Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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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

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
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