Archives for category: Charter Schools
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Linda Darling-Hammond: Can Public Education Survive Betsy DeVos?

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2017 //
34

Linda Darling-Hammond surveys the wreckage of the privatization movement and assesses whether Betsy DeVos’s failed policies in Michigan will inflict further harm on the nation’s embattled public schools.

The article is well worth reading. It contains useful data.

However, I have some caveats.

I greatly admire Linda and her scholarship, but we have a fundamental difference about charter schools. As currently configured, I see them as an integral part of the privatization movement. She thinks there are good charters and bad charters. This is true, but the charter idea itself has been captured by people like DeVos who are hostile to public schools and equity. I agree with the NAACP that no new charters should be created until charters meet the same standards of accountability and transparency as public schools, and stop cherry picking the students likeliest to get good test scores. The good charters, in my view, should be part of the school district, given a charter to meet a need, and regularly supervised for compliance with state and federal laws.

Darling-Hammond overstates, from what I know, the extent to which California’s charter industry is regulated and supervised; too many very bad charters are rejected by the district, rejected by the county, then approved by the state board. Even some under investigation for fraud get new charters in California. And supervision is virtually non-existent. It is the financial and political clout of the California Charter School Association that protects the charter industry, not their academic success.

Darling-Hammond accurately shows the segregating impact of school choice on the neediest children, as in New Orleans, where the best charter schools serve an elite white enrollment and poor black children get to choose among D and F rated charter schools.

In praising the charter schools of Massachusetts, she does not mention that the state overwhelmingly rejected an expansion of charters, nor does she mention the reasons for the negative vote:

1) deep budget cuts to public schools that serve most children to fund schools for a small number of children;

2) loss of local democratic control to unaccountable charter corporations;

3) recognition that some charters act like publicly-funded private schools, with their own admissions and discipline policies.

I wish she had mentioned that Al Shanker turned against the charter movement that he inspired. In 1993, only five years after touting the promise of small, unionized, teacher-led charter schools, Shanker declared that charters were no different from vouchers and that they had been captured by private interests that would use his idea to bust unions and destroy public education. He was right. More than 90% of charters are non-union. Although a few charter teachers have formed unions, they have to fight the charter owners and risk being fired. The anti-union Walton Family Foundation claims to have funded one of every four charters in the nation. It is also a major donor to Teach for America. It is “all for the kids,” of course, but the Waltons home state of Arkansas is one of the poorest in the nation. Some local beneficence and minimum wages for parents hired for full-time jobs might really help the kids more than charter schools and TFA.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Alex Molnar: Spinning Rightwing Ideology into Gold

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2017 //
13

Alex Molnar, research professor and publications director at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, writes here about the privatization movement and its sustained attack on public education.

He writes:

Today, politicians in thrall to neoliberal ideology seek to subordinate the democratic mission of public education to a theory of market-driven economic development and social organization. Policy deliberations are now dominated by of econometric modeling and production function research. This modeling and research is often used, inappropriately, to make decisions about the value of education reforms. The mathematical models used by researchers are made to “work” only by assuming away much of the real world in which people live and students learn. The phantasmagorical belief in neutral “scientific” expertise as the primary basis for policymaking has, therefore, profoundly antihuman as well as antidemocratic implications — a topic Sheila Dow takes up in “People Have Had Enough of Experts.”[5]

The major education reforms of the past 35 years — education vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, and education savings accounts — all seek to remove public schools from the control of elected bodies; to subject them to the “laws” of the “market”; and to put them at the service of the economic elite. The world being called into existence is based on the belief that anyone, but not everyone, can succeed—a world of winners and losers, each of whom has earned his or her fate.

Of course, if the privatizers actually believed in science or evidence, they would have already abandoned vouchers, which has no research to support it, and whose results have been shown in some places to actually harm students. In effect, students are given a low-cost voucher to spend in a school where teachers are usually uncertified and the curriculum is based on 19th century ideas that have been long disproven. It is ideology, not science, that drives the voucher movement, and its wicked stepsisters, tax credits and education savings accounts.

Those who believe in evidence would also demand transparency and accountability from privately managed charter schools, which in many states are excused from such inconveniences and use their freedom to kick out and exclude students they don’t want.

Molnar examines the policies of the past 25 years and their neglect of the lives of people affected by them.

He writes:

Over the past two and a half decades, the poor in privatized urban schools have been successfully harnessed to the delivery of reliable profits to investors and munificent salaries to executives. At the same time, the working class has discovered that schools in their communities often cost more than they can afford to pay. The decades of wage stagnation, unemployment, and tax shifting have taken their toll. Teachers and the unions that had won them the relatively high wages, job security, and benefits that are a distant memory for many blue collar workers became a useful target for the ideologues and politicians pursuing neoliberal reforms.

The neoliberal argument is that public schools cost too much (the largest item in a school budget is for teacher salaries) and performed too poorly to justify the tax dollars they commanded. If “star” teachers could be freed from the union wage scale to earn what they were worth, the resulting competition would create incentives for better teacher performance. Mediocre teachers would earn less, and low performing teachers would be fired. The mechanism proposed for measuring teacher performance was assessing the performance of their students on standardized tests. So began the policy embrace of “Value Added Assessment” (VAA). In the kind of methodologically sophisticated, intellectually fatuous study that has become all too common, Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff claim to have found long-term economic benefits for students whose teachers have higher “value added” scores.[22]

This is a valuable overview of the recent past, the present, and the likely future. Unless we fight back hard.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Obama, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Testing, Trump, VAM, Vouchers

Los Angeles: Final Results of the Voting

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2017 //
9

Final results are in for the LAUSD school board election, where the billionaires outspent everyone else in their attempt to grab control of the district and put at least half of the students into charter schools:

Monica Garcia, chief charter cheerleader, defender of John Deasy and enabler of the $1 Billion iPad debacle, defeated Lisa Alva and Carl Petersen, with 57% of the vote. A big loss for public schools.

Steve Zimmer, president of the board, came in first in his district with 47.5% of the vote and will face a run-off against the billionaire’s favorite, Nick Melvoin, who received 31.2% of the vote.

In District 6, charter teacher Kelly Fitzpatrick-Gonez came in first with 36.1% of the vote. She will face Imelda Padilla in the runoff, who received 31% of the vote.

Supporters of public schools have their work cut out for them to assure victories for Zimmer and Padilla in the runoffs.

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Los Angeles, Privatization

Charter Advocates Slip Legislation Through Without Notice in Arkansas

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2017 //
16

The Trump-DeVos privatization agenda is moving fast in the Deep South, where some people long for the good old days of segregated schools.

In Arkansas, charter advocates said there would be no action on a bill to turn public facilities over to charters, then introduced the bill with no opponents present, and passed it without debate. Word is that the same legislation was introduced in Missouri, though I don’t yet official confirmation of that.

Click to access SB308.pdf

This bill requires local school districts to hand any underutilized buildings over to charter operators.

The charter operators get free public space that was paid for by local taxpayers.

This sounds ominously like ALEC at work. ALEC is a fringe-right organization that writes model legislation and gives it to its members (state legislators), who fill in the name of their state, and lobby for privatization and deregulation. The beneficiaries of ALEC legislation are corporations and alt-right folk.

ALEC opposes local control. It supports vouchers, charters, state takeovers of school districts, high-stakes testing, and opposes unions, tenure, and any rights for teachers.

No doubt the Walton family helped this legislation along, perhaps with the help of their paid-for academics at the University of Arkansas, endowed by the billionaire Waltons.

Categories ALEC, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Missouri, Privatization

SomeDAM Poet: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
13

The Good Old Days

Don’t you miss the good old days?
The days of school deforming ways?
When Arne ruled with iron hand
With Common Core and test and VAM?
And Cuomo plotted night and day
The way to make the schools obey?
And Rhee was riding on her broom
And closing schools and spreading doom?
And charter schools in neighborhoods
Were popping up like shrooms in woods
And billionaires were here and there
And all about and everywhere?
Don’t you miss reformy times
Immortalized by someDAM rhymes?
Well, good old days of yesteryear
Have never left, are still right here
The good old days were never gone
The school deform lives on and on

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM

Red Queen in LA: Why Can’t Public Schools and Charter Schools Get Along?

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
12

Sara Roos, aka the Red Queen in LA, explains here why public schools and charter schools are bound to clash.

To begin with, they are competing for a finite amount of public dollars and a finite number of students. It is a zero-sum competition.

To make matters worse, the needs of both entities is not reciprocal, nor is the distribution of these commodities without impact on the other entity. That is, the cost to educate every pupil is not equivalent, some are costlier than others. And where you cluster funds is not a matter of +$1 here means -$1 there because the impact of a dollar matters depending where it is. There are economies of scale, for example, to be gained or it is long-acknowledged that severely disadvantaged communities require more money to come to equity (this is what Federal Title 1 dollars provide, it is why the new “LCFF” uses a formula to assign more money per capita to poorer schools than to relatively richer ones).

Therefore while it’s possible for both entities to tolerate one another, it’s not possible for their existence not to impact the other.

That’s where the fallacy lies. Folks who wonder ingenuously why we can’t all “just get along”, seem not to understand the pernicious consequences of charter schools on the totality of a public education system.

The underlying game-plan of charters is to rarefy its pupil-population, by hook or by crook. Sometimes in the past, this has been done illegally through fixing lotteries or selections processes. Sometimes the lottery process has been weighted through a sanctioned, if questionable, process. Empirical reports of “counseling out” already admitted kids are easy to come by; discouraging applicants to begin with through onerous application or enrollment procedures, for example, which disproportionately impact the “wrong sort” is another trick. There are many, many, many sleights of hand employed to fix the underlying demographic of a charter school in a certain fashion (there are, after all, many, many charter schools). The reciprocal of fashioning a student body just-so, means that elsewhere in the system whatever is overrepresented among charters, is underrepresented among RDS.

The “business plan” of charters is to manipulate the student and parent demographic to their advantage, and that disadvantages the public schools.

Sure we can get along if what you need does not negatively effect what I need. But your school system inherently, necessarily, diminishes mine. It will inherently, necessarily, with time, bankrupt mine. And it will inherently, necessarily, with time grow what is to me democratically intolerable social inequity with time.

“Regular Public District Schools” were designed to be by, for and about the public: it is democracy itself.

Charters are simply the modern incarnation of ancient tribalism, constitution-era separatism, pre-Plessy “separate but equal” schools.

Sending your child – yes, yours – to sit beside someone who is different, smells different, looks different, speaks differently, thinks differently, acts different: this plurality is intrinsically valuable. It sustains a system of equal opportunity and it assures a possibility of awareness and tolerance of things-different.

As we march today nationally, even internationally, toward fascism, protecting with fierceness a public education system of equity for, and by us all, seems about as critical – most very especially for “progressive democrats” – as the very sustenance of democracy itself.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Segregation

Paul Thomas: Unpacking the Lies Behind the “Failing Schools” Narrative

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
12

Paul Thomas of Furman University taught high school in rural South Carolina for 18 years before becoming a college professor. He happens to be one of the nation’s leading authorities on the effects of poverty on children and schooling. Recently, he has been writing about the flaws of education journalism.

In this post, he unpacks the claim that public schools are “failing,” that (some) charter schools have found the secret sauce of innovation, and that public schools are resisting change. He cites two paragraphs from a recent article in Education Week that embody what he calls a “self-fulfilling prophesy.” Open the link to read the two paragraphs.

The article he cites does not mention the names of the charter schools that have unlocked the magic of innovation and hold the key to reforming recalcitrant public schools if only they were willing to change. It would be good to know where they are.

Thomas says these are “post-truth” claims. He is right on the face of it. If I knew of five or ten or twenty schools that held the key to reforming all of American education, I would name them and give everyone their location so all the world could see their amazing success.

Thomas writes:

The paragraphs above traffic in very predictable nonsense—”innovative charter schools” and public schools and educators who actively resist change—that resonates only with those who have no real experience in public education.

This nonsense is driven by the self-proclaimed innovators, few of whom are actual educators, and embraced by the public, most of whom have been students in public schools, and thus, believe they know the system.

Let’s here, then, unpack the nonsense…

The Great Lie about charter schools versus public schools is very complex. The lie begins with the hollow use of “innovation,” a term that means nothing except in the sort of pyramid-scheme reality now promoted by Trump and newly minted Secretary of Education DeVos.

The lie then falls apart when you unpack the claim that innovative charter schools will save public education; we must ask, if bureaucracy and mandates are crippling public schools, and freedom to be innovative is the key to charter schools, why not just release public schools from the bureaucracy and mandates so that all schools are free to innovate?

The answer reveals the circular and misleading logic of the Great Lie that is charter innovation: For decades, school choice advocates have struggled against the public remaining mostly against school choice, mostly in favor of their local public schools (even when the public holds a negative view of public schools in general). How, then, could the public be turned against public schools?

The solution has been relentless and ever-increasing mandates that guarantee the self-fulfilling prophesy of public schools.

From SOE DeVos to the EdWeek narrative above, relentless education reform has resulted in creating public schools and teachers trapped in mandates and then criticizing them for not being innovative.

If innovation is really the solution to the problem facing public schools (and I suspect it isn’t), teachers need autonomy.

Yet, education reform has systematically de-professionalized teaching, systematically made teaching and learning less effective, and systematically overwhelmed schools with impossible demands so that the public sees only a failing system, one that the innovator-propagandists can smear as resisting change, refusing to innovate, and doomed to failure—with only innovative charter schools to save the day.

When we peel back the post-truth rhetoric, evidence fails to support claims of charter school success, and five minutes in a public school reveal that schools and teachers are not incapable of “imagin[ing] dramatic change,” but are blocked from practicing their professional autonomy by the exact forces accusing them of being against reform.

Public school teachers have never had professional autonomy, and most cannot even go to the restroom when they need to.

Spitting in the face of public school teachers as the paragraphs above do is the worst of post-truth journalism.

I have now spent about the same amount of time as an educator in K-12 public schools and higher education.

The professional autonomy gulf between the two is stunning.

K-12 public schools and teachers are scapegoats in a ridiculous political charade that depends on post-truth journalism and a gullible public.

There is nothing innovative about that.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Mother Jones: Why Did Trump and DeVos Choose Florida as Their National Model for School Reform?

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
8

Kristina Rizga, the veteran education journalist at Mother Jones, explains why Trump and DeVos love Florida. Although the state has a constitutional ban on the use of public money for private and religious schools, although the state’s voters rejected Jeb Bush’s effort to change the state constitution in 2012, Florida has figured out numerous DeVious ways to circumvent the state constitution and the will of the voters.

Jeb Bush is the permanent state minister of education in Florida, and he loves school choice. He does not like public schools. The state has hundreds of charter schools, many of which are managed by for-profit entrepreneurs. The head of the education appropriations committee in the state senate is a member of a family that owns the state’s largest for-profit charter chain. But better yet, for the purposes of DeVos, who is a religious zealot, Florida has a tax-credit plan that funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to unregulated and unaccountable religious schools.

Rizga writes:

Tax credit scholarships provide a crafty mechanism to get around these obstacles. Tax credits are given to individuals and corporations that donate money to scholarship-granting institutions; if parents end up using those scholarships to send their kids to religious schools—and 79 percent of students in private schools are taught by institutions affiliated with churches—the government technically is not transferring taxpayer money directly to religious organizations.

While DeVos is best known as an advocate of vouchers, most veteran Beltway insiders told me that a federal voucher program is very unlikely. “Democrats don’t like vouchers. Republicans don’t like federal programs, and would rather leave major school reform decisions up to states and local communities,” Rick Hess, a veteran education policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute said. “Realistically, nobody thinks they’ve got the votes to do a federal school choice law, especially in the Senate.”

This political reality is perhaps why Trump and DeVos are singling out Florida’s tax credit programs as a way to expand private schooling options. While Trump and DeVos have not specified what shape this policy might take at the federal level, most of these changes will come from the state legislators. Republicans have full control of the executive and legislative branches in 25 states, and control the governor’s house or the state legislature in 44 states. At least 14 states have already proposed bills in this legislative session that would expand some form of vouchers or tax credit scholarships, according to a Center for American Progress analysis. (And 17 states already provide some form of tax credit scholarships, according to EdChoice.)

This perfect storm for pushing through various voucher schemes comes at a time when the results on the outcomes of these programs “are the worst in the history of the field,” according to New America researcher Kevin Carey, who analyzed the results in a recent New York Times article. Until about two years ago, most studies on vouchers produced mixed results, with some showing slight increases in test scores or graduation rates for students using them. But the most recent research has not been good, according to Carey: A 2016 study, funded by the pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation and conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, found that students who used vouchers in a large Ohio program “have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”

Businesses make gifts to Step Up for Students. They get a tax credit. Step Up for Students gets a hefty cut of the take. It currently has about $500 million to use to fund vouchers for private and religious schools that the state does not regulate or supervise. The voucher-receiving schools report attendance, but are not subject to the state standards, curriculum, or tests, and they do not report on academic performance.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, Privatization, School Choice, Testing, Vouchers

Norm Scott: The Battle to Save JHS 145 from Eva Tonight

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2017 //
8

Retired teacher Norm Scott writes:

While closing schools is not as widespread as it was under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, it is still occurring and it is very troubling. The Department of Education still fails to provide proper resources for schools and then calls them failures… James Eterno, ICE blog

I’m taking the subway up to Yankee Stadium tonight, not for a Yankee game, but to take the long walk from there to 1000 Teller Ave for the JHS 145 hearing. I never go to the Bronx, even for Yankee games, because it is as far away from where I live as possible and still be in NYC.

If Eva and her little band of slimeballs show up to tell us about their scholars I’m going to be retching, so I better not eat.

This is not about closing a struggling school but about yet another giveaway of a school building to Eva Moskowitz, who has enough money to rent Radio City Music Hall for a test-prep rally, but wants to toss poor kids into the street in another avaricious grab. And the DOE is closing the school – or trying to – because they fear the slings and arrows of the charter lobby publicity machine.

As for the UFT — they are supposedly doing things behind the scenes. Ho-hum –when what is needed is a strong public stand against the Farina/deB giveaway to Eva. DeB thinks if he pays off charters they will lay off him in the election. Good luck with that.

I reported on teacher Jim Donahue’s heroic efforts to help organize resistance — Closing JHS 145 So Eva/Success Academy Can Ge..

When Jim spoke at the UFT Ex Bd they acted dumb — it was Jim and MORE that asked for the item to be pulled from the March 22 PEP agenda which so far has not happened. March 22 may turn into a redux of Bloomberg era resistance.

James Eterno reported on tonight’s hearing at the ICE blog:

SCHOOL CLOSING BATTLE IN BRONX TONIGHT

The common perception from the UFT is that school closings are not a real problem under the current Mayor Bill de Blasio and his Chancellor Carmen Farina. While closing schools is not as widespread as it was under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, it is still occurring and it is very troubling. The Department of Education still fails to provide proper resources for schools and then calls them failures.

Tonight there will be a Joint Public Hearing to save Junior High School 145 in the Bronx. JHS 145 is slated for closure. Eva Moskowitz has already claimed the building for one of her Success Academy charter schools.

The only trouble with this arrangement is the school community at 145 is waging a valiant fight to save their school. Tonight is their Joint Public Hearing, a public meeting required before a school can be closed. If you can make it to the Bronx this evening, I suggest that you attend the hearing to show your support for 145. Get there before 6:00 p.m. to sign up to speak. Schools targeted for closure need the public to be behind them to have any chance of surviving.

I certainly know how the JHS 145 people feel as Jamaica High School, where I taught for 28 years, was phased out and then closed in 2014.

Here is an email from MORE leader Jia Lee on tonight’s JHS 145 hearing.

Colleagues,

An injury to one is an injury to all. Success Academy is slated to take over the building where JHS 145 has been for generations. Incredibly, SA has advertised for their new middle school even before the vote has taken place at the March 22 PEP.

The staff and families of JHS 145 are fighting to keep their school open. They serve students who have been mislabled based on faulty test score metrics. A large showing of support for the school and resistance against charterization will send a message to the DOE that we will not stand by while they destroy public schools.

Please join me at this joint hearing with JHS 145 and Success Academy

JHS 145
1000 Teller Ave. Bronx NY
Take any train to Yankee Stadium or
take the A or 1 train to 181 Street in Washington Heights, then take the Bx35 bus toward the BX.

Categories Charter Schools, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Carl Petersen: Employees of Scandal-Ridden Celerity Charter Chain Donated to Monica Garcia, Their Cheerleader on LAUSD Board

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2017 //
2

Carl Petersen is running against Monica Garcia for the LAUSD seat in District 2. Garcia has long been one of the most vociferous and aggressive proponents of charter schools expansion in the district. So it is not surprising that she has received campaign contributions from the owner and employees of the Celerity Educational Group, the charter chain currently under investigation by the district and by the FBI.

Petersen is a father of five and an advocate for students with special needs.

Both Petersen and another candidate, Lisa Alva, received endorsements by the Network for Public Education.

If there is a runoff including Garcia, friends of public schools and public integrity should work hard to elect either Petersen or Alva.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization
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