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Maurice Cunningham: The Strange Disappearance of the 2023 “National Parents Union” Elections

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2023 //
17

Maurice Cunningham is a retired professor of political science in Massachusetts. He is an expert on Dark Money in education issues. His revelations about the money behind a state referendum to expand the number of charters indefinitely in Massachusetts in 2016 helped to defeat the referendum. I wrote about his role in my book Slaying Goliath.

What Happened to Election Day at National Parents Union?

There I was on the edge of my seat in front of the television waiting for Steve Kornacki to break down the numbers in the election for the hotly contested highest offices in the National Parents Union. Could Keri Rodrigues be re-elected to another three year term? Might Alma Marquez, elected secretary-treasurer three years ago before mysteriously disappearinglaunch a comeback bid? Would the networks call a winner before my bedtime?

But no, nothing. No network call. No Steve Kornacki. No election at all.

That was a huge disappointment because on January 27, 2020, Beth Hawkins of The74 reported “Founders Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez were voted into three-year terms as inaugural president and secretary-treasurer, respectively.”

So I waited three years for the next election. If you can’t get reliable information about a Walton Family Foundation franchise like NPU from a Walton Family Foundation publication like The74, where can you look?

I’m kidding. I knew there would be no election, just like I knew the Hawkins piece was corporate puffery, and just as I knew there was no real election in 2020 where Rodrigues and Marquez “launch[ed] the National Parents Union on Jan. 16, when they … [held] an inaugural summit in New Orleans with 125 delegates from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.” For one thing, Rodrigues signed NPU’s incorporation papers on April 4, 2019 as president. Then on the 2020 annual report Rodrigues signed as president with a term ending December 31, 2025. Tim Langan (later to marry Rodrigues, in 2022) replaced Marquez as treasurer. There has never been any accounting of what happened to the duly elected treasurer and apparently zero curiosity about her from the “125 delegates from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico” who presumably left New Orleans thinking they had elected her to a three year term.

Still, an election for a part-time job that pays $232,000 for twenty hours per week would seem attractive enough to draw some opposition. (Source: National Parents Union Form 990 tax return for 2021)

The $180,000 is from a related organization, the Walton Family Foundation franchise Massachusetts Parents Union, also a 20 hour per week gig. (Source: Massachusetts Parents United Form 990 tax return for 2021)

Reading over The74 article I’m struck by how important it was for the Waltons to portray NPU as something like a real union. But it isn’t. For one thing unions elect their leadership democratically. Rodrigues promised Fox News that NPU would “be creating a national parent council and a board of advisers. We will assemble delegates, agree on by-laws, vote on ratification, and form our union.” The parent council has never materialized, no by-laws have been made public, and ratificationwas about as valid as the treasurer’s vote. But they did appoint delegates! Then NPU killed off all the delegates. They were replaced with a 7 person parent “advisory council.” Keep your bags packed, councilors.

Who would vote if NPU did hold an election? Rodrigues recently tweeted “Just held our last @NationalParents Union leadership meeting where @TafshierCosby announced we have now grown to almost 1,000 affiliated organizations in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.”

There are no parent organization affiliates. The only verifiable affiliated organizations are those, as I wrote in Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, that are in the charter school industry or related privatization fronts. Cosby is identified at the NPU website Senior Director of the NPU Center for Organizing and Partnerships and “also the CEO of Parent Impact.” Parent Impact is apparently part of the KIPP charter school business. Itwas recognized by the IRS as a tax exempt organization only on September 10, 2020. IRS placed Parent Impact on the auto-revocation list for not filing tax returns on May 15, 2021.

I didn’t let the popcorn go to waste on election night but I sure did miss Steve Kornacki.

Maurice T. Cunningham is author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization. As a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, he is a union member.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Education Industry, Elections, Fake, Funding, Hoax, Parent Groups, Walton Foundation

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

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2023 //
6

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

An excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron Blake: Some Republicans Disagree with DeSantis’ Dictatorial Ways

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2023 //
20

Aaron Blake of the Washington Post points out that some Republicans don’t like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ intervention into everyone’s business to control them. Wyoming is a great example of a state that has refused to join DeFascist’s war against WOKE.

Blake wrote:

A potential flash point in the 2024 GOP presidential race: Conservatives are criticizing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other Republicans for going too farin using the heavy hand of government to combat so-called “woke” entities.

And in Wyoming, the tension between those two approaches has come to a head.

The nation’s least-populous state could be considered its most Republican. In both 2016 and 2020, it handed Donald Trump his largest margin of victory of any of the 50 states, going for Trump by more than 43 points. Republicans hold more than 90 percent of the seats in both of its state legislative chambers.

But recently, the state House has effectively shelved a number of bills resembling proposals that have sailed to passage elsewhere:

  • A school-choice bill that would create a scholarship fund for students to attend private instead of public schools.
  • A bill modeled on Florida’s education bill, dubbed “don’t say gay” by critics, that would ban the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.
  • A bill that would ban state officials from contracting with businesses and investment funds that boycott fossil fuels or emphasize political or social-justice goals.
  • A bill called “Chloe’s Law” that would forbid doctors from providing hormone blockers and gender-affirming surgery to children.

All four have passed in the state Senate. But along the way, they lost GOP votes — a significant number of them, in the first three bills — and now the state House is holding them up.

A big reason? The state House speaker says he believes in “local control” and worries about the broader effects of state government dictating such issues.

Speaker Albert Sommers (R) has used a maneuver on the school-choice and education proposals known as keeping a bill in his “drawer.” In the former case, he noted that a similar measure already failed in the state House’s education committee. And on the latter, Florida-like bill, he argued for a limited role for state government.

“Fundamentally, I believe in local control,” Sommers told the Cowboy State Daily. “I’ve always fought, regardless of what really the issue is, against taking authority away from local school boards, town councils, county commissions. And in my view that’s what this bill does.”

He also argued that the bill was unconstitutional, because legislation in Wyoming must be focused on one topic. This bill would both restrict instruction on certain subjects and implement changes in how much control parents have over school boards. Sommers suggested such proposals “do not come from Wyoming but instead from another state, or they are templates from a national organization.” And he echoed some conservatives in arguing that it was a solution in search of a problem. “This type of teaching is not happening in Wyoming schools,” he said.ADVERTISEMENT

On “Chloe’s Law,” Sommers angered some conservatives by sending the bill to the appropriations committee rather than the labor and health committee. While the bill was being considered, some Republican legislators warned the bill would undercut counseling and mental health care for transgender youth and could create problems with the state’s federally regulated health insurance plans. The appropriations committee voted against the bill 5-2, tagging it with a “do not pass” designation.

Sommers also sent the fossil-fuels bill to the appropriations committee, and GOP lawmakers expressed worry that the bill would reduce investment in the state and force out large corporations and financial institutions.

These tensions come as some conservatives have warmed to the idea of using the government to crack down on so-called “woke” policies and practices in private businesses and in public education. That turn is perhaps best exemplified by DeSantis, who moved to prevent cruise lines from requiring covid vaccinations, prohibit social media companies from banning politicians and strip Disney of its special tax status after it criticized the so-called “don’t say gay” bill. He also has repeatedly involved the government in school curriculum decisions.

Such moves have earned significant criticism not just from some free-market and libertarian-oriented groups, but also from DeSantis’s potential rivals for the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2024.

“The idea of going after [Disney’s] taxing authority — that was beyond the scope of what I as a conservative, a limited-government Republican, would be prepared to do,” former vice president Mike Pence said last week.

“For others out there that think that the government should be penalizing your business because they disagree with you politically, that isn’t very conservative,” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu added in February. He has said that “if we’re trying to beat the Democrats at being big-government authoritarians, remember what’s going to happen.”

Last year, former Maryland governor Larry Hogan called DeSantis’s moves on Disney “crazy” and said, “DeSantis is always talking about he was not demanding that businesses do things, but he was telling the cruise lines what they had to do.”

Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, too, criticized DeSantis for his proposed changes to Disney’s special tax status (which have since been significantly watered down). In 2021, Hutchinson also took a relatively lonely stand in his state, against the legislature banning gender-affirming care for children.

“While in some instances the state must act to protect life, the state should not presume to jump into the middle of every medical, human and ethical issue,” he said at the time. “This would be — and is — a vast government overreach.”

Hutchinson’s veto was easily overridden by the state legislature. That, and DeSantis’s rise in the GOP, suggest which way the wind is blowing.

But as Wyoming shows — and the 2024 primary could demonstrate — that doesn’t mean the debate within the GOP about the scope of government is settled

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Competition, Corporate Reform, Courage, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, For-Profit, Freedom, Wyoming

D.C.: Two Educators Fired for Opposing “No Excuses” Approach

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2023 //
22

Two educators in the District of Columbia were fired because they refused to implement the harsh, no-excuses pedagogy of the so-called “Relay Graduate School of Education.”

One of the fired educators was a respected principal of an elementary school, Dr. Carolyn Jackson-King. She objected to the practice of barking out commands to students and demanding unquestioning compliance. She said it was racist. She and another school employee who agreed with her—Marlon Ray—were fired.

I was invited to write a deposition on behalf of the fired educators, and I did. The Relay “no excuses” pedagogy would never be acceptable to middle-class parents of any race. Children are not dogs. They should not be trained like dogs. Why is this harsh treatment reserved for low-income Black children?

Peter Greene wrote about the case, which is going to trial in a few weeks at Forbes, where is a senior contributor.

When Relay Graduate School of Education was brought in by D.C. Public Schools to do staff training, administrators Carolyn Jackson-King and Marlon Ray blew the whistle on the disciplinary methods they mandated. The two lost their jobs, in what they claim was retribution for speaking out. They sued the district; now that lawsuit is finally moving forward.

Carolyn Jackson-King spent almost two decades working in the District of Columbia Public School system, including seven years as principal of Lawrence E. Boone Elementary School.

Jackson-King started there is 2014, inheriting a school that was chaotic, with fighting, low morale, and weak academics. Jackson-King started there when the school was still named Orr Elementary, after Benjamin Orr, D.C.’s fourth mayor. When a student in the predominantly Black school discovered that Orr had been a slave owner, Jackson-King worked with the school community to have the name changed to honor the school’s first Black principal.

Jackson-King was respected in that community (they reportedly called her Dr. J-K or Principal JK). She told WAMU, “In order to have a culture like the one we have at Boone, we have to build relationships and that’s what we do best.” Boone’s rating went from 1 star to 3 star. Jackson-King appeared to be a successful, well-respected principal who had lifted up a struggling school in an underserved community. Then Relay Graduate School of Education came to town.

The defendants opposed the Relay methods and refused to comply.

Their argument is not that complicated: They stood up for the students against a program they saw as abusive and racist (a point on which many authorities agree, including charter schools that had previously implemented the model), and the district retaliated by taking their jobs…

What is Relay GSE?

Relay Graduate School of Education was launched in 2007 as Teacher U. It was set up by three founders of charter school chains as a way to beef up the teacher pipeline for their schools. The founders had little formal teacher training of their own. In 2011 they changed the name to better reflect their expansive new plans, expanding Relay’s operations across the country.

Relay is not a graduate school in any traditional sense of the word. As Lauren Anderson, chair of the Education Department at Connecticut College, once put it:

It is a charter-style network of independent teacher preparation programs created by the leaders of three prominent charter school chains (Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First), primarily as a means to bypass traditional teacher education.

Education historian Diane Ravitch wrote of Relay:

It has no scholars, no researchers, no faculty other than charter teachers. It is a trade school for teaching tricks of test-taking and how to control black and brown children and teach them to obey orders without questioning.

Please open the link and read the rest of this enlightening article.

If you have any personal experience with Relay and its pedagogy, please let me know or write a letter to the lawyer representing the two educators. The lawyer who represents them is Raymond C. Fay. He can be reached at: rfay@faylawdc.com

Frankly, it is shocking that a successful principal would be fired because she refused to bow to the demands of a pretend “graduate school” led by charter school teachers with far less experience than she has. Relay’s leaders undoubtedly attended prep schools and elite suburban public schools where they were never subjected to “no excuses” pedagogy.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Ethics, Injustice

Leonie Haimson: Success Academy Spends $13 Million a Year on Marketing and Recruitment

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2023 //
7

The pro-charter media, especially anything owned by Rupert Murdoch (e.g. The New York Post), continually boasts about the long waiting lists of students hoping to enroll in charter schools.

New York City’s Success Academy charter chain, which posts extraordinarily high test scores, supposedly has a long waiting list. The tale was first told in a movie called “The Lottery,” which showed hundreds of parents entering their child’s name in a lottery in hopes of winning a coveted seat in the school. The documentary was made by Madeline Sackler, yes, of the same billionaire family that marketed opioids to the nation and became insanely rich.

Leonie Haimson reveals in a recent blog post that Success Academy has an enormous operation to market its schools, augmented by a division whose job is recruitment of students.

She writes:

One of the political weapons that charter chains & their hypesters in the media like the NY Post repeat like a mantra to support the push to expand their schools and eliminate the NYC cap on charters is their dubious claim that there are thousands of kids on their waiting lists.

For many reasons one should doubt the reality and relevance of these claims. As Chalkbeat points out, 58% of NYC charter schools lost enrollment over the past three years; and 45% lost enrollment in the last year. This includes the most aggressively expansionist charter chain in NYC, Success Academy, whose enrollment has fallen by 7.7% in the last year.

Moreover, as our charter school presentation and draft resolution explain, the claims of high demand and long waiting lists at charter schools are unconfirmed by any independent audits and likely include many duplicates.

As to Success Academy, a research study revealed that only about 50 percent of the students who win the lottery to attend one of their schools choose to enroll, making the significance of what it means to be on one of their waiting lists even more dubious.

In addition, the network was still desperately urging more families to apply to their schools through October of the current school year, revealing a shortage of students. They also recruit students outside the city for their charter schools, suggesting a lack of demand in NYC.

Perhaps one of Success’ biggest problems in keeping their seats full is their high rates of attrition, with 75% of students leaving from Kindergarten on; and about 50% of those students who even make it to high school departing before graduation, according to analyses done by Gary Rubinstein.

In any case, in their determined effort to persuade as many families as possible to apply, whether or not they really intend to enroll, Success Academy has a whole team focused on recruitment. See this job posting for a “Scholar Recruiter” to join the “Scholar Recruitment Team,” managed by the “Lead of Scholar Recruitment” and “reporting to a Senior Scholar Recruiter”.:

…. the Scholar Recruiter will execute field outreach programs and promotional activities in individually assigned New York City regional markets. A Scholar Recruiter will often be the first touchpoint to Success Academy for prospective families, making this team a critical contributor toward reaching our enrollment goals.

One of the many responsibilities of this “Scholar Recruiter” is to ” Identify, initiate, and maintain relationships with community based organizations (CBO’s) to develop CBO-to-Success Academy pipelines, identify Success Academy as the premier educational choice in the community, and cement Success Academy as a member of the community.”

The following metrics will be used to evaluate their performance:

Scholar Recruiters will be measured against individual performance indicators including but not limited to:

  • Gross application volume generated among families who reside in their regional markets
  • Gross application volume generated to schools in their regional markets.
  • Yield of regional applicant pool that is converted to enrolled status.
  • Retention of enrolled families through the first 60 days of each academic year.
  • Volume of applicant leads generated in their market.
  • Number of new and continuing community-based contacts established and maintained, segmented by type (e.g. social service, faith-based, childcare, business, etc)
  • Conversion rate of event attendees into applicants or long-lead applicants.
  • Regular submission of performance and market data reporting.

Success Academy also spends millions on advertising and marketing efforts to lure more applicants onto their waiting lists, with ads running on TV, bus shelters, YouTube and Facebook concurrently. They send repeated mailings to families, sometimes as many as 10-12 times per year, after being given free access to DOE mailing lists despite vehement parent protests. (DOE is the only district in the nation to share this info voluntarily.)

As evidence of their huge marketing efforts, they also have an internal marketing firm, called the Success Academy Creative Agency:

The SA Creative Agency is a full service brand strategy, marketing, and creative division within Success Academy Charter Schools (SACS). Aligning business goals and creative and cultural trends, we partner with internal clients to define the value proposition, develop strategic insights and create marketing campaigns and other creative content to help redefine what’s possible in K-12 public education.

SA Creative Agency itself advertises many openings, including senior copywriter, creative director, and Leader of Growth Marketing, “responsible for the design and execution of integrated demand strategies across our paid and organic channels.”

According to her Linked in profile, the Success marketing office is headed by someone named Amanda Cabreira da Silva, who came from Revlon, and as of Success Academy’s 2017 IRS 990 was paid over $200,000 per year.

Open the link to continue reading.

Does this sound like a school or a consumer product?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Fake, Harlem Success Academy, New York City, Students

Ohio: Senate Bill to Strip Power from State Board of Education Is Unconstitutional

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2023 //
6

Bill Phillis, retired deputy state superintendent of education and tireless advocate for public schools, discovered that the latest Republican effort to gut the State Board of Education violates the State Constitution.

He writes:

Unbelievable—Senate Bill 1, the Bill to render ineffective the State Board of Education violates the 1953 constitutional amendment which established the Board.

The Department of Education in Ohio is comprised of the State Board of Education, the superintendent of Public Instruction and the staff. Prior to the 1953 amendment, the education department, including the Superintendent of Public Instruction and staff (state education agency), constituted an administrative arm of the Governor’s office. This arrangement had been in place since 1913 after the Delegates to the 1912 Constitutional Convention proposed to replace the State Commissioner of Common Schools with the Superintendent of Public Instruction, which proposal, the citizens of Ohio approved on a statewide ballot. In 1939 a constitutional amendment proposal to establish a State Board of Education failed by a near two to one margin. The Depression may have been a factor in the overwhelming defeat.

In 1953 Ohioans passed a constitutional amendment to establish a State board of Education and Superintendent of Public Instruction to be selected by the Board. Prior to the 1953 amendment, the state education agency was completely under the control of the Governor. The State Board of Education, with the newly selected Superintendent of Public Instruction, began operation in January 1956; hence the state education agency operated as a 4th branch of government until the mid-1990’s when legislation was enacted to allow the appointment of eight members by the Governor.

Article VI, section 4 of the Ohio Constitution states that the respective powers and duties of the Board and Superintendent of Public Instruction shall be prescribed by law; however, this language does not authorize the legislature to transfer the core functions of the State Board to the Governor’s office. The 1953 amendment transferred the core functions from the Governor’s office to the State Board. That is why the amendment was passed.

The legislature should deal with this matter in a manner that respects the intent and language of the Constitution. This question should be submitted to the citizens of Ohio to determine if the 1953 amendment should be reversed.

Learn more about the EdChoice voucher litigation

https://vouchershurtohio.com/learn-about-vouchers-hurt-ohio/

https://vouchershurtohio.com/8-lies-about-private-school-vouchers/

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OhioEandA

VOUCHERS HURT OHIO

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540|ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://ohiocoalition.org

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Fake, Ohio, School Choice, Vouchers

Hakeem Jeffries Will Downplay His Support for Charters Now That He Is Party Leader

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2023 //
19

The 74 Million—a news site funded by charter supporters and billionaires—reports that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries will downplay his support for charter schools now that he is Minority Leader of House Democrats. Charters have lost ground among Democrats, and Jeffries wants to unite the party. Importantly, he doesn’t want to alienate the teachers’ unions, which are an important part of the Democratic Party’s base.

Most Democratic members of Congress realized that charters were a step towards vouchers, and that both were deeply embedded in the Trump MAGA agenda.

For a time, during the Obama years, Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sold charters as a “progressive” idea that would nurture innovation. After thirty years, the charter claims dimmed. Too many scandals, too little innovation. Too many charter chains making profits or paying outlandish salaries. Too many charters that opened and closed within three years. Too many charters that believed harsh discipline was “innovative.”

The charter lobby considered Hakeem Jeffries one of its best friends, but that was before Trump chose Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. She was an outspoken friend of School choice, including charter schools. In recent years, red states have embraced charters and vouchers in their frenzy to privatize public schools and transfer public funding to private organizations.

Now, it’s clear to most Democrats that Republicans own the issue of charters and vouchers, not Democrats.

When Biden’s Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona proposed modest rules to clean up the federal Charter Schools Program, which hands out $440 million a year to start new charter schools, the charter lobby made wild claims about how any accountability would irreparably harm new charters, but Democrats didn’t go along. The usual charter supporters in the Senate—Booker, Bennett, and Feinstein—complained about the new rules, but when the Senate voted on a motion to overturn them, not a single Democrat voted for the motion.

Today, the strongest allies of charter schools in Congress are conservative Republicans, like Virginia Foxx (NC), chair of the House Education Committee.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Obama, School Choice, U.S. Department of Education, Unions

Chicago Mayoral Election: Parent Says NO, NO, NO to Paul Vallas

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2023 //
15

The Chicago mayoral election is February 28. Nine candidates are running. If no candidate wins a majority, there will be a runoff on April 4. You can read about the candidates here.

One of the candidates who is faring well in the polls is Paul Vallas. He is of interest to parents and educators because most of his professional career has been spent as a leader of school districts, although he is not an educator. He introduced a bold experiment in privatization in Philadelphia, which failed. After Vallas left Philly, the district was taken over by the state. He lost his position as superintendent in Bridgeport, Connecticut, because of his lack of credentials. If Vallas should win, the charter crowd would descend on Chicago to reap their rewards.

Julie Vassilatos is the parent of two students who graduated from the Chicago Public Schools in 2017 and 2021. She was outraged that the Chicago Tribune endorsed Vallas. (The tribune is behind a paywall.) She wrote a response to the editorial. The Tribune was impressed by Vallas’ long resume, but Julie writes that he left behind chaos and budget deficits wherever he was in charge of a school district.

She writes:

It’s unclear to me exactly what motivated the members of the Chicago Tribune editorial board to endorse Paul Vallas for mayor in our upcoming election.

Vallas has run for mayor before. In 2018 I wrote about why he was not a good candidate, and these reasons all hold true today. I could simply re-run that piece today on its own and that would be nearly sufficient as a response to the Tribune’s endorsement. (Notably, they didn’t endorse him last time around.) But there are specifics in Sunday’s editorial that require a response, so I will do that here, with the former piece, from my now-disappeared blog “Chicago Public Fools,” appended below.


The Tribune editorial board gave their reasons. But they’re poor reasons at best, and at worst, wrong or disingenuous. Let’s go through their claims.

I. First, the Tribune editorial highlights Vallas’s “expertise in city financing, policing, and public education.” Expertise can mean, I suppose, “someone did a thing, maybe a lot.” But doing it well and successfully should be inherent in the word. “Expertise” in this case is absurdly unsupported by facts. Cities he’s worked in—rapidly, and left rapidly—were left with complicated budget problems, vast deficits, and controversy. He was superintendent of schools in Philadelphia for 5 years (ousted after causing ballooning budget deficits, OR he resigned in order to gallop to New Orleans, you pick), New Orleans for 4 (he left in order to run unsuccessfully for Cook County Board President), and Bridgeport, CT for 2 (ousted because he did not meet the job qualification of being an educator, OR he resigned to run unsuccessfully with IL gubernatorial candidate Pat Quinn, you pick). A quick recap of each stint:

In Philadelphia

Vallas’s record here is complicated. From The Notebook in 2007:

One thing is certain – Paul Vallas certainly shook up the Philadelphia School District.

Full of energy and confident that he could solve any problem, Vallas’s five-year tenure was a whirlwind of bold initiatives and dramatic changes in policy.

At the same time, he is leaving a district in tumult, with the same deep financial problems that he inherited – running a large deficit, and still without stable, reliable funding that meets the extraordinary needs of the city’s students.

His legacy here has much to do with the Broad Institute’s brand of “reformers.” Recapping the history of “reform” in Philadelphia, Thomas Ultican writes of Vallas in 2018’s “Philadelphia Story: Another School Choice Failure”:

He also opened the door for billionaire Eli Broad to infest Philadelphia with administrators trained at his unaccredited Broad Academy.

Broad believes that leaders of school district need financial and business management skills but require little or no experience in education. He also says that the best way to reform education is through competition and market forces.

Vallas is an example of the kind of school leader Broad sought to foster. He was someone who had little to no experience in education but understood finance.

We have some experience of the Broad Academy here in Chicago. You remember. Barbara Byrd-Bennett was a Broadie. [She was convicted of taking kickbacks and sent to prison.]

In New Orleans:

Even those who accept the rising test scores narrative know there are vast problems in New Orleans post Vallas, as recounted in a 2015 New York Times article. “The rhetoric of reform often fails to match reality.” Privatization here, as elsewhere, hurts the most disadvantaged students.

“We don’t want to replicate a lot of the things that took place to get here,” said Andre Perry, who was one of the few black charter-school leaders in the city. “There were some pretty nefarious things done in the pursuit of academic gain,” Mr. Perry acknowledged, including “suspensions, pushouts, skimming, counseling out, and not handling special needs kids well.”

Privatization, writes teacher, scholar, and author Mercedes Schneider, was not a better way to run schools. Schneider has researched and written substantially on this topic, speaking of expertise; if you have any interest in the long-term effects of school privatization, do yourself a favor and learn from her.

Has Vallas’s brand of reform been sustainable in New Orleans? In a 2008 piece in nola.com, a principal presciently considered this question:

Cheryllyn Branche, the principal of Bannecker Elementary School, wonders about sustainability. ‘I have a vested interest in this community. No matter what, it will always be home,’ she said. ‘If we don’t have people who have a commitment to this place in the long term, it won’t come back.’

‘Sometimes I want to ask him, “What happens when you are gone?”’


In Bridgeport CT:

Vallas was hired shortly after the state takeover of Bridgeport, CT public schools, subject to his fulfilling CT law that he be trained as an educator. A special condition was created just for him, non-trained-educator that he was: that he complete an educational leadership program. Instead of doing this he took a single independent study course that was later deemed not to fulfill the special condition. The whole thing ended in a tangled lawsuit, explained in this 2013 piece in the Stamford (CT) Advocate:

[I]t is a case study about the arrogance and abuse of power that have become the hallmark of the so-called reform movement.

The Vallas saga is the story of how an infamous reformer broke the law — a law written expressly for him — and how senior officials put personal and political connections above the law and welfare of Bridgeport’s children.

The court ruled against Vallas, but later reversed the decision in an appeal; Vallas had already left to join Pat Quinn’s IL campaign for governor. His short tenure in Bridgeport was largely colored by this controversy.

It’s clear that the expertise the Tribune touts, based largely on his school district leadership, is fraught with complications and possibly wildly overrated. The parts that worry me in this history include the rapid fire breaking and destruction coupled with simultaneous rapid spending and rapid budget slashing. The failure to listen to constituents. The repeated disadvantaging of already-disadvantaged children.

I know reformers like Vallas do not see that the upshot of their work turns out to be racist. But oddly, districts subjected to the Vallas type of reform somehow get a whole lot whiter—from administrators, through teachers, and on down to students. Saying “choice is the civil rights issue of our time” over and over like a magic spell does not make it true. School choice has never, and will never, increase equity in a school district. School choice originates in the racist response to Brown v. Board of Education and the creation of schools not subject to federal oversight. Today choice is instrumental in breaking down democracy in our communities. [These claims were the subject of my blog that ran for 7 years; though I want to go on and on about this, we’ve got to keep moving or I’ll never get through this post!]

Just on a practical level, Vallas’s plans for keeping schools open on nights and weekends baffle me. How does he propose to pay for all that staffing? Our schools don’t even have libraries. They have hardly any extracurriculars. Some of them are lacking in utter basics. What is he talking about? I can’t even imagine the epic Godzilla versus Mothra battles that would ensue between him and the CTU over this.

No, Chicago Tribune. No. No to someone who is a serial privatizer. No to someone who set corporate ed reform in motion in Chicago decades ago. No to someone who blows things up and leaves. No to someone who’s left increased racial inequity in his wake. We don’t need a mayor who has this kind of proven track record on education.

II. Next, the Tribune loves that Vallas “has the ear of rank and file police officers on the street.”What they mean by this is that he is very cozy—one could say uncomfortably cozy—with FOP president and disgraced cop John Catanzara. Last month the FOP endorsed Vallas; this week Vallas spoke at an FOP event for retired police officers alongside Catanzara; and he recently accepted a $5K donation from a retired policeman involved in the Laquan McDonald murder. When WBEZ reported on that connection, his campaign acknowledged that, and rather than returning the money, they gave $10K to Parents for Peace and Justice.

His public safety plan is full of dog whistles, like so: “Our city has been surrendered to a rogue element who act with seeming impunity in treating unsuspecting, innocent people as prey.” Kicking CPD Superintendent David Brown to the curb is Job One. Bypassing Kim Foxx when necessary is key. And adding thousands of police officers is a priority, so that CPD is staffed “like it was under Rahm Emanuel.” Said new cops would be recruited from military bases (?!), the fire department, retirees, and private security forces; residency requirements would be waived (but wait, didn’t he say having cops from the local community was best?). Every CTA station would be staffed with cops. In a just and good world, these are not inherently problematic proposals. In the world we live in, with out of control, hostile, already overly militarized cops, these ideas would implement a semi-privatized dystopian police state with watchful cops on every corner trying to snatch the city back from the rogue element. Of course rank and file cops like these ideas.

The Tribune is hopeful that Vallas would use the trust of the police “to improve police conduct.” Again with the saying it/wishing it connection. I think the next mayor needs more concrete proposals about improving police conduct than we see in Vallas’s plan.


III. In discussing some of Vallas’s challengers, the Tribune is “troubled by [their] associations”(in this case, Chuy Garcia’s connection to Madigan). But how can the editorial board overlook Vallas’s own troubling associations? Let me detail a few.

He spoke at an Awake IL event this past summer. Days later, after he was roundly criticized for joining forces with the group, he walked back his connection with them, assuring folks that he, himself, is not in any way homophobic or racist. It would have taken a 5 second internet search to see that Awake IL has a history of being unhinged about covid restrictions, threatens trans people regularly, refers to the governor as a “groomer,” was instrumental in the vandalism of UpRising Bakery, and is connected to the Proud Boys. But Vallas didn’t make a 5 second internet search when he was invited to serve on a panel that Awake IL leader Shannon Adcock called “the Continental Congress of school choice.”

He received a $7.5K donation from disgraced former CPS Board of Ed member Deborah Quazzo, whose notoriety derives chiefly but not solely from the large profits she secured as a result of contracts obtained while serving on the Board of Ed. Her husband threw in another $10K for good measure. Interestingly, in his last at-bat for mayor, Vallas received a much smaller donation from Quazzo, then returned it after he was asked about it by WBEZ. Time heals all wounds, apparently. Vallas now says, 4 years ago there were allegations being made about her that didn’t seem great, and his campaign was wary. Now he thinks “nothing came of those investigations” into what Quazzo did on the Board, and besides, “She has a reputation for being very active in school reform.” (Again, a 5 second internet search would yield the CPS Inspector General’s report on all matters Quazzo. Allegations sustained.)

I’ve already mentioned the deeply problematic John Catenzara. At least the $5K donation of the Laquan McDonald-involved cop, Richard Hagen, did cause a twinge of conscience.

Disgraced Barbara Byrd-Bennett partner in crime Gary Solomon was also an associate of Vallas’s—for years. Solomon went with Vallas to Philadelphia, then New Orleans. “In a series of letters to Louisiana officials who oversaw the New Orleans district, Vallas vouched for Synesi Associates,” Gary Solomon’s education consulting firm. “Synesi landed two no-bid contracts worth nearly $893,000 in New Orleans during Vallas’ time running the Recovery School District from 2007 to 2011, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.” Solomon’s prison term for his involvement in the Barbara Byrd-Bennett kickback scandal ended early because of covid. He’ll be released from home confinement in October.

Vallas owes one of his jobs to yet another shady connection, former governor Bruce Rauner, who set him up as Chief Administrative Officer of Chicago State University, in hopes of turning it around. This scenario didn’t end well—CSU cut ties with Vallas when he announced his run for mayor in the middle of his tenure. “I find it unfortunate that he would attempt to use Chicago State University as a platform to run for the mayor of the city of Chicago,” [Board Vice President Nicholas] Gowen said. “It is not the role of Mr. Vallas to try to use Chicago State University to try to bolster his bona fides to the black community.”


IV. The Tribune touts the need for “turnaround specialists” like Vallas and hopes others join him. But what is this? Do we want this? What does a turnaround actually do beyond slash-and-burn destruction of communities and gentrification outcomes that turn out looking quite racist? Educator and author Larry Cuban asks if turnaround “experts” are what struggling school districts (and presumably by extension, cities) really require.

Vallas is (or was) the premier “turnaround specialist.” Whether, indeed, Vallas turned around Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans is contested. Supporters point to more charter schools, fresh faces in the classroom, new buildings, and slowly rising test scores; critics point to abysmal graduation rates for black and Latino students, enormous budget deficits, and implementation failures.

“Turnarounds” as a school strategy have been notorious, and notoriously ineffective. On the school level, a turnaround means every staff member of a school is fired, down to the last lunch lady, and replaced with new staff members. These supposedly higher quality (and perplexingly, usually way whiter) staff members are supposed to fix everything. Break it all fast. Rebuild it fast. Voila! It is fixed. On the district level, it means replacing traditional public schools with charters, lots of firing, much slashing of budgets. Poof! District is fixed, and it is a miracle! Until said turnaround experts leave town with the district and city holding the bag—and the bag is usually empty.

What in the world does a “turnaround expert” do in charge of a whole city? What parts are going to be dismantled? What parts remade? What parts gentrified? What budgets slashed and burned?

I can’t picture it. More significantly, Vallas hasn’t really articulated it.

The Tribune lauds Vallas for his expertise in education—which is questionable—and his rapport with CPD—which is dubious. It overlooks some super sketchy connections and wants to bring down the cursed turnaround upon Chicago. You know, and I know, that Paul Vallas is not the mayor we Chicagoans need—not in 2019 and not now.

If you want to read the author’s appraisal of Vallas in 2018, when he captured a little more than 5% of the vote, open the link. It follows this post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry

John Thompson Sees Hope that Oklahoma Educators and Legislators Will Stand Up Against Destructive “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2023 //
0

John Thompson sees some hopeful signs that educators and legistors—especially Republican legislators—are willing to speak out against the attacks on public schools. Perhaps they saw the recent poll that showed that 75% of the public is opposed to vouchers. Perhaps they read in one of my books that merit pay has repeatedly failed and that it discourages collaboration and teamwork.

He writes:

Oklahoma schools have faced a long history of ideology-driven attacks that produced a “culture of compliance” where educators learned to keep their heads low, and avoid being targets. The two biggest exceptions were the1990 teacher rally at the Capitol and the passage of HB 1017’s funding increases, and the 2018 teacher walkout. But today’s MAGA-driven assaults have put previous threats on steroids, seeking to cripple or destroy public education and other public services. After this year’s reelection of Gov. Kevin Stitt and State Superintendent Ryan Walters, a worst case scenario seemed to be unfolding. It now looks like brazen falsehoods being spread by corporate powers such as the Koch brothers and ALEC, and local MAGAs have energized a diverse, bipartisan coalition of truth tellers.

Frankly, I’ve never seen so many education supporters opening up like they have this February. And as the legislature convened, more and more allies of public education have begun to say what’s on their minds.

In his latest tantrum, Ryan Walters further spurred the pushback by threating the accreditation of the Oklahoma City and Putnam City school systems for making “a pornographic book called ‘Let’s Talk About It’” available to students. Both districts deny they have the book. Walters’ source was a rightwing social media account, “Libs of TikTok.”

The Tulsa World’s Ginnie Graham challenged Walters’ attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), writing, “DEI is not a euphemism for race, affirmative action or critical race theory. It is not a liberal indoctrination to make white people feel shame. It is neither Marxism nor socialism.” Graham also explains that only 26% of Oklahomans have a bachelors degree, but within five years, “two-thirds of the top 100 critical professions will require a college degree.” And as Chancellor Allison Garrett explains, DEI is an essential tool for meeting that challenge.

The head of the Oklahoma City Public School Foundation, Mary Melon-Tully, editorialized in the Oklahoman, “A lot of the headlines and media attention have been focused on these divisive bills.” She then wrote in support of pro-education Republicans’ bills, like those of Sen. Adam Pugh and Rep. Rhonda Baker who have focused on “a multi-level pay raise,” paid maternity leave, creation of an Oklahoma Teacher Corps, mentoring, changes to the A-F report card, STEM preparedness, updating the funding formula, and better accountability for virtual and in-person charter schools, as well as “funding literacy instructional teams,” career-readiness, modernizing state graduation requirements, modifying the computer science curriculum, and “adding definition for English Language Learners.”

Similarly, Dr. Pam Deering wrote in the Oklahoman that it’s time to stop being “dominated by divisive culture war talking points,” [and] “focus on the true issues at hand.” Dr. Deering gave an overview of successes in schools, such as Lawton’s Life Ready Center, northwest Oklahoma’s High Plains Technology Center and Technical Applications Programs, Oklahoma City’s STEM academy, Norman’s Oklahoma Aviation Academy, and Sand Spring’s hybrid and virtual programs.”

Then the Stillwater News Press editorialized:

It would be nice to see the focus go to pumping more of that money into public schools, the ones that can’t refuse a child based on disability or who their parents are or how bad they are at basketball.

It would be good if the money wasn’t eventually going to be funneled to a for-profit lobbyist.

It would be great if the focus was on hiring and retention of dedicated teachers and staff.

As Walters pushes for pay-for-performance, the press has displayed a candor that previously would have usually been seen as too risky to articulate bluntly. For instance, the Enid News reported on the thoughts of Erika Wright, founder of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, who said, that the “politicizing a pay scale and a pay raise for teachers that are college-educated that are educating our children is ridiculous.” … “That is just an effort to add more divisiveness and inflammatory rhetoric.”

Bixby’s School Superintendent Rob Miller’s Tulsa World editorial was even blunter. He described teacher merit pay as “one of the more persistent and seemingly indestructible zombie ideas related to education.” It’s been “tried again and again since the 1920s.” And it’s only been 12 years since “the $12 billion merit pay experiment failed once more.” He also cited W. Edwards Deming, who “argued that merit pay ‘nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, and nourishes rivalry and politics.’”

Our last pay-for-performance experiment, as was predicted, started by corrupting school data. Now, Miller adds, the teachers “who are supposed to reap the rewards” … “know that merit pay undermines collaboration and teamwork. They understand that it would corrupt the culture of their school.”

And it is especially encouraging that bipartisan collection of legislators, and Republicans like Sen. Dave Rader, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and Rep. Jeff Boatman, are making such thoughtful arguments against Walters’ and Stitt’s plans. The Tulsa World reports, Sen. Rader says “the state’s tax structure is being reviewed but that he feels no great urgency to make sudden, drastic changes. The state “is in a good position,” he said, with “a nice surplus and a relatively low tax burden.”

Moreover, Rep. Boatman “said there are ways to return value to taxpayers besides just cutting taxes.” He said, “Sure, there’s going to be some tax cuts,” but “there’s going to be some things we invest in through agencies and through services we do as a state. We can give money back that way.” Then Boatman suggested using some of the reserves to fund “some pretty incredible” community projects.

Finally, the Tulsa World’s Carmen Foreman reports, “House Speaker Charles McCall, R-Atoka, recently reiterated his opposition to school vouchers.” But she also reports, “House Republicans are expected to unveil an education plan that would expand school choice options in Oklahoma without vouchers.”

And, as Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer explains, the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board “is set to consider a Catholic charter school this week in what is viewed as a national test case for publicly-funded religious education.”

Given Oklahoma’s Republican majority, and the unconscionable number of Republicans who have remained largely silent regarding the assaults on democracy and public institutions during the Trump era, our future requires more conservatives and Republicans to embrace the wisdom and values of their colleagues and other supporters who are making a stand for our schools. The future remains uncertain, it’s looking more likely that the legislature will come together and at least stop the most destructive rightwing campaigns.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Courage, Disruption, Education Industry, Merit pay, Oklahoma, School Choice

Indiana: Legislators Want Property Taxes for Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2023 //
5

Steve Hinnefeld writes on his blog School Matters that Republican legislators in Indiana want property taxes to pay for charter schools. This will mean budget cuts for public schools or higher property taxes.

Taxpayers in Indiana should be irate that their property taxes will bolster the bank accounts of for-profit charter chains like National Heritage Academies and Accel.

I remember when the idea of charter schools was first discussed in the 1980s. The promise of charter advocates (and I was one at the time) was that they would be more accountable than public schools; that they would cost less than public schools; and they would have higher test scores than public schools. In the more than three decades since the first charter schools opened, the public has learned that none of those promises came true.

Charter schools on average do not produce higher test scores than public schools, unless they choose their students with care. Many charter schools—in states like Ohio—perform far worse than public schools. They are less accountable than public schools because they have private boards that answer to no one. Their finances are usually opaque since they are not subject to the same budgetary oversight as public schools. And now we know that they do not cost less than public schools; they want the same funding as public schools, and many are subsidized by outside philanthropists. And, unlike public schools, charter schools close with high frequency and little warning. They destabilize communities. And that is why I no longer support charter schools.

Steve Hinnefeld writes:

Indiana legislators are considering a significant change in Indiana school finance that would, for the first, time, require public school districts to share local property tax revenue with charter schools.

Senate Bill 398 is set for a hearing Tuesday in the Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee. A similar bill in the House hasn’t yet been scheduled for a hearing, but probably will be. House Bill 1607 goes further than SB 398 by also requiring school districts to share referendum funding with charter schools.

SB 398, authored by Sen. Linda Rogers, R-Granger, would require school districts to share revenue from their property tax-supported operations funds with charter schools. The money would be allocated according to the number of students who live in the school district and attend charter schools.

The measures follow a public advocacy campaign that may have pushed the issue of charter school funding onto lawmakers’ agendas. The campaign, which included TV and social media ads, focused on differences in funding between Indianapolis Public Schools and charter schools.

The bill would also make districts share property taxes with nearby public school districts to which their students transfer.

Under Indiana’s current school finance system, the state provides comparable per-pupil funding to district and charter schools. But districts can also levy local property taxes to pay off debt and for their operations funds, which pay for facility construction and maintenance and for transportation. The state gives charter schools an extra $1,250 per pupil to compensate for their lack of property taxes.

A Legislative Services Agency analysis says SB 398 would shift nearly $70 million a year from school districts to charter schools after a three-year phase-in. The biggest impact would be in Indianapolis and Gary, where more students attend charters or transfer than attend district schools.

Advocates for charter schools argue their students deserve the same funding as students who attend district schools. However, charter schools aren’t subject to the same requirements as district schools and aren’t overseen by elected school boards. It’s rare in Indiana for voters to have no local election mechanism to influence how their property taxes are spent.

The campaign for more charter school funding highlighted the difference in per-pupil funding between IPS schools and Indy charter schools that aren’t affiliated with the district. The ads were “endorsed” by the Indiana Student Funding Alliance, whose website has no contact information or details about who or what it is.

According to Facebook’s ad library, the ads on the platform were paid for by the Institute for Quality Education, an Indianapolis nonprofit that advocates for charter schools and private school vouchers. The group’s political action committee, Hoosiers for Quality Education, is a major donor to Republican politicians. In 2022, it gave $22,500 to Behning’s campaign and $5,500 to Rogers’ campaign.

Open the link and finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Funding, Indiana
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