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Leonie Haimson: Is Colorado’s Rebuke to DFER a Turning Point in the Battle Against Privatization?

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
15

 

Leonie Haimson writes here about the stunning rebuke administered by the Colorado Democratic Party to “Democrats for Education Reform” last Saturday. 

It is hard to overstate the commanding position of DFER in that state. Senator Michael Bennett is DFER-approved. So are two of the leading Democrats running for Governor. DFER’s Dark Money has captured the Denver school board.

Until now, no one has stood up to them. No one could match their cash.

Will DFER survive this denunciation? Of course. But their stamp of approval might turn into a stigma for real Democrats. Real Democrats do not support the DeVos privatization agenda. Real Democrats support public schools u dear democratic control.

Leonie writes:

”Let’s hope that the Colorado vote is a turning point, and that it is no longer politically or ethically acceptable for progressive Democrats to act like Republicans when it comes to education policy.”

Wouldn’t that be great?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Education Industry, Privatization

Colorado: Teachers Plan to Walk Out, Descend on Legislature to Demand Higher Pay, Better Funding

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
5

 

The Denver Post reports that some teachers in Colorado plan to assemble at the State Capitol today to air their grievances, namely, low salaries, which have contributed to teacher shortages.

Inspired by walkouts in other states, teachers will meet with legislators to make their case.

“Earlier this year, 100 CEA members told lawmakers about a survey of more than 2,200 CEA members that showed the average educator spent about $656 a year out of their own pockets for student needs. Many CEA members presented invoices to the General Assembly for the past due amount.

“The CEA said educators in Colorado have had their pay cut by more than 17 percent when adjusting for inflation. A recent study from the Education Law Center, a group that advocates for more school funding, ranked Colorado dead last in the competitiveness of its teacher salaries.

“The typical 25-year-old teacher at the beginning of his or her career in Colorado makes just 69 percent of what a peer with a similar education level who works similar hours earns, the Education Law Center said….

”The CEA on Monday will lobby lawmakers to restore and increase education funding — K-12 public schools in Colorado are underfunded by $828 million in the current school year — and to secure a stable retirement program, CEA president Karrie Dallman said.”

It remains to be seen whether Colorado teachers will enlarge the protest and close down schools across the state. Public schools have been shortchanged by the Legislature.

 

Categories Budget Cuts, Colorado, Education Reform, Funding, Resistance

Good News! Colorado Democratic Party Overwhelmingly Passes Motion Against DFER

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2018 //
19

 

The group that calls itself “Democrats for Education Reform” represents hedge fund money and Wall Street and advocates for charter schools and high-stakes testing. Although it has no evident connection to education other than its name, it has funneled campaign contributions and Dark Money into state and local elections to support privatization of public schools. It has strongly backed test-based evaluations of teachers, despite the evidence against it.

Today, the Colorado Democratic Party voted on a minority report critical of DFER. The motion required a 2/3 voice vote. It passed easily.

The motion said:

”We oppose making Colorado’s public schools private, or run by private corporations, or segregated again through lobbying and campaign efforts of the organization called Democrats for Education Reform and demand that they immediately stop using the Party’s name, I.e., “Democrat” in their name.”

To learn about DFER, read this:

Click to access IntendedConsequencesofDFER.pdf

 

 

Categories Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER

Gary Rubinstein: Will Reformer Michael Johnston Please Stop Boasting About His “Miracle ” School?

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2017 //
22

Gary Rubinstein knows Michael Johnston from his days in Teach for America. He wishes Mike would stop telling tall tales about the school he briefly ran.

Mike said that the school he ran had a 100% graduation rate and college acceptance rate. Gary points out that 44 seniors graduated and got accepted to college, but there were 73 students in tenth grade two years earlier. That’s a 60% graduation rate, not 100%.

Now Mike Johnston is running for Governor of Colorado. He has built a reputation in the state as an education “reformer.” After graduating from Yale, he taught in Mississippi as a member of Teach for America, earned a degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, then a law degree, then was principal of a small school in Colorado where he claimed the school had a graduation rate of 100% and all were accepted into college. Based on this record, he ran for and was elected to the State Senate at the age of 35.

I met Mike Johnston in 2010, when I visited Denver to talk about my then-new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” I was scheduled to debate Johnston at a luncheon before about 100 of Denver’s civic leaders. At the very moment I was in Denver, the Legislature was debating Johnston’s legislation to evaluate teachers and principals by the test scores of their students. Johnston called his law, SB 10-191, the “Great Teachers, Great Principals Act.” It required that test scores would count for 50% of every teacher and principal’s evaluation.

On the day we were to debate, Johnston was late. I spoke. Minutes later, Johnston arrived, not having heard anything I said about choice and testing. He spoke with great excitement about how his new legislation would weed out all the bad and ineffective teachers in the state and would lead to a new era of great teachers, great principals, and great schools.

Johnston, as Gary Rubinstein points out, is very much an Obama Democrat. Arne Duncan, whose Race to the Top squandered $5 Billion, has endorsed Johnston’s candidacy for governor.

Seven years later, even Colorado reformers acknowledge that Mike Johnston’s grandiose promises fell flat. In an article in Education Week, Colorado reformer Van Schoales admitted that the punitive SB 10-191 didn’t have much, if any effect.

He wrote:

“Implementation did not live up to the promises.

“Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.

“What happened?

“It was wrong to force everyone in a state to have one ‘best’ evaluation system.”

“First, the data. We built a policy on growth data that only partially existed. The majority of teachers teach in states’ untested subject areas. This meant processes for measuring student growth outside of literacy or math were often thoughtlessly slapped together to meet the new evaluation law. For example, some elementary school art-teacher evaluations were linked to student performance on multiple-choice district art tests, while Spanish-teacher evaluations were tied to how the school did on the state’s math and literacy tests. Even for those who teach the grades and subjects with state tests, some debate remains on how much growth should be weighted for high-stakes decisions on teacher ratings. And we knew that few teachers accepted having their evaluations heavily weighted on student growth.

“Second, there has been little embrace of the state’s new teacher-evaluation system even from administrators frustrated with the former system. There were exceptions, namely the districts of Denver and Harrison, which had far fewer highly effective teachers than elsewhere in the state. Both districts invested time and resources in the development of a system that more accurately reflects a teacher’s impact on student learning. Yet most Colorado districts were forced to create new evaluation systems in alignment with the new law or adopt the state system, and most did the latter. This meant that these districts focused on compliance (and checking off evaluation boxes), rather than using the law to support teacher improvement.

“Third, we continue to have a leadership problem. Research shows that teacher evaluators are still not likely to give direct and honest feedback to teachers. A Brown University study on teacher evaluators in these new systems shows that the evaluators are three times more likely to rate teachers higher than they should be rated. This is a problem of school and district culture, not a fault with the evaluation rubric.

“Fourth, all of Colorado’s 238 charter schools waived out of the system.

“We wanted a new system to help professionalize teaching and address the real disparities in teacher quality. Instead, we got an 18-page state rubric and 345-page user guide for teacher evaluation.

“We didn’t understand how most school systems would respond to these teacher-evaluation laws. We failed to track implementation and didn’t check our assumptions along the way.”

Unfortunately, when the time came to change the law, Sen. Mike Johnston joined with five Republicans on the State Senate Education Committee to defeat a proposal to fix his failed law.

The rejected proposal, “originally introduced with bipartisan sponsorship, would have allowed school districts to drop the use of student academic growth data in teacher evaluations. It also would have eliminated the annual evaluation requirement for effective and highly effective teachers.”

But Johnston preferred to keep his law in place, despite its failure. It remains today as the most regressive teacher evaluation law in the nation. And it has had seven years to demonstrate its ineffectiveness.

Gary Rubinstein calls on Mike Johnston to stop making the false claim in his campaign literature that his high school’s graduation rate was 100%.

I call on him to renounce and denounce SB 10-191.

Make a clean break of it, Mike. Set things right. Show you are man enough to admit you were wrong.

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, High School Graduation, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM

Good News! Newly Elected Douglas County, Colorado, School Board Kills Voucher Program!

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2017 //
4

The Douglas County School Board voted unanimously to shut down its voucher program, the only one in the nation authorized by a school district. This was a big setback for the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, which lavished funding on the DougCo schools.

Douglas County is one of the wealthiest districts in the nation.

Anti-voucher parents and educators swept the rightwing school board out of Office in the November elections.

“The Douglas County school board Monday put to bed the district’s controversial Choice Scholarship program, ending a six-year battle to set up the nation’s only district-approved voucher program.

“The vote to end the voucher program, and the legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, was unanimous: six to nothing. One board member, Kevin Leung, did not participate in the deliberations or the vote, fulfilling a campaign pledge that he would sit out the vote because he is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the school district.

“Leung is one of four board members elected on a campaign pledge to end the voucher program. He initially asked to be excused from Monday’s meeting but was asked to be present as the board would also discuss its search for a permanent superintendent.

“The other three — Chris Ciancio-Schor, Anthony Graziano and new board Secretary Krista Holtzmann — all voted to end the program along with board President David Ray, Vice President Wendy Vogel and Board Treasurer Anne-Marie Lemieux.

“The Choice Scholarship was authorized in March 2011 by a conservative majority elected in 2009 and backed with tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from wealthy pro-voucher Republicans including Alex Cranberg of Aspect Energy and Ed McVaney, founder of software company JD Edwards.

“The program would have given a taxpayer-funded voucher, valued in 2015 at around $5,000, to up to 500 Douglas County students who lived in the district and attend Douglas County public schools for one year.

“The Choice Scholarship was the first in the nation to be authorized by a school district. Most voucher programs are created by state legislatures and are targeted to low income students in failing schools.

“Douglas County, the fifth wealthiest county in the nation, did not include an income qualifier for its voucher.

“Until recently, school board races have generally been low-key (and low-dollar) campaigns. But the big dollars spent in Douglas County and Denver on this year’s races signaled the beginning of radical change in those two school districts around the issue of school choice. In Douglas County, the hot button issue was the voucher program; in Denver, it was charter and “innovation schools.” The Denver school board hiked the number of charter schools from 17 to 60, beginning in 2010, and the number of innovation schools, similar to charters, from seven to 49.

“In June 2011, the parents group Taxpayers for Public Education filed for an injunction against the school district to block the program’s implementation. The case wound its way to the Colorado Supreme Court, which in 2015 ruled the program unconstitutional based on the state’s Blaine amendment, which bans the use of taxpayer dollars for religious purposes, including religious education.

“The district, the third largest in the state, with more than 60,000 students, received $1.8 million in donations for its legal expenses from the Daniels Fund and the Walton Family Foundation. The district appealed the Colorado high court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent the case back to the Colorado Supreme Court last June.

“Prior to Monday’s board vote, which took place just after 7 p.m., the board listened to more than an hour of pleas from those who wanted to make sure the new board members held to their pledge, as well as from those who wanted the voucher program to have a chance to work.

“During the board’s public comment period, every speaker who addressed the voucher program asked the board to end it.”

Here is the report from Chalkbeat Colorado.

“Public funds should not be diverted to private schools, which are not accountable to the public,” said board member Krista Holtzmann.

“The state Supreme Court, which during the summer was directed by the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the case, will have the ultimate say in whether the legal challenge will end.

“However, the court usually does not consider moot cases, said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the ACLU of Colorado, a plaintiff in the case.

“The board’s action is a blow to conservative education reform advocates and voucher supporters in Colorado and across the country. Proponents of vouchers had hoped a victory at the U.S. Supreme Court would set a national precedent.

“The legal question at the center of the voucher debate is whether a local school district can send tax dollars to private-religious institutions. A majority of the schools that enrolled in the Douglas County voucher system, known as the Choice Scholarship Program, were religious.

“The state Supreme Court in 2015 ruled that the district could not because the Colorado Constitution forbids it. The U.S. Supreme Court gave voucher supporters renewed hope this year when, in a similar case, it issued a narrow ruling for a preschool run by a church.

“A network of voucher supporters has argued that such constitutional prohibitions, known as Blaine Amendments, are rooted in Catholic bigotry and are outdated.

“Americans for Prosperity, a political nonprofit [the Billionaire Koch brothers] that advocates for free-market policies including private school vouchers, announced Friday it was spending “five figures” to warn Douglas County parents about the board’s decision to end the program.

“The new school board must put the needs of school children before any political belief,” Jesse Mallory, the group’s Colorado director, said in a statement. “Ending this program before it even has a chance to succeed and provide real change in our communities would be extremely shortsighted. If the board believes they should deny children more educational opportunities, AFP-Colorado will hold them accountable.”

“Opponents of vouchers, who showed up in force Monday night, presented a lengthy list of claims against private schools and vouchers. Some argued that private schools discriminate against students. Others suggested vouchers were part of a scheme to privatize education.

“What happens to the educational quality of children in the community school where there is less money to work with because of the voucher outflow?” said one speaker, Barbara Gomes Barlow, who has grandchildren in Douglas County schools. “It is diminished. It’s a fiction to believe that vouchers open up choice for all students. They do not.”

“Monday’s meeting comes nearly one month after four anti-voucher candidates — Holtzmann, Anthony Graziano, Chris Schor and Kevin Leung — resoundingly won seats on the board. Their opponents campaigned to keep the legal fight alive.”

Categories Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Koch Brothers, Privatization, Vouchers

Parents in Douglas County: “We Don’t Want to Be Betsy DeVos’ Poster Child for Vouchers”

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2017 //
3

Betsy DeVos visited Douglas County before the recent election. She came, as expected, to promote vouchers. She met with a couple who had taken their child out of public school and placed him in a school for autistic children, where he is happy.

DeVos saluted their courage in seeking a different placement for their child.

But the parents are not pleased to be used as Betsy DeVos’ poster family for vouchers.

As Chalkbeat reported, the parents said they did not get a voucher for their child. The voucher would not have been much help for them. The school he attends costs $70,000 a year. The voucher, if it existed, would be worth $5,000.

“DeVos’s public words were particularly hard to take, Jennifer and Joe said, because they had met with the education secretary privately at her request. They were flattered by her interest, but felt she didn’t understand why private school vouchers would never work for them — or many other families who have children with disabilities.

“First, the dollar amount of most voucher programs is paltry compared to what it costs to pay for specialized private schools like Firefly. Tuition there is more than $70,000 a year.

“Say, there was a voucher system in place and let’s pick $5,000.” Jennifer said. “That’s not enough for placement at Firefly. It doesn’t do anything.”

“Jennifer and Joe, who own a company that sells industrial equipment, pay around half of Firefly’s tuition and their health insurance pays the rest, they said.”

With the sweeping victory of an anti-voucher slate in Douglas County, there won’t be any vouchers for the foreseeable future.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2017/11/15/parents-of-colorado-student-to-betsy-devos-we-are-not-a-poster-child-for-your-school-choice-agenda/

Categories Betsy DeVos, Colorado, Education Reform, Vouchers

Voters in Douglas County, Colorado, Sent a Loud Message: No Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2017 //
8

Parents, teachers, and citizens of Douglas County, Colorado, one of the wealthiest districts in the nation, shocked voucher advocates by voting to oust their choice-loving school board.

Here are two different perspectives.

Writing in the conservative journal Education Next, Max Eden of the rightwing Manhattan Institute tries to find a silver lining in the defeat of vouchers and choice.

Eden takes comfort in the fact that the new board is not anti-charter.

He writes:

“Taken together, these races should scramble the conventional political narrative about charter schooling. That narrative says that charters are really supposed to be for failing urban districts, that suburban parents don’t want or need them, and rather than expand charters to the suburbs to bolster Republican support, advocates should rather work on their rhetoric. But choice creates constituents who will defend their interests, and who will have a far easier time doing so when their neighbors are ideologically sympathetic. If the Douglas County school board moves to harm charters, there will be a significant political cost.

“The headlines suggest that the election was all about vouchers. But the deeper story here is that Douglas County is a compelling case study in the collapse of the traditional education reform agenda. That agenda was a philosophically uneasy fusion of bureaucrat-driven reform and parent-driven choice. Bureaucrat-driven reform wasn’t truly designed for places like Douglas County, but advocates push it there (and everywhere else) anyway. Parent-driven choice could take root anywhere, but advocates tended to view it as not really for a place like Douglas County. While district reform collapsed, and claimed the court case on the never-implemented voucher program as collateral, charter parents will ensure that school choice carries on in this Colorado suburban county.”

Edwin Rios, writing in left-leaning Mother Jones, says that the sweep of every seat on the board sends a clear message to Betsy DeVos. Not that she will care or listen.

“On Tuesday night, the longstanding fight over a controversial voucher program in Douglas County, Colorado, appeared to have come to an end. In a local school board election that has found its way into the national debate over voucher programs, four anti-voucher candidates—Chris Schor, Kevin Leung, Anthony Graziano, and Krista Holtzmann—defeated reform-supporting candidates in a landslide.

“The election was the culmination of a battle that goes back to 2009, when a group of conservative reform-minded candidates took full control of the school board in Douglas County—one of the wealthiest counties in the country, with a school district made up of 67,000 students. As Politico has put it, the county “has gone further than any district in the nation to reshape public education into a competitive, free-market enterprise.” Since 2009, the board has successfully ended a collective bargaining agreement with the local teachers union and enacted a “pay for performance” salary system for teachers.

“Its most controversial move, though, came in 2011, when it approved a sweeping school voucher program that aimed to give up to 500 students publicly-funded scholarships to attend participating private schools. The county’s voucher program was the first district-created program in the country. Ninety-three percent of the pilot class of scholarship recipients enrolled in religious schools, according to court documents. It sparked outcry from those who argued that it was a diversion of public money away from public schools. Over the next few years, the suburban district in many ways become a model for conservatives looking to reform education nationwide and the group of reform-minded board members received support from national right-wing groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.

“This backing helped those board members secure all seven seats for six years. But in 2015, frustrated by the board’s direction, challengers running against the reforms of then-superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen convincingly defeated three incumbents, resulting in a 4-3 split on the board. While conservative members remained in charge, their power over the board was significantly weakened.”

Then on election night, the pro-public school slate captured four seats, adding to the three pro-public school incumbents, to make a clean sweep of all seven seats.

Categories Colorado, Education Reform, Koch Brothers

The Economist: Dark Money and Local School Board Races

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2017 //
16

The Economist magazine published an article about an alarming phenomenon: the large amounts of money entering local school board races, much of it from mysterious political action committees, often from out-of-District and out-of-State sources.

Races in Denver, Douglas County, and Aurora County in Colorado attracted at least $1.65 Million.

Last spring’s School Board Race in Los Angeles was the most expensive in U.S. history, at $15 Million. Billionaires like Reed Hastings and Eli Broad make clear that they will spend whatever it takes to install true believers in privatization. In most such races, you are likely to encounter the same names, whether it is Hastings, Broad, Bloomberg, or members of the Walton family. You are likely to see other names associated with hedge funds or other parts of the financial industry. They have two goals in common: they love charter schools and they don’t like unions.

The intrusion of this kind of money into school board races is a danger to democracy. School boards are supposed to reflect the wishes of the local communities, not the purposes of out-of-State billionaires in search of willing puppets.

How can a local citizen, a parent or community leader, have any chance of running for school board if their opponent has a kitty of $100,000-300,000 to millions of dollars? I recall visiting a city where I was told that, in the past, a candidate could run by raising $40,000. Those days are over. That’s not good for democracy.

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Democracy, Denver

Douglas County, Colorado: Share the Joy as Public Schools Slate Whips Voucher Advocates!

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2017 //
4

Brian Malone, videographer, produced a film called “Education, Inc.” in which he portrayed the intrusion of Dark Money into School Board Elections, with the goal of privatization and destruction of public schools. He focused on Dougco in Colorado, where Voucher forces used big money to take control of the local school board.

On Tuesday night, organized parents and teachers elected their slate of public school supporters.

Brian Malone was there to film it, and he says he will change the ending of “Education, Inc.”

Share the joy by watching a few minutes.

For now, public education is back in Douglas County!

Categories Colorado, Dark Money, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Douglas County, Colorado: Anti-Voucher Slate Sweeps to Victory!

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2017 //
0

Douglas County, Colorado, has been a testing ground for vouchers. A rightwing group gained control of the board and approved vouchers. The case is now being litigated. The vouchers were ruled unconstitutional by the highest state court, then appealed to the Supreme Court, which sent it back for reconsideration in light of the Trinity Lutheran case, which allowed a Christian School in Missouri to get state funds to pave its playground, but did not rule on tuition.

Last night, a pro-public School, anti-voucher slate won control of the school board, ending its support for vouchers and defeating the Moch brothers’ Americans For Prosperity Group. The winning slate received nearly 60% of the vote. The AFT contributed to the winning slate. It remains to be seen how this election will affect the court case, since the new district board no longer supports vouchers.

“A slate of anti-school voucher candidates won a contentious race Tuesday night for the Douglas County School Board, effectively killing the district’s controversial voucher program and entirely remaking the seven-member board.

“The race, because it revolved around school vouchers, drew plenty of media attention…

“But members of the winning CommUnity Matters slate said they wanted to concentrate on bringing unity to the district and calming down a school board often roiled by controversy.

“It is time to return our attention locally — to the students, teachers and community of all Douglas County public schools — while restoring our attention locally,” said Anthony Graziano. “I look forward to working with my fellow board members in a collaborative and transparent manner…”

“Graziano was a member of the CommUnity Matters slate that included Chris Schor, Kevin Leung and Krista Holtzmann. They see vouchers as an attack on public schools and claim that siphoning off tax dollars from schools hurts more children while benefiting only a few.”

“Graziano said the voucher program has been a “distraction to the district.”

This adds one more to the unbroken string of electoral defeats for vouchers.

Categories Colorado, Education Reform, Vouchers
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