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Florida: The Hidden Costs of Charter School Privatization

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2018 //
10

Florida has about 650 charter schools. Nearly half the charter schools in the state operate for profit. Charter schools on average do not get better results than public schools. Charter schools are rife with nepotism and conflicts of interest. The Leislature favors charter school expansion because many important legislators have ties to the charter industry and engage in self-dealing. Since 1998, 373 charters have closed, indicating that this is an unstable sector.

These are just a few of the conclusions of this important report about the toxic growth of charters in Florida.

The report urges serious review of the charter law. Otherwise the charter industry will continue to strip resources from public schools and create a parallel system that is wasteful, inefficient, and corrupt.

Here is a newspaper article about this report that summarizes it and includes responses from critics.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corruption, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization

Mitchell Robinson: Charter Schools in Michigan Have Done More Harm Than Good

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2018 //
6

Mitchell Robinson, professor of music education at Michigan State University, was invited to debate the question of charter schools in Michigan.

He wrote this scintillating article.

The counterpoint is linked inside the article.

Professor Robinson writes:

Why is it that every time I chat with a charter school cheerleader and issues of policy (such as privatization, school choice, competition, school closings, vouchers, teacher tenure, funding, regulations, testing) come up, they are unable to muster a defense of those policies?

Instead, they respond with something like, “We probably agree on more than we disagree. Let’s take the snobbery out of our discourse. I doubt combativeness does much to help conversation, let alone students.”

Counter point: Parents don’t consider charter schools political – why do politicians?

Kind of reminds me of conservatives who attacked President Obama for eight years in the most brutal ways, who are now demanding “civility” from liberals.

No. Just no. Public school advocates and charter school boosters don’t agree more than they disagree. We disagree completely on many issues of prime importance. And public school supporters know that many of the problems in the schools, while they may not have all been caused by charters, have been made a whole lot worse by them – and the reform movement leaders who are profiting from charter schools.

“Let’s stop pretending that competition and choice are the solutions to the problems that have been created by competition and choice.”

The most recent charter school booster I spoke to asked me, “So, what’s your solution? It’s obvious you’re not interested in seeking solutions with me, so just tell me.”

OK, here you go ….

Let’s adequately fund all of our schools, and make sure that the school in the inner city is as clean, safe and well-equipped as the one in the wealthiest suburbs.

Let’s stop allowing uncertified, unqualified edu-tourists from groups like Teach for America to be handed the responsibility of educating our children in urban and rural schools, and insist all kids be taught by dedicated, committed professionals, with the appropriate coursework, licenses and certifications.

Let’s demand that all schools offer a rich, engaging curriculum, including music, art and physical education, and let’s stop referring to these subjects as “extras” or “specials” – our children don’t see them as “extras.” For some kids, these are the things that make school worth going to.

Let’s guarantee that every publicly-funded school is held to the same standards, regulations and expectations, that all such schools are required to admit any child who wishes to attend, that “lotteries” and other similar methods of artificially “managing” student enrollment are eliminated, and that every child has access to a high quality public school, regardless of geography or socio-economic status.

Let’s stop pretending that competition and choice are the solutions to the problems that have been created by competition and choice.

Let’s stop trying to fund two parallel, “separate but equal” school systems, and put a moratorium on the creation of new charter schools until all publicly funded schools are “competing” on level playing fields.

And let’s return control for our public schools to where it belongs: elected school boards made up of concerned citizens from the communities in which their schools are located.

Let’s put an end to schools governed by unreliable charter “management companies” and state-appointed “emergency managers” and “CEOs.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice

Mercedes Schneider: A Guide to Marketing Your Charter School

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2018 //
34

Forget all you have heard about tens of thousands of students on waiting lists for charter schools. That’s a marketing ploy. When people think a product is rare and hard to get, they really want it. When Bernie Madoff said that his fund was closed, people literally begged to get into his fund.

Mercedes Schneider obtained a copy of a guide to marketing charter schools, published by the Colorado League of Charter Schools. It is slick. It tells charter folk which words to use and which to avoid. It advises them to build alliances with their local public schools, the better to poach their children away.

It has the fascination of watching a train wreck in slow motion. That is, it is repulsive. It is consumerism at its worst. Read if you dare.

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Competition, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization

Leonie Haimson: Shedding Light on the Debate about NYC’s Selective High Schools

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2018 //
16

Leonie Haimson lays out the case for reforming the admission practices of New York City’s elite admission-by-exam high schools. Changes are long overdue, she says.

The problem is that so few black and Hispanic students gain admission to the city’s eight specialized high schools.

As a Leonie points out, “Only 10 percent of students admitted to these selective high schools are black and Hispanic, while these students make up 67 percent of the overall public school population. This year, only 10 black students were offered admission to the city’s most selective of these high schools, Stuyvesant, out of 902 students admitted.”

However, only three high schools are shielded by state law from changes initiated by the city’s Board of Education. The Mayor could direct his board to make changes at five of the selective schools now.

New York city’s selective schools are the only ones in the nation that base admission solely on a single test.

The problems are not limited to three or eight high schools.

“The competitive nature of this process worsened under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein. The number of high schools that admitted students through academic screening increased from 29 in 1997 to 112 in 2017, while the proportion of “ed-opt” high schools, designed to accept students at all different levels of achievement, dropped sharply. Even so-called unscreened programs actually do screen students, in covert ways. Moreover, the Gates-funded small schools that proliferated after 2002 initially barred students with disabilities or English language learners from their schools, prompting a civil rights complaint in 2006.“

A major fix would require reducing class sizes in the elementary and middle schools to improve the education of all children.

Categories Class size, Competition, New York City, Testing

Research: High School Grade Point Average is a Better Predictor of College Success than SAT or ACT

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2018 //
48

There is an emerging consensus among researchers that high school grade point average is a better predictor of success in college than scores on the SAT or ACT.

This appears to be the case for students transitioning directly from high school to college. For those who have delayed admission by a year or more, the tests have a slight advantage in math, not in English. The advantage is very small.

“Among students who delayed college entry, GPA didn’t consistently turn out to be more predictive than standardized exam scores. It depended on the subject and exam. Compared to SAT and ACT scores, GPA was a better predictor for success with college English. But compared to the ACCUPLACER scores, the percentage of the variance in college-level English grades explained by GPA was only one point greater. In math, the percentage of the variance in college-level math grades was just a point higher than the percentage explained by SAT scores. GPA was less predictive of college-level math grades than were ACT and ACCUPLACER scores.”

Given the predictive value of the GPA, there is no advantage for students or colleges in using standardized admissions tests.

Currently, in the competition to gain admission to highly selective colleges, parents spend large sums to pay for test prep. Some spend thousands of dollars. The top tutors command hundreds of dollars per hour, even $1,000 an hour.

To see how crazy this is, read this article by an SAT tutor who commands $1,000 an hour. At first, I thought he was jeopardizing his lucrative gig by this public confession, but by the time I finished reading, I realized he had transitioned into online tutoring, which apparently makes lots of dough and works as well as personal meetings. When confronting a mechanical test, a mechanical prep works well.

He writes:

“Nearly every student who came my way was, apparently, a “bad tester.”

“What do most parents mean when they refer to their children as bad testers?

“Bad tester (n.): A student capable of keeping a 3.9 GPA at a competitive high school while participating in four extracurricular pursuits who is nonetheless incapable of learning the small set of math facts, grammar rules, and strategies necessary to get a high SAT score.

“How is it possible that a student who can ace his trigonometry tests and get an A+ in English can’t apply those same skills to the SAT? On the surface, it seems unlikely. But as I learned, parents and students around the country have been conned into thinking that it’s not only possible but standard.

“The first thing you need to know in order to understand the illegitimacy of this entire concept: The SAT isn’t particularly difficult.

“What do you need for a perfect SAT score? A thorough knowledge of around 110 math rules and 60 grammar rules, familiarity with the test’s format, and the consistent application of about 40 strategies that make each problem a bit easier to solve. If you can string together a coherent essay, that’s a plus…

“Kids are remarkable learners. If we give them the tools they need to study, the belief that they can learn on their own, and the gentle support necessary to encourage the process, they’ll accomplish remarkable things.

“On the other hand, if we put the power of education in the hands of figureheads, externalized structures, and programs that dictate what students are supposed to learn, when, where, and how, American students will continue to flounder.

“I’ve seen what students can do and learn on their own, and I’ve seen how students act when someone else is given the reins. I prefer the former.“

The author is explaining how to prep for the test.

Why take the test when your GPA matters more and shows your persistence over four years?

Even better for students would be to skip the test, save your parents’ money, go to school daily, do the work, and improve your GPA.

Categories Competition, Education Industry, Education Reform, Higher Education, Testing

Ed Johnson: An Open Letter To Obama about Race to the Top

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2018 //
19

Edward Johnson is an education activist in Atlanta and one of the sharpest critics of a school board and superintendent determined to privatize the public schools of that city.

He recently wrote an open letter to former President Obama, asking him to apologize for the failed Race to the Top competition, which built on the failed strategy of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind.

Via Email (info@ofa.us)

 

Open Letter to Barack Obama seeking apology for RttT Competition

 

22 May 2018 (revised 23 May 2018)

 

The Honorable Barack Obama

c/o Organizing for Action

1130 West Monroe Street, Suite 100

Chicago, Illinois 60607

 

Dear Mr. Obama:

 

“We are being ruined by competition; what we need is cooperation.”

—W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993)

 

Thank you for your interest in my voting.  Voting, of course, is a cornerstone of democratic practice.  However, education—public education—underlies democratic practice that aims to serve and sustain the common good and to continually advance on closing gaps with democratic ideals, as in “We the People ….”  Unfortunately, your Race to the Top Competition strongly suggests a very different paradigm, a competitive, anti-democracy sustaining paradigm.

 

Frankly, Barack—may I address you as Barack since you addressed me as Ed?  Frankly, it’s hard to figure why especially prominent Civil Rights leaders would forgo inviting you to a private conversation out behind the woodshed at the very moment you spoke the words “Race to the Top Competition.”  Did they not understand competition made the Civil Rights Movement necessary more so than did so-called racism?  That so-called racism is, in reality, but an insidiously malicious and hostile form of competition?

 

The point being, the aim of every form of competition has always been, and always will be, to produce as few winners as possible and as many losers as possible.  Fine for sport competitions, but why would one facilitate attacking and harming the nation’s democracy-sustaining public educational systems by any manner of competition?  Was cooperation between and among the states not an option?

 

All too often, the thinking is that winning means excellence, and losing means failure or “not good enough.”  And that “competition builds character.”

 

But here’s the rub, Barack.  In social systems, such as our public educational systems, people made losers by competition for no good reason invariably figure out how to win, if only in their own eyes.  The massively systemic cheating on standardized tests that Atlanta experienced exemplifies the matter: A great many teachers and schoolhouse leaders the superintendent incited to compete for their job and bonuses for high standardized test scores figured they could win by changing students’ wrong answers to right answers.

 

We also have plenty other examples, including, notoriously: Dimitrios Pagourtzis, at Santa Fe High School, Texas; Nikolas Cruz, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida; Adam Lanza, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut; and, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, at Columbine High School, Colorado.

 

And consider, too, some people made losers by competition for no good reason very likely figured they could win by becoming police officers, or wannabe police officers—in the case of George Zimmerman, for example.  Then to that extent, these winners turned policing into hostile competitions with the public that could not avoid producing notorious shootings of especially young “Black” males and other citizens for no good reason.

 

It really is quite easy to understand, in a word, why the U.S. pretty much leads the world in incarcerating its citizens and children.  And that word is competition, meaning deeply inculcated drives to win at the expense of others, by whatever means necessary, so as to rationalize one is superior or excellent and others are not.

 

  1. Edwards Deming also teaches the wisdom that “when a system is broken into competitive segments, the system is destroyed.”

 

Specifically, Dr. Deming teaches the wisdom that:

 

“We have grown up in a climate of competition between people, teams, departments, divisions, pupils, schools, universities.  We have been taught by economists that competition will solve our problems.  Actually, competition, we see now, is destructive.  It would be better if everyone would work together as a system, with the aim for everybody to win.  What we need is cooperation[.]”

 

Barack, can you see the very name “Race to the Top Competition” necessarily meant breaking our otherwise 50 United States into 50 competitive segments?  Can you see the Race to the Top Competition aim to expand the number of charter schools hence spread malicious school choice meant breaking local public educational systems into competitive segments?  And, therefore, can you see “Chief Facilitator of Destroy Public Education” just might be a fitting aspect of your legacy as a former President of the United States?  And that that would be an astonishing juxtaposition of paradigms?

 

Barack, if you can see these things, and because, as you say, “[t]here are no do-overs,” can you then at least apologize for having created the Race to the Top Competition and then for having foisted it upon the nation?

 

Kindly know until such apology comes, it will be hard to hear and appreciate any interest you express about my voting, or any matters.  Sustaining and improving public education as a common good in service to democracy is just that important.  And please, let’s have none of the nonsensical contention that charter schools are public schools.

 

Sincerely, I am

 

Ed Johnson

Advocate for Quality in Public Education

Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com

 

Bcc: List 1

Categories Accountability, Atlanta, Competition, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Race to the Top

Peter Greene: Charter Schools Would Have Been A Great Idea, But….

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2018 //
20

Peter Greene has written a post in honor of Charter School Week. He notes that it was designated to conflict with Teacher Appreciation Week, but that strikes him as somehow apt. Charters might have been a good idea, but they fell into the hands of the wrong people, that is, people who wanted to use them to bludgeon and destroy public schools.

When Al Shanker first spelled out the idea of charter schools, he envisioned them as a way to help public schools, sort of like an R&D laboratory, using union teachers to help try out new ideas. That was in 1988. When he saw that business entrepreneurs were taking over, he turned against charters. By 1993, he denounced charters and declared they were no different from vouchers, that they had turned into something far different from his vision, and that they would be used to smash unions and privatize public schools. Yet reformers still like to point to Shanker as their founding father, forgetting that he renounced what his idea had morphed into.

Greene writes:

At first glance, putting Charter School Celebration Week O’Self Congratulations on the same week as Teacher Appreciation Week may seem a bit obnoxious, but I’ve come to see it as sort of appropriate, a symbol of how the charter business competes with public school teachers for resources and attention. Kind of like putting Fight Cancer Week and Celebration of Tobacco on the same calendar dates, it encourages people to see that there’s a fundamental conflict here.

Not that there needs to be. The irony for me is that even though I write extensively about the many ways in which modern charters are detrimental to public education and just plain bad policy, it doesn’t actually have to be that way. Charters could work. Charters could be a great addition to the education landscape. But instead, charter fans have chosen to pursue them in the most destructive, counter-productive manner possible. It’s like a landscaper says, “Your yard would look so much better with some azalea bushes,” and you think that, yeah, they would, but then the landscaper puts the bushes in by ripping holes in the front wall of the house and planting the bushes directly into the water and sewage lines for your home.

So I’m going to celebrate charter week with a little reader of posts that have run here, laying out the ways in which the charter industry has gotten it wrong.

Categories Charter Schools, Competition, Education Industry, Privatization

Michigan: Business Leaders Examine Academic Crisis and Conclude: Do More of the Same

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
6

 

Michigan has a major problem. Test scores on NAEP and state exams have fallen signicantly over the past decade for every demographic, the state spends $1 Billion on charter schools with no accountability, Detroit is the worst performing city in the nation on NAEP.

The leaders of the state’s business community looked at the crisis and decided that the state needs to stick to its current policies and do more of the same. but with greater intensity.

Clearly, the business elite decided to ignore studies such as this one by Professor David Arsen of Michigan State University, which concluded that state policies promoting competition and choice were causing fiscal stress and instability in traditional districts. Even a small parasite can do terrible damage to a large body.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Detroit, Education Reform, Funding, Michigan

Jersey Jazzman: DeVos’s Fantasy About the Benefits of Competition

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2018 //
26

Mark Weber, who blogs as Jersey Jazzman, was interested in a part of the DeVos’ 60 Minutes interview that most reviewers overlooked. She made the claim, based on “studies show” that competition with private schools improves public schools. He devotes this post to debunking that claim. 

The effects of competition are tiny. They are “not modest,” he writes. They are “tiny.”

He asks, is choice a reasonable substitute for equitable funding, and not surprisingly, concludes that it is not.

If “choice” is introduced as a substitute for things like adequate and equitable funding, the overall progress of the system will be impeded. The sad fact is that the “Florida Miracle” has been grossly oversold; the state is a relatively poor performer compared to other states that make more of an investment in public education. Can that all be attributed to policy? No, of course not… but Florida is a state that makes little effort to fund its schools.

In any case, DeVos’s contention that public, district schools see improvement when there is competitive pressure is just not held up in any practical sense by research like this. As I said in my last post, the effects sizes of things like this are almost always small. In this case, the effect is exceptionally small; in practical terms, it’s next to nothing.

The idea that we’re going to make substantial educational progress by injecting competition into our public education system just doesn’t have much evidence to support it. I wish I could say that conservatives like DeVos were the only ones who believe in this fallacy; unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Too many people who really should know better have put their faith in “choice,” rather than admitting that chronic childhood poverty, endemic racism, and inequitable and inadequate school funding are at the root of the problem.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Competition, Florida, School Choice

Nancy Bailey: Pressure to Succeed in “High School Hell”

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2017 //
51

Nancy Bailey writes about the ratcheting up of pressure on high school students.

What are we doing to our kids?

“Freshmen are told on one hand not to worry about college, then given an early version of a college entrance exam three weeks into their first year of high school.

~Chicago Tribune Nov.13, 2017

“Like kindergartners pushed to be first graders, high school is the new college.

“Teens are more anxious than ever. Depression and anxiety are a fact. Drugs and alcohol use are an actuality. Suicides are real. More teens seek support from counselors and mental health facilities than ever. Some miss school due to hospitalization.

“The New York Times recently chronicled the lives of teens who struggle with anxiety. They’re frightened they will fail. They load up on Advanced Placement (college) classes not understanding they’re pushing themselves beyond high school—beyond normal teen development.

“However, despite all this so-called concern in the media, the underlying theme is still—grit and mindset.

“The subtitle for the above report is Parents, therapists and schools are struggling to figure out whether helping anxious teenagers means protecting them or pushing them to face their fears.

“Does anyone believe school administrators, teachers, and parents will quit pushing?

Students are expected to learn more than ever. They must do college in high school so they will succeed.

There’s little time to relax. Even sports and extracurricular activities come with a price. Students can’t just play a sport. They must lead. If there’s art, it must be a perfect drawing. If it’s music, there are contests to win.

Some competition is fine, but how much, and at what price? If so many students are struggling, isn’t that a sign there’s too much?

Categories Competition, Students
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