Archives for category: Closing schools
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Peter Greene: Betsy Drew the Wrong Lesson from the Failure of Obama and Duncan

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2017 //
17

Peter Greene read Betsy DeVos’s speech to CPAC and realized that she totally misunderstood why Obama and Duncan’s reforms failed. It wasn’t because they spent money. It was because they spent money on bad ideas. Now she proposes to spend money on vouchers, which have failed miserably, and on charters, which Obama and Duncan promoted. What is new about her approach? She is candid: she wants to destroy public education. Obama and Duncan either believed or pretended that public education would get better because of high-stakes testing, punishments, and charter schools. They were wrong. DeVos is wrong too. The difference is that we already know she is wrong, but she doesn’t.

Greene writes:

“School improvement grants were like food stamps that could only be spent on baby formula, ostrich eggs, and venison—and it didn’t matter if the families receiving the stamps lived on a farm with fresh milk and chicken eggs, or if they were vegetarians, or if they lived where no store sells ostrich eggs, or if there were no babies in the family. The Department of Education used the grants to dictate strategy and buy compliance with their micro-managing notions about how schools had to be fixed.

“As with many classic reform moves, plenty of folks on the ground level could have told the reformers what was wrong with their plan. But as DeVos’s comments show, the damage of School Improvement Grants is not only in wasted money, it’s also in convicting the wrong suspect and discrediting a whole reform approach.

“DeVos and other conservative reformers are taking the real lesson of the grant program’s failure: “spending money on the wrong thing for schools doesn’t help,” and shortening it to a far more damaging assessment: “spending money on schools doesn’t help.”

“The Obama-Duncan-King program didn’t just fail, they say, but it also helped discredit the whole idea of funding schools at all. Thanks Obama.”

Given the miserable failure of school choice in Michigan and Detroit, you would think DeVos was open to reflecting on the error of her ideas. But don’t make that mistake. Her ideas of school “reform” are based on ideology and theology. They won’t change. They can’t be proved or disproved. They are set in stone. Evidence doesn’t matter.

If allowed to do her wishes, public schools will be defunded (they are “godless”), unions will disappear, for-profit entrepreneurs will cash in, and a million weeds will bloom.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Vouchers

Hello, Betsy DeVos! Watch This Video!

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2017 //
8

Ms. DeVos:

The state of Michigan, as you know, plans to close 38 schools, most of them in Detroit.

Please watch this powerful documentary about school closings in Detroit, how they disproportionately affect black children, how they disproportionately affect children with special needs.

Detroit is littered with closed schools.

Don’t you realize that closing schools destroys communities and disrupts the lives of children who have high needs?

Please tell us what you intend to do to stop this madness.

The schools are not failing; our society is failing.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Closing schools, Detroit, Michigan, Special Education

DeVos Pushing More Public School Closings, But Only African American Schools Are Targeted

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2017 //
45

The following article was sent to me by education researchers Russ Bellant and M. Denise Baldwin. Baldwin is a former teacher in Saginaw. Recently, I was on an NPR program hosted by Warren Olney with three other people, one of whom spoke on behalf of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. He insisted that not a single public school in Detroit had ever been closed. This article says that the number of public schools closed in Detroit over the past 20 years is nearly 200, with more school closings ahead, all in African American communities. Meanwhile the Detroit Free Press published an article showing that the closure of neighborhood schools–DeVos’s goal–means less choice for black residents, who no longer have a school they can walk to or transportation to schools of “choice.”

DeVos leads push for school closings, only African American schools targeted

By Russ Bellant and M. Denise Baldwin

When Michigan Governor Rick Snyder concluded that a new law that restructured Detroit Public Schools prohibited school closures until 2019, the DeVos network reacted immediately, demanding closures of Detroit schools. They enlisted elected officials who had received campaign contributions from the DeVos apparatus. Now the Governor has backed down, despite considerable legal muscle that agreed with his interpretation.

In a shocking move, the Governor has proposed the closing of 38 schools across the state, including 24 Detroit public schools (and one Detroit charter). But an examination of the list shows a disturbing pattern: all of them serve primarily African American populations.

The DeVos entity that speaks to education issues in the state, Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), quickly demanded that all 38 be shut down. They ignore the reality that in one part of Detroit, it would close all the area high schools and abandon K-8 education in a large area of the City. More fundamentally, they ignore the fact that they are accelerating separate and unequal education in Michigan.

GLEP, which was set up and has been primarily funded by Dick and Betsy DeVos, has been aggressive in advocating the shutting down of public schools and replacing them with charters. The charters, in turn, have been seen as a base to get electoral support for vouchers, according to plans formulated in the mid-1990s. An amendment to the Michigan Constitution to permit vouchers was put on the ballot by the DeVos family in 2000, but it was soundly defeated.

Undeterred, the DeVos machine continues their plan to charterize Michigan public schools with no caps or accountability mandated. The charters, some placed by DeVos allies, are set up primarily in communities of color. Eighty percent are for-profit corporations, according to a Western Michigan University study. They average a thousand dollars profit off each student, out of a state foundation of just over $7,000 per student.

White school districts have been more resistant to state intervention when school performance is an issue, and it gets more attention. But when Black schools are targeted, there is less statewide concern, so they are seen as a path of least resistance for charterizers.

DeVos has directly used her political muscle to take a highly rated Detroit aeronautics high school and have a state subsidy for that school transferred to a DeVos-created charter high school in west Michigan. They also took the Detroit curriculum as their own. The West Michigan Aviation Academy says that the school was an inspiration of Betsy DeVos.

It remains to be seen how much the Michigan public will tolerate the dismantling of their districts. One school that is in an otherwise majority white district plans a determined resistance to the state closing plan. The East Detroit Public Schools, in a county that voted for Trump, has on its website a statement from its Superintendent that “We have no intention of allowing the SRO (from the Governor’s office-RB) to dictate the future of our students.” A school board member added that “East Detroit Public Schools will not accept the closure of any of the District’s schools by the state and will not allow the SRO to intervene at this point in our plans. School closures hurt children.”

The state is also facing lawsuits over its destruction of public schools and educational quality. They have directly controlled the Detroit schools for the last eight years and 15 of the last 18 years. Their citation of academic shortcomings they created as justification of the closings is really an indictment of state control, a subject they avoid.

The state has also dismantled four school districts across the state. All were African-American communities. Currently three of the proposed schools for closure in Saginaw and in Bridgeport-Spaulding Public Schools serve students who were displaced when their home district, Buena Vista, was dissolved. The proposed closings would subject hundreds of students to two major school dislocations.

Detroit is the model of proving that mass closures only put districts in a downward spiral. In the last 13 years 172 district schools (61%) have been closed, mostly by the state, in response to state-created debt and academic performance. Another 15 were taken and turned into the Governor’s personal school district. Closings have lead to abusive charterization and neighborhood abandonment. If closures were the solution, Detroit would be the Harvard of K-12 education.

There is a likely legal challenge to the DeVos-led dismantling of public education based on impact disparities on African American communities. DeVos has shown no reluctance to exploit this vulnerability in our social fabric as she seeks a world of profit-driven charters and vouchers that undermine over a half-century of educational progress.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Detroit, Michigan

Bill Boyle: Betsy DeVos and the Problem of Institutional Racism

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2017 //
32

 

 

Bill Boyle notices a fact that has been obvious to everyone except corporate reformers for the past 15 years: almost every school that is labeled “failing” enrolls mostly children of color. In Michigan, the home state of Betsy DeVos, every community that is targeted for state takeover and for an emergency manager is majority people of color. Corporate reformers look at schools with low test scores, and they see dollar signs, not children with unmet needs. At present, 38 schools in Michigan have been declared “failing schools.” They are slated for closure. This was surprising to hear, because when I participated in a four-way debate last week with Matt Frendewey of DeVos’s American Federation for Children on NPR, he insisted that public schools are never closed in Detroit or Michigan, only charter schools. Twenty-four of the 38 schools slated for closure are in Detroit.

 

Bill Boyle writes:

 

“Let’s be clear and name this- Betsy DeVos is a huge proponent of institutional racism.

 

“How do you spot institutional racism? It’s pretty easy.

 

“First, here is what you don’t do. You don’t go looking for individual racists. I honestly don’t know DeVos’s personal ideas on race. I am certainly not naming her as a racist. Her intentions are beyond by my ability to determine. More so I don’t see her personal intentions as particularly relevant. (The same goes for Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions. Who cares if those who know him claim he’s a nice guy? See below.)

 

“What is relevant are the effects and outcomes of the policies that she supports. These are very, very easy to determine. And they clearly support institutionalized racism.

 

“It goes without question that DeVos has supported the narrative of “failing schools” and that she has funded it. In the state of Michigan this has led to a number of weird policies (the ability of the SRO to close schools being only one) that have become institutionalized through the financial backing and political influence of DeVos. (As an excellent example of how DeVos exerts pressure, see here.)

 

“So let’s dig a little deeper.

 

“What do these 38 schools on the SRO closing list have in common? They are in areas of high concentrations of poverty, and high populations of African American students. This is called a “disproportional outcome,” one that has a disproportionate effect on a particular group of people. In this case, we are talking about poor Black communities. Poor Black communities are having their schools taken from them. Poor Black communities are having their schools being named as failures, which allows us to avoid considering the racialized economic conditions that actually led to these communities having high concentrations of Black students who also tend to be struggling with poverty. Schools are being named as failures while hiding the fact that those in power have failed those communities.

 

“It is shameful.

 

“And it is, by definition, institutionalized racism.

 

“Maybe we should ask, does closing schools work?

 

“The answer is yes if your goal is to continue to steal resources from those most in need of them.

 

“The answer is no if you are hoping to support these communities.

 

“Hell no.

 

“Not even close.

 

“As an example, Muskegon Heights public school district was completely charterized as a result of the having been overtaken by emergency management in 2012. The whole district was given to a private company to run as a charter district. In 2014, that company left in the middle of the school year because the profit wasn’t what projections hoped for. It remains charterized.

 

“And it is now is on the closure list.

 

“Oh well.

 

“Muskegon Heights district is 95.6% Black with a poverty rate of 61.7%. Hmm…”

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Michigan, Racism

Reader: Why the $3.5 Billion School Improvement Grants Failed

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2017 //
11

This morning, I posted an evaluation by Mathematica Policy Research, which concluded that the federal School Improvement Grants had no effect on test scores. A reader named Sara explains here why the SIG program failed, after spending $3.5 billion:

 

 

The SIG required certain interventions and did not give any autonomy or decision making power to the people who already worked in the school.

 

So for example in the school where I work, SIG required that an outside organization provide social emotional support to students- rather than supplementing the counseling and social work staff who are highly qualified and already know the students. Whenever new people come into a situation there is a long learning curve. Also people from an outside organization do not have a long term commitment to the school.

 
Another example, staff came in for the grant who merely measured and “coached” – what the school really needed was smaller class size, so for example another math teacher instead of a “coach.” Experienced teachers for the most part know what to do, they are just overwhelmed by the large number of students who have special issues – and they do not have support.

 
Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on technology – but the librarian and IT person were let go.

 
The presumption on the part of the administrators (not in the school) of the grant was that the problems in the school lay with the teachers – not with poverty, an insufficient number of qualified staff, and an unstable district.

Categories Accountability, Closing schools, Data, Duncan, Arne, Failure

Peter Greene: Arne’s Education Ideas Are Now on the Ash Heap of History

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2017 //
49

Peter Greene reviews Arne Duncan’s bold effort to declare American public education a failure, to impose high-stakes testing on teachers everywhere, and to develop a test-based system of evaluation for teachers, students, administrators, and schools, all tied to national standards (the Common Core). In pursuit of his fancy, Duncan caused damage to real people: thousands of schools were called “failures,” thousands of teachers’ lives were ruined.

 

If you read my book “Reign of Error,” you will learn that reformers spun a Big Lie about “failing schools,” as an excuse for privatizing as many as they could. They pointed to an achievement gap between different groups and blamed it on schools and teachers, without bothering to demonstrate that their preferred alternative–charter schools–would have any effect on reducing those gaps.

 

In reviewing Duncan’s disappearing “legacy,” Greene offers a few words of consolation:

 

At this point I can feel a little bad for Duncan—he didn’t really accomplish any of his major goals, and the next administration is not even going to pay lip service to his efforts. It must be tough to feel like you really know a lot about how something works, but the people in power won’t even listen to you. It feels, in fact, a lot like being a teacher during Duncan’s tenure at the U.S. Department of Education.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Peter Greene Has an Answer to Doug1943’s Question

By dianeravitch
December 28, 2016 //
47

This morning I posted a question written by Doug1943, rehashing corporate reformer arguments about “allowing children to escape failing public schools.” I invited readers to answer his question(s).

 

Peter Greene put his answer into a post. 

 

This should satisfy Doug (or not), and this is only an introduction to the rest of the post where Doug will find answers:

 

Most public ed advocates that I know and interact with would agree that, particularly in some large urban districts, there are some schools with serious problems. I would never tell you that all public schools are flawless and there are no huge problems. There are, from serious underfunding to long-standing institutional racism to a lack of any sort of vision from leaders. There are absolutely some serious issues, but it does not appear to me that choice-charter-voucher advocates are proposing anything that will actually solve any of the problems.

 

They call to mind lying with a broken leg on the sidewalk, and someone runs up with a chain saw and says, “Hey, I’m going to take off your arms” and I ask what help that will be and are they even a doctor and they reply, “Well, no– but we have to do something!” No, thanks.

 

Do charters generally do a better job? There’s no clear evidence that they do– often they get the same results with the same kids (as far as we can tell, given that we have no good way in place to measure school success– your reservations about standardized tests are on point) and a little too often they do worse. Do charters solve poverty? No. Do charters and choice spur competition that leads to greatness? There’s zero evidence that they do. Do they allow children to “escape” bad schools? Maybe– but here’s the big problem as charters are currently handled: the escape comes at the cost of making a bad school worse by stripping it of resources. And as I frequently point out, the free market can’t handle this problem. The free market survives by picking winners and losers and dropping the losers out– there is not one single business or business sector in this country that serves every single citizen, but serving 100% of US students is exactly the education gig.

 

So in short, yes, there are problems and no, the charter-choice-voucher idea doesn’t solve any of them.

 

So what are my alternative suggestions? Let me first note that the guy who wants to treat my broken leg by chainsawing off my arms is the person carrying the burden of proof. But as someone who is invested in public education, and who has already noticed most of the issues that charter fans holler about in their marketing materials. In the interests of not writing an entire book, let me offer just a quick list of some major steps that, I believe, would help.

 

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

Rahm Emanuel: Don’t Be Afraid of School Choice

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2016 //
36

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel published an opinion article in the Washington Post saying something about how choice is a good thing when it is a good thing, so don’t get your knickers twisted against school choice just because Trump is for it. At least I think that is what he is saying. Read it and tell me why you think he (or someone wrote) wrote this article to get people to think well of school choice.

 

I think he is saying that when Democrats promote privatization by charter school, that is a good thing, and we must keep doing it even though Betsy DeVos wants to turn every school into a charter school and/or give every student a voucher to attend a religious school.

 

Sorry, but I have a hard time reading anything allegedly penned by Rahm about schools without thinking of the day of infamy when he closed 50 public schools at one fell swoop. He will be remembered for the brutal, disruptive, heedless closing of 50 community public schools. That, and the awful youth violence that continues to plague Chicago, promoted to some extent by the deliberate destruction of communities.

 

At the same time that Rahm and his hand-picked board of the city’s elite were closing public schools, they continued opening charter schools. Chicago is not an example of the success of school reform. To the extent that we use the federal NAEP scores as a measure, Chicago is still one of the lowest performing urban districts in the nation. It has some very good public schools, but it also has many very poorly resourced schools. Rahm will not be remembered as an education reformer.

 

In this article, he boasts again of Urban Prep Academy. This is the all-black, all-male school where 100% of the students who reach 12th grade graduate and go to college. This is a school that Gary Rubinstein researched and discovered its high attrition rate and its low test scores, lower than those of students in Chicago public schools. When I googled Urban Prep to find the links, I noticed that newspapers around the country still report the news of its “100% graduation rate” and “100% college acceptance rate.”

 

Knowing what Rahm has done to the Chicago public schools, I find it hard to understand why he thinks he is in a position to offer advice to the nation about school reform. The reality is that he is comfortable with Trump and DeVos and the privatization movement and has no qualms about continuing to implement it in Chicago.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Education Industry, Emanuel, Rahm, Privatization

Boston: When Will Mitchell Chester and Tommy Chang Be Held Accountable?

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2016 //
20

The citizens of Massachusetts spoke loudly and clearly on November 8 when they overwhelmingly rejected Question 2. They don’t want more charter schools. They want strong and well-resourced public schools.

 

But the state of Massachusetts and the Boston school superintendent Tommy Chang have decided to close Mattahunt Elementary School despite the pleas of the parents and the local community. 

 

The state Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester has threatened to take over the school, although state takeovers have seldom been successful at improving schools. Boston superintendent Chang says that the only way to save the school is to close it. Read that sentence over two or three times and see if it makes any sense to you. It reminds me of the saying during the Vietnam War that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” This is insane.

 

Test scores are low. Kids are poor. Why not come up with a strategy to improve the school? Chang, who worked for John Deasy’s in Los Angeles, seems to have no idea how to help the school other than to close it. Neither does Mitchell Chester.

 

Citizens for Public Schools writes:

 

Does Boston have to close a school to save its children from suffering harm at the hands of the state?

 

That startling question was the focus of nearly four hours of passionate debate last week, pitting 100 parents and other supporters of the Mattahunt School against Superintendent Tommy Chang.

 

In the end, the School Committee voted to close the school at the end of June to head off state takeover, even after parents said they were willing to take the risk and would join with the School Committee in fighting for their school.

 

The Mattahunt students are 95 percent Black and Latino, and over 25 percent English language learners. Many come from Haiti and have already experienced trauma and instability. School Department officials said 17 of the students came to the Mattahunt from other schools that the department closed.

 

“You would never do this in a white community,” said Peggy Wiesenberg, a white parent who came to support the Mattahunt parents…

 

All sides agreed that state intervention would be a tragedy for the children. Speakers said the state takeover of the Dever and Holland schools had hurt the children in those schools, using terms like “disaster.”

 

Have public officials in charge of education in Massachusetts lost their minds? Why would they close a school to avoid a state takeover that everyone agrees would be a disaster? Would they do this in a white neighborhood? Why are they treating these children like they are inanimate objects? Like they don’t matter? Like their well-being is unimportant? They are not doing this for the kids. Why are they doing it? What is the point? This is not education reform. This is community destruction and child abuse.

 

Where is the accountability for Mitchell Chester and Tommy Chang? They are guilty of educational malpractice. They should be held accountable.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Boston, Closing schools, Parents, Students

The Death of a Great High School

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2016 //
5

Jelani Cobb graduated from Jamaica High School, as did many other distinguished Americans. In a powerful story that appeared in The New Yorker, Cobb tells the history of Jamaica High School as a paradigm for the clash between race and reform. Jamaica High School was long considered one of the best high schools in New York City in the 1980s. As the city adopted reform after reform, the school went from an integrated model to a highly segregated school; it enrolled growing numbers of students who were learning English or had disabilities. Other schools lured away top-achieving students. When the Bloomberg-Klein regime took over, Jamaica’s days were numbered. The staff and the local community fought for the survival of the school, but Bloomberg-Klein gloried in closing large high schools and stuffing them with multiple small schools with multiple principals. The school that once enrolled over 3,000 students held its last graduation ceremony in 2014, with a graduating class of only 24 students. This is a very sad story about the abandonment of schools that suffered from the reformer conceit that low scores=bad schools. Jamaica in its final years was serving the neediest of the city’s students; it was put to death by the authorities.

Cobb writes:

Underscoring the indignities that attended the school’s last days was a difficult irony: for much of its time, Jamaica was a gemstone of the city’s public-education system. In 1981, the schools chancellor, Frank Macchiarola, decided to take on the additional role of an interim high-school principal, in order to better appreciate the daily demands of school administration. He chose Jamaica, and was roundly criticized for picking such an easy school to lead. Four years later, the U.S. Department of Education named it one of the most outstanding public secondary schools in the nation. Alumni include Stephen Jay Gould, Attorney General John Mitchell, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Walter O’Malley, Paul Bowles, and three winners of the Pulitzer Prize: Gunther Schuller, Art Buchwald, and Alan Dugan. Bob Beamon, who set a world record for the long jump in the 1968 Olympics, graduated with the class of ’65. The school’s closure felt less like the shuttering of a perennial emblem of stagnation than like the erasure of a once great institution that had somehow ceased to be so.

Jamaica had become an institution of the type that has vexed city policymakers and educators: one charged with serving a majority-minority student body, most of whose members qualified as poor, and whose record was defined by chronic underachievement and academic failure. Even so, word of the school’s closure angered students and their families, the community, and alumni. I was among them—I graduated with the class of ’87—and for me, as for many former students, the school was a figment of recollection, frozen in its academic glory. George Vecsey, the former Times sports columnist and a member of the class of ’56, accused Joel Klein, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s schools chancellor, of “cooking the books,” to make schools slated for closure appear worse than they were, and compared the Department of Education’s closure policies to the nihilism of Pol Pot. Vecsey later apologized for having slighted the suffering of Cambodia, but he held to his contention that Klein ruled by dictatorial fiat. He wrote, in a blog, “The city destroyed a piece of history because of its own failure.”

Categories Accountability, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, High School Graduation, Klein, Joel, New York City
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