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Mike Deshotels: The Failure of Charter Schools in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2022 //
22

Mike Deshotels is a retired educator in Louisiana, who blogs at “Louisiana Educator.” He wrote the following post about the now well-established all-charter district.

The state of Louisiana took over most public schools in New Orleans after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It turned them over to charter operators, who were expected to get better academic results than the underfunded public schools. The city’s experienced teachers, mostly African-American, like their students, were fired and replaced by inexperienced Teach for America recruits. Philanthropies and the federal government poured billions into the district to help privatization succeed.

Other states, impressed by the promises of privatization, pushed for more charter schools, and some for vouchers, like Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio. Michigan created the Education Achievement Authority (which failed), Tennessee created the Achievement School District, which boldly promised dramatic increases in test scores. It failed too. Still others, like Oklahoma, Nevada, and Texas, encouraged privatization and rapid expansion of charter schools.

Billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and the Waltons continue to fund the charter idea, as does the federal government, whose Charter Schools Program doles out $440 million annually to open or expand charter schools (many of which will fail or never open).

For the billionaires and the charter lobby, New Orleans was the shining star of the corporate reform movement, promising huge academic gains by firing teachers, closing public schools, and privatizing low-performing schools. New Orleans is the foundational myth of the charter movement.

Mike Deshotels shows here that the New Orleans “miracle” was and is a vast mirage. Fully a decade ago, in a dissent to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations that endorsed privatization of public schools, Linda Darling-Hammond wrote that “New Orleans remains the lowest-ranked district in the low-performing state of Louisiana.” Billions of dollars later, New Orleans continues to be the lowest performing school district in the lowest performing state.

Here is an excerpt from Mike Deshotels’ post:

This recently released report by the Louisiana Pelican Policy Institute, a business funded “good government” group has produced a dashboard that compares the most recent data on all public-school systems in Louisiana. It provides a way for us to compare expenditures and results in public schools. We can now get a good idea about whether the school reforms in New Orleans have lived up to their promises.

It is important to note that not all public schools in New Orleans at the time of takeover had been deemed to be failures. Even though the Orleans public school system, as a whole, fell into the bottom quartile of public school systems in the state based on academic achievement, there was a group of public schools in New Orleans that were performing well, even before 2006. Several highly selective schools had been producing high academic achievement and great college prep results. So approximately one-fourth of the Orleans schools were left intact because of acceptable results. Those schools, even though now converted into charters, continue to be selective in the students they serve and continue to produce exemplary results. But there is still a major problem with the state test scores of the other three-fourths – the reformed takeover schools.

The recent study shows that taken as a whole, the New Orleans all charter system is still ranking in the bottom quartile of all public-school systems in the state. This is in a state that performs near the bottom of all states on national testing and college preparedness. For example, the new dashboard reveals that for the four academic subjects of math, reading, science and social studies, only 18% of all New Orleans public school students are now rated proficient or better. (I averaged the results of the 4 academic subjects)

In the key subjects of math and reading, Orleans performs at the 24th percentile compared to all other state school systems. This is approximately the same as the Orleans school system performed before Katrina!

What about efficiency in the use of per pupil dollars? Has the new business-oriented model resulted in more efficient use of tax and grant dollars?

One thing that the all-charter system has been successful in doing is attracting a generous flow of charitable foundation money to these new experimental schools. A sizable portion of per pupil dollars in the reformed Orleans public system come from charitable and foundation grants. So the reformed all charter school system is certainly well funded.

The Pelican Policy Institute study has provided a rough measure of how the school money in Orleans is now allocated. Total per pupil funding of the New Orleans system now adds up to $24,434 per student. For Louisiana, this is lavish funding by any measure. The state average per pupil funding is now $11,755, less than half the per pupil amount for New Orleans. How do the New Orleans schools allocate their per pupil funding compared to all other public schools? According to the Pelican Policy dashboard, New Orleans now spends 23% of all its funding on administration and 36% on classroom instruction. (Salaries of the Charter managers are not published as far as I know) The state average for other systems in Louisiana is 8% for administration and 56% for the classrooms. (All non-charter public-school administrators and teacher salary schedules are public records)

Did the increased funding allow the reformed Orleans school system to hire a better quality of teachers? The state auditor recently found that more than half of the Orleans teachers are not certified as teachers. In addition, most of the teachers now employed in Orleans are Caucasian while 90% of the students are African American. This ignores studies that show that children learn better from real role models of their own ethnic type. So much for the new business approach.

Finally, on average, the other school systems in the state have 31% of students achieving proficiency in the 4 basic subjects tested. This compares to 18% achieving proficiency in the new reformed Orleans system.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, New Orleans

Pennsylvania: It Is Time to Reform the Charter School Law

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2022 //
9

A former Republican State Senator and the former State Auditor, a Democrat, wrote to argue on behalf of reforming the charter school law.

Bernie O’Neill (R-29, Bucks) is a former special education teacher for more than 25 years and a 16-year former member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

Eugene DePasquale is former Auditor General of Pennsylvania and former member of the state General Assembly, (D-95, York). He presently serves as a Resident for the Keystone Center for Charter Change at the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

They wrote:

Our roles as former elected officials from both of the major political parties have given us unique perspectives into not only Pennsylvania’s political process, but also its public education system, particularly charter schools.

Charter schools in the state have grown tremendously in the 24+ years in which they have existed. It is estimated that nearly 170,000 children will attend a brick and mortar or cyber charter school in the current school year and that Pennsylvania taxpayers will spend an estimated $3 billion to fund charter schools.

Despite being in operation for more than two decades, Pennsylvania’s Charter School Law (CSL) has never undergone any significant revision, other than allowing the creation of cyber charter schools in 2002, even though there are numerous glaring problems with the law. That’s not because the General Assembly hasn’t studied and introduced a myriad of legislative proposals each year to enact meaningful reforms. However, the state’s legislative body seems to be unwilling or unable to fix the problems.

Reforming the CSL should be a bipartisan issue. At its core, charter school reform would 1) ensure that public education funds are spent efficiently and appropriately; 2) that charter schools are as accountable and transparent as other public schools; and 3) preserve and strengthen educational choice by bolstering the law to ensure only quality charter school options are available to students and families.

Choice in public education is well-established in Pennsylvania. However, the status quo results in taxpayers sending hundreds of millions of public education dollars more than what charter schools need to provide an education. This is especially true for cyber charter schools, which do not maintain a physical school building and for all charter schools when it comes to well-documented overpayments for special education services. There’s a word for this type of spending – wasteful. And residents across the state feel the impact of these overpayments when their local school districts are forced to raise property taxes because of these costs.

Charter schools are supposed to be public schools. However, the boards that operate charter schools are not elected and are not required to include any representation from the community which they serve. Further, charter schools can contract with for-profit companies to run virtually all operations of the school. Once a charter school enters into one of these contracts, the public loses the ability to see how their money is being spent.

For years, proficiency on state assessments and graduations rates at charter schools have, on average, been substantially lower than those of traditional local public schools. While there are many high-performing charter schools, the current CSL makes it very difficult to close poor performers. Look no further than the fact that every cyber charter school has been identified by the state Department of Education as being in need of improvement for many years.

The bottom line is this: we owe it to our children and to the taxpayers to make sure that we are doing everything possible so that students are getting the best education available and that we are getting the best return on investment for our tax dollars. That’s something that all legislators should be able to support no matter which side of the aisle they’re on.

It is time to end the paralysis in Harrisburg, stop the practice of passing off charter school expansion proposals that fail to address serious funding flaws and contain little accountability as real reform, and finally work in a bipartisan manner to fix the law.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Pennsylvania

Nora De La Cour: How Privatizers Are Using Culture Wars to Advance Their Agenda

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2022 //
7

Nora De La Cour is a high school social worker and former teacher in Massachusetts. She writes frequently about the attacks on public schools. In this brilliant article, which appeared in Jacobin, she shows how the privatizatizers have exploited the culture wars to promote their own agenda. They are not interested in better education or students. Their agenda is to destroy the public square.

In a nutshell: “A billionaire-backed network of free-market fundamentalists is ginning up controversy over “wokeness” in American schools with an ulterior motive: to demolish public education.”

Please open the link to read the article in full.

She begins:

In a Massachusetts school district neighboring the one where I work, four parents, backed by a conservative Christian organization, are suing the school committee and multiple district employees for calling students by their preferred names and pronouns without informing home. Because one of the defendants is a counselor, some of my counselor peers in the area are now on guard, afraid we could become the targets of litigation if we allow students to broach sensitive topics in our presence.

Setting aside the very real harm that kids and educators are exposed to as a result of the Right’s eagerness to linkacknowledgement of gay and trans people to sexual predation, there’s another problem here. It’s incredibly difficult to teach or counsel someone if you can’t call them what they wish to be called. Addressing students by their chosen names is a basic sign of respect that says, “I see you and I’m here to work with you.” If you need to call home to get permission first — potentially outing kids to their parents and inviting distressing blowback — you might miss the chance to form the human connection that undergirds collaborative scholarship.

Pandemic school closures reminded us that the social aspects of schooling are among the most vital for young people’s development and for society at large. Specific facts and figures (the what of school learning) can be easily forgotten and recalled with a few keystrokes. But the ability to establish a base level of trust with heterogeneous others in order to solve shared problems (the how of school learning) is absolutely essential for both a fulfilling personal life and engagement in the public square. It’s critical that educators be allowed to build that trust without fear of reprisal.

The Koch-backed parents’ rightsmovement aims to make that trust impossible. By pitting parents against schools, libertarian billionaires and Republican strategists intend to motivate voters in the short term and fully privatize K-12 education in the long term. As Christopher Rufo, the self-styled architect of the so-called war on critical race theory (CRT), has argued, “To create universal school choice [i.e., privatization], you really need to operate from a premise of universal school distrust.” Those poweringthe campaign against classroom “wokeness” are trying to hinder our ability to establish common ground from which to defend our last remaining public goods.

The illiberalism that dominates the Right can best be understood as the advanced stage of a long billionaire-funded plot to undo democracy in order to relieve capitalists of any constraints the rest of us might wish to place on them. This understanding clarifies why classrooms, the training grounds for democratic participation, are primary targets of radical right activism. If liberals are to have any hope of countering this coordinated attack, they need to remember the collective, public value of education.

Laying Siege to the Common Good

It makes sense to focus on the reactionary nature of all of this: the commitment to American exceptionalism animating the so-called CRT bans, the fresh fixation on classical education rife with chauvinist dog whistles, and the shockingly overt bigotry of the anti-LGBT “grooming” discourse. Ron DeSantis’s Florida, as some have observed, is looking more and more like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. But while these efforts to reverse cultural change are incredibly alarming, we come up short when we try to understand what’s happening purely in terms of identity-based hatred. Intolerance has always been a feature of American politics. Why does it suddenly seem so viciously well-organized?…

Despite attention-grabbing campaigns to terrify them, a majority of public school parents remain satisfied with their children’s schooling. And massive amounts of outside funding notwithstanding, local parents’ rights candidates have in numerous cases failedto deliver decisive wins for the privatization movement. As in segregated Virginia, US families are not quite prepared to sign away their children’s right to publicly funded, democratically controlled schools. It’s the perfect time, in other words, for those looking to contest the radical right to offer a full-throated defense of public education and all public goods.

But Democrats, by and large, have been unwilling to mount that, scarcely standing up even against the horrific attacks on kids, families, and educators that we are seeing across the United States. And when you look at their record on education, it’s pretty clear why: for the past three decades of education reform, Democrats have ignored the social role that schools play in preparing children for engagement in the public square. Alongside Republicans, they have enabled the privatization of public schools. They have also privatized the ideaof schooling down to the individual level. In the view of the Democratic establishment, the sole remit of schools should be to boost “human capital.” Guided by this view, they have yoked the vision of education ever closer to the needs of employers — a kind of corporate indoctrination eerily similar to the “woke” indoctrination Rufo and his cohort tell tales about.

But Bill Clinton’s assertion that “what you earn depends on what you learn” has proven to be a dangerous oversimplification: Americans are more educated than ever before, and yet economic insecurity is rampant and rising. When public schooling is only justifiable insofar as it increases individual earning power, the case for it is wholly dependent on its utility to capitalist markets. Without acknowledging the higher collective purpose that education serves, we won’t be able to defend public schools ordemocratic governance.

Democracy or Capitalism

“Republican politicians and their strategists,” Nancy MacLean told Jacobin,

have seen . . . culture-war tactics help Jair Bolsonaro get elected in Brazil and Viktor Orbán get reelected in Hungary this spring. And, lo, the CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Committee) is traveling to Hungary . . . to learn from Orbán how to use the tools of democracy to rig the rules to achieve autocracy.

The long plot is reaching maturity.

The Right’s appeals to “the family” resonate in part because our oligarchic political system leaves families in the cold, allowing child poverty to soar even as parents spend long and exhausting hours working outside the home. Any effort to save our commons and restore a sense of public spiritedness must include a material response to the significant challenges that parents face.

We need to work fast to reclaim the places where we give one another the benefit of the doubt and collaborate in spite of our differences. Democrats can still enter the battlefield and expose the Right’s deceitful efforts to turn the public against itself. As MacLean argues, the movement Buchanan authored wants to save capitalism from democracy. We can counter it if we are willing to fight to save democracy — beginning with schools — from capitalism.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Hoax, Koch Brothers, Parents, Privatization

Helen Ladd: How Charter Schools Disrupt Good Education Policy

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2022 //
0

For several years, I have sponsored an annual lecture series about education policy at Wellesley College, my alma mater. We have had a number of distinguished speakers, including Pasi Sahlberg, Yong Zhao, Andy Hargreaves, and Eve Ewing.

This year, the invited speaker was Dr. Helen Ladd, one of the nation’s most eminent economists of education. Dr. Ladd is the Susan B. King Professor Emerita of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University. She graduated from Wellesley in 1967, earned her M.A. at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She has written extensively about school finance, equity, choice, and accountability.

Dr. Ladd discussed how charter schools disrupt good education policy.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, School Choice, Segregation

Steve Hinnefeld: Charter Schools and “Educational Blackmail”

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2022 //
7

Steve Hinnefeld blogs about education in Indiana. Indiana is a state that has been a target for privatizers for more than a decade due to Republican governors like Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence.

Hinnefeld reviews a very provocative article by two scholars at the University of Connecticut.

Hinnefeld writes:

Are charter schools like polluting industries? That’s a provocative analogy, but two University of Connecticut researchers explore it in a recent paper. They contend that, while some charter schools may help students, the sector needs stronger regulation to prevent harm to students and school districts.

“I would argue that, even if there are benefits, that does not give you carte blanche to not regulate or mitigate the harms that occur,” Preston C. Green III, the paper’s lead author, told me.

The paper, “Beware of Educational Blackmail: How Can We Apply Lessons from Environmental Justice to Urban Charter School Growth?,” is pending publication in South Carolina Law Review and is online at the Social Science Research Network. Authors are Green, the university’s John and Maria Neag professor of urban education, and doctoral student Chelsea Connery.

Pursuing the connection between schools and polluters, the authors argue that environmental justice principles can be used to mitigate risks from unchecked expansion of charter schools.

The concept of environmental justice arose from concern that factories and waste facilities targeted low-income, Black or Hispanic neighborhoods where they would face less effective opposition. Often, the projects promised benefits that didn’t materialize: Jobs were few or went to workers from other communities. But the harms — pollution and health risks — were real. The take-it-or-leave-it nature of the transaction gave rise to the term environmental blackmail, hence the title of the paper.

The paper notes that charter schools often locate in economically marginalized communities where families are dissatisfied with the local public school district. (It cites polling that finds charter schools are much more popular with Black and Hispanic Democrats than with white Democrats). Research is mixed on whether charter schools produce the benefits they promise, the authors write.

The paper identifies three types of harm that can be caused by the growth of charter schools:

  • Increased stress on financially troubled school districts.
  • Predatory real estate deals that divert resources to for-profit businesses.
  • Loss of rights for students who enroll in charter schools.

When students leave district schools for charter schools, state operating funds typically follow, sometimes leaving the districts strapped. Over time, districts can cut costs by reducing staff and closing schools. But Green and Connery say districts often have fixed costs – for example, pensions, retiree health care and debt – that can’t be easily reduced when they lose students.

In Indiana, the biggest growth in charter schools has been in Gary and Indianapolis. District enrollment has declined by 57% in Gary Community Schools and 31% in Indianapolis Public Schools since the state began expanding charters a decade ago. The state took over Gary schools in 2017 because of money problems. (IPS recouped some of its lost enrollment via “innovation” agreementswith charter schools).

Predatory real estate deals often involve charter schools paying inflated prices, sometimes to businesses that have a relationship with the schools. The paper cites an Ohio auditor’s report that found some charter schools were paying twice the normal rent for buildings and a New Jersey newspaper investigation that found charter operators charged exorbitant rents and loan rates.

Indiana has seen some of that, but the state’s major charter school scandal involved two online schools, Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy. A state audit found the schools received $68.7 million in state funds by inflating their enrollment figures and improperly paid $85.7 million to vendors with ties to officials and employees of the schools.

Loss of student rights often involves matters of discipline, including high rates of suspension and expulsion at “no-excuses” charter schools. Another issue is the use of dress codes to prohibit Black girls from wearing Afrocentric hair styles. State Rep. Vanessa Summers, D-Indianapolis, filed a bill in 2022 to ban “race discrimination based on hair,” but it didn’t get a hearing.

Green and Connery conclude that it will take stronger laws to limit the harm that can result from charter school expansion, just as it took stricter laws and regulations to make gains in environmental justice.

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Industry

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

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2022 //
7

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

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

Smith writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2022 //
33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please open the link and read on.

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

Massachusetts Poised to Do the Wrong Thing by Taking Over Boston Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2022 //
15

Reader Christine Langhoff sent a warning that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is poised to take control of the Boston Public Schools. This would be a mistake. No state takeover has ever led to better education. The state is not wiser than the city. If anything, the state education department is far removed from daily practice, as it is simply another bureaucracy. The current board is dominated by advocates of choice. Apparently they are unaware that the root cause of low test scores is poverty. The best the board could do would be to reduce class sizes and to promote the creation of community schools, which makes the school the hub of valuable services for children and families. Such proven strategies are unfamiliar to choice advocates. They prefer a failed approach.

Christine Langhoff wrote:

It seems that MA DESE is poised to place Boston’s public schools under receivership, perhaps by a vote as soon as May 24. Doing so would fulfill the Waltons’ wet dream which has been frustrated since the defeat of ballot Question 2 in 2016, which would have eliminated the charter cap.

The board is appointed by Governor Charlie Baker, whose donors are, of course, the Waltons and the Kochs. Four members of the board have day jobs tied to the Waltons: Amanda Fernández, Latinos for Education; Martin West, Education Next; Paymon Rouhanifard, Propel America; and Jim Peyser, New Schools Venture Fund and the Pioneer Institute. Baker is a lame duck, which may explain the haste to pull this off.

No state takeover has yet been successful, and once a system enters receivership, there is no exit. BESE has pointed to low MCAS scores to say our schools are failures, but Boston’s scores, invalid as they may be during the covid pandemic, are higher that in the three districts the state runs: Lawrence, Holyoke and Southbridge.

The Boston Teachers Union has an action letter if anyone is so inclined to support public education in the city where it originated:

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/our-city-our-schools-boston-public-schools-need-resources-not-receivership/?fbclid=IwAR3FA5vSKSZp5PEGedXad-hHlr58RzLy-yNqmmftQO9zS_UBiuMkxAzatHI
Categories Accountability, Boston, Class size, Closing schools, Community Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Massachusetts, Privatization, School Choice

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

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2022 //
36

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

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

She wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2022 //
2

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

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

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

She begins:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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