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Speak Out in Support of #AbbottElementary

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2023 //
3

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, asks you to show your support for #AbbottElementary, the delightful weekly show that favorably portrays the real life of teachers, students, and public schools. The show was written, produced by, and stars the amazingly talented @QuintaBrunson.

Carol writes:

ABC’s award-winning sitcom Abbott Elementary is the story of a wonderful group of teachers who stick with a challenging Philadelphia public school because they love teaching and kids. In recent episodes, it has been critical of the effects of charter schools.

It seems hard to believe it, but “Ed Reformers” are attacking its creator, Quinta Brunson, on Twitter.

Please stand up for Abbott Elementary & Ms Brunson by copying and tweeting the Tweets below. The show and its producers need to know you stand for truth-telling and for public schools.

Thank you @AbbottElemABC & @quintabrunson for yr amazing show that dares to tell truth abt how charters hurt public schools. Love the show. Keep up the great work! I love #AbbottElementary https://abc.com/shows/abbott-elementary

How small @JeanneAllen & @edreform look trying to suppress @AbbottElemABC from criticizing the charter system by lying about @quintabrunson. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/quinta-brunson-shuts-down-critic-151809283.html I love #AbbottElementary

When @AbbottElemABC critiques Pa billionaire trying to undermine public schools w/charters, @edreform goes on the attack. Pathetic to go after a beloved show & its beloved creator/star @quintabrunson. Gotta say it. I love #AbbottElementary. https://abc.com/shows/abbott-elementary

You can read about the show’s critique of charters here and the Jeanne Allen controversy here including the Tweets in which Brunson pushes back.

Thanks for all you do,Image

Carol Burris

Network for Public Education

Executive Director

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Humor, Media, Students, Supporting public schools, Teachers

Quinta Brunson Vs. Rightwing Critic re: Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2023 //
8

Quinton Brunson is the writer, producer and star of the award-winning TV series “Abbott Elementary.” Abbott Elementary is a comedy about an urban elementary school, realistically depicting life in a Philadelphia public school. It is a funny, joyful celebration of life in public schools and a song of praise to public school teachers. No matter how silly they are at times, they are heroes!

In season 2, the show turned to the topic of charter schools, because a big charter chain wants to take over Abbott. The staff is mortified. The staff lays bare the unfair practices of the charter school (e.g. pushing out kids they don’t want), and the series lays bare how underfunded Abbott is (in contrast to the charter school, which is equipped with the best of everything).

Jeanne Allen, founder and chief executive officer of the Center for Education Reform, lashed out on Twitter against Quinta Brunson for her negative portrayal of charters when Quinta had gone to charter schools “her entire education” in Philadelphia and had previously praised them.

Quinta responded on Twitter: “you’re wrong and bad at research. I only attended a charter for high school. My public elementary school was transitioned to charter over a decade after I left. I did love my high school. That school is now defunct- which happens to charters often.”

She immediately added: “Loving something doesn’t mean it can’t be critiqued. Thanks for watching the show :)” (Her quotes appear in the article linked above.)

Hundreds of tweets from Quinta’s passionate followers excoriated Allen, supported Quinta and defended her right to say whatever she wanted.

At one point, Jeanne Allen gratuitously claimed “Money talks,” implying that Quinta was paid off by someone to criticize charter schools. On these pages, it’s not surprising to hear a charter lobbyist jeer that critics must have been paid off by the teachers’ unions. But Allen didn’t spell it out, possibly because it was so preposterous on its face.

Quinta’s fans jumped all over the ”she was bought” idea; one said that this Allen person, with not quite 8,000 followers, must be “clout catching”—that is—trying to grab attention by attacking a celebrity—by going after the great Quinta Brunson, who has more 800,000 followers.

It is more than funny reading Jeanne Allen chastise the brilliant, creative Quinta Brunson for taking aim at charter schools because “money talks.” The Center for Education Reform is handsomely funded by conservative billionaires like the Walton Foundation and Jeffrey Yass, as well as billionaire Wall Street charter suporters. Yes indeed, money talks.

The Center for Education Reform serves the goal of right-wing billionaires like Jeff Yass to destroy public education, even though he is a graduate of New York City public schools. Yass funds election deniers and candidates who want to ban critical race theory in the schools. The school-choice lobby says they are deeply devoted to children of color, yet the heavy hitters are funding the candidates and astroturf parent groups that want to ban teaching Black history. Hypocrites!

Since Jeanne is so concerned about hypocrisy, she might ask Jeff Yass why he wants to destroy the very schools that educated him. Why doesn’t he endow state-of-the-art public schools in New York City and Philadelphia to show his gratitude? The great singer Tony Bennett endowed the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, why not a Jeffrey Yass High School for Financial Success and Ethics?

This contretemps has not worked in favor of the charter lobby. Attacking a beloved TV star is a bad idea. Even TIME magazine used the controversy to explain the shortcomings of charter schools.

For teachers around the U.S., charter schools are a constant concern, beyond an episode of television. They find relief, both comic and real, in Abbott—as well as tangible education and information.

“There’s this myth that charter schools provide more opportunity or their graduation rates are better, but that’s just because they exclude kids,” says Brooklyn public school teacher Frank Marino, who formerly worked at a charter school. Watching Abbott “felt so cathartic, because I was like, yes, it was a public platform where those myths are being busted by parents….”

Abbott Elementary has brought Kathryn Vaughn, an art teacher at a public school in Tennessee, and her husband back to appointment viewing TV like it’s the ‘90s. Vaughn loves the show, but says she was surprised to see it tackle charter schools, a $49.5 billion industry with heavy political sway. She appreciated how the most recent episode hands the power to the parents….

In many states, public schools are mandated to have arts education in each building, and tenure in the arts for someone like Vaughn is possible. Charter schools, however, have more leeway: Some, like Addington Elementary in Abbott, can choose to bring in an art teacher a couple of days a week, often subcontracted out from a company.

“Charter schools make me incredibly uneasy,” Vaughn says. “They don’t have to offer their employees tenure. They don’t have to hire certified staff to teach. So if you’re sending your child to a charter school expecting a great arts education, you might not even be taught by certified staff.”

Abbott Elementary is set in West Philadelphia and Vaughn’s school is in western Tennessee, but no matter where you are in public education right now, she says, you know: the push for privatization is huge.

“That’s really the big connection between urban poor and rural poor, like I’m in, is the funding,” Vaughn says. “Urban schools almost are a little sexier. They get more of the money than us in the rural, poor areas. But we’re all behind where we should be with funding.”

A few episodes ago, at the fictional Pennsylvania Educational Conference for the South East Area (PECSA), Jacob (Chris Perfetti)—a well-meaning history teacher—is hanging out with a group of teachers from Addington Elementary. One of them, Summer (Carolyn Gilroy), tries to convince him to switch schools, telling him, “We’re all about focusing on the kids who have the best chance of making it out.”

“Out?” Jacob asks. “Out of what?”

The scene hit home for Marjahn Finlayson, a climate change educator, researcher, and activist who previously worked at a charter high school in Hartford, Connecticut. While teachers there often took a personal interest in their work, she says, there was little trust in the community.

“In the PECSA conference episode, Addington teachers are talking to Jacob about, like, ‘Oh, we take the best kids, and we try to get them out of the ‘hood,’” Finlayson says. “And Jacob is like, ‘Why are you taking them out?’ That was how the feeling was for me.”

Finlayson noticed disparities in resources between public and charter schools, regardless of the quality and dedication of teachers.

“That’s why it’s easier for these schools like Legendary Schools to get into an inner city space, like where Abbott is, where Hartford is,” she says. “It’s easy to prey on these communities that have a need, based on the fact that public school funding isn’t going to this space, but it’s going to another.”

One of Abbott’s arguments against charter schools is that, as Barbara grimly puts it, “They don’t see students. They see scores.” At Finlayson’s former charter high school, one student was repeatedly pressured into applying to college, despite wanting to pursue a trade career.

“And it wasn’t even the fact that she needed to go, it was just that she had to apply,” Finlayson says. “Because, ‘We have a 100% college acceptance rate, and we’re not going to mess with that number.’”

Note to Jeanne Allen: Don’t attack a beloved celebrity. The blowback will not be good for your cause.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Creativity, Education Industry, Funding, Philadelphia

New Yorker: “Abbott Elementary” Exposes the Charter School Movement

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2023 //
17

Jessica Winter, a staff writer at the New Yorker, wrote an article in the latest issue of the magazine describing how the hit-TV program “Abbott Elementary” is sharply critiquing the charter school movement. The show and its creator and star Quinta Brunson have won multiple awards.

It’s a terrific article.

Most of the public doesn’t know what charter schools are. Abbott Elementary tells them. Abbott artfully weighs in against the privatization of public schools.

I wish I could repost the article in full. Here are snippets:

The local and national growth of charter schools has been propped up by lavish support from a center-to-right spectrum of billionaires with various, sometimes overlapping desires, which include lower taxes, fewer and weakened teachers’ unions, state funding for religious schools, and a more entrepreneurial approach to public education. Prominent advocates include Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, the Walton family, Betsy DeVos, the late Eli Broad, and Jeff Yass, reportedly the richest man in Pennsylvania. When the “weird cash” episode of “Abbott Elementary” aired, viewers immediately speculated that Barbara was referring to Yass. Jeanne Allen, the director of Yass’s education foundation, was unamused, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer that the line was a “gratuitous slap against people with wealth” and tweeting, “This has TEACHERS UNION written all over it.”

Brunson is the daughter of a veteran public-school teacher in West Philadelphia, and “Abbott” doesn’t flinch from the decrepitude of the city’s education system. (For one thing, an out-of-date calendar hanging in Abbott’s main office covers up a hole in the wall that appears to be choked with asbestos.) But the show also dismantles the benevolent narrative of “escape” promulgated by the Yasses and other charter-school advocates—the notion that a public-school system cannot be raround and improved, only bled out and abandoned. “Abbott” grabs this idea around the neck in a conversation between Jacob (Chris Perfetti), who teaches history at Abbott, and Summer (Carolyn Gilroy), an Addington teacher who tries and fails to recruit Jacob to her school, where he’d be, she says, “with the brightest kids from the neighborhood,” “the cream of the crop from all over the city.” “We’re all about focussing on the kids who have the best chance of making it out,” Summer says. (“Out of what?” Jacob asks. He receives no answer.)

In this exchange, as when Addington offers a chance of “escape” to Josh and just as quickly rescinds it, “Abbott” is building a cogent, legally grounded argument against charter-school practices. According to Pennsylvania law, a charter school cannot discriminate “based on intellectual ability or athletic ability, measures of achievement or aptitude, status as a person with a disability, English language proficiency, or any other basis that would be illegal if used by a school district.” But, as Summer openly admits, these prohibitions are not reflected in charter schools’ student populations. In 2019, the Education Law Center found that Philadelphia’s district schools enrolled about five times as many students with intellectual disabilities as charters. They also enrolled twice as many autistic children and three times as many English-language learners and students experiencing homelessness. A 2016 reportby the Center for Civil Rights Remedies hypothesized that “some charter schools are artificially boosting their test scores or graduation rates by using harsh discipline to discourage lower-achieving youth from continuing to attend.”

It’s rare to get this kind of cogent, clear-eyed reporting about charter grift in a major publication.

The article made me wonder about the billionaires’ end game.

Charters for “the cream of the crop.”

Vouchers for the religious who want public money to pay tuition at a church school.

Vouchers for wealthy families to underwrite their pricey tuition.

Homeschooling for those who prefer to avoid organized schooling altogether.

What will be the role of public schools? They will serve the students whom no else wants.

What a mean, undemocratic view!

The reality is that our society needs public schools, open to all, more than ever. As our society becomes more diverse, we need more institutions where people from different backgrounds interact as equals. We need more places where diversity, equity and inclusion are functioning realities, not a goal or a scapegoat.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Media, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Texas: State Takeover of Houston Public Schools Is Unfair, Racist, and Wasteful

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2023 //
9

In 2025, Texas passed a ridiculous law stating that if a school district had even one school that was deemed to be “failing,” the state could take over the entire school district. Houston has one high school, Wheatley High School, that has persistently low test scores (and also unusually high percentages of students with special needs and other groups of high-needs students).

The State Department of Education has been trying for years to seize control of the Houston public schools. The state superintendent, appointed by callous Governor Gregg Abbott is software engineer Mike Morath, whose sole claim to educational “experience” is having served on the Dallas school board.

These Republicans do not believe in local control of schools. They believe the state should take away local control, the easier to erode democracy and advance privatization.

Ruth Kravetz, a former teacher and administrator in the Houston Independent School District, now leads an organization called Community Voices for Public Schools. She wrote an editorial in The Texas Observer (where I published my first article) denouncing the threatened takeover as “unfair, racist, and wasteful.”

As a 1956 graduate of HISD, I take this personally.

After years of wrangling and legal battles, the state took control of HISD a few days ago.

Kravetz writes:

I am a parent and teacher with Community Voices for Public Education, a Houston-based nonprofit rooted in the belief that our community schools are a public good, not a commodity to be sold off to the highest bidder. That is why we, along with many other Houstonians, have protested the attempted state takeover of Houston ISD for years—a dramatic assault on local control that may take place this week.

At a February protest, HISD student Elizabeth Rodriguez stated, “Instead of punishing us with a takeover, our schools should be better funded to make sure students have all the support we need and the facilities we deserve. We are not just test scores.”

Contrary to what you may hear from some Republican leaders, Houston Independent School District (HISD) is not a failing district. HISD received a B grade in the most recent state school ratings and is AAA bond-rated.

Why, then, is Houston ISD even under threat of a takeover?

In 2015, Texas passed a law that allows the state to take over an entire school district if even one campus is rated F in standardized test performance for five years. The state says the rationale for the takeover is Wheatley High School’s low 2019 accountability rating and problems with the HISD school board. Since 2019, when the takeover bid began, Houston ISD had successfully delayed Texas’ efforts, but the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court cleared the state’s legal path in January.

In the past few years, HISD already proved that local control works: Since 2019, voters elected an almost entirely new school board, and students and teachers worked to bring Wheatley’s state score up to a C in 2022. Since 2015, HISD reduced its number of low-performing schools from 58 to nine, which is fewer than are found in Dallas ISD. Even using the state’s deeply flawed accountability system to rate schools, Houston ISD comes out fine.

Nevertheless, the state’s takeover efforts persist. If successful, a state-appointed board of managers will make all policy decisions with Texas Education Agency (TEA) Commissioner Mike Morath pulling the strings behind the scenes. HISD’s democratically elected board will only have a ceremonial role with no voting authority. And the kicker is that the unelected Morath, who’s appointed by Governor Greg Abbott, has full discretion to expand the takeover. The superintendent could also be replaced, and individual schools could be parceled off to charter school operators—such as YES, KIPP, IDEA, and churches—with the usual consequences as seen around the country.

Charter schools often purposefully underenroll students with disabilities and other at-risk children, inflating their state accountability ratings. Should this occur in Houston following a takeover, the state will likely take the credit in its accountability shell game.

A takeover may also lead to teachers leaving the district, creating more classroom vacancies. The chances for a bond to replace older elementary schools will go out the window. If other takeovers are any indication, we can also expect more of our taxpayer dollars to go to costly consultants than to the needs of children.

If all this doesn’t make you mad, how about this? Over and over again, the governor and the TEA commissioner have moved the goalposts in the middle of the game.

In 2019, Wheatley High initially received a passing grade from the TEA, but the agency later changed its scoring criteria and applied them retroactively. And in January, TEA publicly announced more rule changes that will be implemented immediately and applied retroactively to last year’s seniors, whose data is counted in this year’s accountability rating. At the high school level, schools that were projecting a B rating are now projecting a D. School districts around the state are raising the alarm about the change.

We tell our children they have to be honest and to play by the rules; we should expect the governor and TEA commissioner to do the same.

Unfortunately, the state takeover of Houston ISDhas nothing to do with student needs. It is about power, profits, and a willful disregard for children living in poverty.

As I ponder the district’s future, I am reminded of a student I once taught. When I went to his house to help him think about college, he had no electricity and the only furniture in the house was a bed, an engine block, and a chair. He did his homework by a street lamp outside. The last thing he needed was more pressure to meet arbitrary standardized testing goals or for the state to punish his school for serving low-income students like himself.

From Beaumont to New Orleans to Detroit, takeovers—which disproportionately target districts with high Black and Brown political participation—do not improve student achievement and experiences.

Please open the link to finish this excellent article.

Governor Abbott and Mike Morath don’t have any idea how to improve schools or districts. They do know how to loot them and privatize them for the benefit of their cronies and campaign donors.

Shame on you, Governor Abbott and Mike Morath!

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Houston, Texas

ProPublica: Who Is Jeff Yass?

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2023 //
11

Jeff Yass is the richest man in Pennsylvania.

Jeff Yass is a billionaire. The Bloomberg Billionaire Index says he has $33 billion.

Jeff Yass created a Wall Street firm with partners called the Susquehanna International Group.

Jeff Yass is a huge supporter of charter schools. He created the annual Yass Prize, which is administered by the anti-public school organization called “The Center for Education Reform.” CER supports every kind of choice (charters, vouchers, online charters, for-profit charters, homeschooling) while vehemently denouncing public schools. CER is opposed to any regulation or accountability of “choice” schools. CER distributes millions in prizes to charter schools, thanks to the Yass family.

ProPublica says there’s something else you don’t know about Jeff Yass.

He funds Republican candidates and election deniers.

He opposes abortion.

He funds candidates who oppose critical race theory.

His top priority is to defund public schools.

According to ProPublica:

The firm he and his friends founded, Susquehanna International Group, is a sprawling global company that makes billions of dollars. Yass and his team used their numerical expertise to make rapid-fire computer-driven trades in options and other securities, eventually becoming a giant middleman in the markets for stocks and other securities. If you have bought stock or options on an app like Robinhood or E-Trade, there’s a good chance you traded with Susquehanna without knowing it. Today, Yass, 63, is one of the richest and most powerful financiers in the country.

But one crucial aspect of his ascent to stratospheric wealth has transpired out of public view. Using the same prowess that he’s applied to race tracks and options markets, Yass has taken aim at another target: his tax bill.

There, too, the winnings have been immense: at least $1 billion in tax savings over six recent years, according to ProPublica’s analysis of a trove of IRS data. During that time, Yass paid an average federal income tax rate of just 19%, far below that of comparable Wall Street traders.

Yass has devised trading strategies that reduce his tax burden but push legal boundaries. He has repeatedly drawn IRS audits, yet has continued to test the limits. Susquehanna has often gone to court to fight the government, with one multiyear audit battle ending in a costly defeat. The firm has maintained in court filings that it complied with the law.

Yass’ low rate is particularly notable because Susquehanna, by its own description, specializes in short-term trading. Money made from such rapid trades is typically taxed at rates around 40%.

In recent years, however, Yass’ annual income has, with uncanny consistency, been made up almost entirely of income taxed at the roughly 20% rate reserved for longer-term investments.

Congress long ago tried to stamp out widely used techniques that seek to transform profits taxed at the high rate into profits taxed at the low rate. But Yass and his colleagues have managed to avoid higher taxes anyway.

The tax savings have contributed to an explosion in wealth for Yass, who has increasingly poured that fortune into candidates and causes on the political right. He has spent more than $100 million on election campaigns in recent years. The money has gone to everything from anti-tax advocacy and charter schools to campaigns against so-called critical race theory and for candidates who falsely say the 2020 election was stolen and seek to ban abortion.

Grassroots groups, led by the Working Families Party, held a protest in front of his offices to protest his funding of groups that undermine democracy.

The LittleSis Project, which tracks the connections among rightwing funders and organizations, has more information about Yass. He is the money man behind Pennsylvania’s rightwing political machine. His top priority is school privatization. He wants to dismantle public schools. Read the article.

Yass’s influence over state politics doesn’t stop after elections are over. His money gets distributed throughout the right-wing network in the state and influences legislation and the conservative agenda year round. The right-wing organizations that spend Yass’s money consistently and successfully lobby to cut corporate taxes, bust unions, block climate solutions, ban abortion, target trans youth, and prevent what the right calls “critical race theory” from being taught in schools.

The Pennsylvania Capital Star worries about what Yass is doing to our democracy.

Yass is a threat to democracy in Pennsylvania. Our organizations were in the trenches during the 2020 election organizing on the frontline against MAGA Republicans, white nationalists, and conspiracy-riddled extremists. Yass was funding them. Despite Yass trying to back away from those associations publicly and in the press, this year he quietly continued to fund those same organizations like the Club for Growth – a right-wing front group that backed nearly 50 election deniers across the country.

What a guy. Does Senator Corey Booker know? Does Senator Michael Bennett know? Does Representative Hakeem Jeffries know? Does the Center for American Progress know?

Jeff Yass’s enthusiastic support of charter schools is another reason why charter schools should not get federal funding. Why should the US Department of Education spend $440 million a year to open new charter schools (half of which never open), when Jeff Yass and his partners could easily foot the bill, along with other billionaires like the Waltons, Michael Bloomberg, Charles Koch, and Betsy DeVos?

For billionaires like Yass, that amount is pocket change. Or, as the saying goes, chump change.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Pennsylvania, Republicans

Josh Cowen: I Was Never a Member of a Teachers’ Union—Until Now

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2023 //
32

Josh Cowen is a Professor of Educational Policy at Michigan State University. He has spent many years as a voucher researcher and recently concluded that vouchers are a failed experiment, based on a multitude of research studies.

As soon as anyone becomes a critic of charter schools or vouchers, the choice lobby attacks them and claims they are paid by the teachers’ unions. I know this from personal experience. A few years ago, a choice lobbyist accused me of taking union money to buy the house I lived in; I assured her that I paid for my home all by myself.

Funny that the shrill well-paid lobbyists act as though unions are criminal enterprises, when in reality they have historically enabled poor and working class people to gain a foothold in the middle class, to have job security, health benefits, and a pension. They also give public schools a voice at the table when governors propose larger classes, lower standards for new teachers, or decreased funding for schools. I believe we need unions now, more than ever. Whenever I hear of a charter school unionizing or of workers in Starbucks or some other big chain forming a union, it makes my day.

Josh Cowen has undoubtedly been subject to the same baseless criticism from the same union-haters whose salaries are paid by plutocrats. He shares his thoughts here about teachers’ unions.

Here in Michigan, the Democratic legislature just re-affirmed our state’s longstanding commitment to working families by removing anti-labor provisions from state law. The move doesn’t apply to teachers and other public employees, because the conservative U.S. Supreme Court sided a few years back with Right-wing activists in their efforts to hinder contributions to public sector unions, but it’s still good news for the labor movement overall.

And I wanted to use their effort—alongside Republican efforts in other states to threaten teachers for what they say in classrooms—to make a simple point.

We need teachers unions. Other folks more prominent than me, like AFT’s Randi Weingarten, have made this point recently too. But I wanted to add my own voice as someone who has not been a union member, and someone who—although I’ve appeared with Randi on her podcast and count many union members as friends—has never been an employee or even a consultant.

If you want to talk dollars, The Walton Family Foundation once supported my research on charter schools to the tune of more than $300,000. Arnold Ventures supported my fundraising for a research center at Michigan State–$1.9 million from them. And the US Department of Education awarded my team more than $2 million to study school choice—while Betsy DeVos was secretary.

Think about that when I say school vouchers are horrific. And understand, I’m getting no support from teachers’ unions.

Instead it is I who supports them.

I’ve been studying teacher labor markets almost as long as school vouchers. Mostly my research has looked at teacher recruitment and retention. But I’ve also written about teachers’unions specifically. There’s a debate among scholars on what unions do and whether their emphasis on spending translates into test score differences. In the “rent seeking” framework economists use, the concern is that dollars spent on salaries don’t have direct academic payoffs.

There is no question that spending more money on public schools has sustained and generational impacts on kids. Research has “essentially settled” that debate, according to today’s leading expert on the topic.

But I want to branch out from dollars and cents and test scores to talk about teacher voice.

And I want to do that by raising a few questions that I’ve asked myself over the last couple years:

Why should the voice of a billionaire heiress from Michigan with no experience in public schools count for more than the voices of 100,000 teachers in my state’s classrooms every day?

Why should the simple fact that they work with children made by other people mean that teachers surrender their own autonomy and judgment not just as professionals but as human beings?

Why should educators have to work under what amounts to gag orders, afraid to broach certain topics or issues in the classroom? Some states are setting up hotlines to report on teachers as if they’re parolees, and a bill in New Hampshire would essentially give the fringe-Right Secretary of Education subpoena power to haul teachers in front of a special tribunal for teaching “divisive concepts.” This, after a Moms for Liberty chapter put out a bounty on New Hampshire teachers who were likewise divisive on an issue. Read: an issue of race or gender.

It’s not just threats to teacher employment. We know this. There are threats to teachers’ lives. How many teachers have died alongside their students—other people’s children—over the years in school shootings?

Why does the Right claim to trust teachers enough to arm them with guns in response to those shootings, but not enough to let them talk about race, gender, or any other “divisive concept?” Even some conservative commentators have worried publicly that we’re asking teachers to do too much. Why are we asking them to be an armed security force too?

‘In her recent history of “The Teacher Wars”, The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein noted that teachers formed unions, and fought for teacher tenure, to protect themselves not just professionally but personally. For free speech. To prevent harassment from supervisors—then as now, teachers were mostly professional women—and to keep from being fired for pregnancy or marital status.

So really, attacks on teachers are nothing new. Instead, teachers seem to be one of the few professions that it’s still acceptable in political conversation—even a mark of supposed intellectual sophistication in some circles—to ponder the shortcomings of the educators who work with our kids every day.

There’s nothing sophisticated about attacking hardworking, thoughtful, and dedicated people. And the only result of doing so will be the further erosion of our public, community schools. And that’s really the point. Just a few days ago, we learned that the big data that I and many others have gotten used to working with finally caught up to the on-the-frontlines warnings of educators everywhere: teachers are exiting the profession at unprecedented rates.

I’ve taken no money from teachers’ unions for any of the work I do. I’ve never been a member of a union—teachers’ or otherwise. Until now. Because after writing this today, I made a donation to my state’s primary teachers’ union and became a general member: a person “interested in advancing the cause of education…not eligible for other categories of membership.”

There’s a word for that in the labor movement. You hear it a lot here in Michigan, where I grew up and now teach future teachers in a college of education. That word is Solidarity.

Sign me up.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Class size, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity, Freedom, Funding, Health, History, School Choice, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, Unions, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Chicago: Vallas’ School “Reform” Ideas Are Stale, Costly and Failed

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2023 //
6

Julie Vassilatos writes about Paul Vallas’ school reform ideas here. Privatization and choice. She says that they are no longer innovative: they have been tried again and again, and they have failed again and again. We seen this rodeo before: disruption; closing schools; high cost; poor results.

An excerpt:

Here’s what you need to know if you don’t already. Vallas is the OG of a tired, old, failed style of school reform marked by privatization of public services, charter proliferation, and school choice. These elements are now omnipresent in American public education; he helped make this so. In no school district anywhere have these initiatives enabled positive transformation, not in thirty years. But choice-based school reform does two things well—it racks up big, huge spending deficits, and it racially stratifies urban school systems. Vallas has achieved both, here and everywhere he has led districts.Vallas-style school reform has a kind of tech-bro aesthetic: spend big, break things, disrupt systems, do it all at once. But this has always come with a cost. We need to know the cost.

Vallas’s push for privatization and its ugly impact in urban districts

In Chicago, the effort to privatize is by now the rather hackneyed status quo. Charter advocates say there just aren’t enough charters yet. But critics say we can’t possibly afford to keep throwing money at this worn-out approach. After all, in Chicago we have seen the rise and fall of the UNO network, and embroilment in scandals for Urban Prep, Acero, Epic, Gulen, and many other chains.

If you click this link, you can find 26 articles on charter scandals in IL dating back just to 2017.

Privatization lacks accountability. These schools are not subject to the standards and accountability faced by traditional public schools, which eventually is what lands many of them in trouble—they say they are handling special needs and aren’t. They claim they offer bilingual services and they don’t. They get millions in funding from the district and it goes up in smoke. These schools also yield a poor ROI—that is to say, their results are not good. On top of this, these schools are prone to closing without notice.

Privatization always results in disinvestment of traditional public schools. Privatizers love to say that public schools are terrible without ever acknowledging that they’ve been deeply disinvested for decades, then divert much of what funding remains to charter schools, entrenching the cycle of disinvested schools failing to provide what students need and deserve. When you factor in poor ROIs, scandals, and instability, banking on charters seems like a pretty poor bargain. In Chicago, the district added charter schools for years prior to the school closings, very much impacting or even creating the 2012/13 “school utilization crisis” pushed by Rahm and Barbara Byrd-Bennett. Suddenly we had too many schools for too few students. The end result was 50 closed neighborhood public schools, displacing 30,000 kids.

By the way, I posted a tweet the other day, retweeting Fred Klonsky’s Blog titled “Vallas Will Defund CPS.” CPS=Chicago Public Schools. Hours later, I received a notice from Twitter that my comment had been deleted because it contained offensive content. What? An opinion about a mayoral candidate is “offensive”? And this on the giant social media site that welcomes Nazis, election deniers, COVID crackpots, and assorted conspiracy theorists.

This was the “offensive” post that had to be censored.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Chicago, Competition, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization

What Caused the Layoffs at a Successful Tech Company?

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2023 //
30

As you probably know, there have been many layoffs across the tech sector in recent months. At the same time, unemployment is close to a 50-year low, at 3.2%. Employers are raising wages to attract employees for low-wage jobs. Why is the tech sector in trouble? I’m no financial or corporate expert, so I can’t explain what is going on.

But something caught my eye as I read a story about Salesforce, which was both very successful and yet laying off 10% of its employees.

The company has been dogged by five activist investors in recent months, and is being pressured to cut costs, but the layoffs continue in spite of a stellar quarter. In fact, Benioff bragged to Swisher in bombastic fashion: “We had a great quarter. Yeah, it’s probably I think, it’s probably the best quarter of a software company ever.”

I clicked the link to see who those five activist investors who were demanding more cost cutting, no matter how it hurt morale at the company.

The first was Elliott Management. It rang a bell, but at first I didn’t remember why. More googling and soon I see the name Paul Singer.

Singer is a billionaire. Singer is a big supporter of charter schools. Singer is a rightwing Republican. Singer loves Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain; in addition to giving SA millions, he served on its board.

An article in Mother Jones a decade ago called Singer a “vulture capitalist” and a “fundraising terrorist.”

A few years back, the U.K. Independent said that Singer had destroyed Peru’s economy and was threatening Argentina’s. Again, “vulture capitalist.”

Singer has been called a “doomsday investor.” When he takes over, he sucks out the lifeblood.

This guide to “vulture funds” was published only a month ago.

I have been trying to understand the connection between vulture investing and the aggressive charters that suck the lifeblood out of their host, the public school system.

What do you think?

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Disruption, Economy, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy

Florida Teacher: You Want Choice? Go to a Public School.

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2023 //
39

Steve teaches in Polk County, Florida. He left a comment about where to find a wealth of choices: in public school. Choice advocates claim that public schools are one-size-fits-all. Nothing could be further from the truth. Charter schools and voucher schools are one-size-fits-all. They may exclude students they don’t want, for any reason. They may have a religious core that appeals to one-size. Home-schooling? You can’t get any more one-size-fits-all than learning at home. If you want indoctrination, go to a religious school; if you want education, go to a public school.

Do you want choices? Go to a public school!

Steve writes:

You want choice? Here, in the seventh largest school district in the state, you can choose AP, college-dual enrollment, Cambridge, ACCEL or International Baccalaureate for academics.

You can enter a career academy for aeronautics, health fields, architecture, criminal justice, education, culinary, graphics, CAD/CAM, engineering, legal studies, design, veterinary science, finance, biotechnology, construction. and others.

There are outstanding fine arts programs, with graduates going on to Broadway, television, and the tourism entertainment industry.

Play sports? The state lets you transfer to any school you want. You could join the state champion football team or state champion girls basketball team.

Want something hands on, such as, diesel mechanic, HVAC, auto repair, IT, or welding? Two public vo-tech high schools offer those programs.

All this choice is available in the public system.

So, the issue isn’t choice at all. This is about what vouchers have always been about since the days of massive resistance in Virginia.

Segregation?

Categories Charter Schools, Creativity, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity, Florida, History, Innovation, Propaganda, School Choice, Segregation, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Stop Federal Funding for New Charters!

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2023 //
5

In the late 1980s, the charter idea was brand new. AFT President Albert Shanker thought that charter schools would develop innovative ways to help the students who struggled the most in schools. He envisioned charter schools as “research and development schools” that would learn new ways of reaching the most disaffected and turned off students. He saw them as laboratories created by teachers that would first get the permission of the entire school staff at a regular public school, then get the endorsement of the local school board. In his vision, charter schools would be part of the public school system, cooperating with public schools to share whatever they learned. He also saw them as unionized schools. He imagined them getting a charter for 3-5 years, showing what they learned, then being reabsorbed into the regular public schools if they had finished their mission.

His vision did not include for-profit charter schools. He imagined collaboration between public schools and charter schools, not competition. He did not imagine charter schools run by private corporations. He did not imagine charter schools as privately managed schools run by corporations, chains, or non-educators.

When he realized that the charter idea had been corrupted by privatizers and that they had become a means of breaking teachers’ unions, he turned against charters and concluded that they were no different from vouchers. To Al Shanker, they had turned into a first step on the road to privatizing public education.

Back before the disillusionment set in, the Clinton administration authorized a federal Charter Schools Program to fund the opening of new charter schools; federal dollars were needed to jumpstart more charter schools. At its inception in 1994, the new program had a few million dollars. At the time, there were only a few hundred charter schools in the nation.

Since 1994, the federal Charter Schools Program has grown to a yearly expenditure of $440 million under the astute encouragement of the charter lobby, but between one-third and 40% of the charters funded by the federal government either never open at all or close within a couple of years. The number of failed federally funded charters has grown even larger in the past few years, as Carol Burris’s letter below documents (also see here and here.)

According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, there are now nearly 8,000 charter schools in the nation, enrolling 7.5% of all public school students. (Of course, opinions are sharply divided about whether charter schools are “public” schools, since they are not overseen by elected school boards and court decisions usually rule that charters, unlike public schools, are “not state actors.”)

The time has come to ask, why is the federal government still paying to launch new charter schools? The charter sector seems to be multiplying quite well without federal aid. It is now typical for charter schools to accept not the neediest students, but the most promising ones. They drain students and resources from the public schools, which enroll nearly 90% of students. With so many deep-pocketed backers in the philanthropic sector and on Wall Stree (Walton, Gates, Bloomberg, and a never of hedge funders)t, why do new charters need federal aid?

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, recently wrote a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten, and Deputy Assistant Adam Schott, calling on the US. Department of Education to stop funding the federal Charter Schools Program.

I ask you, dear readers, to send a similar letter to urge the end to funding a failed federal program that is no longer necessary, if it ever was.

Here is Carol Burris’s letter:

Secretary Miguel Cardona (miguel.cardona@ed.gov)

Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten (cindy.marten@ed.gov)

Deputy Assistant Adam Schott (adam.schott@ed.gov)

Dear Secretary Cardona, Deputy Secretary Marten, and Deputy Assistant Schott:

On behalf of the 350,000 Network for Public Education members, I am writing to ask that you do not fund the Federal Charter School Programs in the FY 2024 budget. Here are the reasons why.


First, enrollment in charter schools between 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 declined by 5,323 students. That decline was identified using NCES data. The “surge” in charter enrollment was predominantly in low-quality online schools during the prior year. The need for more charter schools is not there. 


Second, a recent program audit by the Department’s Office of the Inspector General report found that of the grants issued between 2013 and 2016, only 51% of the schools promised by CSP recipients opened or expanded. 


Third, there has not been an opportunity to find out whether or not the new regulations are, in fact, being properly implemented by the State Entities and the CMOs. 


The nearly half-billion dollars saved can be used to reduce the budget deficit or, better yet, to fund our public schools.

Thank you for taking the time to read this email, for the courage to withstand the pressures to back down on the new regulations, and for all that you do for our children every day.


Carol Burris

Executive Director

The Network for Public Education

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, U.S. Department of Education
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