Archives for category: Corporate Reform

Jonathan Chait writes for New York magazine, where his latest article appeared, opposing the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). CSP currently spends $440 million annually to underwrite new charter schools. Chait titled his article “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” but it might as well have been titled “Biden Abandons the Betsy DeVos Legacy on Charter Schools.”

Chait also attacked the Network for Public Education, which had issued two reports (see here and here) documenting the waste, fraud, and abuse in the CSP, based on the Education Department’s own data. NPE found that almost 40% of CSP funding went to charters that either never opened or closed within a few years of opening. In the life of the program, almost $1 billion had been wasted. In addition, NPE pointed out the scandals associated with some high-profile for-profit charter operators, as well as the use of CSP money to open white-flight charters.

This year, for the first time since the CSP was created nearly 30 years ago, the Department proposed to ban the funding of for-profit charter management organizations and of white-flight charters. The regulations also ask applicants for an impact analysis that describes what effect the new charter is likely to have on existing public schools and why the new charter is needed. These sensible reform proposals sent the charter lobbyists into frenzied opposition, claiming falsely that these regulations were meant to destroy all charter schools. This was nonsense because they would have no effect on the thousands of existing charters, only on applicants for new federal funding, that is, charters that do not yet exist.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, sharply denounced the lies and misrepresentations of the “trade organization” for the charter industry. But, despite her reproach, the charter industry still promotes dishonest diatribes about the Department’s efforts to reform the CSP.

Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, was incensed when she read Chait’s defense of the charter industry’s effort to protect the for-profit managers who have abused CSP funds and of the operators that have used CSP funding to provide white-flight charters.

She wrote the following response.

In his recent column, “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” Jonathan Chait is perturbed that the U.S. Department of Education referred Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum to me for comment on an article he was writing about the Department’s proposed regulations for funding new charter schools. He then scolds Barnum for not disclosing that the Network for Public Education has received donations from unions. He calls Barnum’s story “neutral.” Chait’s source for this big scoop? The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Jonathan Chait then parrots the “wild exaggerations and misrepresentations” that Rosa De Lauro called out last week after expressing her support for CSP reforms during the Education Department’s 2023 budget hearing. The Appropriations Chairwoman noted that “this kind of information campaign is a familiar tactic for the trade organization [National Alliance for Public Charter Schools]. It does represent charter schools that are run by risky low-quality for-profit education management organizations.”

You know those “wild exaggerations.” I wrote about them here. Obviously, Chait did not read the mentioned Barnum piece, which was solid reporting, and he certainly did not read the proposed regulations carefully (which Representative DeLauro described in a letter to Secretary Miguel Cardona about the charter industry’s misrepresentations). Or he just chose to twist facts and truth.

Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.

His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writer when that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for West Ed which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, West Ed, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.

But back to NPE funding. During some recent years we got modest donations from unions to bring teachers to our conferences. At our very beginning, we received start-up funds from the Chicago Teachers Union through a fiscal sponsor, Voices for Children. That ended in 2015. We will always be grateful to our friend, the late Karen Lewis, for that jump-start. Karen foresaw the growing attacks on public schools and teachers as an ominous trend and wanted to encourage allies to support a bedrock institution of our democracy.

We appreciate any tax-deductible donations we get. You won’t get favors, but you will always get a thank you. Our income comes from individual donations from our large number of supporters—educators, parents, family foundations, and other citizens who have a deep and abiding love for public schools.

This is not the first time Chait has been called out for not disclosing his wife’s connections with charters. But given the topic and her work in organizations connected with the Charter School Program, this is the worst omission yet. Shame on New York Magazine for not making him disclose and for letting him play fast and loose with the truth. And shame on Chait’s hypocritical critique of Barnum even as he hides the family connections with the program he defends.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Scandals, School Choice, Shame, Support for public schools

Tennessee: Why Did the Education Commissioner Forget to Mention Her Husband in Her Disclosure Statement?

By dianeravitch

May 4, 2022 //

The Tennessee Holler asks a pertinent question:

Why did Commissioner of Education Penny Schwinn fail to mention her husband’s employer in her disclosure statement?

The Holler wrote:

This week some eagle-eyed Hollerers pointed out TN Ed Commissioner Penny Schwinn left TNTP, the company where her husband works, off of her source of income disclosure.

She listed it last year, but not this year, despite the fact that he remains on their website as a “Leadership Coach.”

This is especially noteworthy since TNTP was a recipient of an $16 MILLION contract from the Tennessee Education Department, a department Schwinn is in charge of… a fact that was not lost on legislators who raised the “Conflict of Schwinnterest” issue in committee last session.

Was leaving TNTP off the disclosure an oversight on Penny’s part? Was it intentional? Are they no longer married? Is he no longer at the company?

These are questions someone should ask, and we will next time we see her.

It’s worth noting that Schwinn has a history of conflicts of interest and self-dealing. They’ve been hallmarks of her career, showing up in both Delaware and Texas, her stops along the way since starting a charter school in Sacramento. She also ran for school board in Sacramento, where she was supported by Michelle Rhee, whose charters lobbyist organization 50 CAN now is affiliated with charter school lobbyist Victor Evans at Tennessee Can, who is now vocally pushing through the new TISA funding overhaul plan from Governor Lee, even standing with him at press conferences.

Victor does NOT want to talk to us about the connection between Michelle Rhee at his parent company and Schwinn, no matter how hard we try.

There is more. Open the link and follow the story.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Rhee, Michelle, Scandals, Tennessee

Mercedes Schneider: D.C. Fires 2 Experienced Educators for Refusing to Adopt “No Excuses” Program

By dianeravitch

May 3, 2022 //

Mercedes Schneider writes here about the plight of two experienced Black educators who were fired by District of Columbia officials for refusing to adopt a scripted “no excuses” program developed by the Relay “Graduate School of Education.” I put scare quotes around the last four words because Relay is not really a graduate school of any kinds. It was created by a group of charter chains to teach the methods favored by charter schools—strict discipline, no-excuses, and the pedagogical strategies to raise test scores. Unlike real graduate schools, it has no campus, no library, no faculty with earned doctorates, no programs in research and the social sciences.

The educators—one of them a veteran principal—objected to the Relay approach and thought it contributed to the school-to-prison pipeline. They were fired, and they are suing, all out of their own pockets. I will help them as best I can. Tom Ultican write about them here.

Schneider wrote:

Below are excerpts fron a lawsuit put forth by two former employees of DC’s Boone Elementary School, who took issue with DC Public Schools (DCPS) higher admin wishing to impose controversial scripted and harsh practices at the direction of the so-named Relay Graduate School of Education (“graduate school” as a brand name and worth as much as my legally changing my own name to “Mercedes Schneider, MD” to deceptively promote the idea that I practice medicine).

Former Boone principal, Carolyn Jackson-King, repeatedly voiced her concerns about DCPS pooling lower-income, predominately Black schools under the jurisdiction of Relay and the fact that the administrator overseeing this requirement was formerly with “no excuses” KIPP schools (as in highly-scripted conformity at the expense of developing critical thinking and self-value for low-income students). Jackson-King even collected data to support no need for this concocted “Relay remediation” plan for Boone students, to no avail. Within one year, she was brought from being a principal deemed worthy of mentoring others to one released from her duties as principal and given the lowest rating of her career.

Fellow Boone employee and director of strategy and logistics, Marlon Ray, was arguably singled out and punitively required to work in person throughout the pre-vaccination period of COVID and later terminated due to “reduction in force” after he filed a 2020 whistleblower suit with the Office of Inspector General (OIG) about Relay, including contracts and payments under two distinct codings and that did not line up.

Jackson-King and Ray are suing DCPS and requesting a jury trial “to remedy the effects of the illegal conduct described [in the suit]” and to “award damages for back pay and other monetary losses” incurred by DCPS “[having] violated the provisions of District of Columbia law recited [in the suit].”

The lawsuit itself is 35 pages long and is posted at the end of this piece. I wish I could post the entire document as I believe it is worth a full read for its value on many fronts, including how those in education reform are able to all-too-quickly position themselves in upper administration and through their connections promote other entites selling ill-informed ideas that are contrary to sound educational practice; how such education businesses are often particularly positioned to prey on lower income students and students of color; how genuinely concerned, career-invested stakeholders are often wrongfully punished for voicing their concerns and seeking remedy (including being told that the issue should be kept “in house,” a strategy also often employed by domestic abusers), and how the underdog often has to pay out of pocket to seek relief in the courts.

Please continue reading. The educators acted ethically. The district punished them for acting ethically.

Categories Character, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, District of Columbia, Education Industry

NPR: New Poll Shows that Most Parents Like Their Public Schools and Teachers

By dianeravitch

May 1, 2022 //

NPR released a new poll showing that, despite the loud mouths attacking public schools, most parents like their public schools and teachers.

They like their schools despite the hundreds of millions, if not billions, invested in promoting school choice, charter schools, vouchers, and privatization.

This poll suggests that Democrats should go after people like Ron DeSantis and other politicians trying to harm a civic institution that most Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, appreciate.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Opinion Polling, Parents, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Support for public schools, Teachers

Jeb Bush: Let’s Get Back to Destroying Public Schools

By dianeravitch

April 28, 2022 //

Say this for Jeb Bush: he is not dissuaded by failure. No matter how many studies show the failure of vouchers, he doesn’t care. No matter how many studies show that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how many grifters have drained millions through privatization of schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how little evidence he has for any of his proposals, he still pushes them.

His ideas are old and tired and incoherent. But count on him to package them as fresh and innovative, which they are not.

He is the male counterpart to Betsy DeVos.

He just cares about destroying public schools.

He wrote recently in The Miami Herald:

Last month marked two years since the pandemic swept across the country, causing the largest disruption to our nation’s education system in modern history. But at last, this spring brings an academic revival of sorts. Schools are remaining open, mask mandates are disappearing and plexiglass dividers between students in their classrooms are coming down.

In the rush to return to normal, we owe it to our nation’s children to emerge from this pandemic transformed, not by going backwards, but ready to forge a better future for them with all we’ve learned.

Our starting point is challenging. Prior to the pandemic, America’s public schools were struggling to serve the needs of students, and since the pandemic, a study by McKinsey found students have fallen months behind as a result of school closures and disruptions. There were severe impacts on student mental health, too. Pew Charitable Trusts found students are reporting significantly increased levels of grief, anxiety and depression.

It’s also no surprise that there’s a growing distrust in public education. A survey by Ipsos found trust in teachers declined during the pandemic, and there’s been a subsequent decrease in the number of students enrolling in public school.

Those are serious setbacks, but there are reasons for optimism. The pandemic put a spotlight on a myriad of possibilities for the future of education. Notably, it illustrated a desperate need by families for a broadened ecosystem of options for their children, with funding flexibility to create more equity in choice. And it elevated the power of parents to blaze new educational pathways for their children.

The Associated Press recently reported that homeschooling remains a popular choice for parents, despite schools reopening. And, private schools and public charter schools have witnessed increased enrollment. But choice, in and of itself, isn’t enough. Policymakers must continue to seek new ways to unbundle education systems, transforming old approaches into new and better learning options.

In Indiana, lawmakers, led by House Speaker Todd Huston, took the first step toward creating the nation’s first “parent-teacher compact” law. This innovative policy would allow parents to directly hire teachers. Educators would continue to be paid by the state and receive their health and retirement benefits, but this policy would enable parents and educators to enter into a peer-to-peer relationship to benefit individual students, without the hurdle of a district middleman. This individualized approach to education would give educators more freedom, families more flexibility and individual students the personalized experience they may need.

As we unbundle education, we need to reimagine all aspects of how education is delivered to students. One approach is enacting new part-time enrollment policies. Right now, students are defined by the school in which they’re enrolled.

Lawmakers can improve the education experience by allowing students to have more flexibility, whereby a student can enroll in their local public school and easily access a portion of their education funding to also enroll part-time in a private school, with an online provider, or engage in another learning experience that benefits the child’s education.

Another approach that complements unbundling is rethinking education transportation options. Last year, Gov. Doug Ducey awarded $18 million in grants to modernize Arizona’s K-12 transportation system, including direct-to-family grants to help close transportation gaps. In Oklahoma this year, Gov. Kevin Stitt proposed changing Oklahoma’s school transportation funding formula to expand how public school buses can serve students. And Florida’s Legislature recently passed legislation to create a new $15 million transportation grant program that encourages districts to create innovate approaches to school transportation, including carpooling and ride sharing apps, for both school-of-choice families and traditional school students.

Those are just a few examples, and we must continually look for more ways to unbundle and reimagine education. The pandemic saw an explosion of families, in all communities and from all demographics, embrace micro schools, homeschooling and customized learning pods. Rather than trying to limit these families, we should give them access to direct funds to further personalize and benefit their child’s out-of-school learning experience.

That’s what Gov. Brad Little has championed in Idaho. In response to school closures in 2020, Little used federal emergency COVID relief funds to provide direct grants to families to support students who were no longer learning in school. And this year, Little signed the Empowering Parents Grant Program into law, giving qualifying families up to $3,000 to use for tutoring, educational material, digital devices or internet connectivity….

Transforming our nation’s education system and ensuring students receive the individualized experience to unlock potential and lifelong success require continual forward momentum, especially after two years of disruptions. We have to keep moving, keep reimagining, keep transforming. This commitment to excellence is a point of pride for Florida.

Last year, Florida’s Legislature passed some of the most significant improvements and expansions to the state’s school-choice programs. And this year, lawmakers strengthened the charter school law, expanded the Florida Empowerment scholarship program, created a new financial literacy requirement for high school graduates and ensured parents are better informed of their child’s progress through online diagnostic progress monitoring and end-of-year summative tests.

This Pied Piper plays a tune meant to deceive. Ignore him.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, School Choice, Vouchers

Gloria Nolan: Why I Quit the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch

April 27, 2022 //

Gloria Nolan is a parent of children enrolled in St. Louis public schools. She recently joined the board of the Network for Public Education.

She wrote the following article, which was published in the St.Louis Post-Dispatch.

She begins:

For about three years I worked for an organization that was invested in growing the charter school movement locally and around the country. Thankfully, I moved on, and now I fully support charter school reform, such as the reforms included in the new regulations for the federal charter school program proposed by Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. Here is why.

I fully began to realize what I was a part of during lunch when I had a chance to talk to the chief executive of The Opportunity Trust, Eric Scroggins. I rattled off a list of ideas I had for turning the public schools in the St. Louis district around.

That wouldn’t work, he responded. He said the objective was to burn the system down.

For Opportunity Trust and so-called reform movements like it, the key to school improvement is to replace public schools with charter schools, or public schools that act like charter schools. That is when I lost all faith in what charter proponents were selling.

And where do these charter schools go to get start-up and expansion funds? The federal Charter School Program…

The same special interest groups that promote organizations like The Opportunity Trust are fighting the very reasonable rules that [Secretary Miguel] Cardona has proposed to help clean up the mess. With a campaign of misinformation, the charter lobby led by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools promotes the extreme right’s support for stopping the proposed regulations.

As a Black woman, I find it hard to believe any news outlet that promotes fearmongering about critical race theory and features an op-ed that criticizes the regulations because their frequent use of the words “diversity” and “racial” has the best interests of my children at heart…

The one regulation that the charter lobby objects to the most is the requirement to do an impact analysis to see if the school is needed or wanted by the community. Given that more than 40% of charter schools close within their first 10 years, an impact sounds like common sense to me. This particular regulation is also in line with the implementation of the City-Wide Planning Committee and its call for a moratorium on the opening of new schools. The guidelines here locally were met with strong opposition from The Opportunity Trust and its supporters.

I have been on the inside of the reform/charter school movement. Its ultimate objective is to destroy our public school system by replacing it with a system of charter and voucher schools. These new regulations will not stop that. I wish they were stronger. But at the very least they could help ensure that our federal tax dollars will be given to charter schools that have better intentions than many of the schools that are receiving Charter School Program grants now.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Missouri, Parents, St. Louis

The Tricks of Neoliberal Rhetoric: An Analysis of Betsy DeVos’s Speeches

By dianeravitch

April 12, 2022 //

Kerry McKeon recently received her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy from the University of Texas at San Antonio in December of 2021. Her dissertation focused on neoliberal rhetoric and its use in advancing the privatization of public schools. It is titled Neoliberal Discourse and the U.S. Secretary of Education: Discursive Constructs of the Education Agenda (2017-2020).

She writes, in a summary:

Corporate reform of education has taken hold in the U.S., with neoliberal values regularly propagated and normalized—even among some public-school leaders. I witnessed this transition firsthand, beginning as a U.S. Senate aide, and then over decades as classroom teacher. In recent years, one voice has echoed above the rest, as a consequence of her privilege, power, and opportunity: former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.Listening to her stump again and again for the privatization of public education while pursuing my doctorate in educational leadership and policy, I became fixated on her language choices. The right words can make or break a given argument, and as a teacher, I know that language is the portal to meaning-making. So, I set out to investigate her linguistic and rhetorical strategies, as she sought to drive her neoliberal agenda forward.

Using a corpus of twenty-eight DeVos speeches over her four years in office, I explored the ways she tried to influencethinking around public education in favor of privatization—and how she aimed to normalize and naturalize certain neoliberal beliefs, while minimizing, discrediting, and ignoring other problems and solutions. Given the strength of her platform as education secretary, her messages were often replicated and amplified, while other vital voices in the education community were muted.

While others have explored the causes and effects of neoliberalism’s incursion into public education, little research explores how strategic linguistic maneuvers can reshape American ideas about public education over time. To understand and unpack her persuasive strategy, I identified and mapped thelinguistic formulas and frameworks she used to influence audiences in favor of neoliberalism. When I dissected her speeches, I found neoliberal ideology layered throughout—in everything from her word choices to the personal stories she shared.

For example, DeVos repeatedly expressed disdain for the federal government’s role in education, and advocated more power to individuals and to the private sector. Even with a D.C. officeaddress, she regularly attacked all things “Washington,” including education-advocacy groups, teachers’ unions, and other experts in education policymaking. She also lambasted the elusively defined “elites,” ranging from Democratic political donors to university scholars. While distancing herself from present-day government structures, she averred a near-mythical allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and founding fathers—arguing that current federal oversight in education violates the founders’ intent for the role of government.

Likewise, DeVos expressed economic values that criticize government spending and regulation, while promoting the private sector, marketplace competition, and the rights of the taxpayer. Her economic values were articulated through keywords that celebrate the free market: innovation, results, metrics, efficiency, prosperity—all while presuming that all free-market participantsare equally capable to prosper. In doing so, she disregarded stark and obvious social inequalities that make the market an unequal space.

DeVos eschewed virtually all discussions of inequity, except when it helped her make arguments for school reform or choice. In fact, she regularly employed keywords such as opportunity, choice, freedom and options, and downplayed language relating to economic, racial, or social injustices. DeVos also decentered and discounted teachers and teacher-led classrooms, advocating instead for increased use of classroom technology, including the much-touted personalized learning (technology-enabled learning that is moving schools to a greater reliance on data, data systems and other technology products).

Over and over, DeVos proposed radical change to public schools by rooting educational values in a marketplace reality. In order to do this, she distanced herself from public schools through “othering.” She described public schools as flawed, failing monopolies, consistently underperforming, and failing to innovate. At the same time, she glorified all manner of non-public schools—charter schools, magnet schools, online schools—regardless of their records, eschewing the results and metrics she so strongly promoted elsewhere. And she often plugged a skills-based curriculum with a jobs focus. DeVos sought to create a market of education choices and so-called freedom by depicting families as customers and education as a product, while paying no mind to how communities or the democratic purposes of education may be compromised by a commoditized education system. Rarely did she speak of the important role teachers play in advancing education, and ignored any equalizing effects of education on child poverty. Indeed, she asserted, without evidence, that school-choice fixes all problems with public schools and even went as far as to say that public schools are un-American when choice isn’t an option.

In my exploration of her speeches, I identified a pattern of strategies—a framework—which I call tiered operations for ideological impact that is rooted in how we think and process information. I found that DeVos’s neoliberal ideological language is evident on three levels in her speeches: the micro, the meso, and the macro.

On the micro-level, I found that her word choices delivered a constellation of concepts to the listener. By repeating a set of neoliberal keywords, the scene is set. DeVos aligns educational values with market values, including the belief that school systems should provide “profit opportunities” for capitalists, and the primary outcome of education is to produce employees with skills employable in the free market. She continues by dividing people and things into divisive categories like good or bad, friends or enemies. Just like a novelist focuses on character development, DeVos instructs her audience on who to love and who to fear. In her narrative, the public school system is a disaster. Her anointed heroes want to dismantle the system, while her anointed villains wish to protect it. DeVos is creative with word-formation, whereby two or more words are combined to create a word cluster. These blends are sometimes charged, seeking to provoke audience anxiety or anger. For example, her phrase “the shrill voices of the education lobby” may trigger the sensation of high pitched voices or scraping chalk on a blackboard). Conversely, the blends are sometimes intended to inspire (so-called, hooray words) and thereby assist in the marketing of her ideas to her audience. In both cases, the word clusters impact the way the brain processes information by blending two concepts into a new, unified concept.

On the meso-level, she uses topics to organize her individual speeches, selecting which topics are included or left out, which topics are foregrounded or backgrounded. Through her argumentation strategy, she asserts that opponents of school choice are attacking core American values such as freedom, patriotism, and human rights. By promoting such a polarized perspective, DeVos flattens the complexity of issues, to offer a simpler version of the world in line with her own perspectives. The process of limiting audience attention to a smaller focus is known as windowing. In the current discursive climate, where individuals are exposed to huge amounts of information every day, windowing is one way to manage information overload and guide an audience to embrace a particular worldview.

On the macro-level, DeVos uses her speeches to align with the cultural climate of the current historical moment. Of particular note are ways DeVos engages in relentless “othering.” She depicts a society divided between patriots who value educational freedom and choice, and a corrupt elite who value public education in the form of community schools. Her biased and misleading claims contribute to a crisis of confidence in education. She promotespublic education as a commodity to be bought and sold in a competitive marketplace, rather than as a collective common good. She elevates choice, while humanitarian discourse is undervalued. In the process, she damages the reputation of public education, contributing to the erosion of America’s commitment to public schools an equalizing institution.

Essentially, her discursive strategies amount to a cognitive suppression of certain humanitarian, social-justice values.Furthermore, DeVos participated in populist, anti-elite, and anti-establishment discourses by positioning the privatization of education as a grassroots effort to overthrow an oppressive system. In addition, she embraces an anti-expert and anti-intellectual worldview, as she attacks education advocates, teachers, local leaders, while elevating the education outsider: the education entrepreneur. These post-truth discourses characteristically appeal to emotion and partisanship over reason and rationality. DeVos may also be furthering anti-democratic work by disparaging others in the democratic process, including public schools and teachers’ unions.

Some might highlight that DeVos’s legislative accomplishments were few. Yet, ideological acceptance almost always comes before policy change. Thus, her impact may reveal itself in time. While she failed to meaningfully impact federal law in favor of neoliberalism, she succeeded in further normalizing ideas that continue to be taken up by Republican-led state legislatures. She succeeded in shifting the federal discussion on education from matters of equity and inclusion, to delivering a manifesto on the importance of flexibility, choice, and opportunity. Increasingly, Americans are more focused on individual educational needs than the needs of the larger community. She also reframed the shortcomings of public schools as an existential threat. By invoking a narrative of crisis and a politics of fear, she commands an increased power of persuasion and betrays the possibility of pursuing more practical, modest, and cooperative modes of change.

Neoliberal political and cultural values that currently inform education policy creation can be identified and decoded, by deconstructing and analyzing the political speech of prominent actors like former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. A close look at her speeches revealed various cognitive triggers that attempt to persuade audiences. DeVos’s political speech contributes to a symphony of powerful voices in the education-policy community, whose messages are replicated and amplified, while other vital voices in the education community are muted. Public education advocates would do well to learn more about the rhetorical strategies through which neoliberal ideology is promoted

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Language, School Choice, Vouchers

NEA: End Federal Funding for Corporate Charter Schools

By dianeravitch

April 8, 2022 //

The National Education Association issued an appeal for educators and other concerned citizens: Raise your voice to stop the federal funding of corporate charter schools!

Now is your chance to be heard.

NEA writes:

Email the U.S. Department of Education to advocate for the end of corporate charter schools and support accountability and transparency for all schools taking our tax dollars.

All schools that receive public funds should be held to the same excellence, equity, and transparency standards as district-run public schools. The original intent of charter schools was to provide a space for educators to be more flexible and innovative.

Instead, big business boards and billionaires turned it into a money-making machine that benefits only themselves. The growth of these corporate charters has undermined local public schools and communities—taking taxpayer money with no oversight or any overall increase in student learning and growth.

The U.S. Department of Education is taking these very real issues seriously and is proposing an end to the support of corporate charter schools. We applaud this effort, but there will be loud voices paid by the billionaires running these schools to speak out against this positive step.

That’s why we need your voice. You can speak out in support of the Department of Education’s proposal to ban for-profit schools from applying for grants and receiving funds to open charters, and demand that charter schools be held to the same standards as traditional public schools.

You may use the sample message provided, but we encourage you to share your personal stories and examples. Tell the U.S. Department of Education how important it is to you personally that for-profit charter schools be held to the same accountability and transparency rules as public schools.

What is the federal comment period and what can I do to help?

The Department of Education is seeking comments from the public about the proposed standards. When you send your letter through this form, it will be added to the federal register as part of the official request for comments and be made public. Written comments on this final rule should be received on or before April 13, 2022.

You can help by writing a personalized letter detailing stories and examples. The more personal the better!

Open the link to see the sample letter and instructions about contacting the Department of Education.

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

Tom Ultican: D.C. Educators Fired for Opposing Relay “Graduate School” Ideology

By dianeravitch

April 7, 2022 //

Tom Ultican, chronicler of the Destroy Public Education movement and retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, investigated a strange occurrence in the District of Columbia: Two respected, experienced black educators were fired for refusing to adopt the practices of the so-called Relay “Graduate School” of Education. Relay is not a real graduate school. It has no campus, no research, no graduate programs. It was created by charter schools and recognized by their allies so that charter teachers could teach the tricks of raising test scores to other charter teachers and enable them to get a “master’s degree” from people who had never earned doctorate degrees. Relay’s textbook is Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion.” Relay does not offer the wide range of courses offered in real graduate schools.

He begins:

School leaders and teachers in Washington DC’s wards 7 and 8 are being forced into training given by Relay Graduate School of Education (RSGE). West of the Anacostia River in the wealthier whiter communities public school leader are not forced. When ward 7 and 8 administrators spoke out against the policy, they were fired. Two of them Dr. Carolyn Jackson-King and Marlon Ray, formerly of Boone Elementary School are suing DC Public Schools (DCPS) for violating the Whistleblower Protection Act and the DC Human Rights Act.

Jackson-King and Ray are emblematic of the talented black educators with deep experience that are being driven out of the Washington DC public school system. They are respected leaders in the schools and the community. When it was learned Jackson-King was let go the community protested loudly and created a web site publishing her accomplishments.

In 2014, Jackson-King arrived at the Lawrence E. Boone Elementary school when it was still named Orr Elementary. The school had been plagued by violence and gone through two principals the previous year. Teacher Diane Johnson recalled carrying a bleeding student who had been punched to the nurse’s office. She remembered fighting being a daily occurrence before Jackson-King took over.

In 2018, Orr Elementary went through a $46 million dollar renovation. The community and school board agreed that the name should be changed before the building reopened. Orr was originally named in honor of Benjamin Grayson Orr, a D.C. mayor in the 19th century and slave owner. The new name honors Lawrence Boone a Black educator who was Orr Elementary’s principal from 1973 to 1996.

Jackson-King successfully navigated the campus violence and new construction. By 2019, Boon Elementary was demonstrating solid education progress as monitored by the district’s star ratings. Boone Elementary is in a poor minority neighborhood. It went from a 1-star out of 5 rating when Jackson-King arrived to a 3-star rating her last year there….

Marlon Ray was Boone’s director of strategy and logistics. He worked there for 13-years including the last six under Principal Jackson-King. Despite his long history in the district, Ray was apparently targeted after filing a whistleblower complaint over Relay Graduate School. Ray questioned RGSE’s relationship with DCPS, the Executive Office of the Mayor and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. He implicated Mary Ann Stinson, the DCPS Cluster II instructional superintendent who wrote Jackson-King’s district Impact review that paved the way for her termination. In the lawsuit, Ray alleges that DCPS leadership responded by requiring him to work in person five days a week in the early months of the pandemic while most of his colleagues, including Jackson-King’s replacement Kimberly Douglas, worked remotely. This continued well into the spring of 2021.

In October of 2020, Ray joined with about 30 Washington Teacher’s Union members, parents and students to rally against opening school before it was safe. Ray reported that he received a tongue lashing from a DCPS administrator for being there and then 2-hours later receive a telephoned death threat. He reports the caller saying, “This is Marcus from DCPS; you’re done, you’re through, you’re finished, you’re dead.”

Ray’s position was eliminated in June, 2021…

In Washington DC, the mayor has almost dictatorial power over public education. Therefore, when the mayor becomes convinced of the illusion that public schools are failing, there are few safeguards available to stop the policy led destruction.

In the chart above, notice that all of the key employees she chose to lead DC K-12 education have a strong connection to organizations practicing what Cornell Professor Noliwe Rooks labeled “segrenomics.” In her book Cutting School (Page 2), she describes it as the businesses of taking advantage of separate, segregated, and unequal forms of education to make a profit selling school. Bowser’s first Deputy Mayor for Education, Jennifer Niles, was a charter school founder. Her second Deputy Mayor, Paul Kihn, attended the infamous school privatization centric Broad Academy. She inherited Kaya Henderson as DCPS Chancellor and kept her for five years. Kaya Henderson, a Teach For America alum, was the infamous Michelle Rhee’s heir apparent. The other two Chancellors that Bowser chose, Antwan Wilson and Lewis Ferebee, also attended the Broad Academy and both are members of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change….

The State Superintendent of Education who awarded $7.5 million in public education dollars to five private companies was Hanseul Kang. Before Bowser appointed her to the position Kang was a member of the Broad Residency class of 2012-2014. At that time, she was serving as Chief of Staff for the Tennessee Department of Education while her fellow Broadie, Chris Barbic, was setting up the doomed to fail Tennessee Achievement School District. In 2021, Bowser had to replace Kang because she became the inaugural Executive Director of the new Broad Center at Yale. Bowser chose Christina Grant yet another Broad trained education privatization enthusiast to replace Kang.

For background information on the Broad Academy see Broad’s Academy and Residencies Fuel the Destroy Public Education Agenda.)

Bowser and her team are in many ways impressive, high achieving and admirable people. However, their deluded view of public education and its value is dangerous; dangerous for K-12 education and dangerous for democracy.

“Teach like it is 1885”

The root of the push back against Relay training by ward 7 and 8 educators is found in the authoritarian approach being propagated. NPR listed feedback from dismayed teachers bothered by instructions such as:

“Students must pick up their pens within three seconds of starting a writing assignment.
“Students must walk silently, in a straight line, hands behind their backs, when they are outside the classroom.
“Teachers must stand still, speak in a ‘formal register’ and square their shoulders toward students when they give directions.”

Dr. Jackson-King noted, “Kids have to sit a certain way, they have to look a certain way. They cannot be who they are. Those are all the ways they teach you in prison — you have to walk in a straight line, hands behind your back, eyes forward.”

RSGE does not focus on education philosophy or guidance from the world’s foremost educators. Rather its fundamental text is Teach Like a Champion which is a guidebook for no excuses charter schools.

In her book Scripting the Moves Professor Joanne Golann wrote:

No excuses charter school founders established RGSE. In the post “Teach Like its 1885.” published by Jenifer Berkshire, Layla Treuhaft-Ali wrote, “Placed in their proper racial context, the Teach Like A Champion techniques can read like a modern-day version of the *Hampton Idea,* where children of color are taught not to challenge authority under the supervision of a wealthy, white elite….”

‘“Ultimately no-excuses charters schools are a failed solution to a much larger social problem,’ education scholar Maury Nation has argued. ‘How does a society address systemic marginalization and related economic inequalities? How do schools mitigate the effects of a system of White supremacy within which schools themselves are embedded?’ Without attending to these problems, we will not solve the problems of educational inequality. ‘As with so many school reforms,’ Nation argues, ‘no-excuses discipline is an attempt to address the complexities of these problems, with a cheap, simplistic, mass-producible, ‘market-based’ solution.’” (Page 174)

Legitimate education professionals routinely heap scorn on RSGE. Relay practices the pedagogy of poverty and as Martin Haberman says,

“In reality, the pedagogy of poverty is not a professional methodology at all. It is not supported by research, by theory, or by the best practice of superior urban teachers. It is actually certain ritualistic acts that, much like the ceremonies performed by religious functionaries, have come to be conducted for their intrinsic value rather than to foster learning.”

So these two courageous black professionals were fired for refusing to accept the harsh “no excuses” pedagogy designed for black children, designed to make them servile and obedient.

Their jobs should be promptly restored. Mayor Bowser has been captured by the forces of privatization and conformity. She should wake up. Some of the “no excuses” charter schools have recognized the harm they do to black children by treating them as clay to be molded, instead of human beings with vitality and interests who need to discover their talents and the joy of learning.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Fake, Racism, Teachers and Teaching