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The Los Angeles School Board Race Next Tuesday

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2017 //
4

It seems every school board race in Los Angeles is a struggle for the existence of public education.

That is because Eli Broad and his billionaire friends pour millions of dollars into local school board races (and Eli is one of the few billionaires who actually lives in Los Angeles) to try to control it.

Why do they want to control it? None of them has a child in the system. They despise public schools and they want to turn Los Angeles into a charter school demonstration district. It is all about power and money. No matter how many scandals they are in charter schools in Los Angeles or in California, or how many charter leaders are arrested, or how much money is stolen or misappropriated, the charter school advocates won’t give up. They refuse to devote their energy and money to rebuilding the Los Angeles public school system.

Despite Eli Broad’s last-minute disavowal of Betsy DeVos, don’t be fooled. He is thrilled to see a like-minded reformer in charge of the U.S. Department of Education. After all, he is used to it. He was best buddies with Arne Duncan and John King. It wouldn’t do to have someone in the federal Department who actually cared about public schools.

The Network for Public Education Action Fund hopes you will vote for pro-public school candidates next Tuesday.

In District 2, one of the most vociferous advocates of privatization is Monica Garcia. We urge you to vote either for Lisa Alva (teacher) or Carl Petersen (parent) so that Garcia is forced into a runoff.

NPE Action Fund did not make an endorsement in the race for school board chair.

I personally endorsed Steve Zimmer because I know him and believe that he will be far better than any of his challengers. Eli Broad, Richard Riordan, and Michael Bloomberg have bundled a large amount of money to defeat Steve, and that’s reason enough to know that he want him gone. He has tried to be reasonable but they don’t want anyone reasonable. They want a puppet.

I urge you to vote in District 2 for either Alva or Petersen.

And to vote for Steve Zimmer, if you live in his district.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Politics, Privatization

Vicki Cobb: I Attended the Great Debate About Charter Schools at Intelligence Squared

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2017 //
15

On March 1, there was a heated debate around the proposition “Charter Schools Are Overrated,” hosted by Intelligence Squared. The room in New York City was packed. Two academics–Gary Miron of Western Michigan University and Julian Vasquez Heilig of Sacramento State–debated two charter advocates–Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform and Gerard Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute in D.C.

Education Week covered the debate here.

Vicki Cobb, a celebrated writer of science books for children, attended the debate and reports on it here. Cobb notes that she previously served on the board of a charter school, so was not anti-charter. Apparently the audience was evenly divided or undecided before the debate.

Cobb describes the major issues: the question of democracy and control; the question of teacher turnover. On the matter of data, charter schools on the whole perform no better or worse than public schools. Some get higher scores, some get lower scores. It is a wash. But as the anti-charter side pointed out, test scores are not everything.

As Julian Vasquez Heilig argued for the motion: “Charter schools, if they don’t have public accountability, direct public accountability, are antidemocratic. So, saying that publicly elected school boards and districts and unions, which are also democratic organizations are an old idea — I don’t think democracy is an old idea. In fact, I think we need excessive democracy when it comes to our thinking about education reform. We need to avoid education reform that is top down and concentrates power in the hands of just a few people.”

Cobb writes, “By the way, the team for the proposition “Charter Schools Are Overrated,” won the debate.

According to Education Week, The debate’s winner was determined by the percentage of audience members who changed their minds. In the first vote of live audience members, 33 percent cast votes for the motion and 31 percent against. In the final vote, 54 percent were for the motion and 40 percent were against. The rest were undecided.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization

Peter Greene: Claudio Sanchez of NPR Sends a Love Note to the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2017 //
48

Peter Greene reports on an NPR program explaining charter schools. Perhaps you thought the program would give equal time to charter advocates and charter critics. Perhaps you thought you thought the program might explain why charters are controversial. Perhaps you thought that NPR–supposedly a bastion of liberalism–might explain why Trump, DeVos, the Koch brothers, the Waltons, and every red-state governor–loves them. Or why blue-state Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly not to allow more of them.

http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/03/npr-explains-charter-schools.html?spref=tw

If you thought that, you guessed by now that none of those things happened.

Claudio Sanchez of NPR interviewed three charter cheerleaders and tossed them softball questions.

Maybe this is what NPR had to do to justify the subsidy it gets from the Walton Family Foundation.

For shame.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Media, Privatization

Massachusetts: State Board Rejects Request to Double Size of Chinese Immersion Charter School

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2017 //
12

You may recall that voters in Massachusetts overwhelmingly rejected a ballot referendum to expand charter schools in the state. The vote was 62-38%, with only wealthy districts (which are not targeted for charters) supporting the referendum. The state has not yet reached its “cap” on charters, so new ones are still opening, despite the clear public objection to them. The public understands that every dollar for a charter is taken away from their local public schools.

On Monday night, the State Board of Education rejected a request to double the enrollment of the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School. Last November, the community voted against charter expansion because of the drain on the resources of the public schools.

“HADLEY — After hearing testimony that the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School is draining resources from local school districts and not educating a sufficiently diverse student body, the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on Monday turned down a proposed expansion to nearly double its enrollment.

“In a voice vote about four hours into its meeting in Malden, the board denied a 452-student enrollment increase at the charter school recommended by Mitchell D. Chester, the commissioner of elementary and secondary education. Chester called the decade-old school an “exemplar” of what the charter-school movement is about.

“But Michael Morris, acting superintendent for the Amherst-Pelham Regional School District, told the board that adding students would be transferring funds from schools where underserved students are educated to one attended by more privileged children. Amherst, Morris said, is already sending $2.24 million from the school and town budgets to the charter school.

“Morris also presented statistics showing that the demographics indicate the charter school is not meeting its mission, with PVCICS having fewer low-income students and English language learners than Amherst schools, and special education children often returning to Amherst after being enrolled in the Hadley school.”

Barbara Madeline, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said that the school should be investigated for its failure to meet the needs of students with disabilities.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Funding, Massachusetts, Privatization, Special Education

Jane Doe: Why I Quit as a Teacher at Success Academy Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2017 //
28

This letter was sent to me by the person who created the SCAM advertisements in the previous post. i asked to explain why she decided to leave her job as a teacher at Success Academy Charter Schools. She sent the following commentary.

She writes:


When I applied to teach at Success Academy Charter Schools, I was just out of college with little teaching experience, and I was interviewing at every school I could, hoping to get my first real teaching job. As soon as I walked into Success’s Wall Street office for the interview, I knew this was a different kind of school. The space looks and feels like corporate headquarters, complete with glass-walled conference rooms and a minimalist aesthetic.

I was called into a boardroom with five or so other applicants, and someone from the “Talent” team (in charge of hiring) showed us a slick marketing video: we were being seduced. Then, one by one, we were asked to deliver a mini-lesson to everyone present. After each turn, we were given explicit feedback, which the next person was expected to implement immediately. It became clear that this was less of an interview, and more of a practical test to determine how well we could emulate the specific teaching style Success subscribes to. It was also an early introduction to the network’s trademark language and unique demands: we were told that every employee pledges support for the “dual mission,” which is to say that our job description included advocacy for “school choice” in addition to our roles as teachers.

I was placed at Success Academy Cobble Hill, which made news last year after The New York Times released a video of “Labsite teacher” Charlotte Dial berating a first-grader for stumbling during “Number Stories,” before she publicly rips the young girl’s worksheet in half. (This practice is common enough to have a nickname within the network, the “rip and redo.”) Contrary to statements made by Ms. Dial, CEO Eva Moskowitz, and Principal Kerri Tabarcea, this type of interaction is not at all out of the ordinary at Success. Ms. Dial’s harsh classroom management was known – in fact, celebrated – by school leaders. Newer hires were even sent to Ms. Dial so they could learn to model her “no-nonsense” teaching, earning her the “Labsite teacher” title and a higher salary. Perhaps most disturbingly, Charlotte Dial is still employed as a first-grade teacher at Success Academy Cobble Hill, sending a clear message to students, families, and other teachers in the network.

One of the real and valuable benefits to working at Success is that there is remarkable focus on professional development. Teachers are observed often, given feedback almost constantly, and participate in formal professional development sessions at least once a week. The caveat is that this training is entirely geared towards the specific strategies developed by Success for the purposes of social control over “scholars” and high test scores for the network.

“Scholars” are taught to value urgency. Children are expected to complete transitions in a given amount of time, often as short as ten seconds – taking any longer is considered unacceptable. This teaches students that learning is precious. It also teaches that taking one’s time, moving at one’s own pace, is irresponsible. It was heartbreaking to know that I was imparting on my young students the very same constant pressure that I felt from my supervisors.

Teachers’ directions to students must follow a stubborn formula, and are enforced just as strictly. “When I say go, safely and silently walk to your desk, take out your book, and begin reading. You have ten seconds, go.” Once at their desks, students will already know the correct posture for reading; they know that to avoid a “consequence,” their feet need to be flat and still on the floor, with their backs straight against their chairs, and two hands on their books. When I allowed for a more relaxed atmosphere in my classroom, I was reprimanded and lectured about the value of posture while reading. Any wavering from Success philosophy is treated as heresy, and often encourages unwanted attention from administrators – for instance, a teacher who fails to maintain perfect silence while students are on the carpet might be ordered to participate in “live coaching,” wherein a superior stands in the back of the room during the lesson, whispering directions into a microphone, which the teacher hears through an earpiece. In the middle of a sentence, the teacher will hear, “narrate and consequence voice,” and is expected to immediately use pre-practiced language to correct a murmuring student in the corner. Part of the reason I accepted a position at Success was for the professional development, but this was not what I had in mind.

Most of the students I taught at Success dreaded coming to school, as did most of the teachers. It is a grueling, relentless atmosphere where every second is cherished as potential learning time, and every slip-up garners an immediate consequence. There is a small fraction of people – students and adults alike – who thrive in this extreme environment. More often, the constant pressure makes for tense relationships, high anxiety, and negative affects on health and behavior. During testing season, each Success school is shipped extra pairs of pants to keep on hand, because inevitably several third graders will be so scared to sacrifice test time for a bathroom trip, they’ll have an accident. Some students react to this extreme environment in extreme ways; at the strictest Success locations, it is commonplace to hear screaming and crying in the hallways throughout the day as children as young as five break down for one reason or another. Different Success locations have different ways of dealing with this behavior, ranging from the infamous “got to go” list at Fort Greene to School Safety interventions elsewhere. If there was screaming in the hallway, one of my students would silently get up to close the classroom door. Other students continued working, both because they were unfazed and because they knew they would be held accountable for being on-task regardless of what was happening around them.

Every teacher imparts learning to students outside of their explicit lesson content. Given the tenor of current events, I have been thinking about what priorities and values I want to model in my teaching and embody in my curriculum. I want my students to know the importance of empathy, respect, and generosity. I want them to know that they matter, and that every other human matters too. I want them to feel empowered to speak up to an authority figure – including me – if they feel they are being treated unjustly. These are crucial social-emotional understandings, and though they may not affect test scores, they will surely affect students’ lives. Not only does the curriculum at Success ignore social-emotional learning, but the structure of the day allows for such minimal peer-to-peer interaction that students are unable to learn such skills from each other.

Like so many others, I quit Success because the brand of teaching the network demands prevented me from providing the quality of education my students deserve. When I tried to accommodate a restless student by allowing her to fidget on the carpet, I was told I was doing her a disservice and was ordered to keep her still. When I tried to advocate for under-performing students to undergo psychological testing so that they might receive services they needed, I was ignored or admonished, and in one instance told flat-out that the school was not testing students so as to avoid being legally obligated to provide services to them. I watched coworkers struggle to decide whether to report suspected family abuse when leaders didn’t share their concerns, given that network protocol is for school administration to make such calls. (Legally, teachers and psychologists are mandated reporters and cannot be punished for reporting suspected abuse. But with no union representation, it is difficult for an employee to feel confident that this will hold true in practice.) I was sick of overlooking the profit-driven motivations of the network, and sick of being forced to comply with practices that I believed were damaging my students.

When I use the word scammed, I am not just talking about money, and I am not just talking about those who send their kids to Success. I’m talking about the whole country, because all of us are being scammed by Charter advocates like Betsy DeVos and Success CEO Eva Moskowitz. The changes they seek put public schools at a disadvantage, as they are being forced to fight with Charters for space, funding, and high-engagement/high-resource families. Meanwhile, not all Charters perform like Success. Some are much better, with more emphasis on experiential learning and less emphasis on strict behavioral expectations. Others, like those DeVos lobbied for in Detroit, have test scores similar to or worse than nearby public schools, with the same downsides of Success – no unions, poor treatment of special education students, and high suspension rates, to name a few.

What I want people to know when they see advertisements for Success Academy is that to enroll or apply to a charter chain is to propagate a very specific brand of education. Success is funded in part by private donors like the Koch brothers and the family that owns Wal-Mart, because conservatives and big corporations have a vested interest in chipping away at public education. I call upon all teachers, all parents and caregivers, and all who care about public education to resist this model of teaching and learning. Our students deserve better.

NYT article on Dial vid: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/success-academy-teacher-rips-up-student-paper.html

“Got to go” list: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.html

On DeVos in Detroit: http://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2017/01/18/betsy-devos-charter-schools/96718680/

Teacher turnover at SA: http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/teacher-turnover-success-academy-charter-schools

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Discipline, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Ads for Scammed Academy Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2017 //
12

A former teacher at Success Academy charter schools–let’s call her Jane Doe–decided to use her talents as a graphic designer to create advertisements for the school where she had worked. For some reason, there are ads on billboards, in buses, and on subway trains urging students to apply to Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools. This is odd because we have been told that there are long waiting lists. The waiting lists are so long that there must be a lottery. If there are long waiting lists, why are there ads to recruit students to apply? Maybe the purpose of the ads is to create a demand to exceed the supply? A marketing tool?

Jane Doe attached this comment:

I chose to respond to advertisements for Success Academy Charter Schools because every time I see those ads on websites or in subway stations, I wish they told more of the story. It’s not that the ads are based on lies; it’s true that “scholars” at Success in every grade have science class every day, it’s true that Success puts a lot of emphasis on parent/family engagement, and it’s true that the average kid at Success does much better on standardized tests than the average kid in a (non-selective) NYC public school. All of those things make it more likely for those kids to “succeed,” especially if your idea of success includes admission into a liberal arts college.

It’s also true that Success is funded in part by private donors like the Koch brothers and the family that owns Wal-Mart, because conservatives and big corporations have a vested interest in chipping away at public education. The high test scores are real, and they matter, but are they worth the pressure Success puts on its employees and its students? During testing season, the Success Network ships each school extra pairs of pants to keep on hand, because inevitably several third graders will be so scared to sacrifice test time for a bathroom trip, they’ll have an accident. There are countless tiny examples that illustrate this extreme environment, a few of which I chose for this assignment.

Families don’t pay for a Success Academy education. When I use the word scammed, I am not just talking about money, and I am not just talking about those who send their kids to Success. I’m talking about the whole country, because all of us are being scammed by Charter advocates like Betsy DeVos and Success CEO Eva Moskowitz. Neither Moskowitz nor DeVos has any actual experience in education, yet they’ve each made a wealthy career for themselves out of advocating for so-called school choice reform. The changes they seek put public schools at a disadvantage, as they are forced to fight with charters for space, funding, and high-engagement/high-resource families. Meanwhile, not all charters perform like Success. Some are much better, with more emphasis on social-emotional learning and less emphasis on strict behavioral expectations. Others, like those DeVos lobbied for in Detroit, have test scores similar to or worse than nearby public schools, with the same downsides of Success – no unions, poor treatment of special education students, and high suspension rates, to name a few.

Ultimately, my goal is for people to see a more complex picture of Success Academy. Education reform is a complex issue, especially when a person has their own kids in mind. But we need to talk about charters for what they are: a scheme to gradually privatize education to further benefit the ruling class. I hope that if and when a person sees my “ads” in conjunction with the original Success ads, it will give them a better picture of the motivations, complications, and realities of Success Academy schools.

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Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, Privatization, Testing

Glen Ford: DeVos, Trump, Booker, Obama: Enemies of Public Education

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2017 //
51

I am reposting this because I forgot to put in the link. Please listen. It is a lecture so you can listen while driving. I knew the late Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation, a very rightwing foundation, and I can confirm that he knowingly manipulated black leaders in Wisconsin to get vouchers passed.

Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, is a fierce critic of corporate education reform. He is equally hard on Democrats and Republicans who have sold out their schools to satisfy rightwing foundations and Wall Street.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/4666

In this post, he lacerates DeVos, Trump, Booker, and Obama
as enemies of public schools, who sold out their community schools to satisfy their funders or (in DeVos’s case) personal ideology.

Here is an excerpt:

“Sometimes, when ruling class competitors collide, the villainy of both factions is made manifest. Donald Trump did the nation’s public schools a great service by nominating Betsy DeVos, the awesomely loathsome billionaire Amway heiress, for secretary of Education. In turning over that rock, Trump exposed the raw corruption and venality at the core of the charter school privatization juggernaut. Only an historic tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence saved DeVos from rejection by the U.S. Senate. Two Republicans abandoned their party’s nominee, joining a solid bloc of Democrats, including New Jersey’s Cory Booker, a school privatizer that crawled out of the same ideological sewer as DeVos and has long been her comrade and ally. Booker defected from his soul mate in fear that the DeVos stench might taint his own presidential ambitions.

“The New York Times editorial board, a champion of charters, bemoaned that DeVos’ “appointment squanders an opportunity to advance public education research, experimentation and standards, to objectively compare traditional public school, charter school and voucher models in search of better options for public school students” – a devious way of saying that the Senate hearings exposed the slimy underbelly of the charter privatization project and the billionaires of both parties that have guided and sustained it.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Obama, Privatization, Trump

Glen Ford Explains Corey Booker, Howard Fuller, and the Corporate Assault on Public Education

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2017 //
16

Journalist Glen Ford explains and eviscerates the corporate education movement. He shows how black leaders like Corey Booker joined the rightwing effort to destroy the key pillars of progressivism: unions and public education. He shows the important role of Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation in figuring out how to use black leaders to achieve far-right goals.

Glen Ford is editor of the Black Agenda Reprt.

This is a brilliant analysis of the co-opting of black politicians by the corporate movement.

Categories Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Unions

Peter Greene: Betsy Drew the Wrong Lesson from the Failure of Obama and Duncan

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2017 //
17

Peter Greene read Betsy DeVos’s speech to CPAC and realized that she totally misunderstood why Obama and Duncan’s reforms failed. It wasn’t because they spent money. It was because they spent money on bad ideas. Now she proposes to spend money on vouchers, which have failed miserably, and on charters, which Obama and Duncan promoted. What is new about her approach? She is candid: she wants to destroy public education. Obama and Duncan either believed or pretended that public education would get better because of high-stakes testing, punishments, and charter schools. They were wrong. DeVos is wrong too. The difference is that we already know she is wrong, but she doesn’t.

Greene writes:

“School improvement grants were like food stamps that could only be spent on baby formula, ostrich eggs, and venison—and it didn’t matter if the families receiving the stamps lived on a farm with fresh milk and chicken eggs, or if they were vegetarians, or if they lived where no store sells ostrich eggs, or if there were no babies in the family. The Department of Education used the grants to dictate strategy and buy compliance with their micro-managing notions about how schools had to be fixed.

“As with many classic reform moves, plenty of folks on the ground level could have told the reformers what was wrong with their plan. But as DeVos’s comments show, the damage of School Improvement Grants is not only in wasted money, it’s also in convicting the wrong suspect and discrediting a whole reform approach.

“DeVos and other conservative reformers are taking the real lesson of the grant program’s failure: “spending money on the wrong thing for schools doesn’t help,” and shortening it to a far more damaging assessment: “spending money on schools doesn’t help.”

“The Obama-Duncan-King program didn’t just fail, they say, but it also helped discredit the whole idea of funding schools at all. Thanks Obama.”

Given the miserable failure of school choice in Michigan and Detroit, you would think DeVos was open to reflecting on the error of her ideas. But don’t make that mistake. Her ideas of school “reform” are based on ideology and theology. They won’t change. They can’t be proved or disproved. They are set in stone. Evidence doesn’t matter.

If allowed to do her wishes, public schools will be defunded (they are “godless”), unions will disappear, for-profit entrepreneurs will cash in, and a million weeds will bloom.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Vouchers

Carol Burris: How Charter Schools Use Money and Political Clout to Take Over Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2017 //
10

Carol Burris writes here about the struggle between the parents of the John Wister Elementary School in Philadelphia and the rich, powerful Mastery Charter Chain, which longed to take control of Wister.

Philadelphia has been under the control of a “School Reform Commission” since 2001; three of its five members are controlled by the governor. Its superintendent is a graduate of the unaccredited Eli Broad academy. It is worth your time to read the timeline of the state takeover of Philadelphia. The state took over because the district’s finances were in poor shape and its test scores are low. Guess what: 16 years laters, its finances are in poor shape (due to state underfunding) and its test scores are low.

In years past, parents had the right to vote on whether to go charter. But that right was taken away because parents didn’t always vote yes.

The parents organized to fight off Mastery, which is run by a non-educator and which practices stern discipline, the “no-excuses” philosophy.

The Mastery Charter School chain, known for its tough discipline and “no-excuses” philosophy, was already running more than 10 schools in the city. CEO Scott Gordon’s background was in business. He founded a home health-care company and marketed cereal before starting Mastery. Just the kind of guy who should be running schools, right?

The parents resisted. For a brief moment, they got a reprieve.

Then the big money kicked in along with the political connections, and Wister was handed over to Mastery.

Charter schools are not public schools. The charter industry is rapacious and greedy. It is never satisfied. It wants more. Arne Duncan was on its side; John King, who founded his own no-excuses charter school, was on its side. Betsy DeVos is its champion.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Philadelphia
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