Archives for category: Charter Schools
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New York City: Mayor de Blasio’s Capitulation to the Powerful Charter Lobby

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2017 //
51

There used to be a well-known saying: “You can’t fight City Hall.”

Change that to: “You can’t fight the charter lobby.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio ran for mayor with the promise that he would fight the charter lobby. He was a public school parent and had served on a community school board. I believed him. I endorsed him.

Then after he was elected, the billionaires showed him who runs education policy in Albany. Governor Cuomo, the recipient of large sums from the financial industry, became the charter cheerleader, even though charters enrolled only 3% of the children in the state. The Republican-led State Senate gives the charter industry whatever it wants. The charter industry’s best friend is State Senate Republican leader John Flanagan, who loves loves loves charters, but not in his own district on Long Island. Call him Senator NIMBY.

De Blasio wanted charters to pay rent if they could afford it. The legislature required the City to give free space to charters, even though public schools are overcrowded, and to pay their rent if they locate in private space.

In the recent legislative session, the mayor was told that the only way to get a two-year extension of mayoral control was to revive 22 charters that had been closed or abandoned for various reasons.

Now the mayor is seeking a “truce” with the private charter industry that sucks the students it wants from the public schools.

Sad.

Mayoral control is a failed experiment. New York City needs an independent Board of Education, which chooses the Chancellor and to whom the Chancellor reports. The Mayor should make appointments to that board, along with the borough presidents. Candidates should be screened for their qualifications and experience by an independent review board of civic leaders, a process used in the past.

The city needs a board prepared to support and defend the 1.1 million students in public schools, to provide a public forum for grievances, and to listen to their parents and communities.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New York City, Privatization

Los Angeles: New School Board President, a Charter School Operator, Calls for Unity

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2017 //
22

Two newsworthy items from Los Angeles:

First, the new school board elected charter chain operator Ref Rodriguez as its president. Rodriguez leads the PUC (Partnership Uplifting Communities) charter chain of 16 schools. Rodriguez called for unity after the just-concluded dirty election, the most expensive in U.S. history.

Politico reports:

“LA SCHOOL BOARD PRESIDENT SEEKS UNITY AFTER UGLY ELECTION: New Los Angeles school board president Ref Rodriguez says he will kick off his tenure by reaching out to fellow board members in one-on-one meetings. The goal: helping the nation’s second-largest school district heal from one of the ugliest and most expensive school board races in the district’s history, he said. Rodriguez, who was elevated to president last week in a 4-3 vote, told Morning Education he wants to meet with his colleagues away from the public and media spotlights to build new relationships and work on old ones. That includes meeting individually with two new board members who were elected earlier this year, Kelly Gonez and Nick Melvoin, who share his support for charter schools. And it means finding common ground with each of the three board members who voted not to install him as president last week. Rodriguez also said he wants the board to get together soon and collectively commit to some “guiding principles.”

– The race is like a “cloud hanging over us” – The school board race pitted charter school backers against teachers unions, generating $17 million in campaign spending. Supporters of charter schools ultimately came out on top, shifting the board’s politics with the election of Gonez and Melvoin, two former Obama administration staffers, in May. Rodriguez, who joined the board in 2015, is now part of the majority that supports charters. But despite the victory, the race is like a “cloud hanging over us,” Rodriguez said. “What I’m hoping to do is unify this board and get past all of that rhetoric.”

– The divisiveness over charter schools has been damaging, Rodriguez said. “The media doesn’t help us any,” he said, adding that the “meat of the story” isn’t about school choice. Rodriguez ticked off a number of other pressing priorities – like addressing a multi-billion deficit made worse by underfunded pensions and declining enrollment, with students leaving the district for charter schools, for example. To improve the district’s finances, local education officials are also working to launch a unified enrollment system that would allow families to apply online to any school in the district. After some contentious debate last month, the board voted unanimously to approve $16.7 million for the new enrollment system, while excluding independent charter schools from it for at least two years. Rodriguez said he’s not sure if the board will revisit the issue with charter school supporters in the majority. “I’m not sure where we’ll end up,” he said.

– Rodriguez also stressed the need to highlight the successes of traditional public schools, while increasing collaboration between public schools and charter schools. “Charter schools are not a panacea,” he said. “They don’t have the ‘secret sauce’ when it comes to quality and we have to stop pretending that they do.”

Second item from Los Angeles: the salary of school board members was more than doubled, to $125,000 if they have no other job.

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization

Former Charter Teacher: Why Teacher Attrition is High in Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2017 //
13

Alternet posted an informative article that explains why charter schools churn through teachers. It was written by Rann Miller, who taught for six years in a charter school in Camden, New Jersey.

He writes:

“John was fresh-out-of-college and had never set foot in a city school before. Hired the day before the school year started, he missed out on the two-and-a-half weeks of training the charter organization had given the rest of us on what to expect at a turnaround school in Camden, NJ. John lasted less than a week.

“I’d started the year as a history teacher, relieved to be without the responsibility of my own classroom and homeroom. But after five more teachers followed John out of the school building within the first month, I had both. When I left at the beginning of the next school year, seven more teachers were right behind me.

“When a school loses teachers, by choice or by chance, students are cheated out of continuity, while the goals and objectives of the entire organization can be hindered. In charter schools, including the ones where I taught for six years, this problem is particularly pronounced. Teachers leave charters at significantly higher rates when compared to traditional public schools. Among urban charter schools, it’s not uncommon to see teachers turning over at a rate of 30, 40 or even 50% a year. I’ve witnessed first hand—and experienced—why this is such a problem, and what causes teachers to flee. But I’ve also seen for myself that there are charter schools and networks that don’t mind high levels of teacher turnover. Turmoil and churn work for organizations that are determined to control both the makeup and the mindset of their faculty…

“The weeding process is all about maintaining control where there is none. It serves to remove “troublemakers”: the folks who will hold the organization accountable. For charter leadership looking to maintain sovereignty of mission and mission implementation, teachers who are independent thinkers and teachers with lives outside of schools are as much of a detriment as those deemed incompetent. The teachers who remain either like the Kool-Aid or at the very least are still thirsty.

“Teacher turnover is an effective tool for organizations that seek to shift accountability away from school leadership. High teacher attrition is an accountability loophole. Rather than rethink a mission that prizes drilling over teaching, or addressing why young teachers get burned out or why teachers of color walk away from the very communities they are so passionate about, some charter leaders will often put the blame on the leavers. “They couldn’t cut it,” you’ll hear them say. They’ll insist to stakeholders that some teachers weren’t good enough, while others weren’t the right “fit” for the organizational mission and culture. The charter school’s organizational leadership and mission remain intact; anyone who is not fighting for “our kids” has been let go.”

Read it all. Quite a story.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Speak Out for the Teaching Profession!

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2017 //
7

Many states are planning to lower standards for new teachers, because charter schools can’t recruit enough teachers to fill their staff.

Speak out against lowered standards!

Don’t let them destroy the teaching profession!

Click here and stand up for qualified teachers!

The Network for Public Education invites you to speak up and let the charter authorizers in New York know that every child deserves a well-prepared, professional teacher.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching

Jersey Jazzman: Do Charter Teachers Need to be Certified or Pass State Exams?

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2017 //
11

Jersey Jazzman explores the flap in New York about certification–or lack thereof–for charter school teachers.

The charter industry says, if we get the test scores, we don’t need teachers with masters’ degrees or certification…

JJ says:

Yes, “better results” are all that matters, no matter how practically small they may be. And no matter how you got them: if your gains are from student attrition, or narrowing the curriculum, or onerous disciplinary policies that drive out students, or resource advantages, that’s just fine with SUNY (State University of New York). You should be able to bypass the teacher certification rules the loser NYC district schools have to follow, so long as those test scores stay high…

We’ve been through this over on my side of the Hudson. The charters, usually affiliated with larger networks, believe that their “successes” entitle them to train their own staffs outside of standard regulation by the state. The theory seems to be that traditional university-based teacher training programs are too… well, traditional.

…they shouldn’t have to subject their teachers to all that boring research and theory and intellectual inquisitiveness and whatnot. Just bring these prospective teachers into the charters, let them soak up the awesomeness, and then put them into schools…

Oh, sorry: charter schools. The data is thin, but that’s what appears to be happening with the Relay “Graduate” “School” of “Education,” the premier charter teacher training center in the Northeast. Despite some unsourced claims from Relay’s leadership, and some professional development contracts with districts like Newark and Camden and Philadelphia, it’s clear that Relay has become more a staffing firm for a particular group of charter chains than a broad provider of teacher training.

Relay is a phony “graduate” school. There is no faculty. No library. No research. Just charter teachers teaching other charter teachers. How to be awesome.

As Bruce Baker and Gary Miron have pointed out, this leads to a “company store” style of professional development, where charter teachers essentially pay back a part of their wages to their employers (or their employers’ partners) in exchange for the right to continuing working at their jobs — usually for lower wages than their public district school counterparts.

As many have noted, Relay is steeped in the “no excuses” style of pedagogy, exemplified by Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion. I contend it’s a type of teaching that would never, ever be accepted out in the leafy ‘burbs; one that makes the teacher the focus of the classroom instead of the student. This is yet another instance of the charter industry selling its schools as an antidote to race and class inequality, even as it imposes a different kind of schooling on urban students of color than the schooling found in affluent, majority-white suburban schools.

Relay has been at it for a few years now, but I’ve yet to see any empirical evidence that they’re doing any better than the university-based teacher training programs. Relay is placing most of its teachers into a separate group of schools, and most (if not all) of the teachers in those schools are being trained by Relay. Both Relay and its client charter schools make what Angus Shiva Mungal calls a “parallel education structure.” We’re not likely to see many Relay grads move into jobs currently held by traditionally trained teachers, which is what we would need to properly compare the two training paths.

Still, Relay has had to at least adhere to the form of university-based teacher training. Their “professors” may be inexperienced and utterly lacking in scholarly qualifications, but their graduates do get an actual teaching certification, based on a “graduate” “school” teacher training program. The SUNY proposal, however, does away with even the pretense of college-level training.

TFA and Relay will destroy the teaching profession if they can manage it.

They are a destructive force in education.

Speak out against this retrograde policy.

Categories Charter Schools, Fraud, Teacher Education

Detroit: New Superintendent Says District May Stop Authorizing Charters, Focus Instead on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2017 //
7

Good news from Detroit, the lowest performing urban district in the nation. After years of outsourcing students to privately managed charter schools, the new superintendent says he is considering no longer authorizing charters but focusing instead on improving traditional public schools.

Imagine asking a business to jumpstart competitors and you can see how wacky the current policy is.

I am very impressed by what I have heard about Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. Unlike his predecessors, who collaborated with the plan to destroy public education in Detroit, Vitti wants to fight for the public schools.

To seal his argument, Detroit’s much-maligned public schools outperform its charter schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Detroit, Supporting public schools

Mark Naison: How Charter Schools Stifle Innovation

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2017 //
6

Mark Naison is a professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in New York.

He writes:

How Charter Schools Have Stifled Educational Innovation and Fought the Opt Out Movement

Although charter schools were originally promoted as a vehicle to encourage educational experimentation, their meteoric growth in influence has actually coincided with a REDUCTION in innovation in schools because those promoting them most have also pushed for national testing and test based accountability measures for rating schools. In New York City, for example, the largest charter chains have fiercely opposed the opt out movement, and used their political influence to support state testing at all grade levels and the continued use of testing to rate teachers and schools. They have also virtually eliminated all instruction outside ELA and Math and used high test scores as a selling point, putting pressure on local public schools to raise their test scores to compete with them. They have helped create a political climate, in New York City and New York state, where teachers and principals in high poverty communities feel they might be subjecting themselves to a state takeover and eventual closing if they do anything to serve their students that doesn’t translate into higher test scores. Make no mistake about it, the Charter Lobby welcomes such an atmosphere. It is their version of educational entrepreneurship, even though its results are toxic in high need communities which need arts, sports, community history, and caring teachers and counselors to help students stay and thrive in schools.

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

New York: Allowing Non-Certified Teachers in Charter Schools Is Not a Done Deal!

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2017 //
31

Correction: I posted this morning that New York would allow charter “teachers” to be ncertified.

Not yet a done deal.

Stay tuned.

Categories Charter Schools, Teachers and Teaching

A Nashville School Board Member Warns Kentucky and Mississippi about the Charter Scams

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2017 //
8

Amy Frogge ran for the Metro Nashville School Board in 2012 as a concerned mom who was also a lawyer. She was unaware of the pitched battle about charters and privatization. She had the simple goal of improving public schools, which made her an enemy of the privatizers. She ran again last year and was re-elected. Both times, she faced candidates who outspent her by vast sums with out-of-state reformer cash. She was previously named to the Blog’s Honor Roll for her fortitude in standing up to the vilification by reformers and sticking to her promise to fight for public schools.

In this post, she writes that it is a new day in Nashville. High-profile charter operators arrived with big promises, then crashed and burned. The Nashville community sees them for the frauds they are.

She hopes to alert parents in Kentucky and Mississippi to beware, now that rightwing legislators have opened their state’s to the same scammers.

She writes:

“While my personal views and political positions have not changed at all since my first run for school board, the atmosphere surrounding education policy has changed drastically, both in Nashville and at a national level. Locals have finally become aware of the driving forces behind the school privatization movement, and alliances have shifted. After a newspaper editor was fired last fall, all of the politically-motivated, factually inaccurate “hit pieces” about me in the local paper (accompanied by comically bad photos) ceased. Many of the bad actors have either been fired or fled town- headed off to other less suspecting places that have not yet caught onto the privatization movement.

“At our last board meeting, we discussed LEAD Academy, often touted as a Miracle Charter School. LEAD likes to promote its 100% graduation rate, but as we learned at our last board meeting, this statistic is at the very least misleading, if not entirely untrue. In reality, LEAD high school has a 40% attrition rate, meaning that nearly half of students who start high school at LEAD don’t make it through to graduation. (So much for that 100% graduation rate!) It’s also clear that LEAD does not serve all students. Only one English Learner at LEAD has reached graduation in four graduating classes, and only three students with special needs are on track to graduate this year. Furthermore, student performance is decreasing in all tested areas for grades 3-8 at LEAD. Over a one-year period at LEAD, 13.5% more students scored basic or below in math, 17% more students scored basic or below in English Language Arts, and 42.6% more students scored basic or below in science.

“Ravi Gupta, head of RePublic Schools, left Nashville last year after a number of disturbing events occurred at his “no excuses” schools: First, several parents accused the RePublic of “abuse and neglect” of students, and Teach for America (which supplied most of its teachers) also expressed concerns about RePublic. Then, a parent accused RePublic of copyright violation for photocopying book passages (a common practice in charter schools to save money) containing inappropriate reading materials for middle school students. And most recently, parents filed a multi-million dollar class action lawsuit against RePublic for violation of federal law. Gupta is now trying to recreate himself as a political consultant of sorts with a new group called “The Arena,” standing in opposition to the new President. Ironically, though, Gupta’s own work in schools has been very much aligned with Betsy DeVos’s education agenda.

“Shaka Mitchell, former head of Rocketship, also left his post. Rocketship came into Nashville amidst great fanfare, thanks in large part to former Mayor Karl Dean (and his education liaison Wendy Tucker, mentioned in the attached article). However, only a few years later, Rocketship is now performing in the bottom 3% of schools statewide. Recently, Rocketship was also found in violation of state and federal laws for failing to provide services for students with disabilities and for English learners. Furthermore, Rocketship was censured for requiring homeless students to buy uniforms. Despite all this, the state has expressed its intent to force Nashville to open another Rocketship school this fall. This should tell you ALL you need to know about the charter school movement. (Hint: It’s not “about the children”)…

“The PR wall has begun to crumble, the veil is pulled back, and the truth emerges. Evidence has emerged that charter schools are contributing to the re-segregation of school systems, that they have a negative fiscal impact on school systems, and that they do not improve educational outcomes for students.

“In response, what do these folks do? Do they try to address these problems or worry that perhaps they are increasing inequity within MNPS? No, they work on the “spin.” They go after the reporter who wrote the attached story, demanding a retraction. They manipulate, harass, bully, race-bait, and attack. They tell charter parents that board members “hate charter parents and their kids,” hoping to whip these parents into a frenzy. This is the toxicity we have experienced in Nashville for years.

“Watch out Mississippi and Kentucky. These problems are headed your way. Steel your spine, and buckle your seatbelt. It doesn’t matter how professional or evidence-based you remain; if you don’t toe the line for charter schools, you will be attacked. You will be demeaned, bullied, and belittled. Get ready for the smear campaigns and character assassinations. But pay them no mind. Stay on the right side of history, and keep standing up for the students. Keep standing up for justice and equity. Keep standing up for public education. There’s important work to be done.”

Open the link to read the attached article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization

New York: Charter Schools Win Power to Hire Non-Professional “Teachers”

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2017 //
50

Blogger Peter Goodman reports that a last-minute deal was struck in the closing hours of the legislative session in New York State. Charter schools authorized by the State University of New York (which includes Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy schools) will not be required to hire professional, certified teachers. This is yet more evidence that charter schools are not public schools. Teachers in public schools must be professionals, with appropriate professional education and certification. To become a public school teacher, applicants must pass three different tests.

Goodman writes:

“Within days of the end of the special session of the state legislature the SUNY Board of Trustees approved a new regulation – teachers in SUNY authorized charter schools are no longer required to be certified by the State Department of Education – charter school networks can now self-certify teachers: no college courses, no student teaching, no pre-service tests. Politico writes,

“New York City’s charter school sector appears to have secured a significant victory in the 11th hour of the Legislative session Wednesday night, with a set of regulations that will make it much easier for large charter networks to hire more uncertified teachers.

“All other teachers must complete a program approved by the state education department as well as meet CAEP Standards (Council on the Accreditation Of Education Programs) and pass three separate tests: the edTPA (a self-assessment developed by Stanford), Educating All Students (multiple choice and essay test emphasizing teaching children with disabilities and English language learners) and a Content Specialty Test, also multiple choice and essay testing knowledge and literacy within their area of expertise. SUNY teachers would not have to meet ANY of these requirements.”

Charters are already free to hire as much as 30% of staff from uncertified persons.

Bottom line: the public schools have genuine standards for teachers. The charters authorized by SUNY have no standards at all for their teachers.

Categories Charter Schools, New York, Teachers
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