Archives for category: Corporate Reform
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What You Need to Know About “Educators for Excellence (E4E)”

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2017 //
7

Educators for Excellence occasionally pops up when the privatization movement is looking for “teachers” who will speak out against hard-earned rights of teaching professionals.

Two years ago, the Boston Teachers Union compiled research on E4E to warn their members about this AstroTurf group.

It was founded by two TFA teachers in New York City who are no longer teachers. It is funded by the reactionary anti-union Walton Family Foundation, the Rightwing William E. Simon Foundation, the anti-union Bodman Foundation, and the Arnold Foundation, which wants to eliminate pensions.

It favors merit pay based on test scores, teacher evaluation based on test scores, and opposes seniority.

BTU warned its members:

“Bottom line—Beware of E4E and its tactics

“E4E is getting funded to set up a chapter here in Boston. They tend to target early career teachers and try to build their membership through coffee hours, free lunches, raffles, and happy hours. Please help spread the word about E4E so that our members are aware of their tactics! If you see them in your school, please let us know.”

Categories Boston, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers

Dark Money Billionaires Lick Their Wounds after Defeat in Massachusetts and Look for New Targets

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2017 //
7

I was tempted to give an entire day to this post about the Dark Money group deceptively called Families for Excellent Schools.

The “families” are financiers, billionaires, and garden-variety multimillionaires. They enjoyed great success in New York, where they made an alliance with Governor Cuomo and launched a $6 Million TV buy to promote charter schools. Under pressure from Cuomo, the state legislature compelled the City of New York to provide free space to charter schools and to give Eva Moskowitz whatever she wanted.

Then, Families for Excellent Schools opened shop in Massachusetts, where they launched a multimillion dollar campaign to increase the number of charter schools.

Parents, teachers, the teachers unions, Rural and suburban communities turned against charter schools. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren joined the opponents of charter schools. Before the vote, the backers of Question 2 were revealed in the media (though not all of their names), and the referendum to expand the charter sector went down to a crashing defeat.

After the election, things went bad for FES.

“This September, the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance fined Families for Excellent Schools a comparatively nominal $426,500. But it also forced the charter group to reveal its donors — a who’s who of Massachusetts’ top financiers, many of whom are allies of Gov. Charlie Baker — after it had promised them anonymity.”

In addition to the fine, FES was banned from the Bay State for four years.

One of the big donors to FES was the rightwing, anti-union Walton Family, which gave FES more than $13 Million between 2014 and 2026. The chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education gave FES nearly $500,000.

Now FES is trying to redefine itself.

Here is a suggestion: support the public schools that enroll nearly 90% of children. Open health clinics in and near schools. Invest in prenatal care for poor women. Lobby for higher taxes for the 1%.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Hoax, Massachusetts, New York City, Privatization

John Merrow and Mary Levy: The D.C. “School Reform” Fiasco: A Complete History

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2017 //
72

I intended to make this the only post of the day, but late last night I learned of the lawsuit in Florida challenging the disastrous HB 7069, a gift to charter operators.

So this is the last post you will see today. I want you to read it in full. The post was written by veteran journalist John Merrow with Mary Levy, a civil rights and education finance lawyer, and an education finance and policy analyst.

One of the key episodes in the short and divisive history of the corporate reform movement was the appointment of Michelle Rhee as Chancellor of the D.C. public school system. Rhee became the public face of the movement. Rhee was idolized by the media because of her take-no-prisoners style and her evident contempt for teachers and unions. Amanda Ripley wrote a cover story about Rhee for TIME magazine, which suggested that Rhee knew how to fix America’s schools. The cover showed her scowling and wielding a broom, ready to sweep out the bad teachers in D.C. Newsweek put her on its cover. I wrote a chapter about her in my book, Reign of Error, describing the adulation she received and the cheating scandal that broke on her watch. As it happened, Rhee identified one elementary school principal as exactly the kind of relentless, data-driven, no-excuses sort of person that she wanted more of. He received bonuses because of the incredible improvement of test scores. Incredible indeed, because his school was at the nexus of the cheating scandal, identified by the unusual number of erasures from wrong-to-right on standardized tests. He was soon gone. Immediately after Mayor Adrian Fenton was defeated in 2010, Rhee resigned, vowing to create a group called StudentsFirst, which would raise $1 Billion and enlist one million members. The name of the group typified Rhee’s divisive approach: education works best when students, teachers, parents, and the community work together. She never raised $1 Billion or one million members, but she actively supported vouchers and charters and gave substantial funding to candidates who would vote in the state legislature for privatization and against unions. She married the mayor of Sacramento, where she lives now. StudentsFirst merged with another anti-public school group.

But the myth of the transformation of the D.C. schools under Rhee and her successor Kaya Henderson lives on, Because to acknowledge the failure of teacher-bashing would harm the movement.

John Merrow contributed to the myth of Michelle Rhee, in a major way. To understand his credibility now, it is necessary to recognize his role in building that myth. As the PBS education correspondent, he featured her work in D.C. about a dozen times. He was a believer. But when he was doing his last show, a full hour about Rhee, he had an epiphany. Was it because she invited him to film her firing a principal? Was it the cheating scandal? Was it the effort to cover up the cheating? I don’t know. What I do know is that Merrow had the courage to change his mind. His admiration changed to doubt then to skepticism then to criticism. I understand his transformation because I have been there. I too once believed in what is deceptively called “Reform.” I saw the light. So did Merrow.

Merrow and Levy call this post “A Complete History” of Rhee’s reforms. It is one part of the history, but it is not THE Complete History. “The Complete History” would be a job of deep investigative research that would determine why Rhee, who had never been a principal or a superintendent and had taught only briefly in a privately-run contract school in Baltimore, was chosen to lead the D.C. system. It would examine the claims she made about the spectacular score gains in her classes (which G.F. Brandenburg debunked on his blog). It would investigate the negotiations among funders like Gates and Broad, who let it be known that their money would be cut off if Rhee left the district. It would delve into the district’s relations with the reactionary Walton Family Foundation, which targeted D.C. for charter saturation.

John Merrow’s knowledgeable perspective is important. The story is not all bad. He calls attention to the positive changes that occurred on Rhee’s watch. But where he comes down hard is on the mistaken idea that the route to success requires administrators who “crack down” on teachers, who offer rewards and punishments for teachers based on test scores. That strategy produces teaching to the test, score inflation, gaming the system, and narrowing the curriculum.

That is why this is the only post you are likely to see today. It is long, and it deserves your full attention.

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Vouchers

Steven Singer: The Corporate Reformers Are Goliath, But Pretend to Be David

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2017 //
40

Steven Singer has noticed that the hired hands of the billionaire “reformers” like to play the role of victim.

They are bravely standing up to those teachers’ unions on behalf of “the kids.” All they have on their side are the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons and a long list of other billionaires who want to privatize public schools and get rid of those unions.

Who is Goliath? Who is David?

Who are the real grassroots activists?

Don’t be fooled.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Hoax, Koch Brothers

The Economist: Dark Money and Local School Board Races

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2017 //
16

The Economist magazine published an article about an alarming phenomenon: the large amounts of money entering local school board races, much of it from mysterious political action committees, often from out-of-District and out-of-State sources.

Races in Denver, Douglas County, and Aurora County in Colorado attracted at least $1.65 Million.

Last spring’s School Board Race in Los Angeles was the most expensive in U.S. history, at $15 Million. Billionaires like Reed Hastings and Eli Broad make clear that they will spend whatever it takes to install true believers in privatization. In most such races, you are likely to encounter the same names, whether it is Hastings, Broad, Bloomberg, or members of the Walton family. You are likely to see other names associated with hedge funds or other parts of the financial industry. They have two goals in common: they love charter schools and they don’t like unions.

The intrusion of this kind of money into school board races is a danger to democracy. School boards are supposed to reflect the wishes of the local communities, not the purposes of out-of-State billionaires in search of willing puppets.

How can a local citizen, a parent or community leader, have any chance of running for school board if their opponent has a kitty of $100,000-300,000 to millions of dollars? I recall visiting a city where I was told that, in the past, a candidate could run by raising $40,000. Those days are over. That’s not good for democracy.

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Democracy, Denver

A Student Recounts the Experience of Being Indoctrinated in Corporate Education Reform at the University of Washington

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2017 //
14

Heidi Schauble describes her disheartening experience as a student at the University of Washington at Bothell, when she signed up for an education policy course and found that her instructors worked for the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CPRE). CPRE is a major advocate of the “portfolio” model for school districts, wherein the school board treats its schools like a stock portfolio, keeping the good ones and getting rid of the bad ones. It advocates on behalf of charter schools. Schauble refers to CPRE as an “anti-public education think tank.” It might be more accurate to call it an advocacy group, not a think tank.

The amazing aspect of this article is that the author had sufficient information to question what she was taught and to know that she was getting a one-sided presentation.

Here is an excerpt. It is worth reading in full:

As a UW student, who signed up for the only “Education Policy” elective offered in my program, I learned first-hand how CRPE views public education, and witnessed first-hand how they conduct their own classroom.

Robin Lake and Bethany Grove, the co-instructors of the CRPE course, presented the argument that business models were more equitable and efficient than traditional public schools, and that the only way to reform education was to dismantle it and replace it with charters that will constantly open and close according to their “results”. The goal was never “better schools overall”. The goal was the ability to close “bad” schools.

These instructors argued the education system is supposed to have mixed results, to compare outcomes (test scores), and shut down “ineffective” schools; they argue that it is good to create a continuous, responsive cycle for “improvement”. They argue that public institutions are too bureaucratic, too slow to change and adapt to the 21st century. Their goal is to privatize public education.

Robin and Bethany, the instructors of the CRPE course, blamed teachers, parents and students in the process of demonizing public education. They didn’t mention the factors of poverty or low school funding, nor did they mention budget cuts or how since Federal education policies from No Child Left Behind, and every version since then, drain resources from public education. According to Robin and Bethany, “money doesn’t make a difference and we need to stop throwing it at education”. When have we ever done this?

That quarter, we read from business models how shutting down and “starting from a clean slate” was the best way to turn around failing businesses. We did not read a single piece of educational literature that did not come directly out of CRPE. I was shocked..

I don’t doubt that these two upper middle class white women care a great deal about children like theirs. I do doubt CRPE’s ability to question their unwavering faith in Neo-Liberal Market reform.

How material is taught is just as important as the curriculum itself. Does the instructor value debate as a tool of learning? Or is repetition of subject material the leading indicator of learning?

I recall watching “Waiting for Superman” in previous classes. This video is a popular marketing tool for Charter Reformers. One of the central arguments of the video, is that students are currently taught as passive recipients of knowledge. Where the teacher is the ultimate authority and attempts to “dump” knowledge; rather that teaching students to engage with material.

If the fundamental argument of Charter reformers is that you can break up the “bureaucracy” and “monopoly” of public ed so that teachers are able to engage with students; why are their reformers teaching in the very authoritarian style they critique?

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Corporate Reform, Washington State

CREDO: The Strategy of Closing Schools Disproportionately Affects Students of Color

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2017 //
9

The Walton-funded Center for Research on Education Outcomes published a study containing a finding that almost everyone knew:

The strategy of closing schools because of their test scores disproportionately affects children of color.

A little less than half of displaced closure students landed in better schools.

• Closures of low-performing schools were prevalent but not evenly distributed.

• In both the charter and traditional public school sectors, low-performing schools with a larger share
of black and Hispanic students were more likely to be closed than similarly performing schools with a
smaller share of disadvantaged minority students.

• Low-performing schools that were eventually closed exhibited clear signs of weakness in the years
leading to closure compared to other low-performing schools.

•The quality of the receiving school made a significant difference in post-closure student outcomes. Closure
students who attended better schools post-closure tended to make greater academic gains than did their
peers from not-closed low-performing schools in the same sector, while those ending up in worse or
equivalent schools had weaker academic growth than their peers in comparable low-performing settings.

• The number of charter closures was smaller than that of traditional public school closures, however, the percentage of low-performing schools getting closed was higher in the charter sector than in the traditional public school sector.

Peter Greene wrote about this study here. Peter asks: The staggering bottom line here remains– we are closing schools that serve black, brown and poor students because they serve black, brown and poor students. How is that even remotely okay?

Steven Singer wrote about it here.

This was Steven’s takeaway:

If Sally moves to School B after School A is closed, her success is significantly affected by the quality of her new educational institution. Students who moved to schools that suffered from the same structural deficiencies and chronic underfunding as did their original alma mater, did not improve. But students who moved to schools that were overflowing with resources, smaller class sizes, etc. did better. However, the latter rarely happened. Displaced students almost always ended up at schools that were just about as neglected as their original institution.

Even in the fleeting instances where students traded up, researchers noted that the difference between School A and B had to be massive for students to experience positive results.

Does that mean school closures can be a constructive reform strategy?

No. It only supports the obvious fact that increasing resources and providing equitable funding can help improve student achievement. It doesn’t justify killing struggling schools. It justifies saving them.

This study leaves the observer to wonder why so much money was spent by Arne Duncan, Michael Bloomberg, and Rahm Emanuel to disrupt schools instead of investing in improving them with proven strategies like class-size reduction?

Categories Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption

Dark Money in Education: Stand for Children Edition

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2017 //
10

Maurice Cunningham, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, is an expert on the infusion of Dark Money into education.

He wrote several articles about the millions of dollars that poured into Massachusetts to promote the referendum to increase the number of charter schools in November 2016.

This article is about a Dark Money passthrough called Stand for Children, which began its life as a pro-public school group but turned into a pro-Privatization, anti-union, anti-teacher organization. It highlights the role of Stand for Children in Massachusetts. It does not explore its national activities, where it plays a pernicious part in the attack on public schools, unions, and teachers.

http://blogs.wgbh.org/masspoliticsprofs/2017/10/6/your-dark-money-reader-special-edition-stand-children/

Those who remember the early days of SFC now call it “Stand ON Children.”

It has funneled money to corporate reform candidates in cities from Nashville to Denver. It tried to squelch the Chicago Teachers Union by buying up all the top lobbyists in Illinois. It has funded anti-union, anti-teacher campaigns.

It pretends to be a “civil rights” organization. It is not.

Categories Boston, Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Denver, Education Industry, Education Reform, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nashville, Privatization, Stand for Children, Teachers, Unions

Susan Ochshorn Sends a Message to Billionaires: Little Children Are Not Investment Vehicles

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2017 //
10

Susan Ochshorn founded ECE PolicyWorks to advocate for high-quality education for young children.

In this post, she analyzes the pernicious influence of financiers and hedge fund managers on decisions about the fate of young children, as they figure out how to make a profit with “Social impact bonds.”

Everyone loves the idea of early childhoood education. But unfortunately the financiers have figured out how to make it pay—for them.

Ochshorn shows how Goldman Sachs and other investors saw a path to profit and how public officials fell in love with metrics. The children? Not so much.

She gives the background of the social impact bond.

And she concludes that commodifying children is a very bad idea:

“By last summer, the U.S. Department of Education had gotten on board. Under the aegis of John King, former education commissioner of New York, they launched a Pay for Success grant competition, $2.8 million available for state, local, and tribal governments interested in exploring the investment vehicle’s feasibility. Early this year, as Betsy DeVos replaced King in the top job, the department distributed funding ranging from $300 to $400 million to 8 recipients. Rigorous evaluation, as the Urban Institute’s “Pay for Success Early Childhood Education Toolkit,” makes clear, is the sine qua non of the transaction, precise metrics and data collection essential for determining the venture’s outcome.

“To quantify is to have the illusion of mastery over all that defies our control, yet the metrics fall short, the ends perverted: they cannot capture children’s unique capacities, or the uneven trajectory of their development—as messy and challenging as it gets.

“Three- and four-year-olds are not commodities. They have had the grave misfortune of entering the academic arena in a period of measurement gone berserk. What young children need most is time, and sustained support for experiences that nourish their bodies, minds, and spirits—their due, according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the U.S has not yet ratified more than 25 years after the resolution was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly.

“The benchmarks and assessments of the Common Core violate this right—especially for our youngest students. So do social impact bonds. If the payback is contingent upon a particular timetable, and the desired outcomes are not forthcoming, where does that leave the kids?

“Those who have made their millions and billions in private equity, investment banking, and hedge funds see themselves as the saviors of our most vulnerable children. Yet their fancy models are putting our youngest learners at greater risk—along with democracy and the public good.”

Categories Bill de Blasio, Billionaires, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Corporate Reform, For-Profit

Lordy, Lordy! Bill Gates Has a New Idea. Run. Hide. Protect the Children and the Teachers

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2017 //
49

After two high-profile failures that he acknowledges, and one high-profile failure that he does not acknowledge, Bill Gates is ready to start reforming the schools of America again.

Valerie Strauss reports on his announcement here.

He jumped into school reform in 2000 with his plan to break up the nation’s high schools into small schools. He promised dramatic test score gains. It wasn’t a terrible idea, but it did not get the score gains he wanted, and he gathered the creme de la creme to his digs in Seattle in 2008 to announce that he was abandoning small schools. Valerie says he dumped $650 Million into that, but my own Research says it was $2 Billion.

His next obsession was evaluating teachers by the test scores of their teachers. He partnered with Arne Duncan on that; Arne made it a condition of Race to the Top funding. The ratings were criticized by the American Statistical Association, the National Academy of Education, AERA, and many individual scholars. But Duncan and Gates plowed ahead. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Post published the ratings of individual teachers. Duncan congratulated them for doing so. A teacher in Los Angeles committed suicide after his ratings were published. Gates gave out hundreds of millions to districts that adopted his evaluations. Hillsborough County, Florida, won $100 Million to apply Gates’ ideas about teaching, and the district exhausted its reserves and abandoned the plan. Gates paid up only $80 Million, and the district was left holding the bag.

Now Gates has given up on that idea, although many states are still sticking with it. Thousands of teachers and principals have been fired based on the ideas sold by Gates and Duncan, but that’s not of any interest to him.

The failure that Gates does not yet admit is the Common Core. He paid hundreds of millions for its development and promotion, and he still loves the idea of standardizing education. He refuses to accept that it’s dead man walking.

So what’s his new idea? I’m not really sure, so I will quote Valerie. My hunch is that he is still pushing Common Core, but it is not clear.

He said 85% of the money will go to public schools and the rest to charter schools. Knowing that Gates is a charter zealot, one must wonder what medicine (or poison) he is offering.

“He said most of the new money — about 60 percent — will be used to develop new curriculums and “networks of schools” that work together to identify local problems and solutions, using data to drive “continuous improvement.” He said that over the next several years, about 30 such networks would be supported, though he didn’t describe exactly what they are. The first grants will go to high-needs schools and districts in six to eight states, which went unnamed.

“Though there wasn’t a lot of detail on exactly how the money would be spent, Gates, a believer in using big data to solve problems, repeatedly said foundation grants given to schools as part of this new effort would be driven by data. “Each [school] network will be backed by a team of education experts skilled in continuous improvement, coaching and data collection and analysis,” he said, an emphasis that is bound to worry critics already concerned about the amount of student data already collected and the way it is used for high-stakes decisions.”

What is he up to? Big data? Common Core? Data mining?

I have often said and written that if he really wanted to help children, he would open health clinics in their schools. He would provide doctors to supply good maternal care to pregnant women. He would not tell teachers how to teach or get involved in evaluating teachers or writing curriculum. He would stop pretending he knows how to reform education and do something that is actually needed.

After 17 years of failure, has he learned nothing?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates
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