Archives for category: Corporate Reform
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Two of Baton Rouge’s Largest Charters Closing as IDEA Chain Fails and Quits

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2025 //
2

IDEA is a major charter chain in Texas that has gone through some ugly financial scandals about spending on luxury items (season box seats at a basketball arena, a foiled plan to lease a private jet, other executive perks). It expanded to Louisiana, thanks to a multi-million grant from the federal Charter Schools Program.

Things did not go well in Baton Rouge, as we learn from this report by Charles Lussier in The Advocate, a New Orleans newspaper.

IDEA Bridge and IDEA Innovation, two of the
largest charter schools in Baton Rouge, are
closing their doors in May, the last schools in
the state operated by Texas-based IDEA
Public Schools.

It’s the end of a 7-year foray into Louisiana by
the IDEA organization, which came in with
great fanfare as a “proven operator” with
schools in Texas that were ranked among the
best in the nation and graduates who
routinely continued onto college.

IDEA Bridge educates about 1,100 students
and IDEA innovation has about 750 students.
They both opened in 2018.

IDEA schools, however, slipped badly
academically during the COVID pandemic and
did not recover enough to lose their negative
ratings. Both IDEA Bridge and IDEA
Innovation have received F letter grades or
low Ds since the state began rating its public
schools again in 2022.

Both currently have Fs.

Parents received a letter Tuesday from the
charter school management organization that
the organization had made the “difficult
decision” to close the two schools when the
current school year ends. They follow the
closure of IDEA’s two other Louisiana schools,
IDEA Dunn in New Orleans in 2022 and IDEA
University in Baton Rouge in May.

“While we are proud of the determination and
grit of our students, the trust and patience of
our families, and the dedication and
commitment of our teachers and staff, we
have not delivered the academic results our
students deserve, and believe that now is the
time to bring in new options and
opportunities for our scholars and their
families,” according to the letter to parents.

School leaders say they are working with the
East Baton Rouge Parish school system and
the influential nonprofit, New Schools for
Baton Rouge, to identify new school
operators this fall for both the Bridge and
Innovation campuses.

In a statement Wednesday, Taylor Gast, a
spokeswoman for the East Baton Rouge
Parish school system, said district staff are in
the process of developing alternatives for the
affected families and plans to have options for
the parish School Board to consider next
week.

“Our foremost objective continues to be
guaranteeing that every student in East Baton
Rouge Parish has access to outstanding,
tuition-free educational opportunities,” Gast
said. “We are prepared to assist IDEA families
and address their needs to the greatest
extent possible.”

The decision to close the two schools was
made Monday night at a special meeting of
the board of directors for IDEA Public Schools
Louisiana. Alicia Myers, an IDEA
spokeswoman, said that school performance
scores released in November — both IDEA
schools earned Fs — prompted “deeper
discussions about the future of IDEA
Louisiana,” leading to Monday’s vote.
“We believe this is the best decision for our
students and families,” Myers said.

IDEA Bridge and Innovation were the original
IDEA schools in Louisiana. Both opened in
newly constructed facilities at 1500 N. Airway
Drive and 7800 Innovation Drive, respectively.
Bridge served students in north Baton Rouge
while Innovation served students in south
Baton Rouge.

Enrollment for IDEA schools in Louisiana
peaked in fall 2021 at more than 3,000
students. It has dropped over the past three
years by about 1,100 students, a 37% decline.
Both IDEA Bridge and IDEA Innovation earned
three-year renewals of their charters in early
2023, extending their operations through
summer 2026. School system leaders,
however, warned that getting renewed again
would be difficult unless test scores
substantially improved.

Tuesday’s announcement comes seven
months after IDEA’s other Baton Rouge
school, IDEA University Prep, closed its
doors.

It was the newest school in the IDEA network
in Louisiana. When it opened in 2021, it took
over operations of a low-performing charter
school called University Prep, or UP
Elementary, and expanded into middle school
grades. It grew to more than 600 students,
but then began losing enrollment. Its facility
on Plank Road near the Metro Airport was
purchased in June by another charter school.
Helix Aviation Academy.

IDEA is the largest charter chain in Texas. It was once hailed as an outstanding charter chain. But a year ago, the state put it in conservatorship due to financial problems. IDEA’s leaders have a taste for luxury.

Texas’ largest charter school network has been placed under conservatorship by the Texas Education Agency after a years-long investigation into improper spending within the system of 143 schools.

The arrangement, announced Wednesday, is part of a settlement agreement between IDEA Public Schools and the TEA. IDEA had been under investigation since 2021 following numerous allegations of financial and operational misconduct.

It was revealed that IDEA officials used public dollars to purchase luxury driver services as well as $15 million to lease a private jet, just two weeks after promising TEA it would be “strictly enforcing” new fiscal responsibility policies put in place in response to ongoing investigations, as reported by San Antonio Express-News.

The revelations led the district to conduct an internal investigation, resulting in the firing of JoAnn Gama, former superintendent and co-founder of IDEA. Gama later filed a lawsuit against IDEA claiming wrongful termination. IDEA came to a $475,000 settlement with Gama in January. This followed co-founder and CEO Tom Torkelson’s departure in 2020; he was given a $900,000 severance package.

The charter school district serves about 80,000 students in K-12. The schools are independently run but publicly funded with state dollars, having received about $821 million in state funding in 2023-2024 school year.

Among its many luxury expenses, IDEA kept a private pilot on its payroll.

IDEA originally planned to buy a Beechcraft King Air plane, according to the former senior executive. After discussing the plan, however, the board decided to lease a Cessna Citation jet instead.

The board approved an eight-year lease agreement for the Cessna jet in December 2019.

IDEA agreed to pay $57,000 per month for the jet, which didn’t include the cost of fuel or paying the pilot. The board also voted to buy a hangar at the Weslaco airport for about $528,000.

During the board meeting, an executive assured the board that all costs would be covered by private funds.

News that a charter school planned to buy a jet, however, caused an uproar. IDEA abandoned the plan.

The U.S. Department of Education believed that IDEA would be a huge success. In 2016, when John King was Secretary of Education, the Department gave $12 million to IDEA to expand into Louisiana. IDEA opened four charter schools. All four have closed.

IDEA was Betsy DeVos’s favorite charter chain. She awarded it $260 million to expand while she was Secretary.

O, how the mighty are fallen!

.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Louisiana, Privatization

The Nation: Linda McMahon’s Very Important Rightwing Think Tank

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2025 //
2

Trump selected Linda McMahon to be the next Secretary of Education. She is well known for making it rich in the world of wrestling entertainment, in partnership with her husband. Less well known is her role as Chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). Trump is close to AFPI, which promotes school choice and the “parental rights” movement, which promotes censorship of books and curriculum about racism and LGBT topics. They oppose any teaching that might make students “uncomfortable,” like learning about the history of racism, or that might teach students that LGBT exist.

The Nation published an article by Christopher Lewis and Jacob Plaza. The article tells the story of the think tank McMahon leads. It was launched after Trump’s loss in 2020 and its policy agenda defines Trump’s plans. To understand what Trump intends to do, learn more about AFPI.

Lewis and Plaza write:

Amid the incoming Trump administration’s flurry of unqualified, corrupt, and/or vengeance-driven cabinet nominees, it’s been easy to overlook Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to head the US Department of Education. McMahon is best known for her role in running World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) with her husband the longtime Trump crony Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon’s background in education is exceedingly thin; she served on the Connecticut Board of Education more than a decade ago, thanks to an appointment from another politically connected friend, then–Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell. McMahon has a teaching certificate but has never actually taught. Indeed, she was forced to resign her spot on the Connecticut board when the Hartford Courant reported that she’d lied on her résumé about having an education degree. Add in the alleged role of the WWE and its parent company in a sexual-abuse scandal involving “ring boys” for the wrestling league, and McMahon’s nomination, in any sanely administered political order, would be dead in the water. (McMahon and her husband both deny the abuse allegations in the pending WWE suit.)

Yet McMahon possesses one key credential for the next Trump administration—in addition, that is, to a proven track record to personal fealty to the president-elect, and a long string of Fox News appearances: She’s the former head of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the policy nerve center for MAGA governance. For all the attention focused on the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 policy agenda, AFPI has been Trumpworld’s principal policy network, serving as a haven for former Trump appointees during the Biden years. AFPI hands assembled a detailed blueprint for Trump’s return to power, including plans to make the Trump tax cuts permanent and purge the federal workforce of civil service workers deemed insufficiently MAGA. In addition to McMahon, Trump has tapped several senior AFPI figures for cabinet posts, including EPA nominee Lee Zeldin, Agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins (the think tank’s president and CEO), and its Georgia chapter chair, Doug Collins, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Veteran’s Affair

As education secretary, McMahon would be charged with administering a uniquely destructive suite of policies, even by the usual standards of Trump governance. That’s because the Department of Education has been a bête noire of the American right ever since Jimmy Carter founded the agency in 1979. By creating a layer of federal oversight over locally run schools, the DOE has, in the overheated imaginings of right-wing policy mavens, arrogated deep-state sovereignty over the rights of parents to preside over the best educational options and life chances for their children. And as the Education Department has sought to clarify and standardize anti-discrimination policy for LGBTQ+ students, it’s become a pet target for anti-trans culture warriors on the right.

McMahon probably won’t heed the growing chorus of conservative calls to abolish the DOE outright, but she can be counted on to aggressively pursue other key MAGA objectives in education policy. In line with her work at AFPI, McMahon will likely continue to promote the use of privately backed charter schools to defund public education—the most fundamental plank of right-wing education policy. In addition, she’ll probably resume her predecessor Betty DeVos’s campaign to deny basic Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students. And it’s a safe bet that she’ll also re-up plans to promote Trump’s 1776 commission—MAGA’s agitprop answer to the 1619 Project, promoting a “patriotic” national curriculum to downplay and discourage honest discussion of America’s racial history in the schools.

Following the lead of billionaire right-wing donors, AFPI enthusiastically champions the charter-schools movement, while seeking to undermine the government’s role in providing quality public education. McMahon’s think tank has erected a whole policy infrastructure to promote charter schools, including direct public subsidies to them, the creation of education saving accounts (ESAs) for parents to enroll kids in charters, and proposals to weaken teachers’ unions in conjunction with the rise of open-shop charters. This agenda does more than harness the long-standing animus to government-backed education on the right—it advances the creation of a parallel education system for right-wing partisans. In this regard, as well as in its aggressive model of privatized education funding, the AFPI plan recalls the original role that neoliberal economics played in supporting the new ad hoc network of “segregation academies” launched in the American South after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling to desegregate the nation’s schools. The same basic dictum holds for today’s American right as it did then: If you can’t segregate with law, segregate with economics.

AFPI claims that charter school students have higher scores on standardized tests. In reality, the findings here follow what holds for better-funded public schools: namely, that well-funded charter schools tend to produce better test scores, while less well-off charters fare a bit worse, with some regional variations. Students in the competitive DC charter school system’s Opportunity Scholarships program, often cited as the gold standard by charter school advocates, actually performed worse on reading tests than those who did not attend the program.

School choice and voucher programs are a drain on the public’s coffers. For hard-right ideologues like the advisers at AFPI, that’s the whole point. Privatized education is part of the broader right-wing campaign to block the public sector’s ability to finance anything, especially if it would further racial equality. The National Education Association notes that voucher programs redirect scarce public funds toward unaccountable private school programs, and found zero evidence that these programs—which increase school segregation—improve students’ performance. In some cases, there are negative impacts.

What’s more, private management naturally leads to a focus on profit, financial self-sustainability, and expansion—mandates that typically lead to steep budget cuts in the schools, even if students suffer. According to the Network for Public Education, for-profit management companies run nearly one in seven charter schools.

AFPI has also endorsed federal legislation to create national education savings accounts. Like charter schools, ESAs seek to redirect public resources to market-driven gimmicks under the broad rubric of consumer choice. When parents open an ESA, they withdraw their children from the school district and receive a deposit of public funds in a savings account authorized by the government. Parents are then allowed to spend from that account on a range of educational expenses, including tutoring, therapy, or school supplies.

ESA plans create an obvious bind by forcing parents to navigate the education industry all on their own. The ESA scheme affords no safeguards for students whose parents made poor spending choices with the funds in their account. A report in Forbes recounted the story of a family using up its entire account before paying for a single English or math class. And like the broader charter model it upholds, the savings-account system reinforces, rather than weakens, the core inequalities of the US education system; it ensures that wealthier parents will be able to afford to send their children to the best schools.

For a bracing illustration of how charter and for-profit education schemes pillage publicly funded schools, consider Chicago’s experience. In 2013, the city closed 48 public schools to cover widening budget shortfalls. And Chicago’s public schools were going broke in no small part due to the rapid expansion of a parallel charter systemcaptained by ardent school privatizers. Since the insurgent charter schools operated outside traditional governance and accountability, they accumulated millions in debt while draining desperately needed funding away from public schools. Ultimately, 17,000 students were displaced, and Chicago was left with a more unequal and racially segmented school system than it had at the outset of the city’s charter-school fiasco.

To finish reading the article, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, History, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

ProPublica: Secret Papers Reveal How Ohio Politicians Worked with Religious Allies to Get Vouchers for All

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2025 //
10

Alec MacGillis wrote a story for ProPublica titled “On a Mission from God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools.”

ProPublica gained access to a large trove of communications among the Governor of Ohio, George Voinovich, and prominent religious figures, planning how to pass legislation to send public money to religious schools. This, despite explicit language in the Ohio state constitution prohibiting state payments to religious schools.

Here is ProPublica’s overview of the article:

Reporting Highlights

  • The Ohio Model: Rarely seen letters show how the voucher movement started in the 1990s as a concealed effort to finance urban parochial schools and expanded to a much broader push.
  • Helping the Affluent: An initiative promoted as a civil rights cause — helping poor kids — is increasingly funneling money to families who already easily afford private school tuition.
  • The Voucher Deficit: Expanding programs threaten funding for public schools and put pressure on state budgets, as many religious-based schools enjoy new largesse.

The article begins thus:

On a Thursday morning last May, about a hundred people gathered in the atrium of the Ohio Capitol building to join in Christian worship. The “Prayer at the Statehouse” was organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, whose growing influence was symbolized by its new headquarters, directly across from the capitol. It was also manifest in the officials who came to take part in the event: three state legislators and the ambitious lieutenant governor, Jon Husted.

After some prayer and singing, the center’s Christian Engagement Ambassador introduced Husted, asking him to “share with us about faith and intersecting faith with government.” Husted, a youthful 57-year-old, spoke intently about the prayer meetings that he leads in the governor’s office each month. “We bring appointed officials and elected officials together to talk about our faith in our work, in our service, and how it can strengthen us and make us better,” he said. The power of prayer, Husted suggested, could even supply political victories: “When we do that, great things happen — like advancing school choice so that every child in Ohio has a chance to go to the school of their choice.” The audience started applauding before he finished his sentence.

The center had played a key role in bringing about one of the most dramatic expansions of private school vouchers in the country, making it possible for all Ohio families — even the richest among them — to receive public money to pay for their children’s tuition. In the mid-1990s, Ohio became the second state to offer vouchers, but in those days they were available only in Cleveland and were billed as a way for disadvantaged children to escape struggling schools. Now the benefits extend to more than 150,000 students across the state, costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion, the vast majority of which goes to the Catholic and evangelical institutions that dominate the private school landscape there.

What happened in Ohio was a stark illustration of a development that has often gone unnoticed, perhaps because it is largely taking place away from blue state media hubs. In the past few years, school vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Proponents are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others — and, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they will likely have federal support.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-­riding lessons.

The voucher movement has been aided by a handful of billionaire advocates; it was also enabled, during the pandemic, by the backlash to extended school closures. (Private schools often reopened considerably faster than public schools.) Yet much of the public, even in conservative states, remains ambivalent about vouchers: Voters in Nebraska and Kentucky just rejected them in ballot referendums.

How, then, has the movement managed to triumph? The campaign in Ohio provides an object lesson — a model that voucher advocates have deployed elsewhere. Its details are recorded in a trove of private correspondence, much of it previously unpublished, that the movement’s leaders in Ohio sent to one another. The letters reveal a strategy to start with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools, then fight to expand the benefits to far richer families — a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate. As one of the movement’s progenitors put it, “Government does a lousy job of substituting for religion.”

Please open the link to read this important article.

Thanks to ProPublica for its excellent reporting about the effort to privatize and defund American schools.

Categories Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Carol Burris: West Virginia Starves Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2024 //
2

Carol Burris, executive director of the Betwork for Public Education, describes the devastating advance of privatization in West Virginia. In 2019, the teachers of West Virginia banded together and went on strike, closing down every school in the state.

Burris writes:

West Virginia is closing its public schools. Seven schools will close in the next few years due to declining enrollment. These schools will join the 53 that closed in the past five years, and there are an additional 25 that counties have proposed or approved to close.

These numbers are not small in the context of West Virginia. The National Center for Education Statistics reported only 643 public schools with enrollment in the state in 2023-2024.

West Virginia’s population and student enrollment were in decline. In 2015, there were 277,452 students in West Virginia public schools. By 2020, enrollment was down to 253,930. In 2021, however, the drop seemed to level off—the public schools lost only 1,100 students the next year.

And then school privatization began.

In 2019, the legislature passed a charter law. It was cautious. Three charter schools were allowed to open as pilot schools under the control of districts, but none opened.

And then greed kicked in. The for-profit operators wanted to open schools in the state. In 2021, the legislature expanded the number of charters to ten a year, not including online schools, which they then approved. The authority to approve them was given to a politically appointed state board.

Six charter schools were rapidly approved, five of which are open.

Three of those five are run by for-profit corporations. In 2023-2024, those three for-profit-run charters enrolled 87% of the charter school students in the state. 

Charter schools in West Virginia operate on the “money follows the child” system, depleting school district budgets. That money accounts for a whopping 99% of state per-pupil funding, even though most charter students (70%) attend low-cost, low-quality online schools run by for-profits.

To add insult to injury to the state’s public schools, the U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary Cardona, awarded $12.2 million to the state’s charter board to open new charter schools or expand existing ones in West Virginia.

Over $905,000 was given to open a “classical” academy run by the notorious for-profit ACCEL. ACCEL already operates two of the state’s five charter schools. The new school will be operated on a sweeps contract, violating 2022 CSP regulations. Three of the existing five charter schools would be given funds to expand.

I registered a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education regarding West Virginia’s violation of its own regulations. I have not received a response. 

If that were not enough, this fall, the West Virginia legislature passed a law allowing charter schools to access the state building fund—giving them their own privileged funding stream.

In 2022, the same year that the law to expand charter schools was enacted, the state passed a voucher law called the Hope Scholarship, heralded by Ed Choice as one of the most expansive voucher laws in the country. That law gives vouchers to fund homeschooling, private schooling, tutoring, and “enrichment” activities for students who do not attend a public or charter school.

The scholarship is worth 100% of the average per-pupil state funding. There are no income limits. Beginning in 2026, any student, including a private school student or home-schooled student who has never attended public school, can apply.

In 2023-2024, West Virginians used a voucher. In 2024-2025, the number jumped to 10,000.

Let’s do the math.

During the 2021-2022 school year, there were 252,830 students in public schools. That was the year before charters and the voucher law. In 2023-2024, that number dropped to 243,560. 

Just when West Virginia enrollment had begun to stabilize, 2,277 students were siphoned off along with funding to charter schools, and 6,000 students received vouchers. In West Virginia, privatization through charter schools and vouchers is now the primary source of public school enrollment and funding decline.

As charter schools continue to expand, thanks in part to the federal Charter School Program, and vouchers become accessible to 100% of students in the state, school closings will accelerate. 

For the right-wing Libertarians who run education policy for the Republican Party, this is not a bug; this is the main feature. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Teachers, Vouchers, West Virginia

Tom Ultican: Denver Charter School Study Is Shoddy Research

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2024 //
3

Tom Ultican is a retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics. Before joining the teaching profession, he worked in the corporate sector.

He writes here about a shoddy piece of research on charter schools in Denver.

Ultican writes:

Another education study financed by Arnold Ventures and the Walton Family Foundation blurs education reality. Their 2022 model did not pass the laugh test so “researchers” from the University of Colorado Denver tried again. Unfortunately their claims still confuse correlation with causation. This error seems purposeful.

The study of school reform in Denver was conducted by the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA). They state, “For the past three years CEPA has partnered with the Center on Reinventing Public Education to consider a paradigm-shifting approach to family and community engagement efforts in school districts.” It is a study apparently to justify and promote the portfolio model of school management, a system first proposed in 2009 by the founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Paul Hill.

In their 2022 study, this same team also used state testing data from years 2004/5 through 2018/19. They explained that the first 4-years of the research employed pre-reform data and the final 10-years were from the portfolio model reform period. The authors reported, “During the study period, the district opened 65 new schools, and closed, replaced, and restarted over 35 others.” (Page 7)

The National Education Policy Center contracted with Robert Shand to review the 2022 Denver study. Dr. Shand is Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Leadership at American University and an affiliated researcher with the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Shand also did a review of the new 2024 study.

In his 2022 review, Shand agreed that the test scores for Denver Public Schools had gone up but he noted a few reasons why claiming these gains were because of the portfolio model was unreasonable:

  • Demographics shifting to a larger percentage of white students in Denver coincided with the reforms.
  • Per-student revenues increased in Denver by 22% but only 13% across Colorado.
  • Student-to-teacher ratio in Denver dropped from 17.9 to 14.9.
  • DPS was already showing academic improvement before implementation of the portfolio reforms.
  • Black and Hispanic/Latinx students were growing at approximately 0.06 standard deviations per year pre-reform and 0.03-0.04 standard deviations per year post-reform. (Page 7)

The 2024 Redo

Professor Shand’s summary response to the 2024 report states:

“While the new report does convincingly demonstrate that the gains are not significantly due to changing demographics, it fails to address other critiques of the prior study, including (1) that the portfolio model was undertheorized, with unclear mechanisms of action and insufficient attention to potential drawbacks; and (2) that circumstances, events, and resources besides the portfolio reform and student demographics were changing concurrently with the reform. Additionally, the report’s sweeping conclusion—that Denver’s reform is the most effective in U.S. history—is unsupported. The improved outcomes in Denver during this time period are impressive, but the authors seem overly determined to cite a package of favored reforms as the cause.” (Page 3)

While Shand agrees that demographic changes are not the whole reason for the improved test scores, they are a significant input. The chart above from USAFacts.org shows the typically higher scoring groups Asians and Whites going from 54.2% of the population to 58.9% in the 14 years from 2005 to 2019. During the same period, the Hispanic and Black population shrunk from 42.9% to 38.1% which resulted in a 9.5% shift in the population from a lower scoring to a higher scoring racial mix.

An even bigger impact on the scoring in Denver was the change in economic circumstances. Standardized testing is useless because the results are dependent on one variable, family wealth. Statisticians assign r values between -1 and +1 to results tested. Plus 1 signifies certainty, zero shows no influence and -1 indicates certainty in the opposite direction of expectations. The only input ever found with more than 0.3 r-value is family wealth at 0.9 r-value. The median family income in Denver is up significantly.

Two sources show how strongly Denver’s family income has grown. Neilsberg research shares that between 2010 and 2020 the median income grew from $61,394 to $82,335, a 25% growth. City-Data states:

“The median household income in Denver, CO in 2022 was $88,213, which was about the same as the median annual income of $89,302 across the entire state of Colorado. Compared to the median income of $39,500 in 2000 this represents an increase of 55.2%”

This kind of wealth growth over the 14 years the Denver researchers studied was bound to have a significant impact on testing results, but they ignored it. Add this to the 9% greater revenue for Denver schools and three less students per teacher compared to the rest of the state and of course Denver’s student made comparative testing gains.

Professor Shand mentions the damage caused by school turnaround efforts and closing schools noting the research indicates these are especially harmful events for students in low income or marginalized neighborhoods. (Page 6 and 7)  Shand concluded:

“In sum, this report provides some additional supporting evidence in favor of the tentative conclusion that Denver’s portfolio reform was positive. Importantly, the report also grossly exaggerates both the magnitude of the success and certainty behind the evidence for it. The findings should thus be interpreted with extreme caution. (Page 8)

He is being nice. He should have concluded that this report is school choice propaganda.

About the Report Authors

The lead author, Parker Baxter, is Director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at the University Of Colorado Denver School Of Public Affairs. He previously was Director of Knowledge at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. Parker is also a Senior Research Affiliate at the CRPE, where he worked on the District-Charter Collaboration Compact Project and the Portfolio School District Project. He is a former alumnus of Teach for America.

Anna Nicotera is a Senior Researcher at Basis Policy Research specializing in quantitative and qualitative applied research methods. She worked six years as Senior Director, Research and Evaluation for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Nicotera was a Graduate Research Assistant at the National Center on School Choice, Vanderbilt University for four years.

David Stuit holds a Ph.D. in Leadership and Policy Studies from Vanderbilt University. He is a former Emerging Education Policy Scholar at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice (Rebranded EdChoice), and member of the American Enterprise Institute’s K–12 working group. He began his career as a classroom teacher in Denver, Colorado.

Expecting an unbiased piece of research from this group is like learning about the dangers of smoking from Phillip-Morris.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Denver, Education Reform

Houston: Voters Rejected a $4.4 Billion Bond Issue to Protest Mike Miles’ Arrogance

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2024 //
4

Houston’s public schools were taken over in 2023 by the state because one (1) high school was persistently getting low scores. One! That school happened to have a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, students who were English learners, students who were impoverished, as compared to other high schools in the district .

The Texas Education Agency engaged in a hostile takeover. Governor Abbott may have wanted to teach the blue district of Houston a lesson, and he did. His hand-picked State Commissioner imposed a new superintendent, Mike Miles, and replaced the elected school board. Houston lost democratic control of its schools.

Miles was a military man and a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy, whose graduates were steeped in top-down methods and taught to ignore constituents. Miles was superintendent in Dallas, where he had a rocky three-year tenure. He then led a charter chain in Colorado.

Miles proceeded to impose a new lockstep curriculum and to fire administrators and principals who did not please him.

Members of the public complained bitterly about being disregarded, ignored, belittled. Miles plowed ahead.

New test scores came out, and the scores went up. Miles felt triumphant. See, he said, I was right! The Houston schools needed a leader who didn’t listen to the public.

But when Miles and the state’s puppet board put a $4.4 billion bond issue on the ballot last month, parents urged others not to vote for it. In the only place where parents had a say, they organized against the bond issue. It went down to a defeat.

On November 5, Houston voters rejected a proposed $4.4 billion bond that would pay for critical school construction, renovation and infrastructure projects, as well as safety and security improvements, by a wide margin, 58% to 42%. It appears most of those voting against the measure did so not in opposition to the bond itself, but out of deep distrust for Miles and the district’s leaders. For weeks the rallying cry repeated publicly by opponents, including the Texas Federation of Teachers, was simply “no trust, no bond.” 

Miles said it had nothing to do with him. But he was wrong. It was a referendum on his leadership. He lost.

Public education requires community engagement. It requires parent involvement. Committed parents will fight for their schools. They want to know who’s leading their schools, they want to be heard. Miles still doesn’t understand the importance of listening. He thinks that the goal of schooling is higher scores, regardless of how many people are alienated. He doesn’t understand the importance of building community. And without it, he failed.

It’s time to consign the Broad Academy philosophy of leadership to the dust bin of history. Districts don’t need military command and control. They need educators who have a clear vision of what education should be, who care about ALL students, and who understand how to build community.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Houston, Parents, Texas

Peter Greene: What Did Kevin Huffman Learn from Failure?

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2024 //
17

Writing in his blog Curmudgucation, Peter Greene reviews Kevin Huffman’s career as a big Reform honcho and his latest advice about what the federal government should do to make schools better. Peter noted that none of Huffman’s ventures has been successful, which makes a fine example of someone who has mastered the art of “failing upward.”

Peter Greene writes:

A few weeks ago, Kevin Huffman was in the pages of the Washington Post, bemoaning the lack of education discussion during the Presidential campaign and offering thoughts about What America Needs To Do Next. Nobody needs to read it. Really.

Kevin Huffman is a long-time reformster; in fact Kevin Huffman, as the Tennessee Grand High Commissioner of Education, represents a reformster milestone. Huffman’s career path took him to Swarthmore, which led to a Teach For America posting, which led to law school, which led to practicing education law in DC, which led back to TFA, first as general counsel and later as various VP executive titly things. Then, a few years later, Governor Bill Haslam tapped him for Tennessee Educational Poobahdom. Which made him the first TFA temp to get to run an entire state’s education system. 

Once in charge, he made his reformy mark. (I will mention, because someone always brings it up, that he was for a brief while married to Michelle Rhee). He chimed in with Arne Duncan to claim that low-achieving students, including those with learning disabilities, just needed to be tested harder. And as a super buddy of charter schools, he took $3.4 million dollars away from Nashville city schools because their board didn’t approve the charter that he had personally shepherded through the process.

He became one of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the Race to the Top keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn’t like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters)

Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network of business investment opportunities private charter schools?

The ASD was Huffman’s audacious attempt to bundle the bottom 5% of schools and take them over as a state-run “district.” The 2012 edition of the now-defunct ASD website proclaimed:

The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students’ life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.

 Three years later, Barbic gave up, saying, 

Let’s just be real: achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment. I have seen this firsthand at YES Prep and now as the superintendent of the ASD. As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.

Barbic was replaced by a Broadie, who also failed to do anything other than move some goal posts (no more of that “top 25%” stuff). Huffman couldn’t close the deal on selling the model to other states. And the ASD just kept failing. 

Failing so consistently that a little more than a week after Huffman’s WaPo op-ed, Chalkbeat reported that research by Brown’s Annenberg Institute found that the ASD “generally worsened high school test scores.” It also didn’t help on ACT scores and “data related to attendance, chronic absenteeism, and disciplinary actions wasn’t encouraging, either.” Researchers found neither short-term nor long-term gains for students, and Tennessee legislators seem to finally be getting the idea that the ASD is junk.

But the guy who created it is still failing upward, having passed through the reform-pushing City Fund and now working as CEO of Accelerate, one more educational consulting fix-it shop operated by people with lots in the reformy funding universe (the board includes John White and Janice Jackson). They’re particularly keyed in to tutoring and individualized instruction, both computerized.

So what advice does the chief with no actual edu-wins to his name have to offer? Well, he thinks that George W. Bush was swell, and remember, reading and math scores wet up in the early days of No Child Left Behind. Folks like Monty Neill of Fairtest have since pointed out that these gains were only on the state Big Standardized Test. I was in the classroom at the time, and I can tell you exactly why test scores went up initially– because once the tests were rolled out we could learn how to teach to the test, and after a few years we had collected all the test prep gains we were going to get. 

Huffman likes the “gains” in race to the Top testing which, again, reflect teachers learning how to game the new PARCC and SBA tests. 

But, Huffman complains, by the end of the Obama administration, the feds were giving in to demands for more local control and pre-COVID test scores were already dipping, then “following the academic wreckage covid-19 left behind, heavy deferral to the states on spending and policy has left us with massive learning gaps and no national plan for closing them.”

It takes a person whose educational “experience” is almost entirely outside the classroom to believe that the Big Standardized Test is a useful measure of learning that should be the centerpiece of education policy rather than understanding that BS Testing is the most toxic force to be unleashed on education in the last couple of decades.

Huffman argues we need “strong national leadership around education policy,” which makes sense only if such leadership is guided by an actual understanding of teaching and learning and schooling, but history suggests that isn’t happening any time ever. But, he asserts, everyone wants “the best basic education for their children.” I don’t know what to do with that “basic” in there. 

How do we get it?

For starters, the next president should issue a national call for all states and all groups of students to surpass pre-pandemic learning levels in reading and math by 2030 — and direct the Education Department to report on each state’s progress.

God, one of my least favorite forms of management– management by insistence. This is like sales managers who issue increased sales targets with helpful directives like “sell more.” But worse, this is demanding that schools focus more intently on the wrong damn target– test scores.

Huffman also wants the feds to replace ESSA (too weak) with “a return to nationwide education goals” along with accountability measures. And also, grants for states that “pursue ambitious education reform” as, one assumes, defined by the feds.

In other words, Huffman would like to rewind to 2002 and start NCLB/CCSS/RTTT all over again, and I guess we can say that keeping on with something that hasn’t worked yet is on brand for Huffman. But man– it all didn’t work the first time, and not just “didn’t work” but “did more harm than good.”

But he has some specifics that he wants the feds to enforce this time. One is phonics-based learning and I don’t have time to get into the reading wars other than to say that any time someone says “if we just use X, every student will learn Y” they are wrong.

He also wants the feds to boost high-dosage tutoring, which coincidentally is one of the foci of his present gig. High-dosage tutoring is hard and expensive to scale up, with the research support very narrow and specific. He also wants more CTE (fine).

Bottom line, Huffman wants presidents not to abdicate their “responsibility to push school districts toward success,” a sentiment in line with the reformster notion that everything wrong with education is the fault of lazy educators who have to be coerced into doing their jobs (and certainly not treated like partners in the education world). 

The federal standards and BS Testocrats had their shot, and they failed hard. In many ways, their failures are still haunting the public school system. Huffman is a poster child for the Teach For America crowd who visited a classroom for a couple of years and parleyed that into “education expert” on their resume, going on to promote and support an array of ill-advised policies flavored with a barely-concealed disdain for the people who have actually made education and teaching a career. They should not get a do-over. They cannot be taken seriously, even if they manage to be platformed by major media outlets. 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Privatization, Teach for America, Tennessee

Peter Greene: Another Charter Miracle School Implodes

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2024 //
7

Perhaps you remember “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” the overhyped documentary from 2010 that made the audacious claim that public schools were failing due to “bad teachers”and that the only sane alternative was charter schools. The documentary was funded by the Gates Foundation, with the obvious purpose of smearing public schools and promoting charter schools. I reviewed the film in the New York review of Books, in a review called “The Myth of Charter Schools.” Among other flaws in the film, I pointed out that it misused and distorted NAEP data to paint a horrifying picture of public schools. I concluded it was dishonest propaganda on behalf of the privatizers.

One of the amazing, miraculous charter schools featured in the film was a residential boarding school in D.C. called SEED.

Peter Greene writes that SEED is in deep trouble and may be shuttered.

The SEED School of Washington, D.C. was in the Washington Post yesterday, accused of inaccurate records and wholesale breezing past laws that are supposed to protect students with disabilities.

If the name of this unusual charter boarding school seems vaguely familiar, that may be because back in 2010, they were one of the charter schools lovingly lionized by the documentary hit piece, “Waiting for Superman.”

“Waiting for Superman” was a big hit, popularizing the neo-liberal narrative that public schools were failing because public school teachers were lazy incompetents. Every damn newspaper in the country jumped on the narrative. Roger Ebert jumped on. Oprah jumped on. NPR wondered why it didn’t get an Oscar (maybe, they posit, it was because one big emotional scene was made up). It helped sustain the celebrity brand of Michelle Rhee (the Kim Kardashian of education, famous despite having not accomplished anything). It was a slanted hatchet job that helped bolster the neoliberal case for Common Core and charter schools and test-centric education and heavy-handed “evaluation” of teachers.

And it boosted the profile of SEED, the DC charter whose secret sauce for student achievement is that it “takes them away from their home environments for five days a week and gives them a host of supporting services.”

Except it turns out that maybe it doesn’t do that after all. 

According to the WaPo piece, reported by Lauren Lumpkin, audits of the school suggest a variety of mistreatment of students with special needs.

SEED underreported the number of students it expelled last year. It couldn’t produce records of services it was supposed to have provided for some students with disabilities (most likely explanation–those services were never provided). Federal law says that before you expel a student with an IEP, you have meetings to decide if the misbehavior is a feature of their disability, or if their misbehavior stems from requirements of the IEP that are not being provided. 

These have the fancy name of “manifestation determination” which just means the school needs to ask– is the student acting out because that’s what her special situation makes her do, or because the Individualized Education Program that’s supposed to help deal with that special situation is not being actually done. For absurd example– is the student repeatedly late to her class on the second floor because she’s in a wheelchair? Does her IEP call for elevator transport to the second floor, and there’s no elevator in the building? Then maybe don’t suspend her for chronic lateness. 

Founded in 1998, SEED enrolls about 250 students, which seems to preclude any sort of “just lost the details in the crowd” defense. But as Lumpkin reports, questions arose.

But after receiving complaints about discipline, understaffing and compliance with federal law, the city’s charter oversight agency started an audit of the school in July. One complaint claimed school officials had manipulated attendance data and were not recording suspensions.

The audit’s findings sparked scathing commentary from charter board members and questions about SEED D.C.’s practices.

“I’m the parent of a special-needs child, and I’ve got to tell you, reading what was happening in these pages, it’s like a parent’s worst nightmare,” charter board member Nick Rodriguez told SEED D.C. leaders. “I sincerely hope that you will take that seriously as you think about what needs to happen going forward.”

Lumpkin reports that this is not their first round of problems. A 2023 audit found a high number of expulsions and suspensions compared to other charters– five times higher. A cynical person might conclude that SEED addressed the problem by just not reporting the full numbers. Inaccurate data, missed deadlines, skipping legal requirements–that’s a multi-year pattern for the school.

The school is now on a “notice of concern,” a step on the road to losing its charter and being closed down (or I suppose they could just switch over to a private voucher-accepting school).

The whole sad story of the many students who have been ill-served by SEED is one more reminder that there are no miracles in education, and no miracle schools, either. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

D.C.: Celebrated Charter School Closes Its Doors Abruptly

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2024 //
6

A charter school in D.C. that opened in 2003 and had a reputation built on its services to students with disabilities suddenly closed, with minimal notice to students, teachers, and parents.

Its finances had been shaky for a long time, and its enrollment had declined. Yet no one anticipated its sudden closure.

As it happens, the Network for Public Education reported only days ago on the frequency of charter school closures. Its report is called Doomed to Fail. It’s sad but true that charter schools have an unusually high record of transience. Parents can’t be sure that the charter school they chose will keep its doors open for more than a year, or three, or five.

The Washington Post reported:

On the day Eagle Academy abruptly closed, teachers at the D.C. charter school had been unpacking supplies, moving furniture and hanging bright posters covered with the names of students who were supposed to fill classrooms.

There had been rumblings of financial troubles, but the school’s leaders told families over the summer they had a plan: Another charter school had agreed to take over Eagle’s two campuses in Congress Heights and Capitol Riverfront.

But the D.C. Public Charter School Board, an independent city oversight body, blocked that plan. Eagle Academy unexpectedly was shuttered in August, less than a week before the new school year, leaving roughly 350 prekindergarten through third-grade students, plus their teachers, scrambling….

Eagle Academy had shown signs of financial shakiness as enrollment declined over several years, relying at times on credit cards to stay open and missing reporting deadlines, according to a staff report from D.C.’s charter school board.

While pandemic emergency funding gave the academy a temporary boost, Eagle made errors in budgeting, including overshooting student enrollment estimates and grant allocations, a Washington Post review shows. A promise to make significant cuts in spending and an effort to attract more students did not fully materialize.

Public records and more than a dozen interviews with Eagle families, school leaders and D.C. officials show that the city and Eagle’s own board lacked a clear picture of the school’s increasingly dire financial situation — leading to questions over whether more could have been done to stave off closure or allow for an easier transition for families. The city’s charter school board also said it would examine its oversight practices…

Eagle Academy opened its first campus in 2003. It was the dream of Cassandra S. Pinkney, who set out to build a school where Black children from underserved communities would learn to swim and kids like her son — who had special-education needs — could thrive. Pinkney founded the school with [Joe] Smith, a friend and charter-school advocate.


It was vaunted at the time as the District’s first “exclusively early childhood public charter school,” according to Eagle’s 2023 annual report. Two years after opening, the school had a special-education department with speech-language therapy, mental health services and other supports. It would later expand to enroll children through the third grade…

The enrollment problems caused financial ones. Schools are funded by the city largely based on the number of students who attend.

Eagle was spending close to $50,000 per student — higher than the citywide average of about $28,000 — according to data from the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent available. Most of Eagle’s student body came from lower-income homes, and the school had a higher-than-average share of children with disabilities, according to data published by the city, which are factors that bring in more funding.

The combination of declining enrollment and financial stress doomed the school.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Failure

Tom Ultican: The Plutocrat Privatizers Target Delaware

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2024 //
9

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced math, is a close observer of the public school privatization movement. In this post, he reviews the situation in Delaware, where the big money for privatization is coming from the DuPont family. The school board of the Christina district recently fired its superintendent, who was named superintendent of the year only two years ago. The reason, Tultican writes, was his opposition to charter schools.

He begins:

July 10th the Christina school board voted, at 2:45 AM, to remove popular Superintendent Dan Shelton. The seven member board split 4 to 3. It seems that Shelton’s opposition to allowing charter schools to take over the district motivated the vote. The Christina school district serves the small Delaware cities of Wilmington, Newark and their outskirts. It is a modest sized district with about 14,000 students. The unseen force behind the ouster was the DuPont family.

The attack by billionaires on schools in Delaware is similar to harm visiting public education throughout the nation. The local rich guy sets up tax exempt “charities” and uses them to undermine local schools. The “charities” hire young ambitious and talented people to lead the effort. Looking behind the scenes in Delaware illuminates the undermining of public schools nationwide.

Board President Donald Patton was joined by Vice President Alethea Smith-Tucker, Y.F. Lou, and Dr. Naveed Baqir in voting to oust the Superintendent two months before the new school year begins. It is alleged that they are the compromised four. In a local pod cast, Highland Bunker, board member Doug Manley reported that Matt Clifford, who dropped out of the recent school board election, was offered support if he agreed to vote with Board President Patton. Manley also speculated that Y. F. Lou received the same offer.

Trustee Manley stated that in his view the only reason Shelton was removed from office was because of his opposition to letting charter schools parcel out the district. It is notable that in 2022, Shelton was named Delaware State Superintendent of the Year.

Longwood Foundation

The Longwood Foundation is not called the DuPont Foundation because it was originally established in 1937 by Pierre DuPont to support Longwood Gardens. A tax reform act in 1969 caused a change and Longwood Gardens Inc. was formed to finance the gardens. The Longwood Foundation remained in existence to “principally support charitable organizations” and push forward the DuPont agenda.

Over the last decade, the foundation has spent $1,812,200 to support Reading Assist Inc. whose web page says:

“Reading Assist provides high-dosage tutoring for students in grades K-3 in the lowest 25% for reading proficiency, with a focus on serving in schools where there is the highest need.

“We recruit, train, and embed AmeriCorps members – known as Reading Assist Fellows – willing to commit a school year of service to provide our accredited, one-on-one intervention program to struggling readers.”

Reading Assist is a science of reading (SoR) advocate whose founder has ties to the dyslexia community. AmeriCorps has helped provide Teach for America (TFA) training and recruits. In other words, these organizations come with privatization blemishes. Many researchers believe SoR is bad science promoted by wealthy people and publishing companies while TFA is their army.

Longwood is still a DuPont family run organization. According to the 2022 tax form 990PF (TIN: 51-0066734), John DuPont is the current president and Margaret DuPont is Vice President. The tax records also show that in the last decade they have provided the fake education graduate school, Relay Graduate School, $1,300,000.

The Foundation concentrates its spending into the Wilmington area and does very little spending nationally. So their spending of more than $15,000,000 on charter schools in the last decade has made a huge impact locally. Margaret and one other DuPont family member also sit on the board of the smaller Chelsea Foundation (TIN: 51-6015638) which also provides grants to charter schools. It is this drive to privatize the Christina School District that seems to have led to firing a respected and popular administrator.

In 2017, Indiana scholars Jim Scheurich, Gayle Cosby, and Nathanial Williams posted an article on Diane Ravitch’s blog that outlined the model used by billionaires to gain control of local schools.  Point five of their rich guy privatization model is, “Development of a network of local organizations or affiliates that all collaborate closely on the same local agenda.”

Please open the link to finish the article.

One other interesting point in Ultican’s post. Remember Julia Keleher? She was appointed to be the Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico when the island was in dire financial straits. She pushed charters and vouchers and was widely opposed by teachers, parents, and students. She ended her time on the island with a jail sentence:

While serving as Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico, Keleher who is not Puerto Rican, secured a new law allowing for charter schools and vouchers plus the closure of hundreds of schools.

On December 28, 2016, Keleher was appointed Puerto Rico Secretary of Education by Governor-elect Ricardo Rosselló who became so hated he was driven from office in 2019. The appointment was just a few months before hurricane Maria hit. Keleher also became disliked as was demonstrated by San Juan protesters loudly chanting, “Julia go home!”

Things went sideways for Keleher. December 17, 2021, a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced her with six months prison, 12 months house arrest and a $21,000 fine. She plead guilty in June to two felony counts involving conspiracies to commit fraud. Almost as soon as she finished her prison term, she was hired by First State Educate. Now she is the executive director.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Delaware, Education Reform, Teach for America
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »