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Jon Pelto: Another Disguised Corporate Reform Group Pops Up in Connecticut

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2015 //
7

Jonathan Pelto writes that Connecticut has acquired yet another corporate reform group, disguised an nonpartisan and independent.

 

Pelto writes:

 

Like some type of gigantic octopus the pro-charter school, pro-common core, pro-SBAC Testing scheme and anti-teacher corporate education reform industry has set up multiple front groups, while dumping more than $7.9 million dollars into their lobbying effort on behalf of Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy’s “education reform” initiatives.

 

By now you’d think these hedge-fund managers and corporate executives would have created enough different groups in their effort to create the impression that they are more than they seem.

 

But that’s just not the way it works…

 

Connecticut’s education policy arena is being honored with the presence of yet another “reform” front group.

 

And as with their earlier pronouncements, the charter school and education reform industry is claiming that their latest front group is an “independent source of accurate data and information that transcends special interests.”

 

The newest corporate funded education reform group to invade Connecticut’s education policy debate is called the Connecticut School Finance Project and according to its PR:

 

“Founded in 2015, the nonprofit Connecticut School Finance Project strives to be a trusted, nonpartisan, and independent source of accurate data and information that transcends special interests.”

 

Independent?

 

Transcends special interests?

 

File under this one under – There is truly no lie that is too big for the charter school industry and its corporate education reform associates.

 

What makes Pelto so sure that this is just another corporate reform front group?

 

Well, it may be because the Chief Operating Officer of the Connecticut Council for Education Reform, one of the state’s leading advocates for Governor Malloy’s anti-teacher, anti-public school agenda, is the new Director and Founder of the Connecticut School Finance Project.

 

Don’t be fooled, Pelto warns. The corporate reform industry has a galaxy of organizations with misleading names, but no popular support for their agenda.

Categories Connecticut, Corporate Reform

Ohio: The One Reform That Is Forbidden

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2015 //
5

This past year, there were numerous reports of scandals, arrests, and convictions of charter operators in Ohio. There seemed to be real hope to enact legislation that would hold charter schools accountable and make their finances transparent. But that died in the closing hours of the legislative session.

Why?

Charter operators wrote the charter law. They give millions of dollars in campaign contributions to key legislators. The Speaker of the House took a free trip to Turkey, thanks to the Turkish Gulen charter chain.

Charters don’t want to be regulated. They don’t want to be accountable or transparent. The leading charter operators receive hundreds of millions from taxpayers each year, even though most of their schools are rated as low-performing by the state.

In this post, Denis Smith explains the inner workings of the charter industry, which he calls “the dark side.” Smith worked in the State Department of Education, in the office intended to oversee charter schools.

He writes:

“At a national charter school conference in Indianapolis several years ago, two attendees saw my registration badge at a reception and approached me. “Ohio, huh? So you’re from the Wild, Wild West!”

“They, of course, were talking about a state that allows two charter school operators to direct several million dollars in GOP campaign donations during the last decade in return for favorable treatment (read: weak oversight) and the receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars from state funds. Finance types and Wharton School profs would marvel about such a robust return on investment.

“They were also talking about a state that does not require charter school board members to be American citizens and doesn’t have a problem with non-citizens serving on charter boards, and where one of the members of the House Education Committee advocates burdensome Voter ID requirements for citizens trying to vote.”

Ohio has an excellent website called “KnowYourCharter.” It was not created by the State Education Department, but by independent groups using official data. The charter sector has some of the state’s lowest performing schools and is far behind the state’s public schools. But don’t expect Givernor Kasich and the current legislature to hold them accountable.

Accountability is only for public schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Ohio, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Gary Rubinstein on “The Three Stooges” of Corporate Reform

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2015 //
14

Gary Rubinstein watched a panel discussion on the reform movement’s three allegedly successful turnaround districts. He reports on the discussion here. The discussion was sponsored by the Fordham Institute, which is in the forefront of the privatization movement. This is an impressive debunking of “reformer” boasts. It is especially important because so many in the media take those false claims at face value, and several states say they intend to copy one of these failed models.

 

Rubinstein points out that none of these highly touted examples of “reform” success are successful. New Orleans is a swamp of conflicting data, but the bottom line is that it continues to be one of the lowest performing districts in one of the lowest performing states in the nation. The Tennessee “Achievement School District” is based on a bold and wholly unrealistic pledge by Chris Barbic that he could take the lowest performing schools in the state and lift them into the state’s highest 25% in only five years. That has not happened, and it may never happen. The third speaker is from Michigan’s woeful Education Achievement Authority, which has produced numerous scandals but not much academic progress for the students.

 

Rubinstein uses his keen mathematical intelligence to dissect each of the reformers’ claims. In the case of the Achievement School District, he points to the slippery use of data (a common trait among all the “reform” projects):

 

In a very revealing moment, Barbic explains that he’s the one who came up with the bottom 5% to top 25% in five years. He could have just said bottom 5% to bottom 10% and he wouldn’t be taking such heat now, but having such an ambitious goal had a positive side effect since “It created a momentum and an urgency that we needed to create to get this off the ground” and allowed them to recruit ‘partners’ and leaders and teachers. In other words, it was a lie, but it was a worthwhile one since it tricked people into giving us their money.

 

Barbic makes some bizarre claims about the success so far of the ASD like that the bottom 5% ‘priority schools’ are growing ‘four times faster than the rest of the state.’ To put this in context, the rest of the state of Tennessee has had flat math scores and declining reading scores. So if the state went up, on average, of .25%, then ‘four times’ that is just 1%.

 

Rubinstein notes:

 

Watching these three turnaround gurus quote misleading statistics, give vague abstract answers, and really offer nothing in terms of concrete ideas from what they’ve learned in trying (unsuccessfully) to turnaround their respective districts, made me think that rather than call these ASDs, it would be more accurate to call them BSDs.

 

 

Categories Corporate Reform, Michigan, New Orleans, Tennessee, Turnaround Schools

Milwaukee Democratic Legislators Oppose State Takeover of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2015 //
8

Milwaukee Democratic legislators wrote a letter to their colleagues urging them to oppose the state takeover of low-performing Milwaukee public schools. Any students of a school taken over would be transferred to the control of a charter operator or a voucher school. This is not “reform,” it is privatization.

 

Ironically, the public schools of Milwaukee perform as well as, or in many cases, better than the local charter schools and voucher schools.

 

What would be fair, if the Legislature passes the takeover bill, would be a mandatory transfer of students in low-performing charter schools and voucher schools back to the public schools.

 

It would create chaos, but “reformers” love disruption. Fair?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Milwaukee, Vouchers, Wisconsin

We Must Persist Despite the Odds

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2015 //
11

Our regular contributor KrazyTA offers the following advice:

“It is easy to get tired and feel beaten down by the edubullies and edufrauds as they use their bludgeons of sneer, jeer and smear on all those for a “better education for all.”

“They say it is often darkest before the dawn.

“The beginning of a speech of 1854 by William Lloyd Garrison:

[start]

“I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together. I do not know how to worship God and Mammon at the same time. If other men choose to go upon all fours, I choose to stand erect, as God designed every man to stand. If, practically falsifying its heaven-attested principles, this nation denounces me for refusing to imitate its example, then, adhering all the more tenaciously to those principles, I will not cease to rebuke it for its guilty inconsistency. Numerically, the contest may be an unequal one, for the time being; but the author of liberty and the source of justice, the adorable God, is more than multitudinous, and he will defend the right. My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery or ceasing to prate of the rights of man ….

[end]

Link: http://www.blackpast.org/1854-william-lloyd-garrison-no-compromise-evil-slavery

Remember: not that many years before the start of the Civil War, things looked pretty bleak for the abolition of chattel slavery. And nowadays, not a day passes that some new development might make folks think that things look pretty bleak for ensuring a “better education for all.”

As the old saying going, it’s darkest before the dawn. If you feel you can’t go on, just remember:

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”

Harriet Tubman. She didn’t say it would be easy. But she did say we could do it.

And the tide has been turning, albeit slowly and painfully, for a while.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” [Mahatma Gandhi]

As I see it, we are in stage 3.

Categories Corporate Reform, Equity

Edward F. Berger: The War Against Our Public Schools and Their Teachers Is an Assault on Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2015 //
12

I usually devote days like July 4 to appropriate pieces, such as poems and songs celebrating our nation and its freedoms.

 

But I am not feeling especially celebratory today. In many respects, it appears that our politics is rushing headlong back to the 1920s or even the 1890s, when polite society diverted its eyes from unpleasant facts like hunger, homelessness, and other signs of human distress. Our politicians must worry constantly about raising enough money for the next election, so they listen more attentively to those who have the most to contribute to their campaign, rather than to voters. Voters can always be hoodwinked by a slick media buy.

 

We must not despair because despair is a certain path to defeat. We must rededicate ourselves on this day to saving our democracy, to restoring the belief that America is meant to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” We can’t compete with the billionaires’ cash for votes, but we can build organizations to inform and mobilize public opinion to take our government away from the plutocrats. I, for one, do not want to sit idly by as income inequality and wealth inequality grows. I commend to you the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. A short description on amazon.com, “Almost every modern social problem-poor health, violence, lack of community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness-is more likely to occur in a less-equal society.”

 

If you look back over American history, you will see swings of the pendulum, from eras where there was a strong sense of social responsibility to eras of selfish individualism. We are now at the far end of the pendulum swing, with our elites pushing hard to persuade the public that selfish individualism and consumerism is true Americanism: every person for him- or herself! Let the hungry fend for themselves, it is their own fault that they are hungry.

 

We can sit back and watch as the social safety net is shredded, or we can resist. We can sit back and allow our public schools to be taken over by entrepreneurs, religious groups, and privateers, or we can resist.

 

I say resist.

 

Here is a wonderful post by Edward F. Berger, a blogger in Arizona who is leading the charge against corporate reform in that benighted state, where the profit-making entrepreneurs have grown fat by taking over public schools and draining their funds for their own profit.

 

He asks the following questions and urges his fellow Arizonans to organize and resist the destruction of the public square and the corporate takeover of public education:

 

 

Edward R. Murrow once said: “I am in a financial morass from which I am unable to extricate myself.” Many States are in a political morass as a result of a planned assault on America. The question is, how do we extricate ourselves? In Arizona, one of the most corrupt states, leaders are emerging who know how. They use facts and data, and social media to bypass the in-pocket Press.

 

Is there anyone who believes that the misuse of hundreds of millions of dollars of public taxpayer money in Arizona is an unexpected consequence of so-called education reform?

 

If so, they most likely profit at the expense of the children and families from whom this money is stolen.

 

If so, they are part of a radical and nation-killing movement based on feudal ideology and pure greed.

 

If so, they are part of a State Legislature that intentionally forbids charter school accountability and protects those who are given our tax dollars and use them for their own profits, kids-be-damned.

 

If so, they have written laws that allow pirates to create closed and unaccountable “schools” that rake in millions of public tax dollars via side-deals and Real Estate deals. They eliminate students that they can’t benefit from. They kick out children that don’t serve their needs and send them back into the public schools humiliated, damaged, and often broken.

 

If so, they are Legislators who do not believe in the separation of Church and State.

 

If so, they are part of political organizations that supports the privatizers and radical right-wing, and ignore the damages to their community and to children and families.

 

If so, they support privatization and profiteering from dollars citizens pay to educate children. They privatize any-and-all functions of government where there is profit to be gleaned. Prisons and schools for example.

 

Is there anyone in Arizona who believes that the extreme right-wing, working for ALEC-Koch-Goldwater Institute-John Birch Society bosses has not intentionally, decade after decade, placed totally unqualified non-educators in the position of Superintendent of Public Instruction, thus undermining public education from inside?

 

Those who wield these powers have used every opportunity to destroy the teaching profession, our community schools, and now our Universities.

 

Is there anyone in Arizona who doesn’t know that a Right To Work State is a trick to extract more profit from battered workers and to curtail information the public needs by not letting workers organize and speak out?

 

Is there an educated citizen of Arizona who is not convinced that the Democratic process of Representative Government has been defeated through the control of primary elections and the selection of those who will get massive financial support: Those candidates they allow to run and win? That those who wield power have effectively discouraged people from voting?

 

Be sure to read his conclusion.

 

And when you are done, join The Network for Public Education, which is supporting resistance across the nation.

Categories Arizona, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, For-Profit, Vouchers

Peter Greene: A Primer on Privatization

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2015 //
23

Most people have no idea about the privatization movement. They don’t know that the narrative of crisis (“our schools are failing, failing, failing”)–repeated again and again–is intended to clear the way for privatization.

Peter Greene explains the insidious plan here.

Step one, create a crisis.

Step two, take power away from the community, dissolve the local school board, give it to the mayor, the governor.

Step three: cash in.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Funding, Privatization, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

Corporate Reform Organization Seeks Teachers to Train as Voices for Common Core

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2015 //
54

An educator forwarded an email he received, inviting him to apply for a fellowship at Néw York Educator Voice-America Achieve. If accepted, he would gain training in writing opinion pieces, speaking at public forums, and becoming a voice for Common Core. The organization would help him to get invitations to national conferences as a speaker and to become a prominent voice for the profession, on behalf of Common Core.

Here is the invitation:

“Dear Colleagues,

“Happy summer!

“The application deadline for the New York Educator Voice Fellowship is this Friday, July 3rd. The Fellowship is a really great program for teachers and principals who are interested in education policy and looking to make a difference in their communities and across New York. Don’t miss this chance to help one of your favorite teachers take advantage of this opportunity.

“HERE is a link to our application website where you can learn more about the program and submit a nomination.”

The program offers to give teachers “voice,” but the voice must be used to support the corporate reform narrative. This is no voice at all; it is hiring teachers and principals to endorse someone else’s agenda.

The program is paid for by Michael Bloomberg, the Harry and Leona Helmsley Foundation (“queen of mean”), and the Gates Foundation.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reform, Teachers

My Interview with “Brainwaves”

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2015 //
6

You might (or might not) enjoy watching this 7-minute interview I did with former teacher Bob Greenberg. Bob has created a large archive of interviews like this one. It was filmed in my living room. The collection is called “The Brainwaves.” He sets up a camera and says “talk.” He doesn’t ask questions or interrupt.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Ravitch, Diane, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

Laura Chapman on The Big Lie about “Global Competition”

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2015 //
26

Laura Chapman, a frequent contributor to the blog, comments here in response to an article in the Boston Globe about whether the Common Core was “killing” kindergarten:

THE BIG LIE: “The United States is falling behind other countries in the resource that matters most in the new global economy: human capital,” declared a 2008 report from the National Governors Association. Creating a common set of “internationally benchmarked” standards was seen as the best way to close the persistent achievement gaps between students of different races and between rich and poor school districts.”

THE BIG LIE: I have found only two international benchmarking documents in the early history of the Common Core. The first was in 1998 with comparisons of standards in two states and the math and science standards in Japan and standards available from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS). The second report in 2008. titled “Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education,” was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates and GE Foundations. The author was a professional writer of reports. The advisory committee included seven governors or former governors, CEOs at Intel and Microsoft, three senior state and large metro area education officials, three advocates for minority groups, one foundation, and five university faculty, only two of these scholars in education. The most important source of information was the data analytics expert at the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). In this report, benchmarking is little more than a process of: (a) identifying the nations that score high on international tests, then (b) assuming the scores reflect higher expectations, and then (c) looking at some economic descriptors for those countries.

The result is a set of dubious inferences– high test scores and high standards are predicates for economic prosperity. Dubious should be written DUBIOUS, especially because this publication was rolled out with great fanfare in the midst of the 2008 crash of the world economy…for reasons that have no bearing on international test scores, no bearing on educational standards, no bearing on the nation’s children and teachers and public schools.

Nevertheless, “The executive summary (p.6) calls for the following:
Action 1: Upgrade state standards by adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12 to ensure that students are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to be globally competitive.

This is a very big lie. It is a dangerously misleading one when tossed into a discussion of kindergarten. There is no way to internationally benchmark standards or tests for every grade or subject because the meaning of “internationally benchmarked” is limited to test scores on international tests in at most three subjects, no international tests yet in kindergarten.

On top of those insistent misrepresentations from the nation’s governors and those involved in the whole Common Core Experiment to save the economy is it not strange that we find no demand at all for more and better knowledge of geography, cultural history including the arts, political history, and world languages–all of which might actually bear on functioning with savvy and grace on an international stage?

If the only or the prime value of our nation’s children and youth is economic, we are back to the same wretched outlook on children as that which existed before child labor laws. The Governors are still using this appalling rhetoric, treating the nation’s children and youth as more or less useful and productive for the economy. The same for their teachers. What will it take to get a reversal of this narrow and attitude that “It is perfectly OK to think of kids as economically worthless, or worthwhile, or somewhere in between?

The real causes of the so-called achievement gap are the result of thinking that test scores are objective…when they are not. It is the result of thinking that humans should all be thoroughly standardized to perform in the same way, at the same time, to the same level on a set of test questions that only predict scores on other tests. And those tests and scores are the marketing tools of choice for the unregulated testing industry.

Test scores have been a major weapon in the arsenal of federal and state policies designed to produce, reproduce, and not to reduce the huge disparities in income and opportunities in this nation and to distract attention from real fraud and abuse. Children are not responsible for the fate of the economy. They did not tank the economy in 2008. Nor did their teachers.

This nation is in desperate need for more ample education and for more generous views of humanity than has come from the National Governor’s Association, the Secretary of Education, corporate leaders, billionaires, and the press. The press has become too lazy. This piece about kindergarten does little more than recycle talking points from easy to find and ready-made sources.”

Categories Corporate Reform, Economy, Education Industry, International
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