boost for the nearly $15 billion Title I program, the largest federal K-12 program, which is aimed at covering the cost of educating disadvantaged students. The Trump administration had wanted to use that increase to help districts create or expand public school choice programs. And it had hoped to use the Education Innovation and Research program to nurture private school choice.

The Senate bill essentially rejects both of those pitches. It instead would provide a $25 million boost for Title I, and $95 million for the research program, a slight cut from the current level of $100 million.

But importantly, the legislation wouldn’t give U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team the authority to use that money for school choice. In fact, the committee said in language accompanying the bill that the secretary of Education Betsy DeVos must get permission from Congress to create a school choice initiative with the funds.

A House appropriations panel also rejected the school choice initiatives in a budget bill approved earlier this year. Taken together, that’s a major setback for DeVos’ number one priority.

But the Senate bill does include a $25 million increase for charter school grants, which would bring them to $367 million. That’s not as high as the $167 million boost the administration asked for, or even as high as the $28 million the House is seeking.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Pennsylvania: Debate about School Choice, September 19

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2017 //
6

Here is an event you won’t want to miss:

CONSIDER IT: SCHOOL CHOICE AND THE CASES FOR TRADITIONAL PUBLIC EDUCATION AND CHARTER SCHOOLS

September 19 @ 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM Hilton Reading

Berks County Community Foundation
Panelists:

Carol Corbett Burris: Executive Director of the Network for Public Education

Alyson Miles: Deputy Director of Government Affairs for the American Federation for Children

James Paul: Senior Policy Analyst at the Commonwealth Foundation

Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig: Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and the Director of the Doctorate in Educational Leadership at California State University Sacramento

Karin Mallett: The WFMZ TV anchor and reporter returns as the moderator

School choice has been a hot topic in Berks County, in part due to a lengthy and costly dispute between the Reading School District and I-LEAD Charter School.

The topic has also been in the national spotlight as President Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have focused on expanding education choice.

With this in mind, a discussion on school choice is being organized as part of Berks County Community Foundation’s Consider It initiative. State Sen. Judy Schwank and Berks County Commissioners Chairman Christian Leinbach are co-chairs of this nonpartisan program, which is designed to promote thoughtful discussion of divisive local and national issues while maintaining a level of civility among participants.

The next Consider It Dinner will take place Tuesday, September 19, 2017, at 5 p.m. at the DoubleTree by Hilton Reading, 701 Penn St., Reading, Pa. Tickets are available here. For $10 each, tickets include dinner, the panel discussion, reading material, and an opportunity to participate in the conversation.

https://bccf.org/event/consider-it-2017/

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Pennsylvania, School Choice

How Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools and the Children Lost

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2017 //
9

More than any other state, Michigan placed its bets on charter schools. This article shows what happened. Republican Governor John Engler sold his party on the miracle of school choice. Betsy DeVos jumped on the Choice bandwagon and financed its grip on the legislature. Although the article doesn’t mention it, Betsy and her husband funded a voucher referendum in 2000 that was overwhelmingly defeated.

The author Mark Binelli describes the mess that choice and charters have made of the state’s education system. The state is overrun by unaccountable charters, most of which operate for profit.

The damage has fallen most heavily on black children, especially in Detroit and in the districts where the state installed emergency managers and gave the public schools to for-profit charter operators.

Rich districts still have public schools.

Binelli writes:

“Michigan’s aggressively free-market approach to schools has resulted in one of the most deregulated educational environments in the country, a laboratory in which consumer choice and a shifting landscape of supply and demand (and profit motive, in the case of many charters) were pitched as ways to improve life in the classroom for the state’s 1.5 million public-school students. But a Brookings Institution analysis done this year of national test scores ranked Michigan last among all states when it came to improvements in student proficiency. And a 2016 analysis by the Education Trust-Midwest, a nonpartisan education policy and research organization, found that 70 percent of Michigan charters were in the bottom half of the state’s rankings. Michigan has the most for-profit charter schools in the country and some of the least state oversight. Even staunch charter advocates have blanched at the Michigan model.

“The story of Carver is the story of Michigan’s grand educational experiment writ small. It spans more than two decades, three governors and, now, the United States Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, whose relentless advocacy for unchecked “school choice” in her home state might soon, her critics fear, be going national. But it’s important to understand that what happened to Michigan’s schools isn’t solely, or even primarily, an education story: It’s a business story. Today in Michigan, hundreds of nonprofit public charters have become potential financial assets to outside entities, inevitably complicating their broader social missions. In the case of Carver, interested parties have included a for-profit educational management organization, or E.M.O., in Georgia; an Indian tribe in a remote section of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; and a financial firm in Minnesota. “That’s all it is now — it’s moneymaking,” Darrel Redrick, a charter-school proponent and an administrator at Carver at the time I visited, told me.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Deregulation, Detroit, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Michigan

Master of Disruption Will Speak to National Charter School Conference

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2017 //
25

Clayton Christensen, the leading advocate of DISRUPTION, will address the “National Summit on Education Reform,” sponsored by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence. He will speak on Thursday November 30 in Nashville, as Jeb’s group celebrates a solid decade of efforts to privatize public education. Don’t expect to see or hear about charter school frauds or the failure of vouchers to improve student test scores or the looting of public funds by virtual charter schools.

If you are going, be sure to read the debunking of disruption by Harvard professor Jill Lepore. She demonstrates that disruption is a fraud, a hoax. Even the business disruptions that Christensen boasts about were actually failures. “Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence….”

Read Judith Shulevitz’s takedown of disruption in The New Republic, and how it has emboldened those who want to destroy public education and diminish democracy. Eli Broad’s love of disruption produced the failed leadership of Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein.

Shulevitz wrote (in 2013):

“But when Broad’s “change agents” move into the institutions they’ve been taught to shake up, as dozens have now done, we can see how disruption, well, disrupts—not just “the status quo,” but peoples’ lives. Teachers quit en masse or are fired. Nearby schools close, forcing students to travel to distant ones. School boards divide and bicker. Parents picket. Broad-affiliated superintendents all over the country—Atlanta; Philadelphia; Rochester, New York; Sumter, South Carolina—have resigned or been forced out after no-confidence votes, corruption or cheating scandals, or, in one case, the discovery of alleged irregularities with a doctorate degree.”

Bringing a disruptor into your school district is like inviting an arsonist into your home. You will have change aplenty, but you will lose your home and possibly your family.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Disruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Privatization

Join the Fight to Save Public Schools in Arkansas!

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2017 //
2

Save Our Schools Arkansas and Grassroots Arkansas are sponsoring a showing of “Backpack Full of Cash” on Thursday September 7 from 6:30-8:30 pm at Philander Smith College (M.L. Smith Auditorium) in Little Rock. The event is sponsored by the Schott Foundation for Public Education and SOS Arkansas and Grassroots Arkansas.

All who are concerned about the future of public education as a basic human right are encouraged to attend. Join the Fight to stop privatization of what belongs to all of us!

Parents, educators, students, and other concerned citizens are urged to attend.

In response to the lobbying of representatives of the Walton family, the Legislature stripped Little Rock of local control. The pretext was that 6 of its 48 schools were low-performing.

Learn about the struggle to restore our democratic rights and save our public schools.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Jersey Jazzman: What Makes a No-Excuses Charter School?

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2017 //
31

Jersey Jazzman tries to figure out the definition of a no-excuses charter school. Is it in the eye of the beholder or is there actually a definition that is widely accepted. He traces the ideology back to Dtephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s 2003 book, “No Excuses.” I suggest he also take a look at David Whitman’s 2008 book “Sweating the Small Stuff,” which highlights several exemplary no-excuses schools. Whitman’s book was sponsored by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Soon after he finished it, Whitman became Arne Duncan’s chief speechwriter. That helps explain a lot about Duncan’s love of no-excuses charters. Even earlier was Samuel Casey Carter’s “No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools (2000), which was launched by the Heritage Foundation, thrilled by the idea that schools could get high test scores without spending more money or reducing poverty.

The impulse behind the no-excuses schools, I believe, is neo-colonialism, the desire to teach poor children of color to behave like affluent white children.

I continue to impressed by the Dobbie and Fryer study of charter schools in Texas that found that they had no bearing on test scores or earnings. Dobbie and Fryer are supporters of charters.

They wrote:

“We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings, while other types of charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earn- ings. Moving to school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease test scores also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase test scores have no discernible impact on earnings. In contrast, high school graduation effects are predictive of earnings effects throughout the distribution of school quality. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of what might explain our set of facts.”

The paper concludes with this speculation:

“Charter schools, in particular No Excuses charter schools, are considered by many to be the most important education reform of the past quarter century. At the very least, however, this paper cautions that charter schools may not have the large effects on earnings many predicted. It is plausible this is due to the growing pains of an early charter sector that was “building the plane as they flew it.” This will be better known with the fullness of time. Much more troubling, it seems, is the possibility that what it takes to increase achievement among the poor in charter schools deprives them of other skills that are important for labor markets.”

Maybe conformity and obedience are not enough.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Ohio: Charter School Sponsor Gets Reprieve Even Though Its Charters Are Rated F

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2017 //
8

Thanks to Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy for alerting me to this shocking and disgusting story.

A charter school sponsor, the Ohio Council of Community Schools, is responsible for 50 charter schools. It was exempted from any accountability because it split from its partner, the University of Toledo.

“The council and the university have been partners for 15 years in sponsoring – creating and overseeing charter schools – after the state decided to let more organizations beyond the Ohio Department of Education sponsor schools. While the university was the official legal sponsor, it created the council as a non-profit to do all the oversight work.

“The relationship has been a controversial one, drawing accusations over the years of favoritism and nepotism. See below for more on those concerns.

“Most recently, the state rated the two as “ineffective” as a charter sponsor last fall after their 50 schools landed an academic rating of zero – the equivalent of an F – as a group. Those schools include 11 in Cleveland.

“If student test scores did not improve by the end of this school year, the partners would have been booted out of the sponsorship business.

“Not anymore.

“By splitting from the university, the Council moves on with a clean slate and the poor results will be assigned to the university.”

No results. No accountability. State money wasted. Children’s education harmed.

Who are the criminals in state government who permit this fraud to continue.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Privatization

Alan Singer: Say NO to Unqualified Teachers in New York’s Classrooms

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2017 //
11

Influential charter operators in New York have been pressing for exemption from certification requirements for their teachers. This is a truly bad idea. Why should children have unqualified teachers?

Alan Singer writes here about the fight against this effort to lower standards for charter teachers, which is not only bad on its face, but would make these “teachers” unemployable in real public schools.

He writes:

“Politically influential charter school operators in the State of New York are on the verge of pushing through an administrative ruling that eliminates the requirement that children attending their schools be taught by certified teachers. This is happening at the same time that support for charter schools across the nation is in steep decline, probably because of Donald Trump’s endorsement of charter schools and private-school vouchers. According to a recent public opinion poll the growing opposition to charter schools is bipartisan. Support among Republicans declined by 13%. Democratic support for charter schools dropped by 11%.

“The Network for Public Education and New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) are organizing parents, teachers, and the public to flood the SUNY Trustees and the SUNY Charter Schools Institute with protests against the certification waiver proposal. Their opposition to the waiver is supported by the Deans of Schools of Education at eighteen colleges in the State University of New York system.

“Comments can be submitted online or mailed to Charter Schools Institute, State University of New York, 41 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 by September 10. You can also sign the NYSUT email letter. More information is available at the United University Professionals website.

“The Charter School teacher “decertification plan” is under review by political appointees on a sub-committee of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY). The SUNY Charter Schools Institute is interpreting its authority to ensure the “Governance, structure and operations of SUNY authorized charter schools” as authorization to eliminate teacher certification requirements. It calls the proposal alternative certification, but it allows charters to declare anyone they want to be a teacher. In a series of Huffington Posts I explained why this decertification proposal is a threat to public education and the political forces and financial donors behind the charter school plan. In this post I examine whether the people hired under this waiver are qualified to teach children.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Teachers and Teaching
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