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Dismissed by KIPP, Mike Feinberg Lands on His Feet

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2018 //
16

Mike Feinberg, co-founder of the KIPP megacorporation national chain, was dismissed because of allegations of inappropriate sexual contacts with students, which he denied. Not to worry. Mike has a new gig, teaching people how to start charters.To be clear, I don’t approve of the behavior (unspecified) of which he was accused and led to his ouster or resignation.

I wish Mike would take a job helping public schools. Or he could be a fundraiser for the Network for Public Education.

You may not want to hear this, but I like Mike, even though I disagree with the whole charter school hustle. He invited me to Houston in 2010, and he was a very congenial host. I had a great Tex-Mex lunch with his staff, toured the flagship school, then lectured at Rice University. TFA co-sponsored the event. As he expected, I lambasted Charter schools and TFA. The room was packed with teachers who belonged to the Houston Federation of Teachers. I admired Mike for listening to a dissident like me.

C’mon, Mike, come on over to the good guys. The pay stinks, but you will definitely feel right with your conscience.

Categories Corporate Reform, KIPP Charter Schools

Henry Giroux: Striking Teachers Fight for Public Education and the Public is With Them

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2018 //
41

Henry Giroux places the recent wave of teacher strikes in historical perspective. The teachers are fighting a battle on behalf of the public good against an assault by reactionary neoliberalism.

He writes:

“The power of collective resistance is being mounted in full force against a neoliberal logic that unabashedly insists that the rule of the market is more important than the needs of teachers, students, young people, the poor and those deemed disposable by those with power in our society. Teachers are tired of being relentless victims of a casino capitalism in which they and their students are treated with little respect, dignity and value. They have had enough of corrupt politicians, hedge fund managers and civically illiterate pundits seduced by the power of the corporate and political demagogues who are waging a war on critical teaching, critical pedagogy and the creativity and autonomy of classroom teachers.

“Since the 1980s, an extreme form of capitalism — or what in the current moment I want to call neoliberal fascism — has waged a war against public education and all vestiges of the common good and social contract. In addition, this is a war rooted in class and gender discrimination — one that deskills teachers, exploits their labor and bears down particularly hard on women, who make up a dominant segment of the teaching force. In doing so, it not only undermines schooling as a public good, but also weaponizes and weakens the formative cultures, values and social relations that enable schools to create the conditions for students to become critical and engaged citizens.

“Schools have been underfunded, increasingly privatized and turned into testing factories that deliver poor students of color to the violence of the school-to-prison pipeline. Moreover, they have also been restructured in order to weaken unions, subject teachers to horrendous working conditions and expose students to overcrowded classrooms. In some cases, the dire working environment and dilapidated conditions of schools and classrooms appear incomprehensible in the richest nation in the world…

“Moreover, as state and corporate violence engulfs the entire society, schools have been subject to forms of extreme violence that in the past existed exclusively outside of their doors. Under such circumstances, youth are increasingly viewed as suspects and are targeted both by a gun culture that places profits above student lives and by a neoliberal machinery of cruelty, misery and violence dedicated to widespread educational failure. Instead of imbuing students with a sense of ethical and social responsibility while preparing them for a life of social and economic mobility, public schools have been converted into high-tech security spheres whose defining principles are fear, uncertainty and anxiety. In this view, a corporate vision of the U.S. has reduced the culture of schooling to the culture of business and an armed camp, and in doing so, imposed a real and symbolic threat of violence on schools, teachers and students. As such, thinking has become the enemy of freedom, and profits have become more important than human lives…

“Rejecting the idea that education is a commodity to be bought and sold, teachers and students across the country are reclaiming education as a public good and a human right, a protective space that should be free of violence and open to critical teaching and learning. Not only is it a place to think, engage in critical dialogue, encourage human potential and contribute to the vibrancy of a democratic polity, it is also a place in which the social flourishes, in that students and teachers learn to think and act together.”

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform

New York: Who Was Behind the State’s Beneficence to Charter Schools? Cuomo.

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2018 //
30

 

Governor Andrew Cuomo has never been a friend to public schools or to public school teachers.

He pushed for the harsh and ineffectual test-based teacher evaluations that everyone now acknowledges have failed.

He was the primary driver of state legislation benefitting non-union charter schools. 

Why? Because his biggest campaign funders are hedge fund managers who believe in privatization and want to destroy teachers’ unions.

Now, Cuomo is counting on support from unions and public school teachers in his bid for a third term.

They should ask themselves whether he deserves their support.

This article was written in 2014:

It was a frigid February day in Albany, and leaders of New York City’s charter school movement were anxious. They had gone to the capital to court lawmakers, but despite a boisterous showing by parents, there seemed to be little clarity about the future of their schools.

Then, as they were preparing to head home, an intermediary called with a message: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to meet.

To their surprise, Mr. Cuomo offered them 45 minutes of his time, in a private conference room. He told them he shared their concern about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambivalence toward charter schools and offered to help, according to a person who attended but did not want to be identified as having compromised the privacy of the meeting.

In the days that followed, the governor’s interest seemed to intensify. He instructed charter advocates to organize a large rally in Albany, the person said. The advocates delivered, bringing thousands of parents and students, many of them black, Hispanic, and from low-income communities, to the capital in early March, and eclipsing a pivotal rally for Mr. de Blasio taking place at virtually the same time.

Mr. Cuomo’s office declined on Wednesday to comment on his role.

As the governor worked to solidify support in Albany, his efforts were amplified by an aggressive public relations and lobbying effort financed by a group of charter school backers from the worlds of hedge funds and Wall Street, some of whom have also poured substantial sums into Mr. Cuomo’s campaign (he is up for re-election this fall). The push included a campaign-style advertising blitz that cost more than $5 million and attacked Mr. de Blasio for denying space to three charter schools.

Charter school leaders had built a formidable political operation over the course of a decade, hiring top-flight lobbyists and consultants. They had an ally in former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, but Mr. de Blasio promised a sea change, saying that he would charge rent to charter schools that had large financial backing, and that he would temporarily forbid new schools from using public space.

In public, the mayor largely ignored the outcry. At his prekindergarten rally, before a smaller crowd at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, Mr. de Blasio spoke about the value of early education. Not far away, a much larger crowd of charter school supporters was gathered on the steps of the State Capitol. In an act that his aides later said was spontaneous, Mr. Cuomo joined the mass of parents and students.

“You are not alone,” he told the roaring crowd. “We will save charter schools.”

The move to protect charter schools had begun months before, when it became clear that Mr. de Blasio was favored to win the mayoral race. Charter school leaders were in a panic; a memo circulated over the summer by one pro-charter group, Democrats for Education Reform, had identified Mr. de Blasio as the candidate least friendly to their cause.

Charter schools — privately run, but with taxpayers paying the tuition — have become popular nationwide among Democratic and Republican leaders, as well as with tens of thousands of low-income parents who submit to kindergarten lotteries every year. They are also popular among Wall Street leaders who see charter schools, which often do not have unions to bargain with and have relative freedom from regulation, as a successful alternative to traditional public schools. But many Democrats, including the mayor, have sought to slow their spread, contending that they are taking dollars and space from other public schools. Pro-charter advocacy groups, including Families for Excellent Schools, StudentsFirstNY and the New York City Charter School Center, met regularly to plot strategy. Increasingly, they turned to state officials.

A lot was riding on the debate for Mr. Cuomo. A number of his largest financial backers, some of the biggest names on Wall Street, also happened to be staunch supporters of charter schools. According to campaign finance records, Mr. Cuomo’s re-election campaign has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from charter school supporters, including William A. Ackman, Carl C. Icahn, Bruce Kovner and Daniel Nir.

Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot who sits on a prominent charter school board, gave $50,000 to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign last year. He said that when the governor asked him to lead a group of Republicans supporting his re-election, he agreed because of Mr. Cuomo’s support for charter schools.

“Every time I am with the governor, I talk to him about charter schools,” Mr. Langone said in an interview. “He gets it.”

It was not until late February, shortly before the rally on the steps of the Capitol, that a full-fledged battle broke out.

Mr. de Blasio, reviewing plans for school space, had decided to deny it to three schools run by Success Academy Charter Schools, a high-performing network founded by Eva S. Moskowitz, a former city councilwoman. While he allowed the vast majority of charter schools to continue using public space, many supporters of Ms. Moskowitz’s schools were outraged.

Daniel S. Loeb, the founder of the hedge fund Third Point and the chairman of Success Academy’s board, began leaning on Wall Street executives for donations. Later this month, he will host a fund-raiser for Success Academy at Cipriani in Midtown Manhattan; tickets run as high as $100,000 a table.

The governor and his staff worked with Republicans in the State Senate and others to come up with a package of protections for charter schools in the city. He was already said to be displeased with Mr. de Blasio for rejecting his compromise offer on prekindergarten funding.

Mr. Cuomo did not mention charter schools in his State of the State address, but now, with Mr. de Blasio under assault and charter advocates behind him, he pushed for a sweeping deal.

The proposed legislation included provisions to reverse Mr. de Blasio’s decisions on school space, and it required the city to provide public classrooms to new and expanding charter schools or contribute to the cost of renting private buildings. It also suggested increasing per-pupil funding for charter schools and allowing them to operate prekindergarten programs.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Cuomo, Andrew, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, New York, New York City

Colorado: Democratic Candidates for Governor Fight Over Corporate Education Reforms

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2018 //
28

Colorado is heating up as a battleground over education issues. The gubernatorial race could be a watershed moment in the fight to reverse failed and punitive reforms.

There are three candidates for Governor. Two are corporate reformers: Jared Polis and Michael Johnston. The third, Cary Kennedy, has taken them both on for betraying public schools and teachers. I am not aware of any political race where the issues are drawn as sharply as they are in this race.

Polis and Johnston are angry at Kennedy because a teacher-funded group bought ads criticizing their education views. She can’t control the outside group. Polis and Johnston say she is engaged in negative campaigning and call the ad an attack ad. It seems to me that voters need to know where candidates differ. If they can’t criticize one another for their records, how will voters learn about the candidates?

Cary Kennedy was Colorado State Treasurer, Chief Financial Officer and Deputy Mayor of Denver. She has been endorsed by the Colorado Education Association. She also won a surprise victory at the state Democratic assembly. The Democrats of Colorado had previously denounced the hedgefunder group DFER (Democrats for Education Reform) for claiming to be Democrats while pushing conservative anti-public school, anti-teacher Policies.

Jared Polis is a multimillionaire member of Congress who is zealous about charter schools. He started two of them, and as a member of Congress he has pushed for generous charter funding. When I met with Congressional Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee in 2010, after the publication of my best-selling book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Polis literally threw my book across the table at me and said it was “the worst book he had ever read.” He asked me to give him his money back. Another Congressman peeled off a $20 bill and bought Polis’ copy. I became the target of his wrath because I criticized charter schools.

Michael Johnston is a TFA alum who was briefly principal of a school, then won a seat in the State Senate. He authored a bill called SB 191, which assigns 50% of every teacher and principal’s evaluation to test scores. The Colorado Education Association fought it but lost. Johnston promised that his bill would guarantee that every school, every principal, and every teacher in the state would be “great.” Eight years later, even reformers acknowledge that the bill failed. But Johnston has opposed its repeal. I happened to be in Denver to meet with about 60 civic leaders on the day the bill passed in April 2010 and to debate Johnston. He didn’t appear until I finished my presentation—literally, as I finished, he walked in— so he never heard what I thought of his evaluation bill. I predicted it would fail. He was jubilant because he had just re-engineered Colorado education to march to the beat of standardized tests.

I have never met Cary Kennedy, but I am impressed by her education views and her deep experience. She is a graduate of Manual High School in Denver, one of the schools that reformers have toyed with for years.

If I were lucky enough to live in Colorado, I would vote for Cary Kennedy in the Democratic primary on June 26.

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Teacher Evaluations

Sarah Lahm: The Story Behind the Minneapolis Charter School Lauded in the New York Times

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2018 //
16

Sarah Lahm is an independent journalist based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in The Progressive, In These Times and other local and national publications. She blogs about education at brightlightsmallcity.com.


Should progressives embrace charter schools?

This question came up again recently when Teach for America alum and apparent expert on school choice, Conor P. Williams, landed an op-ed in the June 3 New York Times. Williams, who is now an education policy analyst with the New America Foundation, used Minneapolis’s Hiawatha Academies charter school chain as a key example of why, in his opinion, liberal and progressive activists should indeed be pro-charter school.

In 2017, Hiawatha Academies, which operates five highly segregated charter schools in Minneapolis, received a federal school choice expansion grant worth over $1 million dollars, courtesy of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The money has likely been absorbed into Hiawatha Academies’ expansion plans, as the charter network seeks to enroll “6.2% of the Minneapolis student population” in the coming years.

Being affiliated in any way with DeVos and her devotion to accountability-free school choice schemes is probably uncomfortable for a charter school network like Hiawatha Academies, which likes to bill itself as progressive. DeVos continues to not only staunchly defend a Wild West-style approach to public education, she is also heavily engaged in rolling back many federal education policies that are there to protect the nation’s most vulnerable students.

Frankly, it is becoming harder and harder to separate, or pretend to separate, school choice and the spread of segregated charter schools from Betsy DeVos.

Perhaps that is why many of the links in Williams’ op-ed are as stale as the very premise underlying his piece. His first paragraph includes a description of an elementary school in the Hiawatha Academies’ chain, complete with a charming image of a teacher standing before students in a colorful kindergarten classroom. This, Williams proclaims, is one of “Minnesota’s best public schools.” To support this, he links to a celebratory 2012 PR-laden article written by Minnesota based education writer, Beth Hawkins.

Hawkins’ piece was published in MinnPost, a local online news outlet. Here’s why that matters: Hawkins’ stint as an education reporter at MinnPost was funded by the Bush Foundation, one of many local philanthropic groups that has bestowed money, clout and endless public relations support on the growth of charter schools in Minnesota. Oh, and MinnPost was started and run for years by former Minneapolis Star Tribune publisher, Joel Kramer. (Hawkins has since become the national education correspondent for the reform-funded outlet, The 74.)

Here’s why that matters: Kramer’s two sons, Matt and Eli, are both heavily invested in the national and local education reform movement. While Matt was serving as the co-CEO of Teach for America, Eli was busy “growing” the Hiawatha Academies charter school network, which serves mostly Latino families in south Minneapolis. It would be fair to say that the Kramer family has close political and financial ties to elite education reform policy makers and financiers, in Minnesota and on the national stage.

Eli Kramer is leaving Hiawatha Academies. The charter school chain’s new executive director is Colette Owens, another Teach for America acolyte who received her administrative training through a reform-funded venture, the School Systems Leaders Fellowship. Kramer made over $170,000 annually as head of Hiawatha Academies’ five school sites; Owens’s salary has not been publicly disclosed. (For comparison purposes, Ed Graff, superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools and its 60+ sites, has a contract worth $225,000.)

The Hiawatha Academies’ site (Morris Park) profiled by Williams sits in one of the two Minneapolis Public Schools buildings purchased by the charter school chain nearly ten years ago, on its path to grow its market share. “Hiawatha schools should be easy for the left to love,” Williams insists, before promising (without any evidence) that the schools are “full of progressive educators helping children of color from low-income families succeed.”

Beneath the wince-worthy white savior aura of this argument lurk some actual facts worth exploring further. First, Minnesota’s charter schools do not have to follow the same desegregation laws as public schools. This means highly segregated charter schools, like Hiawatha Academies, have been allowed to flourish, creating artificially isolated sites that cater to one particular demographic. If this is progressive, it sure smacks of age-old segregationist policies that allowed for school vouchers and, eventually, charter schools in the face of federal desegregation lawsuits.

Hiawatha Academies’ Morris Park location, for example, sits in a south Minneapolis neighborhood where over 75 percent of residents are white, and the majority do not live in poverty. But you would never know this by reviewing the school’s demographic data.

According to the Minnesota Department of Education, 91 percent of Hiawatha Academies’ Morris Park students are Latino, and 88 percent live in poverty. Still, Williams insists that the charter network is “successfully” meeting these kids’ needs, and so, presumably, should be excused for being unnaturally racially and economically segregated. But what is the definition of success? If it is standardized test scores, then no, Hiawatha’s Morris Park students are not receiving an education that is “beating the odds,” as education reformers like to say.

Data actually show that test scores at Hiawatha Academies-Morris Park dropped in 2017 and are lower than those of a nearby Minneapolis public school site, Northrop Elementary. Another neighborhood public school, Lake Nokomis Community School, serves almost as many students in poverty and special education students as the Morris Park charter school, but also has twenty-four homeless or highly mobile students on its roster. The charter school had zero.

In his New York Times piece, Williams does acknowledge that Hiawatha Academies schools are staffed by non-union teachers. He also notes that many progressives may also “worry that charters foster segregation, siphon funding from traditional public schools and cater to policymakers’ obsession with standardized tests.” Rather than addressing any of these very real concerns, however, Williams continues on with his fantasy-like defense of charter schools in general and of Hiawatha Academies in particular.

Hiawatha Academies schools are staffed and run by progressives, he assures readers, and they are determined, in the words of outgoing director Eli Kramer, to “elevate the importance of identity, race consciousness” and “pride in self.” Williams then describes taking a walk through the charter chain’s high school, which will relocate this fall to a newly-built campus that has been funded in part by wealthy, Republican-aligned local venture capitalists and philanthropists, not to mention the Walton Family Foundation.

How progressive is that? Many Walmart employees live on food stamps, leaving plenty of profit left over for the Walton family to pour into the promotion of non-union charter schools.

To wrap up his defense of Hiawatha’s privately run, publicly (and privately funded) charter schools, Williams revives yet another stale debate. In trying to prop up Hiawatha’s racially and economically segregated charters, Williams mentions Robert Panning-Miller, who was president of the Minneapolis teachers union from 2007-2009. (Michelle Wiese, the current head of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, is a Latino woman who has helped push the union in a more progressive, social justice-oriented direction. Perhaps her brand of union leadership doesn’t fit into Williams’ narrative.)

Panning-Miller once called Eli and Matt Kramer emblems of a kind of “educational apartheid” for allegedly sending their own children to a private Montessori school (the Kramers’ alma mater) full of wood blocks, natural play areas and hands-on learning, while simultaneously profiting from a test score-driven charter school network for students of color who live in poverty (Hiawatha Academies). Panning-Miller also documented the tightly woven, Kramer-Teach for America cabal that has drawn attention nationwide, and received PR support from, again, Beth Hawkins.

Maybe Williams had to harken back to Panning-Miller’s 2014 critique of the Kramers and Hiawatha Academies because there are so few of them. There is almost no counter-narrative out there for anyone, progressive or not, who would like a more realistic examination of the role Hiawatha Academies and other such narrowly marketed charter schools are playing in the systematic attacks on public education in the United States. As I mentioned, the Kramer family once employed an education writer who continues to serve as a philanthropist-funded champion of school choice.

It is impossible, then, to join Connor P. Williams’ in his unbridled praise for charter schools without fully examining the “ecosystem” of funding, hype and political support that prop up such “schools of choice.” To embrace the racially and economically marginalized population of the Hiawatha Academies charter chain, which Williams tries but fails to defend, would be to also, presumably, embrace the nearly all-white charter schools that also exist in the Twin Cities.

Among these are the Twin Cities German Immersion School, Nova Classical Academy and Great River Montessori School. Is it somehow right for public dollars to be diverted from the public school system (both Minneapolis and St. Paul are facing double-digit deficits for the upcoming school year) to create portfolios of niche charter schools that selectively serve segregated populations of students?

Is that what it means to be a progressive or a liberal? No, it is not. Don’t let the kind of propaganda peddled by Williams and the Kramer family convince you otherwise.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Minneapolis, Segregation, Walton Foundation

Jane Nylund: A System of Water

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2018 //
41

When Mayor Bloomberg first took control of the New York City public schools and launched his reforms, his Chancellor Joel Klein said that New York needed not “a school system,” but “a system of schools.” Over time, his meaning became clear. He would break up and close scores of existing schools and replace them with brand new schools, including dozens of shiny new charter schools. “A system of schools” is akin to what others call “the portfolio model.” The board chooses winners and losers, like buying and selling stocks for your stock portfolio.

It soon turned out that the “system of schools” was a reformer cliche, like offering choice to “save poor black kids from failing schools.” We now know that most of those poor black kids lost their community school and were sent off to a distant school that was no better than the school that was closed. They were not saved. There seems to be a Reformers’ Hymnal that lists all these cliches (“no child’s future should be determined by his zip code,” etc.). I would love to see that list of favorite phrases to rationalize disruption the public schools and replacing them with privatized charters that come and go like day lilies.

Jane Nylund, a parent activist, gave a lot of thought to this “system of schools” thing. Here is her effort to put it in perspective by comparing it to the city’s water system.

She writes:

In all the discussions regarding the idea of creating a “system of schools”, I have not seen any discussion regarding school governance, and why these two sets of schools can never be “systemized” as a means to create an aura of goodwill and cooperation amongst the competitors. That’s because the topic of school governance is seen as unimportant, unnecessary, not needed for quality or equity, etc. Don’t worry about it…parents don’t care, because we told them not to…

I’ve been trying to figure out an analogy for what the board has proposed, and I think I’ve come up with one:

A System of Water

East Bay Municipal Utility District provides a high quality product to just about everyone within our municipality. It’s clear, clean, tasty. It’s not entirely free, but the cost can be subsidized for those who have trouble affording their product. As far as I know, virtually everyone has access to it. It is a public utility governed by an elected public board and heavily regulated. It is also fiscally transparent. It operates for the common good. Everyone gets the same high-quality product. It would be terrible if people couldn’t afford it, or the quality was lacking and people got sick from it.

Meanwhile, an assortment of private bottled water companies are having trouble growing new market share in their mature, saturated market. Their mountain springs are running dry, their expenses are going up, and they need to tap into new markets to keep running, so to speak. Crystal Geyser needs to come up with a strategy to sell to EBMUD, and fast. Their shareholders are breathing down their necks.

Crystal Geyser comes up with this great idea, A System of Water. Who needs a pricey mountain spring? What if Crystal Geyser can use EBMUD’s infrastructure and facilities in order to produce a great tasting product that Crystal Geyser can sell for a profit? EBMUD already has low-cost facilities, so why can’t Crystal Geyser simply take over part of those facilities? It can produce its bottled water easier and cheaper than trying to find another clean, high-quality mountain spring. After all, Crystal Geyser has an ROI to worry about. At the same time, because it’s a business, it also needs to grow market share, so part of that marketing campaign would be to claim that Crystal Geyser is clean, pure, free of any nastiness that might get into the regular water system, you know, EBMUD. So even though their product isn’t really superior, they can sell more of it by bashing the quality of EBMUD’s own water product. Crystal Geyser also has attractive packaging, superior distribution, as well as plenty of advertising budget to sell its water. More and more, you see their ads on social media, TV, AC Transit. Crystal Geyser even hands out discount coupons near public water fountains, warning users of potentially harmful bacteria lurking in the plumbing.

EBMUD’s customers don’t think A System of Water is a good idea. EBMUD has to maintain their quality standards and they are accountable to the voters and the regulators if they don’t perform; if Crystal Geyser takes up a portion of their manufacturing/bottling/purification plant, that’s going to make it more difficult and expensive for EBMUD. They also expose themselves to all kinds of legal and ethical entanglements if they can’t keep the water standards high. They have to be held accountable.

Crystal Geyser’s superior marketing means that they are able to grow their share of the water market, bottled or otherwise. Not everyone wants or needs Crystal Geyser, but that doesn’t matter to them as long as their financials look good. Maybe some people try Crystal Geyser, but they don’t like the idea of using plastic. Or maybe it doesn’t really taste as good as the Hetch Hetchy straight from the tap. Customers complain to the company, but there are other customers willing to drink Crystal Geyser, so not a big concern for the company. Any dissatisfied customer can certainly choose another brand of water or go back to EBMUD.

It also turns out that there is some malfeasance going on with the quality of Crystal Geyser. Lab tests show tiny bits of plastic floating around in the water. If ingested, they can pose a health risk. In addition, it turns out that they have not disclosed to their customers that the company no longer bottles their water from a pure, mountain spring, but they have been filling bottles with EBMUD’s own tap water, slapping their own label on the bottles, and marketing it as mountain spring. Since they are a private company, no one is really checking their marketing claims or making sure that the water is safe to drink.

Does Crystal Geyser care about what happens to EBMUD? Of course not, they are a business. They only care about growing and maintaining their own market share. But the company really, really wants to use EBMUDs facilities to grow and save on expenses, so Crystal Geyser comes up with A System of Water, as a means to increase its market share using EBMUDs infrastructure. Crystal Geyser explains to EBMUD’s customers that they are both on the same page; they both provide a quality product; they are both in demand. There’s room at the table for everyone. Really.

But, as more and more water drinkers start purchasing more and more Crystal Geyser (it’s a nice bottle, and it’s pure mountain-spring!), EBMUD struggles. It has to shut down part of its capacity. Crystal Geyser sees that excess capacity as an opportunity to increase its own production. Soon, EBMUD starts having water quality problems: bacteria, particulates, you name it. They have to add more chlorine to counteract this problem; now it tastes funky. This can’t end well for EBMUD. Meanwhile, Crystal Geyser has managed to set up a brand new filtration/purification system that ensures its side of the plant is functioning well. And now, it can market its water as cleaner, safer, and better-tasting than EBMUD. Bottled water flies off of the shelves. Crystal Geyser’s plan has worked perfectly.

Now, given this scenario, can you imagine this kind of business partnership between two directly competing products ever happening in the real world? Then why would anyone ever think that public district schools and privately managed charter schools can work as a system? It’s the same scenario. My analogy isn’t perfect; charter operators argue that district schools do not, in fact, provide a quality product for everyone; hence the creation of a “choice” system. But of course what ends up happening is that charters “choose” their students in the long run and shed the rest, who often return to the district schools. It’s part of the business model of which the entire charter sector is based, and it’s an effective way to sabotage a public good. Unlike public entities, no business exists to serve high quality to all. It can’t happen. Can everyone buy a Porsche? (sorry, that one doesn’t come with an engine). In contrast, there are plenty of businesses that serve low-quality to most. (Pepsi and Dominos Pizza).

One can also argue that, unlike Crystal Geyser, charters in California operate as non-profits. That feel-good nonprofit label is a tax designation that means their profits don’t go to shareholders, but instead are supposed to be “invested” back into the business. But as we have seen, these investments can include all kinds of money-making opportunities: high admin salaries, big consulting contracts handed out to friends and relations, exorbitant rents paid out to leasing companies owned by friends and relations, etc. No oversight. The usual. All for the kids…

In conclusion, the idea that “Turning charters into the Wolf that guards and hunts with you in lean times, rather than than the one that eats you” is an unenforceable, feel-good platitude at best, and nothing more than a rationale for more charter giveaways. In the business world, they don’t call it “Dog Eat Dog” for nothing. The Waltons would be proud.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

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

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2018 //
19

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

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

Via Email (info@ofa.us)

 

Open Letter to Barack Obama seeking apology for RttT Competition

 

22 May 2018 (revised 23 May 2018)

 

The Honorable Barack Obama

c/o Organizing for Action

1130 West Monroe Street, Suite 100

Chicago, Illinois 60607

 

Dear Mr. Obama:

 

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

—W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993)

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Specifically, Dr. Deming teaches the wisdom that:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Sincerely, I am

 

Ed Johnson

Advocate for Quality in Public Education

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

 

Bcc: List 1

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

Peter Rugh: “Hey, Cuomo, Leave Those Kids Alone!”

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2018 //
11

This is as terrific article about the huge impact made by corporate education reformers in New York State, aided and abetted by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is trying to position himself as a progressive for the 2020 Presidential campaign.

It begins like this:

Imagine you are in grade school, taking a test, one that could determine whether your teacher keeps her job, the amount of funding your school receives or even if it will remain open. You’ve been preparing for this test for months and now there is a multiple-choice question on a computer screen in front of you, but every option — A, B, C — reads “system error.”

This actually happened on April 11 to students sitting for the New York State English exam. Other students in the 263 districts taking part in the digital-testing pilot program weren’t able to log in or their work was lost when the software crashed. The glitch was ultimately ironed out, but the “system error” message spoke volumes to critics of the state’s increased emphasis on standardized tests.

In the past two school years, approximately 20 percent of New York parents have refused to force their children to take the statewide exams in what’s become known as the opt-out movement. They say the tests are developmentally inappropriate, while teachers complain of being forced to devote excessive amounts of time preparing students for them.

Gov. Cuomo has pushed corporate friendly school policies whose impact has been far-reaching.

“As teachers, we’re trained to look at the entire child, but as soon as we enter the institution of the Department of Education, we’re suddenly compliance managers,” says Jia Lee. An opt-out parent and a teachers union activist, Lee has worked as a special education instructor at various New York City public schools for 17 years. She is running for lieutenant governor as a Green Party candidate. “The pressure is on the teacher and the administrators to make sure test scores are high,” she says.

Parents and educators alike have also raised concerns about students’ privacy. The test scores are part of the data used to track student performance over the course of their education. Personal information such as Social Security numbers are often batched in with academic information provided to third-party vendors contracted by the state Department of Education (DOE).

In January, Questar, which received a five-year, $44 million contract in 2015 to administer state exams for third through eighth graders, announced that a data breach had compromised the confidential information of 52 students at five schools in Great Neck, Menands, Oceanside, Queens and Buffalo. That’s only a minute fraction of the more than 2.6 million students enrolled in New York’s school system, but nonetheless the breach — which included student names, teachers, grades and identification numbers — highlighted the risks of collecting massive troves of student data and placing it in the hands of third parties.

Yet the tests and the data-driven assessments of both teachers and students that have accompanied them are just one facet of the education overhaul the state is undergoing at the direction of Gov. Andrew Cuomo — part of a national trend of education “reforms” pushed forward by Wall Street, technology companies and billionaires like the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune.

Gov. Cuomo, the most powerful politician in New York for the past seven and a half years, is seeking a third term but is facing a primary challenge from the left by Cynthia Nixon, a longtime education activist who has name recognition thanks to her role on the popular television program Sex and the City.

The governor, who hopes that winning a third term will vault him into consideration as a viable presidential candidate in 2020, touts himself as a “progressive” Democrat while raising vast sums of money from the 1 percent. Cuomo has increased the minimum wage and pushed same-sex marriage through the legislature, but he has a much spottier record on several other major issues. New York City’s subway system has fallen apart on his watch. He has done almost nothing to shore up state laws that protect the roughly 2 million city residents who live in rent-stabilized apartments, has chronically underfunded city and state university systems, and has pushed forward a series of corporate-friendly school policies whose impact on millions of New York school children, families and teachers has been far-reaching — if more opaque and obscure than a daily commute from hell on a broken subway system.

Often derided as the “school deform movement” by its detractors, the corporate push for education reform has led to the closure of hundreds of public schools, the proliferation of privately-operated, publicly-funded charter schools and attacks on teachers’ unions, one of the last bastions of organized labor. Norm Scott, a longtime public school teacher who now runs the Ed Notes Online blog, describes the surfeit of corporate think tanks, political action committees, charter school chains and data analysis firms that have sprung up under the “reform” umbrella in recent years as the “Education Industrial Complex.”

“It’s not going away any time soon,” says Scott. “There’s too much money in it.”

Both Republicans and many Democrats have promoted these policies, through their preferred ideological lenses. For the GOP, it’s about school choice, “innovation” and often breaking the “obstructionism” of teachers’ unions. Meanwhile, Democrats like Cuomo have couched their calls for stiffer teacher evaluations tied to standardized tests and for replacing public schools with charters in the language of progressivism, arguing their agenda will grant every student an equal opportunity to succeed.

When Students Are Cattle, Teachers Are Ranchers

Gov. Cuomo has championed a series of policies that, taken together, form a kind of feedback loop (See sidebar) threatening the foundation of public education in the state. Test scores are used to fire teachers and to label schools failures and close them down. In turn, those schools are replaced by nonunion charters, thereby weakening the membership base of the New York State United Teachers, the statewide teachers union, and its New York City local, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

“I’ll never forgive Gov. Cuomo,” says Carol Burris, a former principal of the year at South Side High School in Rockville Centre on Long Island, now executive director of the Network for Public Education Foundation. She describes the climate in which the “reform” movement first began to pick up steam. The Obama administration’s 2009 “Race to the Top” initiative gave states an incentive to focus on test scores as a way of securing federal grants at a time when the housing crisis had left schools strapped for revenue.

“Cuomo, he just took advantage of it politically,” Burris explains. “All of a sudden, teachers and principals were seen as villains. We were not doing our job. We had to perform. And if only we were better, poverty would disappear because all of the kids at school, no matter how difficult their circumstances, they would go off to college and poverty would disappear….”

For proponents of education reform in both major political parties, the financial rewards have been handsome. Corporate reformers have big money to throw around, which they have used to insert themselves in policy debates, often drowning out the voices of parents and teachers. In a recent special election in Westchester County to fill a vacant state Senate seat, a political action committee linked to the charter advocacy group StudentsFirstNY poured $800,000 into ads opposing Democratic candidate Shelley Mayer. The bulk of StudentsFirstNY’s funding comes from members of the Walton family. On April 13, 11 days before the special election, Arkansas-natives Alice and Jim Walton wired a half a million dollars each to StudentsFirstNY’s PAC, a review of campaign finance filings shows. Mayer ultimately won despite that torrent of cash.

‘You can’t say you believe in public schools when you aren’t funding them equitably.’
The misleadingly named Great Public Schools PAC run by Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz, has donated $303,500 to politicians of all stripes in New York, including $105,000 to Gov. Cuomo since 2011. Moskowitz, a former City Councilmember from the Upper East Side, makes $600,000 a year as CEO. Billionaire asset manager Daniel Loeb, who served as Success Academy’s chair until he announced on May 1 that he was stepping down, contributed $400,000 to Cuomo and PACs that support him — that’s excluding the $300,000 he’s poured into Moskowitz’s Great Public Schools.

Success Academy gave no reason for Loeb’s resignation, though it appears unrelated to remarks he made on Facebook last August. In them, he praised state Senator Jeff Klein, the leader of the breakaway Independent Democratic Conference that allied with the Republicans to give them control of the Senate, for standing up for “poor knack [sic] kids.” After his glowing endorsement of Klein, who is white, Loeb went on compare charter school opponents to the Ku Klux Klan, specifically citing the Senate’s African-American Democratic leader: “hypocrites like [Andrea] Stewart-Cousins who pay fealty to powerful union thugs and bosses do more damage to people of color than anyone who has ever donned a hood.” He will be succeeded by another Wall Street kingpin, Steven Galbraith of Kindred Capital.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Business Elite in Richmond, Virginia, Hires Michelle Rhee Team to Run Its Schools

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2018 //
16

Parents and teachers in Richmond, Virginia, are very concerned about their new superintendent, Jason Kamras, who was a key leader of Michelle Rhee’s team in D.C.

Kamras was the architect of Rhee’s controversial IMPACT program, which evaluated teachers in large part by student test scores. Kamras told Richmond educators that he won’t bring IMPACT with him, but he continues to believe that it was “equitable” and effective. Half of his cabinet in Richmond worked with him in D.C. He is still looking for a “chief talent officer.” (Corporate reformers do not employ assistant superintendents, they use corporate titles.)

The Richmond Times reported:

“Since the 44-year-old was named Richmond’s new schools chief in late November, Richmond School Board members, teachers and education advocates have raised concerns about the system, IMPACT, and its relationship to the “worst series of scandals in at least a decade” to rock Washington’s school system.

“It created a culture of fear,” David Tansey, a high school mathematics teacher in Washington, said of Kamras’ program. “Because it was paired with a top-down culture of getting results quickly, it became abused.”

“How Kamras, the highest-paid superintendent in Richmond’s history, plans to assess Richmond Public Schools teachers remains unclear.

“Eight days after the Richmond School Board announced Kamras’ selection in a celebratory news conference, an investigation revealed that fewer than half of students should have graduated from Washington’s Ballou High, previously touted as a bright spot in an ailing system for moving every senior on to college.

“Six days before he was sworn in at the beginning of February, an independent review found that those issues, which stemmed in part from Kamras’ evaluation system, were endemic to D.C. Public Schools as a whole.

“Kamras was noncommittal on teacher accountability when he discussed his plans for moving Richmond Public Schools forward at a community meeting the next month.”

The article quoted admirers and critics of IMPACT.

The recent graduation rate scandal began in Ballou High School, which falsely claimed a graduation rate of 100%. That revelation led to a systemwide investigation, and the discovery that the D.C. schools’ graduation rate was inflated, stemming from the fear induced by Kamras’ IMPACT system.

Richmond journalist Kristen Reed says that the power elite selected Kamras to impose Rhee-style corporate reform on the Richmond public schools. She portrays Tom Farrell, CEO of Dominion Energy, as the leader of the “Gang of 26,” business leaders who tried to eliminate the elected board and have been eager to disrupt democratic governance of the schools.

She writes:

“Farrell, who has led Dominion Energy for 10 years, has a vested interest in promoting the narrative that Kamras is a community hire. Farrell’s broader work in the power industry draws its profit model from seizing unilateral control of democratic institutions under the auspices of “public process” and “public good.” Dominion power has been widely criticized as exercising disproportionate control over the Virginia General Assembly.

“Despite extraordinary public opposition, Dominion has proven itself uniquely empowered to take Virginian land, to custom-draft its own legislation, and to do so at tremendous cost to members of the public, who have no choice but to remain a captive and disempowered consumer base. The broader public in Virginia has thoroughly articulated their reluctance to trust our energy monopoly to govern in lieu of democratic process. Our last election season communicated this message clearly when 13 candidates who ran on platforms that specifically refused Dominion funding won seats in our General Assembly. As the public pushes back, however, Farrell and his corporate colleagues continue to demand disproportionate power over public institutions.

“Farrell is right to be concerned. He not only chaired the committee that brought Kamras to Richmond, he also plays a leadership role in a particular strain of Virginia’s business elite that holds growing investment in bringing corporate education reform to our city. At stake is his long-standing interest in the Richmond public education system, which he has struggled to fully realize. In 2007, Farrell joined a movement of corporate leaders in the city of Richmond who advocated against an elected school board and in favor of a corporate monopoly on school governance.

“The Gang of 26, as they have become known, issued a now-infamous letter that demanded our democratically elected school board be “abolished.” Widespread public outcry, led by African-American education activists and the Richmond Crusade for Voters, pushed back at the prospect of a plutocratic school governance structure. Defeated, members of the Gang of 26 have continued to look for other avenues to disrupt democratic governance of public schools.”

Stay tuned.

Richmond may be the next battle between the community and corporate elites over the future of public schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations, Virginia

A Short Video About the Real Cost of School Closings

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2018 //
11

In 2013, Rahm Emanuel closed 50 public schools in one day. If for no other reason, he will go down in history as the mayor who shuttered 50 public schools on the same day. Never happened before.

What happened to those schools? Watch this short video.

Did he think that schools are like hot dog stands or shoe stores? If you don’t make a profit, you close it and move on? Did he forget that he was cutting the arteries away from communities, families, and children?

Tina Trujillo at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado’s Michelle Renée suggest that government agencies and policy-makers, including the U.S. Department of Education, would be wise to look at educational research as they guide school turnarounds.

Evidence shows that top-down, punitive efforts are ineffective and counterproductive. Instead, a collaborative, community-driven approach—combined with significant, sustained financial investment and a focus on improving the quality of teaching and learning—has been proven to be the better path to school improvement.

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform
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