Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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News! Michelle Rhee is Merging StudentsFirst with 50CAN

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2016 //
31

The world of rightwing corporate reform is ever-changing. It seems like only yesterday that Michelle Rhee announced her intention to challenge teachers’ unions, destroy tenure, and take away due process from teachers across the nation. She said she would raise $1 billion in a year and gather 1 million members for her new organization, which she called StudentsFirst, because (she said) teachers don’t care about students, only billionaires really care. She did raise some money–only $7 million or so, far from $1 billion–and she spent it trying to elect Tea Party Republicans and others who support charters and vouchers. Her organization turned into the public voice of anti-teacher, anti-public school activism. But in 2014, she stepped back from the national stage to help her husband Kevin Johnson, the Mayor of Sacramento (whom she married in 2011), and joined the board of Scott’s Miracle-Gro. She also assumed the chairmanship of her husband’s charter chain, St. Hope.

 

And now we learn that Michelle Rhee is folding the tents of StudentsFirst and merging it with 50CAN. The latter organization is funded by hedge fund managers and the Sackler family of Connecticut, whose fortune was made from pharmaceuticals, specifically the opiod drug Oxycontin, that is now causing so much addiction and death across the nation. Forbes says they are the 16th richest family in America. Jonathan Sackler’s daughter Madeleine made a documentary about Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain called “The Lottery.” It gave viewers the impression that these were the world’s most magical schools, and any child lucky enough to win the lottery would have a blessed life. Never having attended a public school, she bought into the myth that they are horrid places that one must escape from, and that charter schools are sort of like the private school she attended in Greenwich.

 

The leader of StudentsFirst is Jim Blew, who most recently worked for the Walton Family Foundation (e.g., Walmart money), which funds StudentsFirst, Teach for America, KIPP, and every organization that promotes the privatization of public education. Now Blew will head the California branch of StudentsFirst, whatever is left of it after the merger.

 

What a close and tight knit world the corporate reformers live in!

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Testing

Education in Crisis: The Threat of Privatization Around the World

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2016 //
53

It has become conventional wisdom that “education is in crisis.” I have been asked about this question by many interviewers. They say something like: “Do you think American education is in crisis? What is the cause of the crisis?” And I answer, “Yes, there is a crisis, but it is not the one you have read about. The crisis in education today is an existential threat to the survival of public education. The threat comes from those who unfairly blame the school for social conditions, and then create a false narrative of failure. The real threat is privatization and the loss of a fundamental democratic institution.”

 

I thank Laura Chapman for pointing me to an excellent online resource sponsored by Education International, which advocates for teachers and free public education around the world. The online site gathers together news from around the world about the crisis I described, the corporate assault on public education, both in developed countries like our own and in nations where the public education system is rudimentary and severely underfunded.

 

As we have seen again and again, the corporate education industry is eager to break into the U.S. public education and turn it into a free marketplace, where they can monetize the schools and be assured of government subsidization. On the whole, these privatized institutions do not produce higher test scores than regular public schools, except for those that cherrypick their students and exclude the neediest and lowest performing students. The promotion of privatization by philanthropies, by the U.S. Department of Education, by rightwing governors (and a few Democratic governors like Cuomo of New York and Malloy of Connecticut), by the hedge fund industry, and by a burgeoning education equity industry poses a danger to our democracy. In some communities, public schools verge on bankruptcy as charters drain their resources and their best students. Nationwide, charter schools have paved the way for vouchers by making “school choice” non-controversial.

 

Yes, education is in crisis. The profession of teaching is threatened by the financial powerhouse Teach for America, which sells the bizarre idea that amateurs are more successful than experienced teachers. TFA–and the belief in amateurism–has also facilitated the passage of legislation to strip teachers of basic rights to due process and of salaries tied to experience and credentials.

 

Education is in crisis because of the explosion of testing and the embrace by government of test scores as both the means and the end of education. The scores are treated as a measure of teacher effectiveness and school effectiveness, when they are in fact a measure of the family income of the students enrolled in the school. The worst consequence of the romance with standardized testing is that children are ranked, sorted, and assigned a value based on scores that are not necessarily scientific or objective. Children thus become instruments, tools, objects, rather than unique human beings, each with his or her own potential.

 

Education is in crisis because of the calculated effort to turn it into a business with a bottom line. Schools are closed and opened as though they were chain stores, not community institutions. Teachers are fired based on flawed measures. Disruption is considered a strategy rather than misguided and inhumane policy. Children and educators alike are simply data points, to be manipulated by economists, statisticians, entrepreneurs, and dabblers in policy.

 

Education has lost its way, lost its purpose, lost its definition. Where once it was about enlightening and empowering young minds with knowledge, exploring new worlds, learning about science and history, and unleashing the imagination of each child, it has become a scripted process of producing test scores that can supply data.

 

Education is in crisis. And we must organize to resist, to push back, to fight the mechanization of learning, and the standardization of children.

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, International, Privatization

Imagine a New Boston with Great Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2016 //
2

 

The city of Boston has a public relations campaign called #ImagineBoston. This is supposed to be a “visioning exercise.” Education activists have taken the challenge to #ImagineBoston. It was trending on Twitter recently, powered by parents.

 

A blogger named Public School Mama invites you to dream with her and imagine a new Boston:

 

 

I can imagine a new Boston. I can imagine a new day for public schools. We just have to believe in it, collectively.

 

 

Boston has the wealth. We can fund our schools.

 

 

We must vote in leadership that supports public education. We must make education the single most important issue when we vote. We must press every single elected official for details on how they will support the schools.

 

 

And more importantly, we have to vote people out of office when they break their promises to us.

 

 

I’ve been invited to the table but I don’t want to eat with wolves. I refuse to entertain relationships with people who clamor to close our schools on the one hand, and then turn around advocate for more charter seats on the other – as if the two weren’t related.

 

 

I don’t want to hear about structural deficits when 56% of our Chapter 70 aid goes to charter schools that only serve 8,000 students in the city.

 

 

I want to imagine a different Boston.

 

 

One where there are charter schools, yes, but not at the expense of the public schools.

 

 

I can imagine a Boston where our schools are joyful centers of learning. Where there is art, music and plenty of recess.

 

 

I can imagine a Boston where restorative justice is used and not suspensions to help children learn to modulate their behavior. I can imagine a Boston where children are allowed to be children and are given space to develop self-discipline.

 

 

I can imagine a Boston where teenagers are not spending their precious time going to school committee meetings to beg for crumbs but are engaged in active learning opportunities, sports, internships and stem activities.

 

 

I can imagine a Boston where our elected and school officials are true partners with us, where we have developed trust and treated each other with respect so that if we do fall upon hard times, there is a well of good will to draw upon.

 

 

I can imagine a Boston where parents aren’t laying awake at night wondering if they made some horrible mistake staying in the city and not leaving for the suburbs.

 

 

I can imagine a Boston where your zip code does not determine the quality of your education. I can imagine a Boston where any high school in the district is a solid choice for your child.

 

 

I can imagine a Boston where schools are opening in beautiful buildings not being closed or constantly threatened.

 

What about your town or city? Can you imagine an end to the destructive corporate reform policies of the past 15 years and a revival of civic commitment to good public schools for all?

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Real Education, Supporting public schools

John Thompson on the Reign of the Broadie Superintendents

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2016 //
13

John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma City, read Motoko Rich’s report in the New York Times on the travails of Antwan Wilson, the Broad-trained superintendent in Oakland, California, and thought of the negative reputation that these “Broadies” have acquired. What is a Broadie? It is someone, with or without an education background, who attended a series of weekend seminars sponsored by the Eli Broad Superintendents Academy. This “academy” has no accreditation. It focuses on management style, not education. The Broad Foundation picks people to learn its autocratic management style and places them in a district where Broad has influence and might even supplement the leader’s salary. Once placed, you may surround yourself with other Broadies to push decisions on unwilling teachers and principals who know more than you do about the local schools and students. The list of failed Broadies is long, including Mike Miles in Dallas, General Anthony Tata in Wake County, N.C., John Covington in Kansas City and Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority.

 

Thompson was reminded of the Broadie who took charge of the Oklahoma City public schools and sowed racial antagonism and division when he read Rich’s article about Wilson and his problems.

 

He writes:

 

It would be easier to sympathize with Wilson’s feelings if Broad and the rest of the Billionaires Boys Club’s public relations teams didn’t have such a long and disgusting record of using racial taunts against those (regardless of our race) who disagree with them. More importantly, the Broadie’s pain is dwarfed by that of poor children of color who increasingly find themselves in “apartheid schools” after competition-driven reformers (illogically) try to use resegregation of schools as a method for undoing the damage done by Jim Crow.
As explained in my book, A Teacher’s Tale, I first encountered the Broad mentality in 2007 when Oklahoma City hired a Broad Academy graduate as superintendent. Hoping to get off to a good, collaborative start, I introduced myself to the mentor that the academy assigned to him. She was sitting with several of my old friends and civil rights allies, African-American women with decades of administrative experience that they also would have gladly shared with the rookie superintendent. The Broad Academy mentor wiped the smiles off our faces when her first words to me were, “Why don’t you in Oklahoma City teach our African-American boys to read?”
At first, I thought we could have better luck communicating with the new superintendent. He was a good enough sport to compete in my school’s “Buffalo Chip Throwing Championship.” (Dressed in a fine business suit, the superintendent finished second, behind me, but unlike the champion buffalo feces thrower, he wore a plastic glove.) The superintendent enjoyed talking with my students, but he never seemed comfortable listening to teenagers when they disagreed with his policies. In one such meeting, the superintendent explained that he wanted an aligned and paced curriculum where every class covered the same material at the same time, and where he could supervise classroom instruction by video, throughout the district, from his office. Afterwards, my students were blunt, saying that the superintendent had no idea of what he was rushing into….

 

Across the nation, Broad and other market-driven reformers are stepping up the use of mass school closures to defeat teachers, unions, and parents who oppose them. Even as the Billionaires Boys Club proclaims that their goal is a 21st century civil rights crusade, they impose a brutal policy where the highest-challenge students are crammed into the schools that were already the most segregated, under-resourced and low-performing. In other words, they sabotage the highest-challenge neighborhood schools in order to discredit educators in them who seek win-win school improvement policies.
The Broad Academy and their allies are thus willing to sacrifice the welfare of the most vulnerable children and to inflame racial tensions in order to defeat educators who disagree with them. Whether they do so in Oakland or Oklahoma City – in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Denver, Washington D.C. or New Orleans – they are playing with fire. Whether we are talking about race, poverty, or special education, we must recognize the complexity of these issues and the need for nuanced conversations. As long as corporate reformers continue to vilify educators, complicated and interconnected problems will get worse. If Broad-trained superintendents had the knowledge about education that is necessary to improve schools, they would also understand why inflaming racial tensions is so dangerous.

 

 

 

 

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Privatization

“Killing Ed” Will Be Shown in NYC for One Week, Starting Today

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2016 //
4

Mark Hall’s important new film about corporate reform and the assault on public education will be shown starting today in New York City at the Cinema Village, 22 East 12 street, at 7 pm.

 

The show will run for one week.

 

Mark will be there tonight, along with Sharon Higgins, an Oakland, California, parent who has written extensively about charter school scandals (she has a website called “charterschoolscandals”), especially the Gulen charter schools. I will be in the audience.

 

Hall is touring the country with his film. Check the schedule to see if he is coming to your city or state. If not, contact him to arrange a showing.  @KillingEdFilm

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Carol Burris: The Coming Collapse of Corporate Reform in New York

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2016 //
27

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, has been active in the resistance to New York’s state’s reliance on high-stakes testing for several years. As a high school principal, she helped to organize other principals across the state in opposition to test-based evaluation of both principals and teachers. About 40 percent of the state’s principals signed the petition opposing the so-called Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) based on test scores.

 

In this article, she describes the recent dramatic turn of events in New York. This state led the way in corporate-style reform. For many years, the Board of Regents–the state’s governing body for education–has strongly supported standards, testing, and accountability as the key to statewide success. Since the passage of charter legislation in 1998, the charter sector has grown, especially in the state’s urban districts. The leader of the Regents, Merryl Tisch, is a member of one of the city’s wealthiest and most philanthropic families. Tisch was a member of the Regents for the past 20 years, and chancellor since 2009. She pushed hard to win a Race to the Top grant of $700 million. She pushed hard for Common Core and rigorous testing. She selected David Steiner of Hunter College as Commissioner of Education, then pushed him aside and selected John King. She said it was all about the kids, particularly the poor kids. She thought that high standards and rigorous tests would be good for them.

 

But then came the parent opt out rebellion, and state officials went into a frenzy trying to figure out how to placate the angry parents. As it happened, Tisch lost her most powerful political ally in the legislature, and suddenly the landscape began to change. There are 17 members of the Board of Regents. Less than a year ago, six of them signed a letter protesting Governor Cuomo’s demand for tougher testing, accountability, and teacher evaluation policies. (A seventh member gave conditional support to the dissidents.) At the time, the dissidents seemed to be fighting a steep uphill battle, with the governor and the board majority opposed to their ideas. A month after the issuance of their letter, the board hired MaryEllen Elia as state commissioner to replace the unpopular John King. Elia was well known as an ardent advocate for high-stakes testing, the Common Core, and test-based accountability.

 

Burris explains in her article the miraculous revolution that occurred in less than a year.

 

Tisch announced that she would not run for reappointment by the Legislature. One of the dissidents, Dr. Betty Rosa, announced that she wanted to succeed Tisch. The possibility of Rosa winning seemed far-fetched. But incredibly, she was elected in a secret ballotmby the Regents on a vote of 15-0, with two abstentions.

 

As Burris writes, Rosa has been critical of the Common Core, high-stakes testing, and test-based evaluation. She was supported by the parents in the opt out movement.

 

The dissidents have taken charge.

 

Burris writes about her personal interactions with Betty Rosa, who is a career educator:

 

Rosa was one of three Regents who voted against the teacher evaluation system known as APPR. In 2011 she met with principals and actively listened to our concerns. As a former administrator, she understood why the practice was bad for kids, and never waivered in her opposition, referring to the inclusion of scores as “poison.”
In 2013, she publicly spoke out against the Common Core, accusing the State Education Department of manipulating data and ignoring successful schools in order to create a myth of massive failure to support their reforms. And last year she led a group of seven Regents (all women and nearly all career educators), in opposition to Cuomo’s revision of teacher evaluations. The seven created a position paper of dissent regarding the Governor’s law that increased the proportion of test scores in teacher evaluations, and six of the seven voted against the New York State Education Department’s revisions.

 

Burris predicts what she expects from Rosa. She calls it a “sea change.” I call it a miracle.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, New York, Privatization, Testing

The Charter School Hoax in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2016 //
9

Stuart Egan, a National Board Certified Teacher in North Carolina, has dogged the false claims of the corporate reformers (aka, the Tea Party) in his state.

 

Recently, Terry Stoops, the “research director” of the libertarian John Locke Institute, published an article saying “charter schools are here to stay, get used to it.” The John Locke Institute is the creation of Art Pope, a multimillionaire who has used his vast resources to defeat moderate Republicans and to build the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement. Art Pope served as the state’s budget director in Governor McCrory’s cabinet, where he used his ideology to advance privatization of what was once a good state public school system. One of the board members of the John Locke Institute opened his own charter chain and is making millions.

 

Charter schools are new to North Carolina, but they have been pushed hard by the Tea Party majority in the legislature, as they defunded public schools and harassed teachers.

 

Stuart Egan wrote the following open letter to Terry Stoops in response to his article touting charters:

 

 

This open letter is written to Dr. Terry Stoops, the Director of Research and Education Studies at the John Locke Foundation, particularly in reference to his March 3, 2016 perspective in EdNC.org entitled “Charter schools are here to stay, so deal with it.”

 

 

Dr, Stoops,
Again, public education is a focal issue in this election cycle, and like you, I am very vigilant in investigating the claims and plans that each candidate and influential body makes concerning the teaching profession.

 

 

I tend to read education op-eds produced by the John Locke Foundation (and its many associated entities) regarding education with great interest because those writings do spur discussion and thought. I also read those same op-eds with great concern, because I find the reasoning and rationale behind many of the arguments to be weak, politically motivated, and built on platitudes.

 

 

However, I read your March 3, 2016 perspective on EdNC.org (“Charter schools are here to stay, so deal with it”) not with just great interest or concern; I read it with great confusion.

 

 

Considering what happened in Haywood County and the closing of Central Elementary School and the reports of fiscal mismanagement coming out of the Charter School Advisory Board meetings, I would have expected more concrete evidence to buttress your claims about charter schools.

 

 

Throughout your perspective you claim that “there is greater knowledge and acceptance of charter schools among North Carolina families, most of whom welcome educational options.” With all of the numbers and statistics you sprinkle throughout your op-ed, you neglect to really show how that could be true. You simply state it and rest on that.

 

 

If you are speaking of options and choices, there are other possibilities that are utilized far more in NC than charter schools. There are private schools, many of which have received taxpayer funds from the Opportunity Grants (that’s a whole other issue), and homeschooling, which encompasses more students in our state than private and charter schools.

 

 

And then there are our traditional public schools, the very institutions our state constitution stipulates that our GOP-led General Assembly must maintain and protect.

 

 

You claim that charter schools create choice for those families who believe that public schools are not servicing their students well. Ironically, your chairman at the John Locke Foundation, John Hood, recently touted our public schools’ success in his February 15th op-ed on EdNC.org (“North Carolina schools ranked seventh”). If our schools are doing so well under these criteria, then why would so many charters need to be created? Just for choice’s sake?

 

 

This past February, I wrote an op-ed for the Winston-Salem Journal (“Defending Public Education”) concerning school choice and the uncontrolled rise of charter schools in North Carolina. Lt. Gov. Dan Forest (who homeschools his children) had just attempted to stop a DPI report on charter schools that did not shed a favorable light on the very entities that you (and Lt. Gov. Forest) claim are doing wonderfully. That op-ed stated,

 

 

“The original idea for charter schools was a noble one. Diane Ravitch in Reign of Error states that these schools were designed to seek “out the lowest-performing students, the dropouts, and the disengaged, then ignite their interest in education” in order “to collaborate and share what they had learned with their colleagues and existing schools” (p.13).

 

 

But those noble intentions have been replaced with profit-minded schemes. Many charters abused the lack of oversight and financial cloudiness and did not benefit students. If you followed the debacle surrounding the DPI charter school report this past month and Lt. Gov. Dan Forest’s effort to squelch it, you might know that the charter schools in North Carolina overall have not performed as advertised. Furthermore, the withdrawal rates of students in privately-run virtual schools in NC is staggering according to the Department of Public Instruction.”

 

 

There are charter schools that do work well within the scope of providing alternate educational approaches not used in public schools. Perhaps a couple you highlighted in your op-ed fit that description. There is one in my hometown of Winston-Salem, the Arts-Based School, which does exactly what charter schools were originally intended to do. But those tend to be more of the exception than the norm.

 

 

The withdrawal of students from NC virtual schools has also been very much in the news of late. Look at the Pilot Virtual Charter Schools Student Information Update published this month. It seems that more and more families are not choosing that option. Yet, Dr. Stoops, in your op-ed, you praise having virtual schools here in NC because they offer options despite their results.

 

 

You define “charter school deserts” as areas that do not have many students serviced by charter schools. Ironically you use a term, “desert”, that many use to describe socio-economic conditions, the most common being “food desert”.

 

 

A desert itself connotes that something is lacking. You do make a great correlation between lack of choices and deserts because a desert may be indicative of a more pressing problem in the regions you talk about, like a symptom of a deeper problem. I would be more concerned with food deserts or economic deserts or cultural deserts than charter deserts. I would be more concerned with the physical, mental, and emotional health of the students and the economic health of those very regions rather than how many charter schools they have.

 

 

And the GOP-led General Assembly can do something about people’s quality of life because that has an impact on student achievement in any school. Just refer back to Mr. Hood’s aforementioned op-ed. He stated,

 

 

“Whenever test scores come out for schools, districts, or states, officials hasten to explain that there are many factors known to shape the results. They are right to do so. The characteristics of the families within which students grow up — household income, parental education, marital status, etc. — clearly affect student performance. Race and ethnicity exhibit statistical correlations with performance, as well, perhaps reflecting not only those family-background variables but also factors such as neighborhood effects, cultural norms, or discrimination.”

 

 

I actually agree with that. Ironically, Mr. Hood retracts a bit from that statement later in his op-ed.

 

 

If the means to obtain the basic needs for families in these “deserts” were provided, then the health of the local public school district may not even be an issue unless there is just a profit-minded motive behind charter school construction. And even if the construction of charter schools in these rural “deserts” were just to create choice, then why do many charter schools detrimentally affect traditional public schools? That’s not creating a choice; that’s removing choice by monopolizing resources.

 

 

Just refer back to the situation in Haywood County and Central Elementary School. When small school districts lose numbers of students to charter schools, they also lose the ability to petition for adequate funds; the financial impact can be overwhelming. That creates an even bigger desert. Talk about your man-made “climate” change.

 

 

And speaking of financial impact, the Summary of Charter School Financial Noncompliance issued on January 28, 2016 lists over 25 charter schools as not complying with laws and regulations concerning finances. Those finances are tax-payer funded and have been taken away from traditional public schools.

 

You conclude your argument with a glossy and baseless claim that the numbers of charter school proponents vastly outnumber those who defend public schools. You state,

 

 

“Without a doubt, school district officials and public school advocacy groups will continue to grouse about the number of students enrolled in charters and the funding that goes with them. But charter school parents, students, employees, and advocates vastly outnumber them and are beginning to find the voice to champion and defend their schools of choice.”

 

 

If that voice to champion their cause has to be enabled with shadowy deregulation, political intervention, and profit minded groups, then that does not represent the true voice of the people. In fact, the withdrawal rates from some of those charter schools listed in the Summary of Charter School Financial Noncompliance report are quite eye-opening. That itself speaks volumes.

 

 

If advocating for public schools (like our state constitution does) in light of this educational landscape is in your view “grousing,” then will I proudly continue to complain, grumble, quibble, bemoan, protest, and quarrel on behalf of our public schools because they are here to stay.
Deal with that.

 

 

Stuart Egan, NBCT
Public School Teacher and Parent
West High School

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization

The 400 Leading Billionaires in the World

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2016 //
24

Bloomberg News posted a list of the 400 top billionaires (those with only a couple of billion don’t make the cut). The collective wealth of these men (and a few women) is nearly $4 trillion.

 

If you scan the list, you will see the big funders of the corporate assault on public education: Bill Gates; the Walton family; Eli Broad. And you will also see the producers of the edu-propaganda film “Waiting for ‘Superman’,” Philip Anschutz and Jeff Skoll.

 

You may recognize some other billionaires who have contributed to the attack on teachers and public education. But the list seems incomplete: missing is Michael Bloomberg. Was it my oversight?

Categories Billionaires, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

Jeff Bryant: Public Opinion Is Beginning to Shift Against Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2016 //
18

Jeff Bryant writes that charter schools have enjoyed an elevated status as a “sure cure” for low-performing students because most Americans know so little about them.

 

He cites a number of polls showing that the appeal of charter schools wears thin when people realize that they draw resources away from the local public schools. As one person quoted in the article says, charters have a “negative fiscal impact” on local public schools.

 

Furthermore, the local press in many cities–especially in Florida and Ohio–has reported frequently on charter frauds and scandals, on money flowing to politically connected charter operators, on legislators with conflicts of interest, on charters that push out unwanted children and avoid students with disabilities, and on charters whose “CEO” is paid over half a million. As more such articles appear, the public begins to see that the absence of regulation leads to systemic abuse, not just a one-time anomaly.

 

Citing John Merrow, Bryant writes:

 

The simple reality is that as charters expand into new communities, and residents see that their neighborhood school loses a percentage of students in a particular grade level or across grade levels to charters, the school can’t simply proportionally cut fixed costs for things like transportation and physical plant. It also can’t cut the costs of grade-level teaching staff proportionally. That would increase class sizes and leave the remaining students underserved. So instead, the school cuts a support service – a reading specialist, a special education teacher, a librarian, an art or music teacher – to offset the loss of funding. Say goodbye to your kids’ favorite art teacher or your school’s Mandarin program.

 

What Charters Have Become

 

“I have been observing what is called the ‘charter school movement’ from Day One,” Merrow recalls, “a historic meeting at the headwaters of the Mississippi River in 1988 that I moderated. Back then, the dream was that every district would open at least one ‘chartered school,’ where enrollment and employment would be voluntary and where new ideas could be field-tested. Successes and failures would be shared, and the entire education system would benefit.”

 

Merrow now finds those early aspirations for charter schools “naïve,” given what characterizes the charter school industry today.

 

Early charter school promoters may indeed have been naïve, but the American public is increasingly getting wise, and the “charter school brand,” as Merrow phrases it, is likely turning from Teflon to tarnished.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers

Students in Douglas County, Colorado, Protest High Teacher Turnover

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2016 //
6

Students in Douglas County, Colorado, walked out and picketed to express their outrage at the high rates of teacher turnover in their school. Teacher turnover may be caused by the demoralizing policies enacted by the state and the district. Colorado teachers have suffered since 2010 under State Senator Michael Johnston’s legislation to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores. DougCo has had a conservative school board, which destabilized the schools.

 

A boisterous crowd of 100 or so students walked out of Ponderosa High School on Wednesday morning to highlight what they say is an excessive departure rate among teachers at the school and within the Douglas County School District.

 

They waved signs on school property that read “We love teachers” and “Keep DCSD Great,” while chanting “best teachers, best students.”

 

Several passing drivers honked their horns in support.

 

“We don’t find it fair that our teachers are leaving the district, and we want to know why,” said senior Lisa Culverhouse, who was skipping math, English and Spanish to rally with classmates. “We hope the district will realize it’s a problem — students want to be heard….”

 

Courtney Smith, president of the Douglas County Federation, said teacher morale has never been lower. She counts the teacher evaluation system — which she said was mostly about “uploading evidence” rather than true assessment of teaching skills — among the chief problems.

 

Good work, Senator Johnston. When does your promise of “great schools, great principals, great teachers” come to pass? How much longer shall we wait?

 

 

Categories Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers
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