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Esquire Blogger: Charter Schools are a Vehicle for Graft and Profit

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2016 //
16

Charles Pierce is an incisive blogger for Esquire. Whenever he writes about schools, he is right on. In this post, he warns people in Massachusetts against a Question 2, which would expand the number of charters by 12 a year forever. Pierce knows that hedge fund managers and billionaires the funding this campaign, and the proposal is deliberately deceptive, appealing to people to improve their public schools. The real purpose, as we know, is to undermine public schools and fund privately managed schools that do not answer to the community that pays the taxes to support them.

Pierce quotes liberally from Carol Burris’s excellent report on the lack of oversight of charters in California.

He writes:

“There’s now a bill before Governor Jerry Brown that would tighten the public accountability standards for charter operators within the state. The evidence is now abundantly clear in a number of states: As it is presently constituted, the charter school movement is far better as an entry vehicle for fraud and corruption than it is for educating children. The fact that the charter industry is fighting to maintain its independent control over taxpayer funds is proof that the industry knows it, too.”

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a48531/california-charter-schools/

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

New York: Former Chair of State Board of Regents Endorses Vouchers and More Charters

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2016 //
28

Merryl Tisch stepped down as chair of the New York State Board of Regents at the end of her term in the spring of this year.

She recently gave an interview where she expressed her support for nonpublic education. Her view was similar to the plan put forward later by Donald Trump: The public should pay for religious and private schools. The story appeared originally in politico.pro, which is behind a paywall.


Tisch calls for increased charter, parochial school affordability

By KESHIA CLUKEY 09/07/16 02:57 PM EDT Updated 09/07/16 03:25 PM EDT

Former state Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch touted the need for school choice and increased access to charter and parochial schools on Wednesday, even in the form of an education tax credit.

Tisch told John Gambling on “AM 970 THE ANSWER” that politics often impede good practice, saying there needs to be a “more affordable” option. “[L]et choice be charter choice, be parochial choice, give families the opportunity to move their children forward, give them the opportunity to have a real ability to access high quality education for their children, and these communities will rise up,” she said.

Tisch, who championed the roll out of the Common Core learning standards, stepped down after 20 years on the board when her term ended in March.

She said Wednesday there is a need for healthy competition for public schools, and described the success some of the well-funded charter school networks are having in terms of student results. “The charter schools in New York City are outpacing the educational gains from around the state,” she said.

However, spots at charter and parochial schools can be difficult to get, charter seats being determined through a lottery system and parochial spots being a matter of affordability. Tisch told a story about a mother she met who had twins, and only one of them was able to get a spot in the charter school. A report from the New York City Charter School Center released Tuesday found that nearly 45,000 city students are on charter school wait lists.

“This notion that we deny choice when the choice is so stark between performance and non-performance to me is criminal,” Tisch said.

She mentioned current tax credit legislation as a possible option. That legislation would provide a credit for donations made to public and nonprofit schools and scholarship funds. The measure, however, has failed to make it through the teachers’ union-aligned, Democratic-lead state Assembly.

Both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Republican-lead Senate have pushed for the credit, though their versions vary, with the Senate’s, for example, including donations made to charter schools.

Regardless of the type of school, Tisch said schools need to be made affordable so parents, especially those in struggling communities, can chose what is best for their children.

“To deliberately go out of your way to force a family to send a child to a school which, more often than not, has failed not only that child, but also the parents of that child, and to just continue to allow it to go on like this to me is a real crime,” Tisch said.

Listen to the full interview here: http://bit.ly/2ci7Wft

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated what the tax credit legislation under consideration would do. It would provide a credit for donations to public and nonprofit schools, as well as scholarship funds.

Read more: https://www.politicopro.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/09/merryl-tisch-touts-need-for-school-choice-including-charters-parochial-schools-105242#ixzz4JubNz2BV
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jesse Hagopian: The Black Resistance to Charters and Corporate Reform is Just Beginning

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2016 //
7

Jesse Hagopian, a teacher and civil rights activist in Seattle, writes here about the growing Black resistance to corporate reform. The resolutions adopted by the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives to stop the expansion of charter schools is only the beginning, he says, of opposition to the corporate agenda.

A moratorium would halt the granting of any more licenses to open new charter schools — that is, schools funded by the public but privately run and not accountable to democratically elected school boards. The NAACP announcement has corporate education reformers reeling. Rick Hess, director of education policy at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, said that if local governments adopt the NAACP’s proposed moratorium, “It would give a permanent black eye to the sector.”

If the NAACP’s stance on charters would bruise the corporate agenda, then the declaration from the Movement for Black Lives — the newest civil rights coalition, comprised of dozens of grassroots organizations around the country — would flatline it altogether. The coalition released a policy platform at the beginning of August that called for, among other things, a moratorium on all out-of-school suspensions and the removal of police from schools, replacing them with positive alternatives to discipline and safety. It also called for a moratorium on charter schools and school closures, and full funding formulas that adequately weigh the needs of all districts in the state.

Hagopian knows that the high-stakes testing and privatization of public schools is not in the interest of Black students, although reformers claim they are.

Billionaire philanthrocapitalists have upended education over the past 15 years by backing a series of major policy changes — codified in the No Child Left Behind Act, the Race to the Top initiative and the Common Core State Standards. These policies have badly damaged education for all kids and have had particularly harmful effects on Black and Brown communities. Today, increasing numbers of people have discovered that these reforms are in reality efforts to turn the schoolhouse into an ATM for corporate America.

While their program for corporate reform is being eroded by research and rising grassroots movements, the corporate reformers are clinging to one last glossy brochure in the public relations portfolio — the one with photos of Black youth on the cover and promises that all of these reforms are really about civil rights and defending kids of color.

What they don’t want you to know is that their favorite schools have high suspension rates for Black students and are highly segregated. They are, he says, part of the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

What the testocracy doesn’t want you to know is that standardized testing is a multibillion dollar industry, with the average student in the American public school system taking an outlandish 112 standardized tests during their k-12 career. They don’t want you to know that many schools that serve Black and Brown students have become test-prep factories rather than incubators of creativity and critical thinking, with testing saturating education at even higher concentrations in schools serving low-income students and students of color. They don’t want you to understand the way high-stakes tests are being used around the country in service of the school-to-prison-pipeline. A review by the National Research Council concluded that high school graduation tests have done nothing to lift student achievement, but they have raised the dropout rate. When one test score can deny students graduation — even when they have met every other graduation requirement — it can have devastating consequences. Boston University economics professor Kevin Lang’s 2013 study, “The School to Prison Pipeline Exposed,” links increases in the use of high-stakes standardized high school exit exams to increased incarceration rates.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Race, Resistance, Testing

Valerie Strauss: Why Did Donald Trump Give His Big Education Speech in a State with Multiple Charter Scandals?

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2016 //
47

Valerie Strauss found many ironies in Donald Trump’s decision about where to give his big education policy speech.

To begin with, he parroted Jeb Bush’s line about public schools as a government monopoly. He mocked him in the debates, now he steals his lines.

Next, he made his speech in Ohio, which has been celebrated for the public exposure of numerous charter school scandals. The biggest charter operators have the worst schools and donate the most money to Republican politicians.

And amazingly, he chose a for-profit charter as his venue, which recently was given an F by the state for poor student growth.

Another irony: the absurd idea of rating schools with a humiliating letter grade was devised by none other than “low energy” Jeb Bush, who has not endorsed Trump.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Trump

New York City: Why Robert Jackson Should Be Elected to the State Senate

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2016 //
2

Robert Jackson is a great champion for public schools. He is running for State Senate in District 13 in New York City. In this post, parent activist Tory Frye explains why you should help him, work for him, and vote for him. Tory Frye is long-time public school parent activist in Upper Manhattan who served as an elected parent member of Community Education Council in District 6 and two School Leadership Teams. Robert Jackson is running for the Democratic nomination this tomorrow, September 13, in NY Senate District 31, which includes parts of the Upper West Side, Harlem, Inwood and Washington Heights. The New York Daily News reported just today that one of his opponents in the Democratic primary has received more than $100,000 from hedge fund managers who are Republicans and who support more charters. Isn’t it amazing that som many wealthy people, who don’t send their children to public schools, are so deeply committed to privatizing the public schools?

Tory Frye writes:


For weeks I have been getting glossy brochures from Micah Lasher who us running for NY State Senate. These tout his devotion to public education, in particular his aversion to high stakes standardized testing and his desire to direct money owed by New York State to NYC public school students.

Here’s the thing; actually it’s two things.

First, the whole reason the state owes NYC public school students money is because his opponent in this senate race, ROBERT JACKSON, led the lawsuit in the 1990s (!!!) that established that the state was denying our kids the money they needed to get a decent public education. The settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity established that the state owed our children billions; in fact, New York state STILL owes city students 2.2 (maybe 3) BILLION dollars! And it is all because Robert Jackson sued the State back then.

Second, Micah Lasher built his career promoting policies that totally UNDERMINE public education in NYC! He was the chief lobbyist for Joel Klein at the NYC Department of Education and then for Mayor Bloomberg when their approach to improving education included: 1) closing schools (labeling them and their students “failures”); 2) using standardized tests to hold children back and evaluate/fire teachers (despite ZERO evidence of efficacy); 3) cutting school budgets and threatening teacher lay-offs; 4) co-locating charter schools with public schools (using a flawed formula for space allocation that had students getting services in closets and hallways) and 5) pushing for a version of mayoral control over our schools that vested all power in one man, Mayor Bloomberg, and none for parents or community members

Lasher then went on to lead StudentsFirstNY, the state affiliate of a national organization (started by none other than Michelle Rhee) that sought to increase the numbers of charter schools, demand space in already crowded public schools, evaluate teachers, students and schools primarily by means of standardized test scores and all sort of corporate education “reforms” that act only to undermine actual public schools and open the “industry” to privatization.

And Lasher has left ALL of this off his campaign literature. Indeed, he has scrubbed any mention of his year running StudentsFirstNY as its first executive director from his biography in LinkedIn.

And what was Robert Jackson doing during these five years? What was he speaking out for ALL that time? Well, I went through my District 6 public school records and my Facebook feed and can attest to the fact that Robert Jackson stood by and actively advocated on behalf of Washington Heights and Inwood public schools – but more importantly for all NYC public school students and families; for example:

• June 2011: fighting against Mayor Bloomberg’s threatened school-based budget cuts and teacher lay-offs.

• June 2012: addressing and trying to limit the damage done by high-stakes standardized testing

• October 2012: fighting Bloomberg’s plan to close PS 132, the Juan Pablo Duarte school in District 6.

• May 2013: advocating for protections of student data, including private health and disability information, that would have been sold and monetized via inBloom.

• June 2013: questioning why the Bloomberg administration was pushing to remove school attendance zones in District 6, a nearly 100 block district, making it likely that many parents would no longer have a neighborhood public school within walking distance that their children had a right to attend;

• May 2014: demanding that the Mother Cabrini Educational Complex be rented to house Mott Hall, the ONLY middle school for gifted students in District 6 currently occupying a dilapidated and antiquated building.

• June 2014: demanding that the DOE remove trailers from PS 48 in District 6.

• October 2014: educating parents about their children’s constitutional rights to a sound, basic education including equitable funding and smaller classes.

In short, Robert Jackson has been a strong and consistent advocate for fighting with parents so that our public schools will be preserved and strengthened, while Lasher has advocated for closing them and turning them into corporate-led charters.

There is another candidate in the race, Marisol Alcantara, who also supports the expansion of charter schools and whose campaign has been funded almost exclusively from the IDC, the renegade breakaway group of Democratic Senators who consistently vote with the Republicans, allowing them to keep control of the State Senate. The Republicans running the State Senate (whose campaigns are ironically now being funded by the hedge-fund billionaires behind StudentsFirstNY) have consistently voted against fairly funding NYC public schools and voted for encouraging unlimited charter school expansion, which are already draining more than a billion dollars from the DOE budget and taking previous space from our overcrowded public schools.

The choice is clear: if you care about our public schools and our children’s right to a quality education, you must support Robert Jackson in Tuesday’s primaries.

–Tory Frye is long-time public school parent activist in in Upper Manhattan who served as an elected parent member of Community Education Council Six and two School Leadership Teams in District Six. Robert Jackson is running for the Democratic nomination this Tuesday, September 13 in NY Senate District 31, which includes parts of the Upper West Side, Harlem, Inwood and Washington Heights.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Funding, New York City, Privatization, StudentsFirst, Supporting public schools

Sarasota: Charter School Kicks Out Second Grader Because His Parents Asked Too Many Questions

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2016 //
18

In Sarasota, the Island Montessori School kicked out a well-behaved student without giving a reason. The parents were active in the school and supported it. The child was thriving.

But the school hired a new principal, and the parents asked too many questions.

Unlike a public school, the kid was booted because of his parents’ actions.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Florida

Mercedes Schneider: Will the Waltons Buy the Public Schools of Massachusetts?

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2016 //
35

Wow! I have seen billionaires put money into elections on behalf of charter schools around the country, but this one takes the cake.

Alice Walton and Jim Walton of Arkansas really want Massachusetts to have more charter schools. They must be very unhappy that the public schools of the Bay State are #1 in the nation. Clearly, the state needs disruption and market forces to shake up its highly successful school system.

Mercedes Schneider writes that the two Waltons gave $1.828,770 to the campaign in Massachusetts to increase the number of charters in the state by a dozen a year in perpetuity.

Mercedes writes:


According to the September 09, 2016, filing of the Massachusetts ballot committee, Yes on 2, billionaire Arkansas resident Alice Walton is one of two individuals providing the $710,100 in funding to promote MA Question 2, raising the charter school cap.

Alice Walton provided $710,000.

A second contributor, Massachusetts resident Frank Perullo provided $100 in order to establish the committee.

And then, the Alice Walton cash was moved to another Question 2 ballot committee: $703,770.29 of Alice Walton’s Yes on 2 committee money was expended to fund Question 2 ballot committee, Campaign for Fair Access to Quality Public Schools, where it was combined with billionaire Arkansas resident Jim Walton’s contribution of $1,125,000, thus making the total Walton contribution to the two committees $1,835,000 (and total Walton contribution to the latter committee, $1,828,770.29).

The Campaign for Fair Access total on its Sept 09, 2016, filing was $2,292,183 for 43 contributors– with 79 percent of that money ($1,828,770 / $2,292,183) arriving from two out-of-state billionaires.

In other words, 95 percent of contributors (41 out of 43) provided only 21 percent of the total funding on the Campaign for Fair Access Sept 2016 report.

I can almost hear the conversation between Alice and Jim:

“You buy this Massachusetts ballot committee, and I’ll buy that one.”

“Done.”

The Waltons are not the only out-of-state billionaires using their wealth to influence the charter cap in a state in which they do not reside. According to the September 09, 2016, filing of the Question 2 ballot committee, Great Schools Massachusetts, other out-of-state billionaire/lobbying nonprofit contributors include the following:

John Arnold (Texas), $250,000

Michael Bloomberg (New York), $240,000

Education Reform Now (ERN) Advocacy (New York), $250,000

Families for Excellent Schools (FES) Advocacy (New York), $5,750,000

She points out that the lobbying groups need not report their donors, so no one will know which billionaires chipped in to the campaign to privatize the public schools of Massachusetts.

This is a disgusting display of oligarchs undermining not only public education but democracy.

People of Massachusetts, send the Waltons and their ill-gotten gains, squeezed out of the wages of underpaid employees at Walmart, back to Arkansas. Let them fix their own state’s low-performing schools. Tell them to go away by voting NO on Proposition 2 on November 8.

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

Trump’s Education Plan: The Death Knell of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2016 //
34

The AFT analyzed Trump’s education plan, the centerpiece of which is a block grant to the states of $20 billion. This is not new spending. This is a redirection of existing federal funding. As you might expect, it is a sham meant to privatize public schools, with no controls or accountability.

Randi Weingarten released this statement:

Want to know what Donald Trump’s plan to take away $20 billion meant for public school children really means? Since he didn’t do his homework, we did it for him. Trump’s $20 billion cut could:

Strip funding from up to 56,000 public schools—putting at risk the educations of nearly 21 million children;

End Title I funding—the most important funding source for high-poverty schools—and cut $5 billion used for other crucial resources, potentially hurting more than 8 million higher education students who rely on Pell Grants, 5 million English language learners in public schools, and millions of others;

Take away $12.7 billion that 5 million students with disabilities count on to fund their educations; and

Eliminate as many as 300,000 teacher jobs—leaving millions of students in larger classes with less support.

And what would he fund with all these budget cuts? Vouchers for 1.4 million or fewer students—up to the states’ discretion, because Trump would hand the money over as a block grant—leaving at the very least 10.5 million other low-income students in the cold, depriving them of vital services they need.

Trump’s plan would gut nearly 30 percent of the federal education budget and turn it into private school vouchers. News flash, Mr. Trump: There’s been a lot of research on this.

Private school voucher programs don’t work—not for the students who get them, and not for the students in public schools whose schools have been drained of funds. Private schools do not enforce all federal civil rights laws, do not adhere to religious freedom protections provided under the U.S. Constitution, and do not face the same public accountability standards that all public schools must meet, including those in Title IX, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—the very law that Congress just reauthorized in 2016.

Trump has no research or evidence to back up his ideas—just his ideology and zeal to destabilize public schools.

Help us push back against Donald Trump and his flawed ideology by becoming an AFT rapid responder today.

Trump’s speech on education this week repeats the same message the anti-public education zealots have been shilling for years. As far as we can tell, Trump never bothered talking to educators to find out what support they need in order to give every kid a great education. His rhetoric today was just one more sound bite from a reality TV star turned presidential nominee.

None of this comes as a surprise: Donald Trump has never shown any inclination to help our schools serve students. In the years I spent working in New York City, I never once saw him at a civic event, never saw him engaged in an effort to lift up public education. Now he wants to hand our public schools over to private businesses so they can make a profit—no surprise, from a man whose idea of education can best be summed up in Trump University, a fraudulent enterprise built to rip off hardworking students. As far as I’m concerned, his ideas on public education don’t earn a passing grade.

Help me send him that message.

In unity,

Randi Weingarten

AFT President

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Funding

Stephen Dyer Responds to Fordham Institute Critique about the Charter Where Trump Spoke

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2016 //
18

Stephen Dyer said that the for-profit charter school in Cleveland where Donald Trump spoke is a failing school, based on its letter grades. The conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which is an official authorizer of charters in Ohio (though not this one), said that Dyer was wrong. As you may know, the A-F report card idea was invented by Jeb Bush in Florida and has spread to accountability-obsessed states like Ohio. It tends to be an accurate measure of family income. Dyer points out that Fordham was gung-ho to adopt the A-F grades, but doesn’t like them so much now. Ron Packard, the owner of the charter in Cleveland, was previously CEO at the online charter corporation K12, where he was paid $5 million annually. His background is McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. K12 Inc. gets bad reviews for its terrible education record, even from charter advocates.

Dyer responds here:

As you know, Donald Trump came to Cleveland to visit a charter school and announce a massive federal infusion of dollars for school choice programs. Regardless of the wisdom of that plan, I found it curious that he would visit a school with an F grade from the state on student growth — considered the most important metric by many charter school advocates. So I called the grade “failing” in several news accounts.

The Fordham Insitute took me to task for that today. So I felt I needed to respond bceause I actually agree that school performance needs more nuanced measures than the simple test regime we have today. But I found it amazing that Fordham, which pushed for Ohio to go to an A-F report card system because it would give parenhts more transparency about how their schools performed so they could then choose whether a charter would be a better option, is now saying that the F grade at the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy doesn’t actually mean it’s failing. Especially given that Fordham said the drop in grades this year (due to PARCC and Common Core) gave Ohioans a more accurate assessment of how kids are “actually doing.”

Here’s my response: http://bit.ly/2cJ7PpM

Best Regards,

Stephen Dyer
Education Policy Fellow
Innovation Ohio
35 E. Gay St.
Columbus, Ohio 43215
330-338-1486
http://www.innovationohio.org

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Testing

Arne Duncan Praising Charters Again

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2016 //
26

Arne Duncan was the best friend the charter industry ever had in the federal government. He praised them again and again, and he periodically announced that he had found a charter school that had closed the gaps and done what no public school could do. He lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on them. I can’t recall him ever praising any public school the way he praised privately managed charters. Apparently, he hasn’t changed his mind. In this article that appeared in The Atlantic, Duncan is back to his old stand, singing the virtues of charters.

But once again, as I have in the past, I have to save Albert Shanker from the bold assertion that he was the visionary who created the charter movement. It is true that Shanker was one of the first to describe a new kind of school that he called a charter school (the other was Raymond Budde at the University of Massachusetts). In 1988, he sang the praises of this experiment. He saw it as a school within a school, made up of union teachers, that would be free to try new methods to teach the disaffected, the kids that regular public schools were not doing well with. He thought these schools would seek out the toughest kids. He said that the charter would have to get the permission of the local teachers’ union before starting. It would be an autonomous teacher-run school with a five-year grant of authority. He saw it as an R&D lab that helped public schools try out and learn new ways to educate.

What people like Duncan and others who invoke Shanker’s name will never tell you is that Shanker turned against his creation only five years later, in 1993. He concluded that charters had been taken over by corporate interests and that his idea had become a vehicle for privatization of public schools. He denounced them as vociferously as he denounced vouchers.
See pp. 123-124 of my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” (The page numbers might be different in the new edition. Just read Chapter 7.)

Twenty-three years ago, Shanker repudiated his love for charter schools. Yet people like Duncan continue to salute him as a founding father, as if that makes privatization palatable.

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