Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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Allie Gross: Detroit Charter School Fires 8 Teachers Without Explanation or Warning

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2016 //
4

Allie Gross has been reporting on the misadventures of the charter industry in Detroit in the Metro Times.

 

This week, she wrote about a charter school, University Academy, that fired eight teachers without any explanation or cause. When teachers have no union, the school doesn’t need to give any explanation about why teachers are fired.

 

Last fall, Allie wrote about the $3.5 million that Michigan doled out to charter applicants who never opened a school.

 

The latter article includes a useful summary of the U.S. Department of Education’s very costly investment in the charter industry:

 

In 1995, four years after the first charter school law was enacted, the U.S. Department of Education started its Charter Schools Program grant. The general gist of the initiative was state education agencies could vie for funding and then host their own competitions for sub-grantees who wanted to create or expand charter schools.

 

The goal of the grant is two-pronged: 1. It aims to expand the number of “high-quality” charter schools across the nation and, 2. It seeks to evaluate the effects of charter schools. The first aim is achieved through three types of grants that the U.S. Department of Education asks state education agencies to offer: planning grants, implementation grants, and, lastly, dissemination grants.

 

That first year the department gave out just over $4 million; today it doles out upward of $125 million. According to the Department of Education, the federal government has spent more than $3 billion on the charter sector in the past 20 years.

 

Michigan received $23 million from the program in 2007 and in 2010 decided to apply again, this time asking for $44 million. By this point the state had 240 charter schools, and as the application explained, there was an expectation of growth. Just a few months earlier lawmakers decided to lift the cap on the number of charter schools university-authorizers could sponsor.

 

This predicted expansion was highlighted in MDE’s application, as was the goal of ensuring authorizers would have high quality operators to choose from when they weren’t burdened with a cap.

 

In 1995, the same year that the Charter Schools Program grants started, Michigan opened its first charter school, a National Heritage Academy in Grand Rapids. Today, NHA, which was started by billionaire J.C. Huizenga, is the state’s largest charter school operator, with 48 different schools across Michigan. This multi-site, for-profit model has proliferated in Michigan — currently, 79 percent of Michigan’s charter schools are run by for-profit charter management organizations — and cracking this monopoly was a stated goal in MDE’s application. Specifically Michigan explained how “planning funds” could help level the playing field and empower grassroots community groups with charter school ideas.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, For-Profit, Michigan, Privatization, Teachers, Unions

Help Sustain the Most Independent Source of Education News in Connecticut

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2016 //
0

Jonathan Pelto is the most independent and reliable source of education news in Connecticut. He has prodigious research skills and uses them to support public education as to expose skulduggery, frauds, and privatization. Jonathan took charge of organizing the Education Bloggers Network, which now has nearly 300 pro-public education bloggers. Jonathan compares them to the Committees of Correspondence that informed and encouraged the movement for independence before the American Revolution.

 

Jonathan needs our help to keep his blog alive.

 

Connecticut is overrun with corporate reformers–millionaires and billionaires– who live in exclusive enclaves like Greenwich, Darien, and New Canaan. They don’t send their children to public schools or even charter schools, but they want to control them. The corporate reformers are major supporters of Governor Malloy, who has shown deference to charter schools in his budgeting and his appointments.

 

We need Jonathan to keep shining the light on the state government and its cozy dealing with the state’s 1%.

 

 

You can contribute by going to this site.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

What Is HANY and Who Funds Them?

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2016 //
19

HANY is High Achievement New York. It has mounted a very costly campaign to oppose the opt out movement and to support high-stakes testing and the Common Core.

 

Who is funding their expensive campaign to maintain the status quo?

 

Fortunately, blogger and former teacher Deb Escobar has done the research and provides the answers. This will come as no surprise to readers of this blog. HANY is funded by the Billionaire Boys Club.

 

Who is the Man Behind the Curtain? Why, it is Bill Gates!

 

But he is not alone.

 

The purpose of this post is to pull back the curtain and let you know who is funding this massive campaign that aims to fix our “broken” system. Because, you know, it’s all for the children. Let’s start with their coalition members, beginning with Arva Rice, President and CEO of the New York Urban League, who previously was affiliated with Paul Tudor Jones (yes the hedge fund guy) and his Robin Hood Foundation.

 

Then there is New York Campaign for Achievement Now (NYCAN), part of the larger 50-state education reform group. The funding stream for 50CAN includes Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bush Foundation, JP Morgan Chase, and the Walton Foundation, among others. A veritable who’s-who of big money in the education reform game. The NY chapter adds more money from Gates, along with Bloomberg Philanthrophies, Kenneth M. Hirsch and William E. Simon.

 

Include Association for a Better New York, founded by real estate tycoon Bill Rudin. Their self-stated goal is to “promote neighborhood revitalization.” AKA gentrification. AKA keeping their fingers on the real estate prize in NY.

 

Coalition member Parents for Excellence in Bethlehem has bought the Common Core Gates funded spin. Co-President Kim Namkoong is a parent, also a mathematician and computer programmer. She is a face for the “How is My Kid Doing?” campaign that is funded by – you guessed it – the Council for a Strong America folks and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Bethlehem Parents for Excellence has a lackluster website (a surprise considering Namkoong’s stated occupation) that does not list its donors. They advocate for common core and testing.

 

Membership includes reformy groups Educators4Excellence and StudentsFirstNY. Educators4Excellence, also funded by the Gates Foundation, is comprised of anti-union young teachers, many of whom are alumni of Teach For America. See ed blogger Jonathan Pelto’s research on the group here. StudentsFirstNY is that pro-charter, pro-voucher group that shares its physical address with New York Charter queen Eva Moskowitz’ organization. NYS Families for Excellent Schools also shares that same address and is a hedge-funded PAC for education reforms.

 

The corporate reformers are a cozy group. There are not many of them, but they have so much money that they pop up again and again, singing the same tired old song. Test your children (not mine); put your children in “no excuses” charters (not mine); testing will make everyone smarter; the harder the tests, the smarter everyone will be and the more the achievement gap will close.

 

Evidence has nothing to do with their campaign. They do what the Man (or Men) Behind the Curtain want them to do.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Steven Singer: Watch Out, Pittsburgh! The Privatizers Are Coming Again!

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2016 //
4

Steven Singer warns that the wealthy privatizers are gearing up to take back the public schools. At the last school board elections, parents, educators, and community leaders joined together to throw out the corporate reformers. The people who actually send their children to Pittsburgh public schools gained control of the board. One of the first decisions of the new board was to cancel a contract with Teach for America.

 

Corporate reformers can’t tolerate losing control of schools their own children don’t attend. Now they are coming back, with a PAC and lots of money, something that supporters of public schools are usually short of.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Pittsburgh

Liberia Needs Free Public Schools, not Privatization and Outsourcing of Its Responsibility to Children

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2016 //
4

Liberia is seriously considering a proposal to outsource its elementary schools to foreign investors, notably Bridge International Academies, backed by wealthy Americans.

 

This Nigerian-born, American-educated journalist and historian thinks privatization is a terrible idea.

 

C. Patrick Burrowes writes that the plan to privatize what should be a government responsibility is a boondoggle.

 

He writes:

 

Poor Liberia! Few countries in the world have been as ill served by its government officials, as Liberia has been.

 

In the 1920s, Liberia earned the opprobrium of the world when some selfish officials opted to supply laborers by force to private foreign contractors. The cries and protests of ordinary Liberians went unheeded by them, until international pressure brought an end to their heartless scheme.

 

If this government is allowed to outsource the entire elementary school system, Liberia will enter the annals of infamy once again. At stake is not just the future of education in Liberia. If this proposal is allowed to pass, it will be the beginning of the end for universal public education, a concept with roots dating back to 1647. At stake is the future schooling of children around the world.

 

The proposal must be blocked, not just as a matter of principle. It must be opposed because it is based on faulty logic. Furthermore, its advocates provide no evidence to support their radical and disruptive experiment with the nation’s school system. Instead, they offer ideological buzzwords like “privatization” and “technology.”

 

But technologies cannot teach; people do. The top three factors for ensuring student success in early childhood education are: good teachers, good teachers, and good teachers. In other words, the quality of teaching and teacher-support are the strongest predictor of quality. If successful Liberians are humble and honest, we will readily acknowledge that we owe whatever careers we have today to the foundation laid by good elementary school teachers.

 

Throughout its history, Liberia produced thousands of such dedicated and self-sacrificing educators. The late Albert Porte and Dr. Mary Antoinette Brown-Sherman are just two well-known examples. Each of us could name several others who impacted our lives directly. Those teachers worked with few, if any, advanced technologies. Yet, their impact in the lives of students was immeasurable. So, why the urgent need now for the outsourcing of curriculum delivery and classroom management by cell phones?

 

The main reason is this: The Liberian educational system over the last decade has been driven by donors’ agendas, with little systematic planning based on local needs. Donors love giving chairs, buildings and other concrete objects that they can slap their logos on for all to see. It is fine to accept those inputs, but government should have its own master plan. The plan should determine allocation of resources, not the other way around….

 

Moments arise in history that tests the honor and moral fiber of a people. The forced-labor scandal of the 1920s was one. This educational outsourcing boondoggle is another. By our actions, let us prove ourselves worthy of the respect we want from the rest of the world and from our descendants.

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, International, Privatization

Laura Chapman Explains the Purpose of Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2016 //
22

Laura Chapman, retired arts educator, explains the goals of standardized testing:

 

She writes:

 

 

“Here is another reason to opt out.

 

Test scores are collected and then marketed by greatschools.org. This non-profit is a sophisticated and well-funded system for gathering test scores and other information about students and parents, then selling that information. The website literally sells ads and licenses for access to test scores and other data on schools–public, private, and charter–with expansions planned for pre-school and daycare-centers.

 

This national data hog is funded by billionaire foundations unfriendly to public schools. The logos of the Gates, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold Foundations are prominently displayed. A list of 19 other supporters includes the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, Bradley Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, and New Schools Venture Fund among others. All of these supporters want to make public schools an artifact from the past.

 

Parents, if you patronize the tests, you feed the data hogs, and this one is one of the biggest.

 

Do not be naïve. Test scores are worth a lot of money and they are grist for publicity campaigns for projects and policies within and beyond your state. Here is an introduction to how greatschools uses test scores.

 

“The overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students at a given school do on each grade and subject test. For each test, ratings are assigned based on how well students perform relative to all other students in the state, and these ratings are averaged into an overall rating of 1 to 10.”

 

“The distribution of the GreatSchools Rating in a given state looks like a bell curve, with higher numbers of schools getting ratings in the “average” category, and fewer schools getting ratings in the “above average” or “below average” categories.”

 

For states where ratings can also include student growth and college readiness information, the overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students do on each sub-rating.” There are three sub-ratings.

 

1. Test Scores: “The test score sub-rating examines how students at a school performed on standardized tests compared with other schools in the state. Specifically, this rating compares student proficiency rates for each grade and subject with all schools in the state. “ (Note that “proficiency” is not defined).

 

2. Student Growth: This “sub-rating looks at how much progress individual students have made on reading and math assessments during the past year or more. This sub-rating is based on student growth models, which can vary from state to state. (Greatschools recycles data from each state’s value-added measure, percentile growth calculation or comparable “growth” measure. Growth is a euphemism for a calculation that requires the test scores of individual students for more than one year. These calculations, based on gains in test scores, are notoriously misleading. They assume, for example, that there are no major differences in the math and reading tests that a student takes in the third and the fourth grade).

 

3. College Readiness: This sub-rating combines a high school graduation rate with data about the student scores on college entrance exams (SAT, ACT). These “are indicators of how well schools are preparing students for success in college and beyond.”

 

Now comes the “weighting” of these dubious measures derived from test scores. Here you go. Begin quote:

 

Sub-ratings are weighted equally, though actual weights depend on the amount of data available per school and what grades that school serves.

 

For instance, a K-5 school has no college readiness data, so the overall rating would be based 50% on student achievement and 50% on student growth.

 

In contrast, the rating for a high school with data for all three measures would be based 33% on student achievement, 33% on student growth, and 33% on college readiness.

 

Each sub-rating represents how a school compares to all other schools in the state on each measure, and these sub-ratings are averaged into an overall rating.” More detail is at http://www.greatschools.org/catalog/pdf/New_Ratings_Methodology_Report.pdf

 

It is not surprising that this system gives the highest possible rating to the notoriously test-driven Success Academy in NY. Take a look at some other ratings here http://www.greatschools.org/about/ratings.page

 

Poke around the greatschools website to see how this non-profit can operate as a mega for-profit operation serving big box stores, and multiple industries— financial, real estate, charter expansions, testing and text publishers.

 

The gigantic “partner” basket at this website offers eclectic fare: It includes Walmart, Target, Yale Center for Social Emotional Intelligence, Survey Monkey, Forbes, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Dunn & Bradstreet, US Department of Education, Goldman Sachs, and more .

 

“The website says that “A range of partners have been critical to GreatSchools’ success. We are grateful to these partners, a sampling of which can be found here.”

 

Look at the list and remember this is JUST a sampling and notice how partners are categorized.

 

CONTENT: 321 Fast Draw; Algonquin Books; Ashoka Foundation; Bay Citizen; California Watch; College Board; Common Sense Media; DK Publishing; Film Sight Productions; IDEO; Learning Ally; Learning and Leadership Center; Mind/Shift; National Center for Learning Disabilities; Parenting.com; Reading Rockets; Scholastic; Treasure Bay, Inc.; UCLA Department of Psychology; US Department of Education; Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

 

COMMUNITY AND FAMILY ENGAGEMENT: Families Empowered; Hillsborough County Public Schools; Iridescent Learning; KIPP; Magnet Schools of America; Miami Dade County Public Schools; Rocketship Education; Stand Up for Students; Step Up for Students; US Department of Housing and Urban Development

 

RESEARCH: Gallup Education; SurveyMonkey (see also Licensees); SRI; Rockman Et Al.

 

MARKETING & OUTBOUND MEDIA: Care2.com; Common Sense Media; Forbes; NBC News Education; The Bully Project; Univision.

 

LICENSEES: Apartments.com, Brain Pop; Digital Map Products; Dunn & Bradstreet; Fannie Mae; Maponics; Michael & Susan Dell Foundation; Military Child Education Coalition; Move Sales, Inc.; National Association of Charter School Authorizers; National Housing Trust; Onboard Informatics; Policy Map; Realtors Property Resource; SurveyMonkey; Target, US Department of Housing and Urban Development; Walmart; WolfNet; Zillow.

 

What do these “partners get” for signing on? At minimum, it is the opportunity to become an advertiser or license holder who can gain access to your student’s test scores—for a fee.

 

The greatschools website gives you some ad rates that direct you to https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619

 

At the bottom of the great schools rate page you can see that these advertising packages are offered via the Rubicon Project (bottom right of the page. Click on Rubicon Project to see what this “project “is.)

 

The Rubicon Project is the name for a company that scoops all of greatschools data and ratings and comments and personal information from users of the greatschools website and puts them in Rubicon’s “Advertising Automation Cloud.”

 

This data warehousing operation “brings buyers and sellers closer together on a robust advertising technology platform. One of the largest cloud and Big Data computing systems in the world, the Automation Cloud leverages over 50,000 algorithms and analyzes billions of data points in real-time to deliver the best results for sellers and buyers,” with 300 real-time data-driven decisions per transaction.”

 

Follow the money. The billionaire foundations gather the test scores and other information about schools. They are notoriously in favor of market-based education. The scores are translated into their dubious but “custom” rating scheme with direct links to Zillow (who has paid for a high end license).

 

The data and ratings and user data from the website migrate out from the greatschools website to Rubicon. For a fee, Rubicon facilitates rapid and custom access to the data and ratings from their “cloud,” (a data warehouse), promising clients they can “Efficiently find your target audience;” “build brand awareness,” “acquire new customers, and re-engage existing customers.”
https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619

 

I hope that this information gives parents another reason to opt out of the tests.

 

Greatschools has test data from every state, has a map of district boundaries searchable by zip codes, and it is seeking data well beyond that required by state or federal regulation such as such as schools safety, cleanliness, and parent involvement.

 

Do not feed the data hog. Do not make the billionaires smile. Opt of the tests.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Testing

Pelto: Malloy Aide Hired by DFER

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2016 //
5

This is really annoying. I stayed up late last night to write this post. And it disappeared!

 

Jonathan Pelto reported that Adam Goldfarb, former chief of staff to Connecticut’s commissioner of education Stefan Pryor, is going to work for Democrats for Education Reform, the hedge fund managers group that promotes charters.

 

Pryor now works in Rhode Island doing economic development for Governor  Gina Raimondo. Her husband roomed with Cory Booker.

 

What is the link that connects Pryor, Goldfarb, Raimondo, Booker? YALE.

 

Not any experience teaching. YALE.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Privatization, Rhode Island

Shame on ConnCAN!

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2016 //
10

Politico reports today that most teachers of the year agree test-based evaluations are the most demoralizing federal policy for teachers. Yet ConnCAN, the corporate reform group, is urging Connecticut legislators to stick with this failed program.

Shame on ConnCAN! Count on them to advocate for policies opposed by teachers and parents. Whom do they represent? Their biggest funder is the Sackler family, which became billionaires selling the highly addictive OxyContin.

And by the way, now that 50CAN has merged with StudentsFirst, it is time to recall that in the psychiatric literature, CAN refers to “child abuse and neglect.”

Politico writes:

“- Speaking of tests, 69 percent of State Teachers of the Year and finalists for State Teacher of the Year say that federal policy that has most damaged the professionalization of the teaching profession has required the use of standardized test scores in teacher evaluations. That’s according to new survey results released by the National Network of State Teachers of the Year: http://bit.ly/1UUGT8s.

“- In Connecticut, the state board will decide whether to adopt a state panel’s recommendation to delay linking student growth to teacher evaluations for the upcoming 2016-17 school year. Jennifer Alexander, CEO of the advocacy group ConnCAN, will testify in opposition to the measure, calling it “folding to political pressure and maintaining the status quo.” Meanwhile, the Connecticut General Assembly’s education committee has approved a bill that would ban the use of student growth in teacher evaluations.”

Categories ConnCAN, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Teacher Evaluations

The Ultimate Guide to Corporate Reform and the Buying of the Media

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2016 //
11

Why is the media so excited about school choice and so indifferent to the defunding of public education?

How did telegenic Campbell Brown, with no experience or background in education, become the face of teacher-bashing, anti-union, anti-public school advocacy? Why is she obsessed with the idea that public schools (but not charter schools or voucher schools) are filled with sexual predators, who prey on “our children” (not hers, actually, because they don’t attend a public school)?

 

Who pays for the attacks on public education and teachers? The linked article digs deep and answers almost all these questions. I say “almost” because it does not explain why Campbell Brown is obsessed with sexual predators in the public schools.

Categories Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Media, Walton Foundation

John Thompson: Corporate Reformers Descend on Oklahoma City to Inflict the “Edu-Politics of Destruction”

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2016 //
12

John Thompson, historian and teacher, thought that corporate reform was happening elsewhere, but not in Oklahoma City. But now they have arrived in full force, with all their failed and demoralizing strategies. It is such a good post that I am quoting a lot of it, but not all of it. I urge you to read the whole thing.

 

He writes:

 

It wasn’t until I left the fulltime classroom in 2010 that I saw out-of-state corporate reformers, ranging from the Walton Foundation and the Parent Revolution to ALEC, try to bring their competition-driven, edu-politics to Oklahoma City. I saw plenty of examples of Sooner state Reaganism, and the gutting of the social safety net. After all, we expect businessmen to play political hardball, as well as take risks and leverage capital in order to increase their profits. That is why we need the checks and balances of our democratic system to counter the “creative destruction” of capitalism. Some free market experiments will fail, but “its only money.” When schools gamble on market-driven policies, however, the losers are children.

 

 

Actually, even the economic game involves more than money, as we in Oklahoma have learned after our state adopted so much of the ALEC agenda of shrinking the size of government. Even as we cut funding by about 1/4th since 2008, national corporate reformers have imposed incredibly expensive and untested policies (such as Common Core testing and test-driven teacher evaluations), while encouraging the creaming of the easiest-to-educate (and the least-expensive-to-educate) students from neighborhood schools and into charter schools.

 

 

Before 2010, I only read about national conservative and neo-liberal school reformers who adopted a strategy of “convergence” or “flooding the zone” to drive rapid, “transformational change” in selected districts and schools. I didn’t personally witness the way that they used mass charterization, now called the “portfolio strategy,” to avoid the messiness of constitutional democracy. Freed of local governance, corporate reformers promoted a school culture of risk-taking, and urgent experimentation to produce “disruptive innovation.”

 

 

Now, it looks like local edu-philanthropists have joined with the Billionaires Boys Club and they may be ready to pull the plug on the OKCPS. Before embracing the policies pushed by national reformers, Oklahoma City and other urban areas should consider Sarah Reckhow’s and Megan Tompkins-Stange’s “‘Singing from the Same Hymnbook’: Education Policy Advocacy at Gates and Broad.” It begins in the glory days of test-driven, market-driven reform, from 2008 to 2010, when the Broad Foundation proclaimed,

 

 

“We feel the stars have finally aligned. With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.”

 
Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange explain how this dramatic change was conducted in the “absence of a robust public debate.” An alphabet soup of think tanks, funded by “venture philanthropists, produced the best public relations campaign that money could buy, and they did so while playing fast and loose with the evidence. As a Gates insider explained:

 

“It’s within [a] sort of fairly narrow orbit that you manufacture the [research] reports. You hire somebody to write a report. There’s going to be a commission, there’s going to be a lot of research, there’s going to be a lot of vetting and so forth and so on, but you pretty much know what the report is going to say before you go through the exercise.”

 
It should now be clear that corporate reform failed. The ostensible leader of the campaign, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is gone, as are the highest-profile leaders of transformational reforms in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, Houston, Memphis, Washington D.C. and other districts. The quantitative portions of teacher evaluations are all but dead, and Common Core has replaced NCLB as the most toxic brand in education. After the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced NCLB, and after Hillary Clinton distanced herself from charter schools, it is likely that federal support for this top-down social engineering experiment is history.

 

 

The prospect of the eminent demise of test-driven, competition-driven reform seems to have prompted the most fervent reformers in the Broad and Walton Foundations to double down on mass charterization, i.e. the “portfolio” model, in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Newark, D.C. and, apparently, Oklahoma City. I believe it is also obvious why top-down, corporate reform failed. It came with the sword, dismissing educators as the enemy. The “Billionaires Boys Club” hatched their secret plans without submitting them to the clash of ideas. These non-educators ignored both social science and the hard-earned wisdom of practitioners. The “astroturf” think tank, the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), has gained a foothold in Tulsa and they seem to have the ears of competition-driven reformers in Oklahoma City. The CRPE may best illustrate the way that reformers are doubling down on the edu-politics of destruction, even while they belatedly try to cultivate a kinder, gentler image.

 

 

I hope that Thompson is right about the demise of corporate reform. It is so lucrative that I don’t expect the hedge-fund-manager-driven demand for privatization to go away quietly, nor do I expect Broad and Gates to abandon their obsession with privatizing the nation’s public schools. I think that once they realize that the public rejects their malignant beneficence and that their reputation is endangered, and that history may view them as scoundrels for the damage they have inflicted on a democratic institution, then they might desist and pick some other sector to micro-manage.

 

By the way, it was Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education who invented the idea of the portfolio strategy about a dozen years ago. His theory was that the school board should look on their schools as akin to a stock portfolio: get rid of the weak ones, hold on to the top performers. Open and close schools to balance the portfolio. This is already a failed strategy because it ignores the reasons for low academic performance.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Privatization, Standardized Testing
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