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Denis Smith: Ohio Charter Lobby Cheers Choice of New State Superintendent

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2022 //
7

Denis Smith retired from the Ohio Department of Education, where he worked in the charter school office and saw fraud after fraud. Ohio’s charter schools (which the state calls “community schools,” which they are not) are unusually low-performing; a large number are failing schools.

Smith wrote about the scandalous selection of the new state superintendent in the Ohio Capital Journal.

Smith writes:

At its May meeting, the State Board of Education voted to employ Steve Dackin as Ohio’s new Superintendent of Public Instruction. But the hiring of the veteran school administrator has raised some concerns that require further reflection.

The state board’s decision occurred in the middle of National Charter Schools Week and prompted questions about the processes used in the appointment and the search that led up to the board’s action.  

To those familiar with the behavior of some charter school boards, where the members are usually hand-picked by the school’s operating company and where tales of conflicts of interest and self-dealing are legion, the state board’s action will need to be more closely examined lest it acquire the same reputation of so many conflicted charter school boards.

In covering the search process and appointment of a new state superintendent of schools, the Cleveland Plain Dealer summarized the situation succinctly:

“Steve Dackin was vice president of the State Board of Education and led the search for a vacant superintendent position before resigning and applying for the job three days later. The deadline to apply was the following day.”

You don’t have to read that Plain Dealer paragraph again to realize there was something wrong in the practices of a state board that allowed a board member to conduct the search for a superintendent, resign so that he could apply at the deadline for the position, add his resume to those already received from other candidates, and then months later be hired for the very position he oversaw as vice president of the board and head of the search committee that was charged with filling the position.

If a public board is concerned about optics, its actions might demonstrate that in addition to suffering from myopia, it’s also tone deaf as shown by its hiring of the new state superintendent.

Catherine Turcer, who directs Common Cause Ohio, an organization which promotes “transparency and accountability in government,” also examined the process that led up to Dackin’s candidacy and had concerns.

“The thing that’s important about this is that we have as much transparency as possible so that we can understand what happened and whether he was attempting to get himself the job inappropriately,” she said. “Right now, we have a lot of questions and things look odd. It’s not enough to do the pro forma, ‘I put my resignation in before I applied.’ You dotted one ‘i’ but what about all the ‘t’s?’ she told the Plain Dealer.

The appointment of a new state superintendent during National Charter Schools Week drew praise from the state charter school lobby, including kind words from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an organization that promotes these publicly funded, privately operated, underregulated entities and, like the schools it promotes, is conflicted in its purposes. That makes Fordham a comfortable and perfect fit in the midst of charter world.

The conflict that is Fordham was described last year in the Ohio Capital Journal. Fordham serves simultaneously as a charter school authorizer, promoter, and so-called “think tank,” crafting studies that unsurprisingly promote public school privatization, which it calls school choice. But with all of its “think tank” research, apparently Fordham hasn’t studied one of the major design flaws in charter schools. 

That flaw doesn’t allow the democratic election of board members by qualified voters in a community. Instead, in many instances we have seen self-dealing by hand-picked board members, conflicts-of-interest by operators, and all of the ethical issues that surround organizations that are not fully transparent in their operations. 

The most classic example of this was seen several years ago, where the chairman of a charter school board was also a part-owner of the company which owned the building where the school was located. The school made an overpayment of $478,000 to the company without any board approval. A number of individuals associated with the charter school were indicted, including the school founder, his wife and brother, the board chairman and school treasurer.

Which brings us back to the recent action of the State Board of Education in choosing a new state superintendent.

Because of a history of scandal in the state charter school industry, where more than $1 billion in public funds alone went to ECOT in the largest online charter school scandal in the country, and where the wreckage of more than 300 closed Ohio charters have further depleted the state treasury due to lax oversight caused by few controls, the State Board of Education itself should not be acting like a challenged and conflicted charter school board with few rules, policies, or any sense of institutional memory. 

Moreover, the enthusiasm for Dackin’s appointment expressed by the charter school industry and the Fordham Institute should also raise even more concerns.

As someone who has experience in providing oversight of charter schools as well as service on non-profit boards, it is my view that the processes used in the Dackin appointment are troublesome. For example, some boards have policies that require at least a one-year separation by a board member before applying for employment with the organization. Such a board policy protects an organization and lessens the possibility of a conflict or self-dealing situation by any member. 

And what about the State Board of Education? Why isn’t there policy which prohibits the employment of a former board member for an extended period of time after separation from the board? For that matter, are there any state boards that have a “time-out” policy before a board or advisory committee member seeks employment?

The Ohio Ethics Commission and its three-page review of the situation before the state board’s hiring of the new superintendent was, to put it mildly, inadequate for the circumstances in the Dackin situation. The appearance of a conflict of interest or any ethical question related to actions that employ past board members recently separated from a public board should be a serious issue.

There is no doubt that the State Board of Education can do better at policy formulation and practice. So too can the Ohio Ethics Commission, which should start a discussion about strengthening its guidelines to go beyond minimalist interpretations of statute and offer more robust models to boards and public agencies that promote greater transparency and accountability. 

After all, a state public board by its actions should not mimic charter school boards that love to receive public money but hate regulation.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Ohio

Oklahoma: Billionaires Pushing Charter Schools and Vouchers Underwrite Salary of State Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2022 //
33

Thank goodness for independent media! Oklahoma Watch published an investigative report that detailed a secret slush fund that supplements the salary of the state Secretary of Education.

(This story was produced in partnership with the Oklahoma nonprofit newsroom The Frontier.)

Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed legislation that would have required cabinet members to file public reports to disclose their finances.

If Stitt had signed the bill last month, Oklahomans would learn that Secretary of Education Ryan Walters makes at least $120,000 a year as executive director of a nonprofit organization that keeps its donors secret. Walters is also paid about $40,000 a year by the state, according to state payroll data.

The nonprofit, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, has refused to disclose its largest donors.

But a joint investigation by The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch has found that much of the organization’s funds come from national school privatization and charter school expansion advocates, including the Walton Family Foundation and an education group founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.

As Secretary of Education, Walters serves as Stitt’s top advisor on public education policy and is the governor’s liaison for dozens of state boards and programs.

Walters’ outside employment with a nonprofit funded by advocacy groups could be a conflict of interest, said Delaney Marsco, senior attorney for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit group that focuses on government transparency and accountability.

“If you are responsible for making decisions in a certain area of the government and you are being paid by an outside organization that has an interest in that, that absolutely can be a conflict of interest,” Marsco said. “If you are a public servant, your duty is to the public, and anything that kind of calls that into question, even raises the appearance of a conflict of interest, is a problem.”

Under Walters’ leadership, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma was the public face of Stitt’s program that distributed $1,500 grants to families in 2020 funded with $8 million in federal coronavirus relief money. The money was intended to buy tutoring and educational supplies. But a lack of safeguards allowed parents to use some of the funds to buy TVs, gaming consoles and home appliances, an investigation by Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier found. Emails and other recordsshow that Walters helped secure the no-bid contract with a Florida company to distribute the money. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General has opened an audit into how the state used those funds.

Walters, who declined multiple interview requests, is now running for state superintendent, an elected position overseeing the state Department of Education and a budget of over $3 billion. Unlike in federal elections, candidates for state office in Oklahoma are not required to fill out financial disclosures until after they are elected.

Please open the link and read on.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Oklahoma, Scandals, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Valerie Strauss: What President Biden Should Say to the Charter Industry About His Proposed Reforms

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2022 //
12

Valerie Strauss is an outstanding journalist who writes “The Answer Sheet” blog about education for The Washington Post. She understands the great heist that is being foisted on American public education by privatizers and their powerful lobbyists. She knows better than the editorial boards of the nation’s leading newspapers that school choice exacerbates the problems of American education and that test scores are not a worthy measure of the worth of a school.

In this article, she offers valuable advice to President Biden about the absurd claims made by the charter industry about the regulations proposed by the Department of Education to reform the federal Charter Schools Program. That program doles out $440 million a year to underwrite new charter schools. Biden has not cut it (even though it is not necessary, since new charters are supported by many billionaires, including the Walton family, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, John Arnold, Dan Loeb, and Michael Bloomberg.)

The Department offered modest regulations, like barring for-profit corporations from applying for federal funding and asking those who seek federal funding for new charters to do an impact analysis of why their charter is needed and whom it would serve. The charter industry and its allies reacted with lamentations, outrage, and hysterical denunciations of Biden (even though Biden said during the 2020 campaign that he would stop funding for-profit charter management organizations).

Strauss writes:

The Biden administration recently released proposed reforms to a nearly 30-year-old federal program that has provided billions of dollars in grants for charter schools, and predictably some charter supporters have launched an unrestrained attack.


The bipartisan charter lobby alleges, among other things, that President Biden wants to “gut” the Charter School Programs, is kowtowing to unions and is willfully harming marginalized students. One magazine piece has this headline: “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools” — as if that were something to behold — and this subtitle: “The Education Department chooses teachers unions over poor kids.”


That’s not what’s happening — for one thing, the administration hasn’t proposed cutting a dime from the program — but that hasn’t stopped the attacks on the proposals, which are being supported by Roberto Rodriguez, a strong charter school supporter who was an education adviser to President Barack Obama and is now Biden’s assistant education secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development.


[Biden proposes tougher rules for charter school grants]


“There is a bit of a mythology that this is an attempt to do away with charter programs or curb the programs or curb the growth of charter schools,” said Rodriguez in an interview. Sure, he could have turned against charters, but he hasn’t: “The administration supports high-quality schools, including high-quality charter schools.”


Charter schools are funded by the public but privately operated. They are not monolithic — no more than schools in traditionally operated public districts are. Each state has its own rules, some resulting in better-quality charter schools than others.


Charters enjoyed bipartisan support for years — and still do — but support within the Democratic Party has lessened because of real problems in parts of the sector that supporters don’t like to publicly address. They include repeated scandals of financial fraud and waste, mismanagement, segregation, and under-enrollment of students with special needs. Charter schools in some places also drain resources from school districts that educate most of America’s schoolchildren.


Before the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020, about 6 to 7 percent of U.S. schoolchildren attended charter schools. Enrollment jumped during the pandemic — with most of the gain in virtual charters, which are the worst-performing schools in the sector — but new data shows the increases starting to fall.


The White House has been silent about the over-the-top protests — including an actual protest outside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW with charter school students. The Education Department published tweets last week that, instead of calling out its critics for promoting falsehoods about its proposed reforms of the program, tried to explain what it was doing by saying, essentially, “It’s not as bad as you think.”


[What Biden’s proposed reforms to U.S. charter school program really say]



So here’s what Biden should have said to charter school supporters who are savaging the proposed changes to the Charter School Programs, which should be made final in the next few months after consideration of public comment:


Hey guys:


Look, I didn’t expect you to love the changes my administration is proposing to the Charter School Programs. You have never been good at accepting criticism — but really, isn’t your reaction a bit much?


A bunch of you said I want to “gut” the program. Gut the program? Charter critics would love that, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have proposed to Congress that we keep funding at the same amount as last year — $440 million. So much for gutting.


I’ll add that the Education Department, even under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, couldn’t spend all of the money allocated to the program by Congress in 2019. That’s when more than $12 million was reallocated from the program to other federal education priorities due to a lack of demand for new charter schools in state and individual grants. During the coronavirus pandemic, some program money was allowed to be used for other purposes.


I have said my administration supports high-quality charters because it does. Charter opponents would rather we didn’t, but we do. But there are a lot of problems in the charter sector, and we can’t find any acknowledgment of that in your scorched-earth assault on us.


I expect that from Republicans — as George Will showed in a Washington Post column — that falsely said charters must “get permission” from a traditional public school to operate if our proposed reforms become official. They don’t — but let’s not let the truth get in the way.


And I expect that from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which sent out missives to supporters to speak out against the proposed reforms and launched media ads that accuse my administration of proposing changes that will hurt students of color.


Unfortunately, Democrats for too long have been part of this let’s-never-admit-there’s-a-charter-school-problem chorus. I read the op-ed that Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat who started a charter school network in 2004, wrote in The Washington Post, which alleged that our proposed reforms would “create chaos and limit public school choice by instituting new rules that would gut” the program. As we said, we haven’t proposed cutting a dime, but, legally the money has to be paid out annually, whether there are good proposals for charters or not. We know full well that some applications that don’t adhere to all of the priorities we have set out in the proposed reforms will get federal money anyway.
I also read the letter that three Democratic senators, Cory Booker (N.J.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) sent, along with Republicans, to my education secretary, Miguel Cardona, warning that our proposed program reforms “would make it difficult, if not impossible” for charter schools to build new facilities or expand. Love bipartisanship, but that’s just wrong.


I’ve also read editorials from charter school-supporting editorial departments. A Wall Street Journal editorial accused the Biden administration of sabotaging charter schools; a Washington Post editorial accused the administration of pandering to teachers’ unions and school district leaders. The headline of that piece calls our proposed changes to the charter funding program a “sneak attack.” A sneak attack in broad daylight?


I expect Republicans to accuse us of caving to teachers’ unions, but we’ve never understood the same from Democrats. My wife, Jill, and I, are big union supporters — she proudly belongs to the National Education Association — but let’s not kid ourselves about the power of the unions. If they had their way, do you think schools would look the way they do? Would teachers be forking out money of their own to buy basic supplies? Would we be worrying about Republicans — many of them racist — taking over Congress this fall? Would schools have broken HVAC systems and, in some places, unconscionably low teacher pay? Knock it off.


Do Democrats really think it’s a good time — with crucial midterm elections coming up — to ignore reality and falsely accuse a Democratic president of wanting to harm marginalized kids to kowtow to unions?
Your union accusations make it sound like unions are the only ones that support our changes. Far from it. House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn.) wrote a public comment letter about what she called a “well-funded misinformation campaign incorrectly claiming” that a proposed reform “would prevent federal funds from going to any charter school that uses a contractor for any discrete service” — another claim by the charter lobby. Civil rights organizations such as the Southern Education Foundation have weighed in to support the proposed program changes; the foundation wrote:


Public funds are intended for public education, so we must invest in the charter schools that will serve their communities, provide equal access to high-quality instruction, and collaborate with the public school system to share successful innovations in teaching and learning that improve outcomes and opportunity for all students.


You talk about charters as if they were all the same, and you know they aren’t. Some are great. Some are awful. In 2016, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, called for better regulation of virtual charter schools, a rare acknowledgment of big problems in the charter sector, but we haven’t heard much since.


Bottom line: The Charter School Programs division needs reform. I have read reports by a nonprofit advocacy group that say since 2019, up to a billion dollars of federal taxpayer money has been wasted on charter schools that did not open or were shut down — and that the Education Department failed to adequately monitor federal grants to these schools. The advocacy group, the Network for Public Education, opposes charter schools. But that doesn’t make their research any less valid. If you want to take the time, you can read about that here and here.


If you don’t care for that, you can read the report the NAACP — one of the longest-standing civil rights organizations in the country — wrote after it called for a ban on charter school expansion until the charter sector is reformed and traditional public school districts are not financially harmed by the spread of charter schools. It says in part:


“Charter schools were created with more flexibility because they were expected to innovate and infuse new ideas and creativity into the traditional public school system. However, this aspect of the promise never materialized. Many traditional inner city public schools are failing the children who attend them, thus causing parents with limited resources to search for a funded, quality educational alternative for their children. …With the expansion of charter schools and their concentration in low-income communities, concerns have been raised within the African American community about the quality, accessibility and accountability of some charters, as well as their broader effects on the funding and management of school districts that serve most students of color.”


By the way, despite some of your protestations, charter schools are draining critical funding from some school districts with policies that make little sense. In Oklahoma, for example, numerous school district leaders got furious about a funding decision made last year by the state Board of Education that forced them to share funding for school buildings with virtual charter schools that don’t have school buildings.
Meanwhile, states including New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey public school districts must pay tuition to charter schools costing them far more than they would pay if the student stayed in the district. Districts have lost millions of dollars in funding that has been sent instead to charter schools. Pennsylvania law funds charter schools as if 16 percent of all of their students are in special education — which costs more than students not in special education — but charters aren’t required to count so nobody really knows. School districts count each special education student.


So let’s talk about what my administration is trying to do with the federal Charter School Programs and why. The changes, as Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler wrote in a piece we read about the proposed reforms, “go a long way to fulfilling” a vow that Biden made while running for president. He said he wanted to eliminate federal funding of for-profit charter schools because that part of the charter sector has been riddled with financial scandal, private enrichment and other problems. The biggest change we are proposing would affect for-profit management companies that often run charter schools. We want those companies that run entire charter operations to be ineligible for grants.


Scandals in the for-profit sector of charters have contributed to some that disillusionment; for example, you can read here about how many for-profit management companies evade state laws banning for-profit charters — by setting up nonprofit charters and then directing the schools’ business operations to related corporations.


[The story of a charter school and its for-profit operators]


In our proposed charter program changes, we also would like to see applicants for federal grants prioritize charter schools that already have their charter school approved — yes, as it is now, applicants can get federal money without an actual school — and that would collaborate with school districts.


My education team and I know there is a great deal of discontent over our priority that charter school funding applicants show that there is some interest in the community for a new or expanded charter school — which, really, doesn’t seem unreasonable. Why should the public fund a school where there is no demand? School districts don’t do that.


The “community impact analysis” we would like to see from applicants includes a priority that the charter would not further school segregation. You say we are insisting that charters serve diverse student populations. We’d like that, but let’s be clear what the proposed reform actually says: that an application from “racially and socioeconomically segregated or isolated communities would still be eligible for funding.”


You may not realize this — or just don’t publicly admit it — but in some places, charter schools are being used as white-flight academies, like decades ago when the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling said segregated schools were unconstitutional.


In 2018, the federal Charter School Programs awarded a grant of $26.6 million to North Carolina to support “high-quality schools focused on meeting the needs of educationally disadvantaged students.” Thirty of the 42 charter schools that received CSP grants via the North Carolina Department of Education reported demographic information — and of those schools, more than one-third have significant overrepresentation of White students or a significant underrepresentation of Black students compared with the population of the public school district in which they are located. One overwhelmingly White private school, located near a public school with mostly Black students, was turned into a charter with the help of federal funding after making a pitch to families that included: “No current law forces any diversity whether it be by age, sex, race, creed.”


[Is federal charter school funding financing white-flight academies?]


I think it makes sense to ensure that federal funding isn’t being used to create white-flight academies. Do you?


There’s a lot more we could talk about that we haven’t addressed in our regulations. For example: Charter schools are supposed to be open to all students, but many of them employ more than a dozen tactics that allow them to shape their student enrollment. And did you know charter schools can be bought and sold and people can get rich from the sale of publicly funded schools?


[13 ways charter schools restrict enrollment]


[Charter schools are publicly funded — but there’s big money in selling them]


So, finally, can we move forward and keep our eye on the prize: making sure that America’s schoolchildren all go to high-quality schools? That’s what my administration and I are trying to do.

Categories Biden, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda

FAIR: Jonathan Chait Should Have Disclosed Conflict of Interest When Writing About Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2022 //
9

A progressive media-watch organization called FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) criticized New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait for failing to report his wife’s role in the charter industry when writing about (and defending) charter schools and attacking teachers’ unions.

On several occasions, Chait has written about education issues, usually to defend charter schools, although he is a political journalist with no particular expertise about education policy. He claims that he doesn’t have to disclose his wife’s role in the charter industry, because he is an opinion writer. FAIR does not consider that an appropriate justification for not disclosing his conflict.

It’s strange to see a journalist who calls himself “liberal” attack teachers’ unions. As a rule, liberals are not anti-union.

Chait’s article at the center of the controversy criticized President Biden and his Department of Education for proposing regulations that would prohibit for-profit charter management organizations from receiving federal funds. For-profit charters are typically low performing and should be an embarrassment to the entire sector, yet the charter industry lobbyists have rallied round the sleaziest of the charter chains. Since Joe Biden promised during his campaign to eliminate federal funding for for-profit charters, no one should be surprised that he is following through.

The proposed regulations also ask charter operators to submit an impact analysis, summarizing the likely effect of their charter on the existing public schools and the need for the new charter, as well as spell out their plans to collaborate with the district where they would locate. The charter lobbyists consider this idea of collaboration with district schools to be abhorrent.

FAIR did not analyze the argument about the value or harm of the regulations. It did address Chait’s failure to disclose his wife’s connection to the federal Charter Schools Program.

FAIR wrote:

NPE executive director Carol Burris, in a post on fellow education expert Diane Ravitch’s blog (5/13/22), laid out a convincing case that Chait’s latest article oversteps even the limited disclosure he had put in the article’s footnote aside.

[Burris wrote]:

Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.

His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writerwhen that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for WestEd, which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, WestEd, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.

FAIR’s research confirmed—and expanded upon—those claims.

WestEd, where Robin Chait has worked since October 2018, has received CSP funding from the Department of Education, most notably an open grant that’s already paid out $8.1 million to evaluate CSP and work with grantees. The contract, issued in September 2020, is one of a number of high-value DOE grants received by WestEd.

Also objectionable, although FAIR does not discuss it, was Chait’s characterization of the Network for Public Education as an organization funded by the teachers’ unions, which is false. That was his way of disparaging NPE, although for the life of me, I see nothing objectionable about taking funding from unions representing the nation’s teachers. It’s not like taking money from foundations of billionaires pushing privatization of the nation’s public goods, like the Waltons, Charles Koch, Michael Bloomberg, and Betsy DeVos.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit

Andrea Gabor: How Biden’s New Regulations Will Help Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2022 //
12

Andrea Gabor is Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College of the City of New York. She writes often for the Bloomberg website, where this article appears. Michael Bloomberg has written in opposition to Biden’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter School Program. Hopefully, he will read this article and change his views. The National Aliance for Public Charter Schools has been running a full-fledged panic attack in opposition to the sensible regulations, claiming falsely that they are a mortal threat to all charter schools; they are not. The lobbyists have even paid for ads on MSNBC, paid for by one of their billionaire funders, assailing the regulations.

Gabor is the author of “After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.” It contains one of the best—maybe the best—analyses of what happened to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Andrea Gabor explains why the regulations will improve the charter sector.

She writes:

Forget the battle over critical race theory. The latest salvos in the public-school culture wars are being fired over the federal charter schools program and the sensible guidelines that are being proposed by the administration of President Joe Biden.

Congress extended the program in March, approving $440 million for state agencies to help charters with startup expenses such as staffing and technology. Almost immediately, the White House is received a barrage of criticism for issuing guidelines intended, most importantly, to rein in charter-school funding abuses.

In particular, the proposed regulations would prevent for-profit management companies that run nonprofit charters from accessing federal funds. Even ardent charter supporters shun for-profit charters, which significantly underperform traditional public schools, and the new guidelines would close loopholes that have fostered fraud nationwide and especially in states including Arizonawhere loose regulations have emboldened legislators to enrich themselves on the taxpayer’s dime.

That kind of common-sense rule should serve as a first step toward a truce in the decades-long conflict over the role of charters in public education. Alas, it probably won’t.

The debate about charter-school regulations has become a proxy for a wider and even higher-stakes fight over the proper role of government. Since at least the era of President Ronald Reagan, conservatives have seen privatization as a way to undermine public schools and teachers unions, rejecting guardrails and often ignoring the original mission of charters to foster educational innovation.

Meanwhile, public-school advocates have been so busy defending the traditional public-school system, which they correctly argue is essential to democracy, that they rarely focus on finding ways to improve it.

Indeed, rancor between charter and public-school proponents is so toxic that a potentially mutually beneficial Biden proposal for granting funding to charter schools — that they demonstrate collaboration with a public school or district — seems almost impossible to achieve.

That’s a shame because the new guidelines offer quite a few possibilities to find common ground; ways to strengthen the charter sector while also protecting public schools.

Consider the proposed requirement that new charters reflect the movement’s original promise of promoting teacher innovation and “robust family and community engagement.” Such an approach could rebuild public trust in charter-friendly cities like New Orleans, which dismantled its public school system and replaced it with private operators over 15 years ago following Hurricane Katrina and, in the process, alienated much of its African-American community.

Instead of engaging local families, officials began by firing the city’s mostly African-American teachers — a sizeable swath of its middle class — and replacing them with inexperienced Teach-for-Americarecruits, most of whom only lasted a year or two. At the same time, charter authorizers recruited out-of-state charter-management organizations that established a harsh-discipline schooling model that often worked against the interests of New Orleans’s poorest and most vulnerable children. The authorizers explicitly excluded even well-regarded local groups from winning charters.

Given no say in the new education system, community groups rebelled — not just in New Orleans, but in Indianapolis, Kansas City and other cities where the same model was being imposed.

New Orleans belatedly and reluctantly recognized the need for community engagement and eventually made room for a handful of independent, community-led charters like Morris Jeff, which fought an uphill battle for authorization and funding and was launched with the express intention of allowing teachers to unionize and have a say in school policies. The well-regarded school offers an international baccalaureate program and is among a minority of integrated schools, but New Orleans is still dominated by large charter management organizations.

Increasing community engagement would mean supporting more schools like Morris Jeff and inviting more family input. It should also mean giving teachers a role in school decision-making, which has been shown to improve both public and charterschools. To that end, charter schools should reserve a percentage of governing-board seats for family members elected by parent-teacher organizations, as well as teachers elected by colleagues. (Unlike public schools, which have elected boards, charters have appointed boards and sometimes exclude family members from serving.)

The new guidelines also could be used to promote racial integration. Charters “can be a great vehicle” for doing so by drawing on students from multiple neighborhoods and appealing to students of diverse backgrounds, said Halley Potter an educational researcher at the Century Foundation.

There are also important elements of the White House guidelines that predictably inflame charter advocates. For example, they might keep some charters from opening when they threaten the stability of nearby public schools as they have in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. There, high concentrations of charters led regular public elementary and middle schools to enroll double and sometimes triple the proportion of special-needs kids of nearby charter schools, which often discourage special-needs applicants.

Traditional public schools still educate the vast majority of American children. The hostility to almost every aspect of the Biden guidelines is sad confirmation of the animosity toward this vital institution itself. It also shows the difficulty of finding common ground that could quell the education wars and foster improvements across sectors.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, For-Profit

Texas: IDEA Charter Chain Hires State Auditor to Be Its New CEO

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2022 //
6

The IDEA charter chain in Texas has gone through some strange ups and downs.

Its founder Tom Torkelson quit in 2020 with a golden parachute of $900,000 after a series of financial embarrassments (like trying to lease a private jet for $2 million a year and $400 box seats at the San Antonio Spurs basketball games for executives); the IDEA chief financial officer Wyatt Truscheit left at the same time.

A year later, the IDEA board fired its co-founder JoAnne Gama and another chief financial operator, Irma Munoz, “after a forensic review found “substantial evidence” that top leaders at the state’s largest charter network misused money and staff for personal gain.” Add to this brew that Betsy DeVos handed over $200 million from the federal Charter Schools Program to help IDEA grow faster and replenish its ample resources

Well, with all this turmoil and financial questions, state officials conducted an audit of the flush charter chain.

But lo and behold, three years later, the charter chain hired the state auditor to be its new CEO!

IDEA Public Schools this week named as its lone finalist for superintendent a top Texas Education Agency official who oversaw an office that has been investigating the charter network over allegations former leaders had misused money and staff for personal gain.

The network’s board on Tuesday named Jeff Cottrill, who has served as TEA’s Deputy Commissioner for Governance and Accountability for the last three years, as the finalist, according a statement from IDEA. He is expected to begin serving as superintendent in June following a 21-day waiting period required by the state for superintendent appointments.

“Jeff is an education leader with tremendous gifts, heart and focus,” Collin Sewell, chair of the IDEA Board of Directors, said in the statement. “He is a veteran school administrator with valuable and diverse experience leading, overseeing, and improving school districts and charter schools throughout Texas.”

In response to an inquiry from the Houston Chronicle, the charter network on Thursday issued a statement saying Cottrill had “recused himself from matters involving IDEA at the Texas Education Agency.”

Cozy!

State Board of Education Rep. Georgina Cecilia Pérez, whose district includes 40 counties in West Texas, said the move “just stinks to high heaven.”

She questioned why the agency had not announced Cottrill’s recusal from the probe. Pérez also asked who currently is overseeing the IDEA investigation and whether the same investigators, who technically worked for Cottrill, would continue digging into a charter network that he now will lead.

Georgina Cecilia Perez is a member of the board of the Network for Public Education.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Texas

Jan Resseger: Inequality of Educational Opportunity Is America’s Shameful Reality

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2022 //
36

Jan Resseger, now retired, spent her career as an activist for social justice. Her recent essay was reposted by the Network for Public Education. It seemed appropriate to post it on the 68th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision of 1954. In trying to assess the meager progress towards the ideals of Brown—specifically, equality of educational opportunity—she lays some of the blame on No Child Left Behind and the corporate school reform movement,

Jan Resseger attended the recent Network for Public Education conference, where she took inspiration from speaker Jitu Brown, director of the Journey for Justice Alliance. Reposted with permission.

She wrote:

A highlight of the Network for Public Education’s recent national conference was the keynote from Jitu Brown, a gifted and dedicated Chicago community organizer and the national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance. His remarks made me think about the meaning of the last two decades of corporate school reform and the conditions today in his city and here where I live in greater Cleveland, Ohio. It is a sad story.

Brown reflected on his childhood experience at a West Side Chicago elementary school, a place where he remembers being exposed to a wide range of information and experience including the study of a foreign language. He wondered, “Why did we have good neighborhood schools when I went to school but our kids don’t have them anymore? For children in poor neighborhoods, their education is not better.”

Brown described how No Child Left Behind’s basic drilling and test prep in the two subjects for which NCLB demands testing—math and language arts—eat up up more and more of the school day. We can consult Harvard University expert on testing, Daniel Koretz, for the details about why the testing regime has been particularly hard on children in schools where poverty is concentrated: “Inappropriate test preparation… is more severe in some places than in others. Teachers of high-achieving students have less reason to indulge in bad preparation for high-stakes tests because the majority of their students will score adequately without it—in particular, above the ‘proficient’ cut score that counts for accountability purposes. So one would expect that test preparation would be a more severe problem in schools serving high concentrations of disadvantaged students, and it is.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 116-117)

Of course, a narrowed curriculum is only one factor in today’s inequity. Derek W. Black and Axton Crolley explain: “(A) 2018 report revealed, school districts enrolling ‘the most students of color receive about $1,800 or 13% less per student’ than districts serving the fewest students of color… Most school funding gaps have a simple explanation: Public school budgets rely heavily on local property taxes. Communities with low property values can tax themselves at much higher rates than others but still fail to generate anywhere near the same level of resources as other communities. In fact, in 46 of 50 states, local school funding schemes drive more resources to middle-income students than poor students.”

Again and again in his recent keynote address, Jitu Brown described the consequences of Chicago’s experiment with corporate accountability-based school reform. Chicago is a city still coping with the effect of the closure of 50 neighborhood schools in June of 2013—part of the collateral damage of the Renaissance 2010 charter school expansion—a portfolio school reform program administered by Arne Duncan to open charter schools and close neighborhood schools deemed “failing,” as measured by standardized test scores. On top of the charter expansion, Chicago instituted student-based-budgeting, which has trapped a number of Chicago public schools in a downward spiral as students experiment with charter schools and as enrollment diminishes, both of which spawn staffing and program cuts and put the school on a path toward closure.

As Jitu Brown reflected on his inspiring elementary school experience a long time ago, I thought about a moving recent article by Carolyn Cooper, a long time resident of Cleveland, Ohio’s East Glenville neighborhood: “I received a stellar education in elementary, junior high, and high school from the… Cleveland Public School system… All of the schools I attended were within walking distance, or only a few miles from my home. And at Iowa-Maple Elementary School, a K-6 school at the time, I was able to join the French Club and study abroad for months in both Paris and Lyon, France… Flash forward to this present day… To fight the closure of both Iowa-Maple and Collinwood High School, a few alumni attended a school facilities meeting held in October 2019 at Glenville High School… Despite our best efforts, Collinwood remained open but Iowa-Maple still closed down… Several generations of my family, as well as the families of other people who lived on my street, were alumni there. I felt it should have remained open because it was a 5-Star school, offering a variety of programs including gifted and advanced courses, special education, preschool offerings, and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).”

In his keynote address last week, Jitu Brown explained: “Justice and opportunity depend on the institutions to which children have access.” Brown’s words brought to my mind another part of Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood less than a mile from Iowa-Maple Elementary School. If you drive along Lakeview Road between Superior and St. Clair Avenues, you see a neighborhood with older homes of a size comfortable for families and scattered newer rental housing built about twenty years ago with support from tax credits. You also see many empty lots where houses were abandoned and later demolished in the years following the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Separated by several blocks, you pass two large weedy tracts of land which were once the sites of two different public elementary schools—abandoned by the school district and boarded up for years before they were demolished. You pass by a convenience store surrounded by cracked asphalt and gravel. Finally you pass a dilapidated, abandoned nursing home which for several years housed the Virtual Schoolhouse, a charter school that advertised on the back of Regional Transit Authority buses until it shut down in 2018.

My children went to school in Cleveland Heights, only a couple of miles from Glenville. Cleveland Heights-University Heights is a mixed income, racially integrated, majority African American, inner-ring suburban school district. Our children can walk to neighborhood public schools that are a great source of community pride. Our community is not wealthy, but we have managed to pass our school levies to support our children with strong academics. We recently passed a bond issue to update and repair our old high school, where my children had the opportunity to play in a symphony orchestra, and play sports in addition to the excellent academic program.

Jitu Brown helped organize and lead the 2015 Dyett Hunger Strike, which forced the Chicago Public Schools to reopen a shuttered South Side Chicago high school. Brown does not believe that charter schools and vouchers are the way to increase opportunity for children in places like Chicago’s South and West Sides and Cleveland’s Glenville and Collinwood neighborhoods. He explains: “When you go to a middle-class white community you don’t see charter schools…. You see effective, K-12 systems of education in their neighborhoods. Our children deserve the same.”

In the powerful final essay in the new book, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, Bill Ayers, a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, agrees with Jitu Brown about what ought to be the promise of public education for every child in America:

“Let’s move forward guided by an unshakable first principle: Public education is a human right and a basic community responsibility… Every child has the right to a free, high-quality education. A decent, generously staffed school facility must be in easy reach for every family… What the most privileged parents have for their public school children right now—small class sizes, fully trained and well compensated teachers, physics and chemistry labs, sports teams, physical education and athletic fields and gymnasiums, after-school and summer programs, generous arts programs that include music, theater, and fine arts—is the baseline for what we want for all children.” (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, pp. 314-315) (emphasis in the original)

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Inequality, Injustice, Ohio, Race, Segregation

Jeanne Kaplan: The Colorado Privatizers Suffer a Setback in the Legislature

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2022 //
2

Colorado is a blue state where the privatizers have poured in millions of dollars to win school board seats. It’s the rare blue state that has gone all-in for privatization, led by Senator Michael Bennett (who served as Superintendent of Schools in Denver, although he was never an educator). Colorado’s Governor is Jared Polis, who is super-wealthy and founded two charter schools. Betsy DeVos hailed Denver as an exemplar of school choice.

Our friend Jeanne Kaplan served two terms on the elected Denver School Board and is a passionate advocate for public schools and civil rights. She has observed the bipartisan consensus around the DeVos-ALEC agenda with despair.

In this post, she brings good news. The “reformers” (aka privatizers) encountered a setback in the state legislature.

She begins:

At 9:23 p.m. MDT on May 11, 2022 Education Reformers in Colorado suffered their first serious setback in the Colorado legislature. While SB 22-197, the so-called Innovation and Alternative Governance Bill passed both houses of the legislature, the resulting legislation was actually a defeat for reformers/privatizers in Colorado, a first such legislative stumble in many years. At the very least the adopted Bill placed a roadblock in the previously unobstructed march to privatization. At the most it was a sign of the weakening of privatization. We can only hope.

While education reformers/privatizers will try to convince you they got a victory in the fight for the soul of public education, that is not the truth. The Bill that passed and will likely be touted as a great success has little substance. In fact, one could say, “There is no THERE THERE,” for the final version neutered the original intent of the legislation and codified:

  • No third party governance with binding arbitration.
  • Retention of decision-making powers for duly elected school
  • An advisory non decision-making role for the State Board of Education should any disputes reach it.

After much ado SB 22-197 ended up being a nothing burger with very few of the original ingredients in place.

The Bill’s original purpose was to install an alternative, third governance model with binding arbitration for disputes between a school district (read DPS) and an Innovation Zone (read City Fund’s RootEd/Gates Family Foundation funded Denver Innovation Zone Schools.) Reformers took this inequitable, highly divisive idea very seriously. Simply put, they wanted special treatment for 12 (!) Innovation Zone schools. The Bill was sponsored by two Denver Democrats Senators, James Coleman and Chris Hansen, both of whom have been highly subsidized by various local and national reform organizations. In real time this bill was crafted specifically for for 12 out of about 1800 public schools in Colorado. After garnering no sponsorship in the House, Jen Bacon, Denver Democrat and former DPS school board member stepped in to co-sponsor the bill. With her leadership and knowledge of the importance of local control for school boards she was able steer the conference committee into producing a more palatable Bill. It must have been very awkward for Senator Chris Hansen to have to admit to his colleagues, the difference between his original bill and the one they were now voting on was the loss of binding arbitration. There were of course other changes but binding arbitration was the big one, for it would have undermined local school boards’ authority by allowing for the appointment of a “third party” to resolve disputes.

The privatizers are constantly on the hunt for new ways to undermine public schools. in this instance, they were thwarted. That’s good news.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Denver, Education Industry, Resistance, School Choice

Tom Ultican Reports on the Highlights of the #NPE2022 Conference in Philly

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
1

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, is now a significant chronicler of the Destroy Public Education movement. He attended the recent national conference of the Network for Public Education in Philadelphia and recapitulates the excitement we shared at being in person after a 2-year hiatus.

After every conference, attendees say, “This was the best one yet.” They enjoy meeting people who are doing the same work to fight privatization of their public schools. By the end of the conference, attendees say they feel energized, hopeful, and happy to know that they are not alone.

I urge you to read Tom’s post. You will get a sense of the embarrassment of riches available to attendees.

I should add that the Nebraska Save Our Schools group shared the Phyllis Bush Award for Grassroots Activism. Nebraska is one of the few states that has managed to protect its public schools and keep out both charters and vouchers, despite being a Red State.

The Pastors for Texas Children, a co-winner of the award, has repeatedly blocked vouchers in the Texas Legislature and has consistently fought for funding for public schools. PTC has opened chapters in other Red states, where they mobilize clergy to support public schools.

A high point for me was interviewing “Little Stevie” Van Zandt, a legendary rock star and actor (“The Sopranos”), who is dedicated to getting the arts into schools, not as an extra, but across the curriculum. we had a wonderful conversation. He has funded lesson plans based on rock and roll, available free at his website TeachRock.

All of the general sessions were taped. I will post them when they become available.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Community Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Courage, Creativity, Dark Money, Democracy, Detroit, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, For-Profit, Hope, Innovation, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Nevada, Philadelphia, Privatization, Racism, Resistance, Standardized Testing, Supporting public schools, Teachers

Carol Burris: What Jonathan Chait Forgot to Mention in His Latest Defense of the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
14

Jonathan Chait writes for New York magazine, where his latest article appeared, opposing the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). CSP currently spends $440 million annually to underwrite new charter schools. Chait titled his article “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” but it might as well have been titled “Biden Abandons the Betsy DeVos Legacy on Charter Schools.”

Chait also attacked the Network for Public Education, which had issued two reports (see here and here) documenting the waste, fraud, and abuse in the CSP, based on the Education Department’s own data. NPE found that almost 40% of CSP funding went to charters that either never opened or closed within a few years of opening. In the life of the program, almost $1 billion had been wasted. In addition, NPE pointed out the scandals associated with some high-profile for-profit charter operators, as well as the use of CSP money to open white-flight charters.

This year, for the first time since the CSP was created nearly 30 years ago, the Department proposed to ban the funding of for-profit charter management organizations and of white-flight charters. The regulations also ask applicants for an impact analysis that describes what effect the new charter is likely to have on existing public schools and why the new charter is needed. These sensible reform proposals sent the charter lobbyists into frenzied opposition, claiming falsely that these regulations were meant to destroy all charter schools. This was nonsense because they would have no effect on the thousands of existing charters, only on applicants for new federal funding, that is, charters that do not yet exist.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, sharply denounced the lies and misrepresentations of the “trade organization” for the charter industry. But, despite her reproach, the charter industry still promotes dishonest diatribes about the Department’s efforts to reform the CSP.

Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, was incensed when she read Chait’s defense of the charter industry’s effort to protect the for-profit managers who have abused CSP funds and of the operators that have used CSP funding to provide white-flight charters.

She wrote the following response.

In his recent column, “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” Jonathan Chait is perturbed that the U.S. Department of Education referred Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum to me for comment on an article he was writing about the Department’s proposed regulations for funding new charter schools. He then scolds Barnum for not disclosing that the Network for Public Education has received donations from unions. He calls Barnum’s story “neutral.” Chait’s source for this big scoop? The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Jonathan Chait then parrots the “wild exaggerations and misrepresentations” that Rosa De Lauro called out last week after expressing her support for CSP reforms during the Education Department’s 2023 budget hearing. The Appropriations Chairwoman noted that “this kind of information campaign is a familiar tactic for the trade organization [National Alliance for Public Charter Schools]. It does represent charter schools that are run by risky low-quality for-profit education management organizations.”

You know those “wild exaggerations.” I wrote about them here. Obviously, Chait did not read the mentioned Barnum piece, which was solid reporting, and he certainly did not read the proposed regulations carefully (which Representative DeLauro described in a letter to Secretary Miguel Cardona about the charter industry’s misrepresentations). Or he just chose to twist facts and truth.

Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.

His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writer when that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for West Ed which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, West Ed, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.

But back to NPE funding. During some recent years we got modest donations from unions to bring teachers to our conferences. At our very beginning, we received start-up funds from the Chicago Teachers Union through a fiscal sponsor, Voices for Children. That ended in 2015. We will always be grateful to our friend, the late Karen Lewis, for that jump-start. Karen foresaw the growing attacks on public schools and teachers as an ominous trend and wanted to encourage allies to support a bedrock institution of our democracy.

We appreciate any tax-deductible donations we get. You won’t get favors, but you will always get a thank you. Our income comes from individual donations from our large number of supporters—educators, parents, family foundations, and other citizens who have a deep and abiding love for public schools.

This is not the first time Chait has been called out for not disclosing his wife’s connections with charters. But given the topic and her work in organizations connected with the Charter School Program, this is the worst omission yet. Shame on New York Magazine for not making him disclose and for letting him play fast and loose with the truth. And shame on Chait’s hypocritical critique of Barnum even as he hides the family connections with the program he defends.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Scandals, School Choice, Shame, Support for public schools
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